La la la la la la la la. Oh, I didn't tell you. I was rewriting the Oompa Loompa song earlier. Well, that sounds like something for the after show. Yeah. The Oompa Loompa song in various musical theater styles. Nice. I've had Randy Rainbow's cofefe for Shippoopy. Oh my goodness. So good. So good. So good. Okay, we are without Justin Minions. Are you ready? Or Snyder, Twizwegens. All right, chat room, there you are. I see you. We're ready. Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. Oh, I need another light bulb in here. Hold on. There we go, just a little bit extra. There we go. Three, two, this is Twiz. This Week in Science, episode number 623, recorded on Wednesday, June 14th, 2017. Coming in like a wrecking ball. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we're gonna fill your heads with cavities, promiscuous salamanders, and solar Twizies. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Are you tired? I am. But still, we're here. We've come here for camaraderie and enrichment, or at least as part of why I'm here, each week that I show up, no matter how tired I am when we begin. The idea of science as a connector, an equilibrator, and although some might protest, a democratizer fills me with excitement and energy so that I'm able to bring you things that I find most exciting here on This Week in Science. Coming up next.  I wanna learn everything all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Good science to you, Kiki. And good science to you, Blair. And we're missing Justin, unfortunately. But we are here, as usual, bringing you all the science that we wanted to fill our rundown with. So much good stuff. We're back from Philadelphia. It was a fun, inspiring, amazing trip to the Young Innovators Fair. Blair, did you have a great time? I had such an amazing time. I had a great time talking with the kids, with the adults that were there to reach out to kids and just seeing a new community full of change makers. It was amazing. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, so many people and I just watched people streaming into the building all weekend long and the building four football fields in size, full of science and technology and people just wanting to get their hands on it. Absolutely. It was great. And I cannot wait to see whether or not they take this Young Innovators Fair on the road. Maybe they could do a West Coast Innovators Fair and we would not have to travel all the way across the country. And then we wouldn't be so tired because, you know, I am tired. I'm tired. I think we're tired. I had lunch today and then I had lunch again at like 3 p.m. And I think it's because my body thought it was dinner time. Why? I'm hungry again. Yeah. Yes. Oh, traveling back and forth across the country. Where's such jet setters for science? That's right. Right now, I hope where you are, you're just interested in hearing about the science because that's what we have this week. I have new stories about our solar nemesis, the true nature of our brains and wireless power. What do you have Blair? Wireless power. I have a whole bunch of nightmare juice and gross stuff. Wait, wait. Okay. That's it. Okay.  You're welcome. Great. I just need to go to sleep and rest and you're just putting stuff. You're just going to put stuff in my brain that's going to make it difficult. Or just some very interesting dreams. We'll see. There's that too. All right. I'm just going to say thanks a lot, Blair, in advance. You're welcome. Thank you. My pleasure. Every week. Okay, you guys, you're ready to jump into it. Our newest segment. What has science done for me lately? Well, according to Minion Greg, science has played a huge role throughout my entire life because it offers a way for us to seek what's most important, the truth. My fascination with science and the answers it brings has led me to become a mycologist. I get to analyze fungi for my job. And through this, I can find new medicines and practical uses for the organisms that most people take for granted. Fungi, for me, or fungi, for me, represents the very aspect of science that is so intriguing and wonderful. And that is all of the mysteries hidden within it, just waiting to be discovered. Thanks again for the wonderful show, Twist, and I look forward to your next episode. Yeah, well, thank you, Greg, for writing in with what science has done for you. And it's beyond, it's led to your job, it's led to your passion for what you search for, and that is so wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with us. Yeah, thanks, Greg. You seem like a real fun guy. Oh, you went there. Okay, anyone who is interested in sending in what science has done for you lately to share with us that we can share? Well, I wanna share one every week, remember, and I need you to write in my emails broken right now. So please message me on Facebook, or you can send me an email at kikifinch at gmail.com. I'll just put it out there, kikifinch, K-I-K-I-F-I-N-C-H, like the bird at gmail.com is my email where you can send it, or message me on Facebook. That's a great way to find us. So this week in science, Facebook, you can message the account and tell me your story, and I will be able to share it with the rest of the Twist Minion audience. So you guys, don't forget, you have to write in so I can keep sharing these awesome stories. There have been so many great ones so far, and I look forward to many, many more. Please send me your stories. Let's get into the science, are we ready? Ready, ready? Okay, so there's a story that's melting everybody's brains this week, and I love it, and it melted my brain too. So I think really you'll understand it if you are a mathematician, an advanced mathematician, or a neural networks scientist. There's a group we've talked about before led by Henry Markham, which is called the Blue Brain Project. And the goal of the Blue Brain Project is to simulate the human brain, and not just simulate it, but really try and model exactly how the brain works. So they're basically trying to make a brain in hardware, in software, through algorithms, through modeling, to put a brain in a computer, but to understand exactly how the human brain works to be able to make a perfect model, as opposed to this approximation that we kind of get to very often when we talk about simulations of intelligence, artificial intelligence, that I read an article this week that talked about the fact that a lot of researchers don't even really understand who work in the field or really understand how the artificial intelligence really, really works. So we want to get to the nuts and bolts of how the brain works, and that's what the Blue Brain Project is working on. And if you've been following this research at all, you would maybe remember that a while ago, a couple of years ago, they simulated part of a cat brain in a computer. It's one of the things they did a couple of years ago, and they published the first digital copy of a piece, little tiny piece of the neocortex part, which is responsible, neomening new, which is the part of the brain that's most recently evolved, that's involved in our planning and executive function. Sensations, consciousness, but now they have published a paper in Frontiers and Computational Neuroscience that is using a new methodology to look at how neural networks within the brain work, and a neural network, you can imagine as a bunch of neurons and how they connect to each other within the network of a particular part of the brain to be able to make certain decisions. When will this motor neuron fire to make you lift your finger, or when will it not? How many neurons have to be stimulated within the network to lead to the end result of you, I don't know, touching your nose with your finger? What has to happen in the network of the brain, the network that's responsible for that action within the brain to make it happen? And so far, we've got neural network models that identify different kinds of neurons, whether they're stimulatory or inhibitory, whether how they connect to other neurons, how many other neurons they connect to, whether it's recursive connection, whether they arc back, whether connections back onto themselves to shut themselves down after a while, whether there are feedback loops, there are all sorts of different patterns that can arise within a neural network, but it's fairly two-dimensional when we really think about it. There's input and then there's output and there's a little bit of it in between. This new paper looks at these neural networks from the perspective of algebraic topology. What does that make you think of Blair? When you hear the words algebraic topology. I don't even know, what is topology? So this is the realm of mathematics that's involved in describing surfaces and structures. Oh, like topography, it's the same root. Kind of the same root, yeah. Okay, so algebraic topology in regards to the brain? Yes. And regardless of how bumpy your brain is? Not how bumpy your brain is, but looking at how within three dimensions of space and then the fourth dimension of time, we have space, what space does your brain fill in the X, Y and Z axes? And then there's also time, which is very important to how the frequency of neuronal firing and how they stimulate or inhibit each other. But the topology goes even farther than that. And it's, some people have kind of explained it in relation to string theory and how a string theory has looked at the universe and the idea that there are multiple dimensions to the universe, even though we only notice four, there are up to 11 dimensions in the universe, possibly on all these intricately folded strings and structures and things that all work together. But here this topology, this mathematical method of topology that they have used has discovered new structures. And they say it's kind of like within these networks, when activity happens, when you say experience something or when you're remembering something, there's a certain confirmation of activity that is elicited within the brain that's almost like a sandcastle forming for a moment and then fading away. And so there's this interesting confirmation of the neurons within the network that create very ephemeral structures and cavities within the brain itself in multiple direct dimensions. In more than the standard four dimensions. And the hypothesis based on what they've discovered with this new mathematical technique is that the reason we haven't found where memories are held in our brain is that maybe they're not actually held in our brain, but as an emergent property of the networks themselves. What? Oh, my mind. Oh, yes. It makes sense that the memories are in the cloud. Kind of in the, yeah. Right, that's kind of... So the neurons themselves hold the information for, they, when you're stimulated by a certain set of inputs, visual or auditory that put you into a certain memory that make you remember something, make you recall something, make something familiar, there's a certain subset of neurons that will become active in response to those things. Now, as they become active, they form, they will start forming because of their activation and whether or not they're activating in the right, at the right frequency, in the right confirmation with the right other neurons at the same time to either allow you to have maybe a sense of deja vu or to relive a moment from your past. And those moments aren't held in the neurons themselves, but only in the way that they interact with each other and these multidimensional structures and cavities that get formed as a result of their activation. Boom. I can't.  Yeah. Your brain, our brains are, I love that the idea that we are, our brains are living in multiple dimensions. We're stuck here in our own realities, but our brains are living in multiple dimensions as we experience and remember things. And that maybe because we haven't looked at things in this particular way before, that's why we haven't found memories. That's why we haven't found them. But this, so this kind of a technique could potentially lead us in the direction of really truly simulating a brain in a computer, really understanding how the neural networks work and interact within themselves and with each other. And additionally, I just think this is, it's just amazing that we're so much more than just the physicality.  No, no. I will say though, this kind of opens the door to a whole realm of what we don't know. So we know even less than we thought we knew. Yeah. Which is, but at the same time, it opens a door. We now know how little we know, you know? Yes. I know. Yeah. So, yeah, maybe because of this, because of the Blue Brain Project, maybe we will discover finally where memories are hiding in the brain or in the cavities that are formed within these neural networks in the brain. That is such a dangerous world to embark upon though. It seems so. It's just asking for a science fiction tragedy to know exactly where memories are stored and how. Ah, yeah. I mean, I've seen, what was it? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, yeah, exactly. I can't help but think about that. The second we know where the memories are, people will just wanna have them professionally erased or augmented. Yeah. Augmented, maybe. Could be helpful to certain individuals like those with PTSD. Yes. That would be great to be able to help them. But to help you forget your ex-girlfriend. Exactly. Yeah, no, don't wipe periods of your life away, nah.  Why make yourself somebody different? Why do that? And so these studies, it's not just, they didn't just model this, they didn't just do the math. They did model it in a computer. It all worked in a computer, but they also performed experiments on real brain tissue that confirmed what they were modeling in the computer. So they used the math, made a model in the computer of how neurons would act in a particular situation, and then they went into the lab, took brain tissue, put it in that kind of situation, and saw that the brain tissue did indeed act that way. So this is not just, oh, we've got a computer and some math. They actually took it to the next step to see if that's how the neural tissue did indeed act and it indeed did. So, hey, people interested in math, topology, it could give us a lot of information about the brain. So if you're interested in neuroscience, topology might be the field to get into. Blair's like blinking her eyes right now, like, what did I just hear? I'm still understanding it in a couple of hours or days. No, I tried to read the paper and I'm still, it's a struggle, it's a high level, it's definitely neural network, mathematics. There's a lot of high level stuff in there, but I don't know, we'll see where it goes. I mean, whether or not this opens up conversation among neuroscientists, whether other people refute it. This is the beginning of a bunch of questions being asked for sure. Absolutely, yeah. And then moving on, lots of people ask questions about our universe, right? Yeah, and you look, we look out, scientists look out, astronomers of all amateur or professional look out into the universe and very often we'll see stars. Our nearest neighbor is, there are a couple of stars, what is it, three stars actually? All together in their system, lots of binary stars out there, but our sun, it's all by itself, it's a solo star.   Our sun is all alone and there's been this, an idea put forward that once a long time ago, our sun had a nemesis. Yes, and then our sun's nemesis careened around and that was probably once sent the giant planetoid asteroid that smashed into earth and ended up creating the moon, that maybe it was this nemesis star that did it. And people are like, oh, okay, you don't really have much proof of that, all right. But astronomers from UC Berkeley have been trying to figure out how common these binary star systems are. Really, how often do we see them in the sky?  Is it over average is what all of them, most of them are like, what is it like? And so they took a data set that they got their hands on and were able to examine all of the stars in an area of the sky in which there's just the perseus molecular cloud. It has a lot of stars being born constantly. It's about 600 light years away from earth, 50 light years long, and there's a very complete survey called Vandem that was taken of it and found lots of different stars. And so it gave a great data set for these researchers to dig into and to look for young stars to see, okay, what do they look like when they're born? How are they really close together with other stars? Do they look like they're all binary stars? And so they took certain parameters to determine what would be a binary star system and what would not as it's being born and growing up. And the end results from this are that our sun may have had a stellar twin. Maybe indeed it did have a nemesis because if we can take the results from this perseus system and apply them across the universe then most young stars, most stars are born as a binary system. And single stars occur because one kind of fades away and fizzles or they smash into each other and the one grows, but there's usually two stars together. So whatever happened to this other star probably has something else to do with what makes our planet special. Possibly, yeah. Especially since we talk about how far away the earth is from the sun about how it's in this Goldilocks zone, right? But if there was another sun that would kind of mess up the whole equation about radiation and heat and all that kind of stuff. Not to mention it would mess up our orbit. It would change the length of our year. There would be so many things different if we were in a binary system. Yeah, so it kind of adds that equation where everything happened in the most advantageous way for life to happen. Yeah, but the question is, if we formed around a single star that possibly had a twin that either went wandering or where is that other star at this point in time? Just out in space somewhere. Where'd it go? So it could be. This other star could still be... It could be out there. Blazing and just be elsewhere. It could be elsewhere, exactly. And the other idea from what you're talking about is, what would it take for a binary star system to be stable enough for life to form around it? Or for planets, rocky planets, to be able to harbor life where it could evolve? To the extent that we have. And this moves me into the next story, Jupiter. Jupiter, big gas giant, right? On the other side of the asteroid belt, got big gas giant. People have said, big planet is one of the biggest. And then, you know, it's probably got such a huge gravitational field that it kept life-killing asteroids from bombarding Earth. And maybe because of Jupiter, we were able to evolve to the point that we have. That without a gas, a giant gas body like Jupiter, we might not have been able to get here. So a new study that was published suggests, this is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Not only is Jupiter the biggest planet in our solar system with its giant magnetic field, it's also probably the oldest planet. It was probably the first planet to form in our solar system.  Gravity started taking hold of stuff and making it grow and grow and grow. And so Jupiter being the biggest and the first and based on where it stuck itself out in the solar system, kind of outside of the asteroid belt, it was able to keep other items further out. So about a million years old, it prevented rocks at about a million years from getting in past its orbit. So it just was like, nope, you can stay out there, you work cloud things, you other asteroids, you gotta stay out. So Jupiter was our bodyguard. Jupiter was the bodyguard, but then Jupiter went wandering a little bit. It had a little unstable orbit and it probably came in really close to the sun for a little while and knocked us around a little, maybe had something to do with the asteroid that came in and allowed the moon to form. We don't know that for sure, but possibly. And then this is about four million years into the evolution of the solar system. It's like, I'm gonna just go toward the sun. And as it did that, of course, it's gravity moved. Asteroids from further out in the solar system were able to come further in and mix with stuff in the inner solar system. And then it's thought that maybe Saturn, because Saturn started getting really bigger on that point, that Saturn was like, you get back here because Saturn had not a gravity and then Saturn probably pulled Jupiter back into its current orbit where it is now stable. So no more wandering for Jupiter, but because of that movement, there was a time period where there were a lot of asteroids from the outer solar system that were able to come in much closer and mix into the asteroid belt that we know now in between Mars and Jupiter. And so this study is based on meteorites, fragments of these asteroids that have landed on Earth. And the researchers were able to look at chemical signatures from these space rocks to determine their age, which is like, okay, how long have you been here? How old are you? And also because of the different aspects of the inner solar system and the outer solar system, they were able to pinpoint their point of origin based on the chemical signatures of these rocks. And so because of basically they're following this chemical signature trail to say, okay, these rocks came from the outer solar system, these ones came from the inner solar system and these ones are really old. So they were in the outer solar system a long time ago or these ones are younger and they're in the inner solar system. So basically be able to take the rocks, pinpoint them in their point of origin in the solar system at a particular place in time, which is how they came to come up with this story of Jupiter as the bodyguard for planet Earth. They looked at like seriously, they're looking at rocks from space that landed on Earth and saying, this is what Jupiter did 4 billion years ago. This is what Jupiter did, or not 4 billion years ago, 10 billion years ago. I'll tell you, this is one of those things, when they talk about this kind of stuff in relation to astronomy, I will never understand how they understand it, never. But I understand the processes by which they understand it. And so I believe them. We talked a whole bunch about that at the Young Innovators Fair, right? Being able to recognize where informed extrapolation comes from. Yes, informed extrapolation, exactly. Yes, it's fascinating.  And I'll tell you why. Why? Because stars in my brain, and I realize I'm wrong, but stars don't move, where do they go? How do they go? Where are they going? Stars are moving all the time. We're moving with our star. Yes, that's true. But why is this sister star just like pace and then it leaves? And are there other bodies around that? What's happening? Did it take other bodies with it that used to be part of our solar system? Possibly. Possibly, yeah. Because there were probably items within the solar system that were closer to it, more attracted to its gravitational pull. Yeah, it all has to do with where things are at a certain point in time. Are they in an unstable orbit, a stable orbit? How much perturbation can be made by this massive gravitational force? How massive is the gravitational force from the star? Was our nemesis smaller than us? You may, I may have brought the nightmare juice, but you brought the things that'll keep me up at night. Because I'll just be laying there, trying to picture the sister star that used to be hanging out with our son. And now he's just out there somewhere, like so far out, man. Like we're even, man.  Emesis. Emesis, where are you? Emesis. Yeah, so there's some cool, spacey news this week. Wow, yeah. Far out, man. Rocks on Earth telling us about, potentially about the history of Jupiter. There's still stuff that needs to be worked out, because as you said, extrapolation, put informed extrapolation, and then these binary stars, maybe our son had a twin. And what? Cavities in the Brain. I got so many good things here. So many fun stories to start off the show. Justin's here, welcome. Thanks for coming. How do you get rid of cavities in your brain? How do you like floss? You don't want to get rid of them. Brush twice a day. Oh, yeah.  You want them. Brain wash, no, that's a bad thing. Yeah, the question is, is more cavities in your brain better for intelligence? Do people with higher intelligences have more cavities in their brain? This is a question that still needs to be answered. I hope that the scientists get on it soon, yo. Yo. Well, OK. Nothing to make an intellectual point but to finish off with yo. Yo, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. This is This Week in Science. It's time for more science. Justin, do you have any stories? Should we move into the animal corner? This is going to bring up. We may have to go to the animal corner. I was going to talk about that. There's a team of Canadian researchers on the icebreaker CCGS Abundson. They were they were going to be doing it's part of a four year, 17 million dollar project to study global warming in the Hudson Bay. But they they had to cancel it. Is it because there's no ice? No, because there's too much too many too many icebergs. Yes, they're on an icebreaker. And yet it was still the conditions were too bad because of global warming for the ship that they were going to send to study effects of global warming into the area. Sounds about right. It's not climate. This is the thing that we need to remind people, though, while it while there is a certain amount of irony. That is not lost. The effects of certain environmental factors on the amount of icebergs or sea ice at a particular point in time and whether it's raining or cold, that's weather. Just whether it's not it's rainy or cold, though. This is this is just a lot of there's ice, which is this is great because weren't we just talking about how little sea ice there was last summer? But it's not. Yeah, OK, it's but it's not just sea ice. If the sea is frozen, that's one thing. That's what the ship is built to do. It's an icebreaker. It's designed to be. But I guess when you get when you get these sort of hidden icebergs floating all around in the water, then it becomes a severe condition. Well, yeah, you don't want to sail in a sea full of hidden icebergs. That's like a recipe for the Titanic. Exactly. No, but still, weather, not necessarily climate. Anything attached to one. No, no, no, anything related to one particular year or even season is weather. It's not climate. Climate is trends over time. Periods of time, like a decade. So if you say irony, it could be this weather is the result of climatic changes. Yeah, no, this is the root of a lot of the problem in the discourse. So the metaphor we always use is weather is what you're wearing today and climate is your entire wardrobe. So today I was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans to work. But I would never wear snow pants to work because the climate in San Francisco is not a place where it's not. So it's it's about it's I don't even own those in my closet because that's not appropriate to this climate. Right. The gem doctor just posted climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get. Yeah, so I mean it is averages over several years. Yeah, so you will see individuals online and maybe you'll meet individuals who will use this example of this ship calling off its climatic research as a result of icebergs as an example of, oh, ha, ha.  Global warming is happening. But look, there are icebergs. So I just want to use it. They're going to use it to they're going to spin it.  I mean, those people spin who who do spinning their the whole job and art of spinning is is taking something that is perhaps not desirable and then polishing it. So think about so think about this. You see an extremely skinny person eating an ice cream Sunday. So are they skinny despite that ice cream Sunday or is that one meal? An event in an overarching story that is not representative, right? So you can eat an ice cream Sunday, even if you're on a strict diet. And one meal is not going to change your diet. Yeah, one sea of icebergs is not going to change the progress of the climate at this point in time. Yeah, so Dr. Barber and his team of experts were able to use state of the art equipment on board the Edmondson to confirm that a significant portion of the sea ice present originated from the high Arctic. Noted climate related changes in Arctic sea ice not only reduced its extent and thickness, but also increase its mobility, meaning that ice conditions are likely to become more variable and severe conditions such as these will occur more often. So they don't seem to think it's just the weather shifting. But as a that they do because they said that events like this will be more frequent. Yes, that's exactly what it is. Climate change results in more extreme weather. Yes, there we go. Yep, more icebergs if you're in an icebergy like area, maybe.  That would have been for now. They'll be back at it next month. So try again. They'll try again later. That's right. You know, we're going to try right now. What? There's animal corner. Except for giant pandas. Gap, I have some awesome fun stories tonight. The first is about a very particular kind of promiscuous salamander. Yes. So salamander promiscuous salamander. Yeah. There is one type of salamander in the genus ambistoma that is a hybrid of only females. And a research team from University of Iowa by analyzing the genome of this weird unisex hybrid genus figured out how this is continually happening. So this isn't something where there's just mules popping up left and right. This isn't something where wolf dogs are just habitually showing up where these salamanders live. This is a consistent population of unisex of all female hybrid salamanders. What is this and why is this happening? It turns out their genetic profile is equal contributions from males of three separate salamander species. So a female of one of these species, ambistoma lateralae, ambistoma texanum and ambistoma tygrinum. All of them. So a female will mate with multiple males of different species. And they are selective about their gene expression. This is crazy. Yes. And so the question here, I'm going to skip right to the end of this. The question that these researchers really want to know next is how and why and also how. Yeah, how, what, why and how, how, how again. So balanced gene expression. They're they are habituating. They are they are continuing this hybrid lineage by mating with multiple males. They keep some genes from the male and discard others. This is known as kleptogenesis kleptogenesis. Kleptogenesis. Stealing. Stealing. They steal genes, the theft of genetic material for male donors, reproductive purposes. Why is it stealing? I was thinking about this earlier. It's stealing because it's not a true representation of the male. So what the male would want out of a breeding opportunity, you take their genes, you take all of their genes so that the the the offspring is a representative of their genome. That's what they want. That's what their DNA wants. But if you're selective and you're mixing this suckers genes with genes of two other suckers. Nobody wins except for the suckers. The salamander sucker males salamander suckers. Yeah. So the only salamander that wins is that female that then can give birth or lay the egg of another female that is now a hybrid. They don't they don't have males.  And and so the way they did it. Ohio State University biologists, they analyzed three thousand genes in a unisex female with three genomes as a triploid. And of that, they found seventy two percent of the genes provided by the three male partners were expressed equally. Wow. So it was triploid, which already is weird. And then on top of that, let me have three quarters of yours and three quarters of yours and three quarters of yours. The genomes are mostly being expressed equally. But what they're trying to find out next is how do they choose? How do they use the genes that they've chosen? And then how do genes from different species of salamanders come together to make a hybrid? Yeah, I think that's what to me, one of the interesting things when I when I saw this story, I immediately immediately thought, these are different species. This female isn't just taking the genes she wants from males of just the same species. And where would males of the same species come from if they're only having females? Right. Is there is there a sex change that the females go can go through during during development later? And then and the and mating with other species. Right. So this is where I had to do I did do some digging because in reading this story, that was really my question was where are all these females coming from? And what males are they mating with if they're all females? What is happening here? So in doing some digging with the ambistoma genus. They're they're called mole salamanders. And they they're no it's a really large group of salamanders, ambistoma, most of them. Are they reproduce through normal sexual reproduction? So nothing weird there. But there are these hybrid. You can't even call them species. There are hybrid all female populations. Unisexual populations. They're distributed mostly across the Great Lakes region in the northeastern regions of North America. They these females. Mate with several different species of males and just use them to piece together another female. So the females require sperm from co occurring related species. They fertilize their eggs. They initiate development and the eggs discard the sperm genome and develop asexually. So they just kind of take what they want. This is why it's the kleptogenesis, right? They take what they want from the sperm package as if they're ripping open the sperm and going, I want this and this and this and this and all the rest of that. Get out of here. It's interesting, Dick Tell in the chat room says the vultron of salamanders. Yes, certainly. I'll be the arm, you be the leg. I'll be the head. Absolutely. Yeah, so I think this is fascinating. I mean, this is just this is so different from any other mating system that we've talked about before. Yes. And it's something. Yeah, it's something that hasn't really been discussed and still is not really understood. Yeah. So they they I love this. They liken the way they use the the genomes of these different salamanders to. A sports team. What? Yes. So it's like having a sports team with a roster of all equally competent players, but no star athletes. If you have a team that's unbalanced and loses a top player, you won't win. But if every player is equal, then you don't lose as much. So instead of trying to get the most fit male to reproduce with, they make the three, four, five males of different species, assemble the best parts of each of them. You have a winning team. So look for more on these weird unisex hybrid salamanders. I'll be sure to report it if I hear any. Yeah, they're so fascinating. Yes, so fascinating. And speaking of weird evolutionary tactics, there's more. Oh, wait, there's more. Let's talk about meerkats. Oh, they're so cute. I love watching them at the zoo. They're very cute. And they're for a long time, they were classified with mustelids in the weasel family. And until pretty recently, I thought they still were. But they've actually since been recategorized as completely unrelated and actually resembling other weasels as a result of convergent evolution. They're predators. They eat things that live in holes. And so they hunt similarly and have a similar body shape to weasels. But but meerkats and mongooses are now in a separate group actually closer related to felines and mongooses are closer related to canids. So they're all carnivores, but they've kind of been parsed out thanks to DNA. So now looking at that, something else that meerkats have in common with mustelids, another case of convergent evolution is in scent marking. So mustelids, weasels, meerkats, mongooses and skunks all used to be in the same group, not just because they were long and skinny and predators, but also because they all scent mark. Skunks also since have been pulled out into their own little group. But all these animals have very particular scent marking structures. They the the meerkat, in particular, makes a pungent paste in a pouch beneath their tails. Yum, a paste, paste. They smeared on plants, rocks, they smeared on each other. This is how they mark their territory and their family. And with one smell, they can tell if a space belongs to themselves, to a relative, a rival or a mate. And how do they make this paste? Great question. So that's what this study is all about from Duke University. Good job, Justin. I wanted to find out not so much how they make the paste, but what makes the paste have a unique chemical signal? They found that it has to do with bacteria. Yes, our good friend, bacteria. So the question was, do they inherit the odor, which is what would be expected, right? Is that it's genetically based? Is it picked up from their environment or does it come from somewhere else? It's from the bacteria. Researchers identified the types of bacteria living in meerkat paste by looking at gene sequences. And they analyze the complex mixtures of chemicals that give the paste its musky odor using a technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry, which we talk about all the time on the show. So meerkat scents are subtle for most humans, thank goodness, to see or smell. But they are crawling with bacteria. They identified more than a thousand types of bacteria and having the meerkat paste. They also detected nearly 220 volatile chemicals, alcohols, aldehydes and other compounds. What's most important, though, is that individuals with similar microbial communities had similar odor profiles. This suggests that meerkat sex and group specific scents are a byproduct of the bacteria feeding on the secretions in the warm, moist, inner folds of the animal's anal pouches. Let me read that sentence again, because it was so fun. Would you please? Would you please? This results suggests that meerkat sex and group specific scents are a byproduct of bacteria feeding on secretions in the warm, moist inner folds of the animal's anal pouches, therefore releasing airborne chemicals that are coopted for communication. So the specific bouquet to a group or to a family isn't because of shared genes, but because they share bacteria. They're most likely passing the bacteria when they rub their anal glands on the same surfaces or during grooming or other types of social contacts. So if you've got a mom or a dad that wants the whole family to wear matching track suits as they go out to an event, just understand it. It could be much worse. It could be so much worse. Oh, man. They call this the fermentation hypothesis, which was first proposed decades ago, but they have not yet looked at the bacteria types in order to identify them. So this is the first time they've actually been able to recognize the fermentation hypothesis when it comes to scent marking in meerkats. Wow. So wow. Yeah. And to to draw parallel, I'm just I'm from a fermentation in the anal gland bacteria odor and all the bacteria that these individuals have. It's not just it. This creates the individual odor that then they can use to recognize whether or not they're related. Right. So remember the smell study we talk about all the time with human female if my armpit, they made men wear shirts, go to the gym. The women smelled and decided that some were more attractive than others. And it was directly related to how unrelated they were genetically. So the idea is actually that there's a similar phenomenon with us in terms of armpits, exactly. So most of the stink coming from your armpits are it's from bacteria. It's not from the sweat itself. It's from the bacteria living in your armpit. Yum. So that odor, even though we might be using that to identify kin from strangers from people who are genetically similar to dissimilar, it could still be all because of the microbes. So bacteria or just comes back to the bacteria and how they really are running our lives. Yes, it's likeers guide to the galaxy should not have had mice as the ultimate creatures that it should have been the bacteria. There should have been bacteria. Yeah, we're little we're little bacterial city buses. I keep saying it. It's true. It's they're telling us they're they're sending out signals to their friends via odors. We're the city buses. But the big area I'm on her being the bacteria are driving. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm not going to say the beavis and butthead thoughts that have been just coming to my head since the beginning of this story. So I'm going to just leave it right there. Everyone, this is this week in science. We're going to take a quick break and come back with more science. I know we've been blowing your mind this first half. We have more coming for you in the second half. So stay tuned. There will be more this week in science coming up next. Hey, everyone, I hope you're enjoying the show. I want to thank you so much for all of your support and for helping us get to the places we want to go for allowing us to continue to bring you the show week after week for helping us go across the country to the Young Innovators Fair in Philadelphia this last weekend. These things we get to do the weeks after weeks after weeks of the show that we put on. It's all thanks to you really, truly. And it's amazing that you keep coming back for more and more of it. So thank you for letting us do this. If you're interested in continuing to help support this week in science, one way that you can do that is to wear our stuff. You know, if you are wearing a twist shirt, somebody might be like, what's twist? What's this week in science? 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And we are back with more this week in science. Yeah, we are. Justin, do you have another story? Yeah, this is from the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. Excuse me. They have provided a window into one of the most exciting periods in human history, as if there was any period of human history that was not exciting. But this is of interest as it is the transition between Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe. They've got a cave in the region of the Czech Republic, which has provided a timeline of time line of evidence from 10 sedimentary layers that span from 28,000 to 50,000 years ago. So a nice a nice chunk of of years in the same cave. The big site near the Czech border with Austria is unearthed over 20,000 animal bones, as well as stone tools, weapons, and an engraved bone bead that is the oldest of its kind in central Europe. Archaeologist Dr. Duncan Wright said the project was important as it gives some of the earliest evidence of modern human activity in the region, as we were beginning to move substantial distances and bringing objects with us. So this is Quoty voice of Dr. Wright. In the early layers, the items we found are locally made flakes, possibly used by small communities living and hunting in the vicinity to kill animals or prepare food. But around 40,000 years ago, we start to see objects coming from long distances away, dating from the same time we unearthed a bead made from metal bone. This is the oldest portable art object of its type found anywhere in central Europe. So between these two periods, we've either seen a change in behavior and human movement, or possibly a change in species. So archaeologist Ladzlam Naiman of the University of Sydney said one of the biggest questions is the beginning of human exploration and landscape by homo sapiens who arrived in this area for the first time. So somewhere between 40,000 to 48,000 years ago, people start moving around a lot. The inhabitants of the cave start becoming much more mobile. Instead of moving short distances from the cave, they're now walking hundreds of kilometers, and quit pretty often, because the materials. So that first 28,000 to about 40,000 years ago, the materials in this cave are local. If you find your flints, it came from a rock that was, you could throw this rock at. And it would hit that rock that this flint came from. And then all of a sudden, around that 40,000 year mark, they start coming from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. And not just from in one direction. It's not like a group just picked up, made their flints here, and then moved to the cave. These where they're identifying the origins of these flakes, some are coming from the north, some are from the east. They're coming from every direction. So it either means that the people living in this cave became super mobile and started traveling around and finding, oh, here's a new rock I've not seen before. Let me make one of my flint tools out of this. Or it could even be trade, right? It could be that there's enough of a population out there of like-minded hominins that they're like, oh, I like pretty rocks, you like pretty rocks, but we have different pretty rocks. Yeah, I'll trade you. Sort of like creating baseball cards. Nobody trades baseball cards anymore. Nobody knows what those are. I have a Darth Vader card, but I'm not gonna trade it with anybody. Yeah, I love the idea here that these, so they start, either they're running out of materials close to hand and they're having to go further afield to find them and they're getting new ones and then running further afield, they start running- I don't think they're running out because it's all similar stuff. They're building similar tools with it, but they're, it's different materials that they're using to build it with. Also it's interesting, we talked about this method, the new method, the new method, the new system where they can test DNA within the soil to go back over layers. So they've been sent through analysis using this technique, which is sort of how they differentiated where or in time some of this was, but it's also, they're waiting for results from that so they can find out, is this Neanderthal, is this modern human from the different layers? And they suspect, they're suspecting, they're suspicious people, these scientists. They're suspecting that the really highly mobile artifacts are gonna be from modern humans and that they will sort of replaced the Neanderthal population or merged with it. But they're waiting now for this DNA analysis from these soil layers to tell them which was which. So the DNA analysis is still underway and they're waiting, awesome. So there's more to come from this study. Yes. Cool. I think it's neat, the idea that there's like multiple species of people. And we find this quite a bit, like. Absorbing their genes, three of them at a time, you know. Yeah, but they're like hanging out. These different species are hanging out going, hey, how's it going? What you doing? You want a spear too? I think it's a tie cave in Siberia. That's the one where we found a Neanderthal that had some human DNA in it, but this would have been well before the classic out of Africa. So some other group of modern humans or close relative made it all the way to Siberia and made it with a Neanderthal there, but also Denisovans. I'm going to do it. So Denisovans. Denisovans, you say Denisovans, tomato, tomato. Denisovans in that same cave also lived there. So there was another spot where you had humans in this cave, you had Denisovans in the cave and you had Neanderthals in the cave at some point. So we hominins, we like our caves. Even once we stopped living in the cave, we started recreating it in our home structures. That's right. We make a cave out of wood. I make a cave out of wood. I make a cave out of brick. I make a cave out of anything. I live in cave. I live in cave. What caves are nice? They're warm. You don't get rained on. You can snuggle up in them, watch a movie. It's all good. Okay, so this weekend when we were in Philadelphia, we talked with a guy about his art relating to Tesla, right? And we kind of got in the conversation of Tesla's the dude who originated the idea of wireless energy. He wanted us to be able to have limitless free energy that was just transmitted through the air. Everyone would have access to it, be able to use it. It was an amazing idea. He created it in a lab. He had it functioning in a lab. He had it functioning. It hold a fluorescent light bulb and it would light up. Yeah, well ahead of his time. Yes, well ahead of his time. But since. Vented radio. Marconi stole it. Don't listen to it. It's not Marconi. He stayed with Tesla, read his notes for like two months and then left and invented radio all of a sudden, even though it was, yeah, Marconi, you fraudster. Tesla alone. Tesla did it. So anyway, moving on from that. Moving on from that side note. Tesla was doing this awesomeness, but now we are still trying to figure out how to make efficient wireless energy transmission possible because it would really help out, especially with things like electric cars to be able to drive along and not have to worry about stopping every so often and charging your car. What if there was electricity being projected maybe above the road or within the road or from below the road itself that could periodically charge a car as you drive and not have any wires to do it. You just drive and it charges your car as you go. It would be an amazing idea. What if you just wanted to walk around and have your cell phone charge and not have to plug it in or put it on a charging plate? That's dangerous. Never have to unplug. Yeah, well, there is a concern also about the frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum at which this transmission would take place and whether or not it is healthy for people or not. We do not exactly know the details of all of this yet. I mean, we walk around in an electromagnetic world. Yeah. So I'm not too concerned about it at this point in time, but Stanford University has published a new study of their work to try and not just we've got this, we've got it down to be able, like Tesla, he could be still not moving in an electric field that was being transmitted, electric current that was being transmitted through the air and his light bulb would turn on. But the problem that we've had in modern science is getting moving objects to be chargeable because there's a certain, you have to, with the current moving in a certain place in space, you have to have the object in that line of space and it has to be in the right orientation for it to be efficient and there are all sorts of factors that have been an issue until now. What? We, what, huh? What are we doing? Wait, tell me the story. Yeah. Wait, I pass the thing. Why aren't you telling me the story now? Tell me the story! Justin! So a graduate student in a lab in Stanford University is named Sid Asa Warra Wararit. He has changed the conventional setup and added a very, it's actually an off-the-shelf general-purpose amplifier that they've added to the normal system. But in the, this, so it's not high cost, this is, but it has increased the efficiency. They think that it can be improved on with custom made amplifiers to improve the efficiency by 90%, but what they have been able to do is create a system where they can have a light bulb moving through a field up to a distance of about three feet and be charged the entire time. So they've got a system where the field is produced and then they can move, just move the receiving end through it and up to three feet. So this is getting at that idea of a moving vehicle, a moving concept. But Tiki, isn't moving through an electrical field really bad for you? No, we do it all the time. We're constantly moving through electrical fields. But what about that elephant? Oh, the elephant that had. That topsy. The elephant, the electrical current killed him. That was on purpose. Yeah. And it was very inefficient. It was very ugly. It was very inefficient. It was inefficient. One of that because they just thought they had a current, they should have used direct current. They used alternating current and it wasn't, they weren't really trying to show that wireless transmission could take place in that situation. This was the situation where what was his name who made the light bulb? Edison, where Edison was like, I'm going to take over Tesla's work and I'm going to get alternating current removed from things and we're going to use. Was it going to take over the work? He was going to, yeah. It was a negative publicity campaign because Edison already owned a bunch of direct current infrastructure, which was his invention. And Tesla had come out with alternating current and had gone, even though he tried to basically give it to Edison. Edison rejected it. So he went to J.P. Morgan, I think it was, or somebody and got it funded and they were going to try their alternating current to put in houses, which is what we all have now. But yeah, the show, the dangers of alternating current. Edison was having dogs, cats, and eventually an elephant. And even the initial electric chair as punishment of death in New York City was created by Edison. Again, as part of this negative ad campaign. We wouldn't have had an electric chair. The reason I brought that up is that even if, and I hope that we do, we figure out how to power things as they move wirelessly. I guarantee there will need to be some sort of public information campaign. Absolutely. Because people will think they're going to walk around and get electrocuted. They will be, actually. They're not going to walk around and be electrocuted. But only pedestrians. If you drive, you're fine. No. Yeah, so I expect, I know somebody is going to say, that's not healthy. Yeah. Yeah, these people are also afraid of smart meters. These people also are concerned that all the different frequencies of radio that you can tune into on a dial are also messing up their brains. Like, there's going to be people concerned about anything, anyway. Of course, but this in particular, I can just picture people being very concerned about magnetic fields and walking through them. But I'm very excited for it. I think it's going to be fantastic. I mean, we walk through, we're in the magnetic field within the magnetic field of the earth. If we can power, if we can use solar panels to harness electricity, and we can use that electricity to get around without requiring people to pull up to a station, to a charging station, it will be the path of least resistance.  And that is what will make this work and completely change how we get around. Absolutely. But we'll have to find alternative ways. And it's not even gassing up the car. It's stopping for several hours to charge your vehicle. But I'm saying making it more convenient than gas will make electric cars the thing universally. And what makes it more convenient than gas is for it to continuously charge. Yep. But now we need a new way of getting beef jerky because, of course, stopping at the gas station, walking in and paying for your gas is then, oh, that's the only, now where do I get this? That's how you get your, you don't subscribe to the beef jerky box online. That's how everyone gets their beef jerky now. You've got to get your beef jerky from them. Jerkybox.com. The big mail order group, that's right. So I'm going to, I'm going to plug a TV show real quick here. Better Call Saul, which is, I think is a great show, but it's whatever. But there's a character in there. It's one of the main characters is allergic to electricity and electrical devices. And it's, and it's kind of not in the story.  It's like this guy's a little touched. There are people who live very far away from normal society. In the desert to stay away from electricity and from the things that they perceive that are hurting them. Right. And this guy is, this is, this is a real affliction. And then the story, he's like a, a, like top of the game sort of partnered a law firm that comes down with this at some point. And so it's had to readjust his life. But, but you can see like how terrible an analogy that really would be. Like he lives in the darkness. He's removed all the wiring from the house. Like anybody who comes to visit has to leave cell phones outside. He has like the insulated magnetic suit thing that he'll wear to go out and get the paper. Like it would be like really impossible to be on a planet like this. If that was a real thing, if you could actually be allergic to electricity or magnetic fields. People perceive themselves as being allergic to it and they do go to great lengths to get away from it. So it's, it's, no, it's real. It's this, the, the affliction perceived or whether it's actual, it is a real thing. And it's, it's sort of- Do go to great lengths. Yeah. And it's sort of a fun thing to imagine. Like he's trying to overcome it in one scene where he's walking down the, the, like the frozen aisle of a grocery store or he's actually trying to get to the other side of it. But suddenly he's now like all of these, like there's, there's the freezer, there's the lights above, there's the lights within the things. It's just all like. But yeah, thankfully for the rest of us, it'll be fine. Yeah, it'll be fine. All right. Where do we get our beef jerky? I don't know where you're gonna get your beef jerky. How about some- Open this a little. How about some, Justin? I don't see any more stories in the rundown. I'm gonna keep running. Keep going. Keep going. All right. How about some deep brain stimulation? Great. I could do that. We could all use this potentially. Well, you know what?  The only way we get electrical signals to stimulate neurons deep in our brains, like my finger length into the middle of my head, the only way that's gonna happen is if somebody cuts open my skull or goes in through my orbital frontal region of my skull and sticks a metal electrode in there. But maybe not for long. Maybe. Just maybe. Researchers have come up with a new methodology to electrically stimulate structures inside the brain with no electrodes. We've talked before on the show about transcranial direct current stimulation. And there's a whole DIY movement. People are getting their own electrodes and sticking electrodes on their scalp to try and get into their brain to alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, to help them focus more, to stimulate them so that they don't have to drink caffeine, but that they are awake and alert to increase alertness. Some really interesting ideas out there. If you look on Reddit for the TDCS community, fascinating stuff online. But some researchers looking at this stuff and looking at other papers have developed a new technique. It's not really a new technique because the Russians have done research on it and there is this whole TDCS community, but this technique is called temporal interference. And so when the direct transcranial direct stimulation, current stimulation is taking place, there are the electrodes on the scalp and usually they work at about two milliamps or so. So it's not a lot of current that's being pumped into your head. It's very low amperage current, two milliamps. But it's usually on the same cycle.  And so you've just got one current going into your head. This new technique, what they have come up with at MIT is that you apply two electrical fields to the subject's head. And instead of increasing the current or even instead of increasing the current, what you do is you have these two electrical fields. And so you can have a positive and negative and a positive and a negative on each side of the head or wherever they are located will help you triangulate to a certain location deeper within the brain. And by making them slightly offset, instead of having them work at exactly the same frequency, say two kilohertz, two kilohertz is not gonna stimulate the brain. They did some experiments and two kilohertz on its own doesn't really do anything to the brain. The brain responds to much lower frequency stimulation like 10 hertz stimulation. But when you have two kilohertz and 2.01 kilohertz, what happens is the waves of each of those currents, the frequencies that they're working at interfere with each other and the interference pattern that occurs at a particular location in the brain is a much lower frequency like 10 hertz that the neurons of the brain respond to. And so they showed in their experiments that they could stimulate the hippocampus of the mouse brain. And that's maybe like a centimeter away from the electrodes that they're using. The mouse brain's very small. So they're not still really working on the distances that they'd have to work on in the human brain. But we really need to get human sized rats in the lab, right? But hey, I love this idea, Blair. I love it. You're on to something. So many experiments. We're getting a good analog of humanity. Let's create giant lab rats. Yeah, we have to make them close to adult size but really adult weight is what we need. So 180 pound lab rats.  Ah, no, size doesn't equate. Size matters, blood flow matters. Of course it matters, but it doesn't equate. That's an interesting thing. I never even conceived of that before. But what is, is there some sort of a ratio with blood flow to brain size? Like, I know we've got really good blood flow to the brain size ratio, even with our large brains. But I wonder if you scale that down, what the next best contestant on the sentience is right would be. Price is right. Interesting. That's an interesting thing.  So it's not a direct link. It's blood flow. This is the thing though. This is blood flow. And that's what I'd be curious to see.  I don't bet that. I don't know about that. I would gamble $100. My brain immediately goes to the giraffe who has the largest heart compared to body size of any animal.  Yeah, but they're using all of it to move their neck. No, they're not. They have to get a lot of... They have to really work to get the blood up to their little... They get the blood up there, but also their blood moves through their ossicones, those things on the top of their head. They have a lot of blood flow in the head. That's just so they can communicate with Mars. Look. Let's get back to the story, though. Hang on. Tangential stuff is taking this show really long and we could be shorter. Okay, I'm sorry. But like an ape, even with its brain, it doesn't have the kind of blood flow that we have. Like, maybe this is something by feet and running. I don't know that it doesn't have the same blood flow. It does not. We didn't. This was like my favorite story from this past year. They did an evolutionary sort of look just at the base of the skull on the opening that allows the blood to the brain. And through our evolution, this thing increased in size and that the higher cognitive abilities of modern man are likely attributable to that trend and more blood flow to the brain. And then we did this other story that showed that there was a mechanical dynamic of this pounding feet on the ground that sort of forces blood up to the brain and that feedback may have actually been responsible for the enlarging and the brain and that's why we're smart because we ran on blood-engorged foot pads and not hooves. So that's what I'm saying. Like, I'm curious to see if there's anything else with that ratio, but without the brain size itself that we could scale up to create a sentient partner on this planet that would help us. Larry's looking very un... What's the word I'm looking for? Dubious. She's looking dubious. It's not claims, it's just speculation. Justin's got some speculation going. Her sideways base is almost up and down. This is an interesting study which is another step possibly forward in the brain stimulation field. This is still really a very young field. We don't really know what or how these electrical external stimulation methods are really working therapeutically. What are they really doing and how are they really helping people? This is still something that's new, it's burgeoning. So for them to move to this point of coming up with a technique that could move past just this kind of superficial stimulation of cortical regions, but to much deeper regions and potentially help in areas of the brain like the hippocampus or the thalamus or any region that's more central to the brain that could help say patients who struggle with seizures, that struggle with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. Maybe there's this kind of technique could maybe it could be helpful. And then if you don't have to have invasive surgery to help something that's so debilitating, a methodology where you could have a hat, you just put on a hat, wear your little hat every day and that helps you get through your day. I mean that. That's a potential possible outcome of if the minute. Yeah, I mean, like great, they can focus the manipulation on the brain somewhere. I think that's gonna be more important for research than it will be utilized as it occur. As beautiful as it sounds, shock therapy in no matter what form you couch it, I don't think is gonna be therapy. I think we're gonna find, yeah, something a little bit better to handle these diseases eventually then. All right, maybe we could send people to space. No, we don't want to send people to space. All of them. Because if they do. We're already here. Yay! Quiet. Quiet, you're not letting me segue. Because if they do send them to space, maybe they'll grow two heads like the flat worm, or they recently sent to space. Some researchers just sent some platyhyl mentheys, some nice flat worms to space. Now these cute flat worms, they kind of have an interesting body plan. They've got a head and they've got a tail end. But an interesting thing is that you can cut off their head and they'll regrow their head. Or you can cut off their tail and they'll regrow their tail usually.  And then it grew two heads. And they named it Zaphod Bebobrocks. Yes. It grew two heads. Congratulations, Worm. You're in NASA.  Right, other worms they sent to space underwent spontaneous vision in which they started growing other individuals off of themselves and budding new individuals off themselves. It was just going to space was kind of stressful. And so it was like, ah, let's make more of us. And then they brought them back to earth and they were like, ah, this is also stressful. Ah, I don't like it.  However, the worm that had grown two heads continued to have two heads. They kept cutting its head off and it continued to grow two heads. They've grown already. Well, wait, did they, hold on. Did they cut off both heads and then two grew back?  Oh no, they cut off both of the new heads and they re-grew the two. It decided it was no longer a single headed lifestyle. It was now double headed. It's double headed. Worm. Just like the U.S. affair. Going to space made this worm need two heads. I mean, so. I get it. Yeah, so an interesting aspect of this worm, this was all published in the journal, Regeneration. These worms had to change in the process of going to space. Like I said, they went underwent spontaneous fission and started making new individuals. And then when they came back, they were kind of upset about stuff and not doing really well. In the process, basically what happened is they had changed around their whole metabolic system for waste removal, for water regulation, osmoregulation. And so they had to move around, move their excretory system around in going to space to manage being in space. And then they had to do it again when they came back to earth. And normally these worms can re-grow their heads and they can re-grow their head from what was their tail.  And then they can re-grow heads out of their butts. So I just pictured four heads, two on the front and two on the back. They could, they could. So for this two-headed worm, it stayed two-headed. But anyway, going to space for flat worms. Very interesting situation that researchers now realize they need to look into a little bit more closely because maybe this is something that could help in or at least maybe it'll give us interesting insight into the genetics of human regeneration or even healing of wounds while humans are in outer space. Okay, so quick question. Yeah. If it became a possibility and assuming that both of the heads would be yours, starting from the same point of today, you would be just duplicating your head. People aren't gonna grow two heads. Would you do it? No. Really? I don't want two heads. I like my head. You wouldn't double like, I mean, I'm not saying like have some strange show up. I'm saying you have two heads now. I'd have to look at myself all day. No. You'd argue with yourself. Yeah. You're starting from the same point. You'd see yourself out of the corner of your eye and be like, am I always have that one hair there? So tall. Yeah, look at that mole. And could you please pluck it by now? Like you should have been able to take care of that. I would do it. All right. I would absolutely do it. I'm shocked. And then neither of us would ever get a word in edge-wise. Neither would I or him or us. Or maybe we'd talk in unison and be like in chorus with each other. Oh dear. I think it would be great to have an extra brain. And by extra, I mean like, okay. Okay, here's, you've got, okay, you remember the shopping list. I'm gonna remember what we're supposed to do after we go shopping and I'll figure that out. Like we could be a great partnership. And who better to talk to than yourself anyway? But also who is going to control your limbs?  Who's gonna pick up the... This has gotta be a transition. This is a transition. I'm moving into the next story. Here we go, moving on. Because I am trying to actually end this show eventually. Wouldn't it be funny if this was longer than our eight hour show? Oh my gosh. We just got on a roll this weekend that we cannot stop. Okay, new study and cell reports suggests that maybe we might not need as much sunscreen in the future. Maybe. Oh no, this is bad news. No, it's not.  Maybe this fake tan lotion will have a compound in it that will stimulate melanin production in your skin cells. Not just make you orange by dyeing your skin but actually stimulate even in people like me of fair haired and pale skin nature to produce melanin in your skin cells. So not only would you... It wouldn't be a fake tan. It would be a real tan because your cells would suddenly be producing the color component of skin and which protects you from the UV cancer causing rays of the sun. That sounds great. I'm all about that. Wouldn't it be awesome? They're working on it. I don't know. I'm slightly suspicious. No, don't be suspicious. They're working on it. No, I'm slightly suspicious of the outcome. No. Because I think this is the same mechanism that discovered rats get cancer. I have rates that they're exposed to light even when they sleep. It's stimulating that same system which also produces estrogen in the body. Not necessarily. It's like a whole... You think you're messing with one aspect because melanin and color skin and tan so combined but it's also part of the estrogen. Manufacturing process. Like there's all these other elements that you... Not necessarily. That's part of the whole system there. Justin, they're definitely gonna test that. Okay, eventually. I'm just telling you where they're gonna end up before they get there. Okay, I take your bet. I take your bet for the future. But they are and they have published on this that it's in cell reports. They are now, and they have done this study in mice but to be able to rub on this compound which actually stimulates... It's called salt inducible kinase. And it stimulates melanin. Stimulates pigmentation. The pigmentation would block UV. They're not saying you shouldn't wear sunscreen. They're saying potentially this drug could be combined with sunscreen in a single product. So you would look tan like a nice fake tan unlike myself and also block the sun even more. Great idea, right? I love it. I think it's great. Around the corner. That's a delicate system. You do not wanna start monkeying around it. You could say that about literally anything. You gotta start somewhere. We have to start somewhere. You could still... Actually, I think you've looked at that hair that keeps showing up in that place. You don't want it to, Blair. And nothing else about the universe will change. But in this case... How about we start talking about how we're gonna get rid of malaria? Okay, that's a productive conversation. Let's have a more productive malaria. Kill all the mosquitoes. Right, so maybe we can do this in a biologically sensitive way that doesn't involve pesticides that hurt human babies, that cause problems. It was shown like, recently it was shown that the pesticide that's used to kill mosquitoes who carry the Zika virus, it causes motor problems in developing children. This is not the kind of thing we want to be putting into the environment, right? So researchers are looking at other things they could use like funguses, fungi. And they have found in a very specific, so there are malaria-carrying mosquitoes who are becoming more and more resistant to the pesticides, the insecticides that are being used. Researchers at the University of Maryland in collaboration with researchers from Burkina Faso in China and Australia are using a fungus. They reported this in scientific reports. Meta-ryseum ping-sha-hen-see-i. And this fungus naturally kills mosquitoes. That's, this fungus does this on its own already. It was isolated from a mosquito originally and previous evidence suggests the fungus is specific to these disease-carrying mosquito species. Anopheles gambiae, 80s Egyptii. This is great, right? However, the fungus doesn't always kill them. But basically what happens is the spores of the fungus they contact the mosquito's body, the spores germinate and then penetrate the exoskeleton of the insect that from the inside out, it gets in there and it kills the mosquito from the inside out. Sounds like a terrible way to die, but the researchers are using this to their benefit and they're making the fungus even more deadly to the mosquitoes. You wanna know how? Using spider and scorpion toxins. Yucky! So they're taking calcium potassium, these ion blocking, these toxins that block ion channels. So these channels are required for their transmission of nerve impulses, action potentials, and these toxins block those signals. The ion channels don't work. And so these are neurotoxins that they've isolated from spiders and scorpions. They've put them in a fungus and now the fungus is going to kill mosquitoes. Okay. Boom! I love it. Yep. Talk about biological control. Hey, do you wanna hear more about fungus? I do, that's why I brought that story up last as opposed to where I had put it previously. So it's your turn. So I wanna talk about a fungus that's pretty darn similar actually. But this fungus, it attacks beetles. Goldenrod soldier beetles native to North America. Researchers from University of Arkansas and Cornell University found a type of fungus that kills female goldenrod soldier beetles in a particularly unique way. So these beetles, they eat flowers. They mate while sitting on top of flowers. And the fungus has used both of these behaviors to their demise. Uh-oh. These fungus also, the fungus is aeroneopsis lampyridarum. Lampyridarum. Lampyridarum. They live on the same type of flowers that as the beetles like to eat. When the beetles land on the flower to eat it, the fungus infects them. Once infected, the beetles' jaws clamp hard down onto the flower and lock. They freeze the beetle in its place and it dies. Oh. Almost a whole day later, the wings start to open as if they're about to take flight. For infected male beetles, that's pretty much the end of the story. But for females, they swell even further and this attracts males. That actually mimics a posture of a female ready to reproduce. Oh. So then the males fly over, they mate with the dead beetle. Yeah. And become infected with their fungus, fly away, latch onto a new flower, infected with fungus, spreads the fungus and it spoils. Why? Why would she be having that stance if she didn't like it? Go hit it, young beetle. I mean, they just can't tell the difference, unfortunately. So they studied 485 males, 281 females, 165 males, 90 were infected with the fungus and it took about 15 to 22 hours for wings to expand and that right after that, they started to swell. Like the chances of me going home with a lady who seems interested in me. And it turns out she was dead the whole time. She was dead the whole time. She was dead the whole time in his ruse that had me devoured by a fungus. It was in a weekend at Bernie's situation. Often in the human world, thankfully. This is a very strange weekend at Burr. It's like weekend at Bernie's meets I-Zombie. Yeah, there's something there, yeah. Weekend at Bernie's, that's the walking dead. That's swollen and has her wings open and so how can they even smell? And actually that's about the same for the modern man, but... All right, all right, you guys. You know what we just did? Science? We scienceed it. We did. We told you all the science stories that we put down in our little planning sheet. Oh, good gracious. What a show, mind-bending and then the fungus. Boom.  And paste. Paste, that's right, fermented paste. Oh, so many memories from tonight that are gonna lead me into my dreamy, dreamy dreamland of sleep. Thank you so much for listening to this Week in Science. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. We obviously had a good time this week. 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This is where we move to the after show, which I'm not really sure how long it's to be tonight because we're all still pretty tired from our weekend in Philadelphia. Yeah, it's like one in the morning. I gotta go to bed. What time is it? Did you have fun touristing? I had so much fun. It was amazing. Good, good, good. Yeah.  Submarine and a boat. It was really, really cool. And redding terminal station was really awesome. And then I also walked around Independence Park, and I saw some really interesting things. They have this, I think there's also a museum of slavery there, but they have a whole walkthrough area near the bell that is all about the struggle of slaves at these historic white men's houses. It was fascinating. That would be interesting. Yeah. And they had, they had TVs mounted and they had people pretending to be those people. So this one guy was talking about being, it wasn't John Adams, but it was someone like that, you know, being his chef. And then someone else was talking about how they tried to get their grandma transferred to the house they were working on in. And yeah, it was very interesting. Very interesting. And that's when I posted that quote that I found particularly relevant. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, here it is.  That was W.E.B. Dubois. How long ago? When was that like 200 years ago? I don't know. Probably. Pretty appropriate. Yeah, the kind of comment, the kind of statement that yeah, has ramifications years after it is made. Oh my gosh, Phoenixville Rising just followed me on Instagram. Really? That's awesome. What to do in and around Phoenixville? That would have been helpful before. Yeah. Where Justin go, he was like pulling things out of a Kaiser bag and then he ran away. Yeah, I hope he comes back soon because I really need to go to bed. I was like almost falling asleep towards that. I'm not in a good way. Oh, strengths. I did the video. I didn't make the video. I can show you right now, but this card right here, it's been sitting next to my computer. So strengths in the chat room. He says, remember the B video last year you failed to do? I went. I have the card. No, it doesn't just need to be edited. All my audio is in this card that has died. I can't get any of the audio off of it. Oh no. Yeah. And so it's just, the project has been like, I've got the card. I've had it sitting next to my desk for a year now because I like, I want to do it, but I don't know how to make the card go. Interesting. And I feel terrible because I went and the guy spent time with me and like, we did video and then I never made a movie and I never did a video. I've got all sorts of great video, bees flying in and out of hives, although he did not at the time have a working flow hive. So anyway, Portland Community College has a flow hive. Awesome. Maybe I can pull it all together. So I don't need a Red Bull. I need to go to bed because I have to work an eight hour day tomorrow. And I, no, no, it's the card. It's not the reader because the reader works fine on other cards. It's the card. There's errors on the card. I need to, I don't know what to do. It's the card. It's the card. Yeah. Ed from Connecticut, Blair's yawn spreads through the chat room. Sorry. It means everyone cares about me. Yeah, it does. Everyone's connected. I mean, I had a great time in Philadelphia. It was really good. It was a crazy trip though, because it was so fast, like doing the red eye over and then jumping in to things and working all day, both days, Saturday and Sunday, and then basically coming right back. Yeah. It was a whirlwind. It was a lot of work. It was a very good trip though, I think. It was great to meet everybody over there and to work with the people at the Young Innovators Fair was fantastic. But now I'm tired and I'm supposed to leave tomorrow afternoon. I don't know when I'm going to leave. I don't know, but I'm supposed to go tomorrow afternoon to a music festival until Monday. And all I want to do is go to sleep. Like I'm looking on Facebook and all my friends who are going, they're like, yeah, we're headed to the festival. We're so excited. Everyone's so excited.  And I'm so tired. I was so tired today. Can I sleep? No, I have to do work. Why? Why can't I sleep? When am I going to pack? Yeah, what were you holding up? This is a, okay, so I haven't really been been talking about this yet. And I was going to like, I was waiting for the right time. But I recently got diagnosed with chronic lymphatic leukemia, which is like the mildest type of cancer you could possibly have. But it also comes with pretty intense fatigue. So I missed the opening of the show tonight. During my third nap of the day, like, this is like that. It wasn't like I just fallen asleep because the day got tough. This is the third time I was required to like fall asleep just by lying down. Boom, I'm out. And so I'm asking the, my general practitioner doctor if there's anything that they can give me to help me stay awake during the day. But the first thing they have to rule out is sleep apnea. And I don't snore. I don't have sleep freaking apnea. Why would you suddenly have sleep apnea if you never had fatigue before? That's idiotic. That changes your sleep pattern. If you have sleep apnea, you'll die. Is that the concern? No, the concern is actually the way my doctor put it was that doctors would be doing stimulants. He said, we're not allowed to prescribe stimulants anymore. That's how he said it.  Now you have to go through like the sleep therapy wing. Because doctors can't be trusted. Exactly how he put it. He said, because we've overprescribed it and probably beyond it ourselves. So you have to go through this whole chain of study to see if you, maybe the reason you're tired is because you don't take in oxygen and like every, like a lot of it's about being obese or this and that. There's all these things that they talk about are things that could lead to sleep apnea. I had to sit through this class today about why you might have sleep apnea and none of them applied to me. I'm like, I have leukemia! Just can I leave? Do I have to read all this?  But so at some point tonight, I've got to plug into this my finger. I got to stick my finger in the machine. It'll close on it. I've got to tape a thing here and another thing here. And I got to sleep with this machine on and rule out that first before I can go to the next level. But yeah, it's crazy. Like this weekend, I didn't hardly sleep at all. That was crazy. I kept like, why aren't you sleeping?  I've had insomnia forever. My first memory of being an insomniatic was like age six. And I can only nail it to age six because of where it took place. I know up till six, I lived there. It might have been five, but it was in the four to six range for what happened. But I would stay up through the night. So part of my doctor's concern also was like, well, is it insomnia? What is creating the fatigue? We have to rule everything out before they can address. But I've had insomnia my entire life and I've not been like a three map a day person in my entire existence. I've always been able to have a well spring of energy throughout the day wasn't affected by the amount of sleep I had on one night, particularly, right? Like two or three nights in a row of insomnia. Yeah, that could lead to a nap. But one or two forget, what am I getting good? Well, not this weekend, but just typically, I get pretty okay sleep. So I got a plug into this machine tonight. But yeah, it was maybe like the weekend because you didn't, I mean, it was four days of not really good sleep, which, I mean, I'm tired. And then you've got this. And then now you've got a disorder that's got really good sleep. And that reset was like fine for a whole day. Yeah, but your body needs a cup. It's not one night's sleep is not going to completely reset after like four days of something like that. So it's gonna be, I mean, you're gonna, I honestly think it's going to take like a week for you to come back from not sleeping most of the weekend. Right, possibly. And so then the ridiculous part is having had three naps in this day. Now I've got the sleep machine I got a plug into. What if I don't sleep? I plug into this sleep study machine. And I'm like, Oh, of course, this is a night where I can't sleep is plugged into the thing and there's no reset button. There's no reset button. Once you start the thing, the process goes. And if you just don't sleep, or if there's an error, then you got to do it again. Yeah, knows if you're sleeping or not. Yeah, it knows if you've been sleeping. It knows if you're awake. It knows if you've been better good, so be good for goodness sake. You'd better watch.  You'd better go to sleep. Better not have sleep apnea. Oh, and for the means in there, there is no, okay, so there's a cure. There is a cure to this thing that I've got. Absolute care within 24 hours. I could be 100%. We'll be covering this a little bit more in depth just because I have a personal interest in now.  And so because it's such a mild form of a cancer, because it's not actually doing like other than being really sleepy once in a while, like doesn't have a whole lot of other affect. And the fact that there's a that this cutting edge cure that they have for it, which cures within 24 hours as a slight percentage chance of being possibly you might die from the treatment, they won't give it to you and tell the diseases progressed really far down the line. And mine is still super early stages. So it's in terms of having, getting a disease, it's not bad. It's kind of like one of the ones you'd shoot for. Really, it'd be like, I'm gonna get like this like, you know, if I could pick from a list of the cancers, like this is the one everybody chooses, right? It's that, it's that mild, and it's actual affect. And it's the one that has a cure, which a lot of them don't. It doesn't yet. It's does it has a cure. It's just not search. It's not a cure cure yet. It's a cure care. It's there. It works therapy is great potential, but it's not a cure yet. But it has a side effect of death, death, which is but it's still like, yeah, Justin, like joking inside, but you have to remember that there are other people listening to this or watching this who might consider trying to do like, we have to we have to remember that if it's not, if it's not perfected yet, or it's, it had, they haven't reduced that chance of, you know, the side effect of death, right? We have to make sure that we're not calling it a cure because it's still, it's still, no, it's still not because it's not it. They've only done a very, very, very small trial with a very small number of people. We don't actually and and like you said, but a lot of them were not, there were several who were not and several who died. So the percentages in like, you got the percentages from this very small trial extrapolate out to a larger group of people. A lot of people will die if this is something that people go after. No, but but but people can't go after. So there's all these intermediate therapies that have been developed over the years, right? But you don't, you don't get to actually go like, give me the cure at any point in this process, you have to be at the last leg of it before they're like, okay, we're going to try this now. It's not a cure. It is.  But it could it could protect you for a time because it's it's changing your immune system. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. The CAR T stuff has such great potential. And I hope I hope that this stuff works. But I mean one or seriously, we're at the level of one or two very small sample size studies. At this point in time, there needs to be way more, way more. It'll get there. I mean, I think we're getting to the point where they're getting the safety dialed in maybe. I hope I want it to be. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's promising. But but also like, in terms of other types of diseases out there, there's things that'd be really, really a lot worse at handling. Like, like having fatigue, having to take a nap as the side effect of a disease, not not really the hardest thing to do. It requires like lying down on a couch. Okay. It was annoying that I had to take this nap. But you know, all that was required was for me to lie down to deal with the side effect. I honestly think even if I had like the minorest form of diabetes, something that required monitoring and watching a diet and pricking your finger to check the blood and then the thing like that would be unmanageable for somebody like me. Like I can't do a really structured monitoring thing where I have to be really involved. If all of a sudden I'm like, oh, time to take a nap. This I can handle. So I think in a lot of ways of the diseases that are out there in the world, this is probably the one I might have gotten to choose it so cautious. And maybe you'll find out that you do indeed actually have sleep apnea. I severely doubt it. And it tends to be like a snoring thing. I'm not a snorer. Well, how would you know? Because I'm like, I'm just going to say some people, I've done a lot of sleeping with somebody else in the room. And because of that, the lack of snoring feedback over those years, it tells me I don't snore. Like that would be really like Have you ever thought that maybe that's how you sleep on a couch? It was a, it was a manipulative technique. It made you think you wanted to sleep on the couch, but really, it was a technique to get you out there. Here, I have an idea. Maybe we should get Justin to do a live stream of himself sleeping. Just put a video, just put the computer, leave it open, do a periscope or something, do a Facebook live, just do a live stream of yourself sleeping, and then people can tune in and see whether or not you're snoring and let you know. Or the sleep apnea machine will just tell you that. That sounds like a good idea, except that I masturbate in my sleep, which would ruin all g-rating of the Good night, everybody. So the reason, the reason I sleep on couches, and I have become like, this is like the most comfortable form of sleep, is because I spent about a decade in the, I think nineties, all of the nineties, we'll call it all of the nineties, where I didn't, I have a home base, but I would, I had, I had a car and I had a job that was like on the road. And so I'd go work on the road for a while and have all this money. And then I would go and visit all of my friends who had dispersed throughout the many states of the Americas. And I'd spend a week or two couch-ranging on, on different friends' couches across the western states. And, and over that time, I developed, you know, this is, this is the comfort zone. This is the home base. This is, once you're on a couch, it's time to sleep. And a bed is like too sprawling. Like, I don't know how people sleep in beds. It's like, ah, I can roll over here. I'm sailing over there. It's not the warm cocoon of being held tightly to the bosom of the bed, like it couches. The couch. I love to starfish. I don't like feeling confined. You like to what? Starfish? Starfish. Starfish. Starfish.  So I sleep in a clean bed by myself. And it's great. I sleep in a clean bed with my husband. I sleep in a twin bed with my son sometimes. Sometimes I sleep on the couch. Yeah, there's starfishing to be had in any of those, Kiki. Nope. I'm pretty confined. I actually, I'm pretty good at, I do, I do, I start on my side and I sleep on my stomach and then I go to my other side and then I move it back and then I do this. I think I rotate throughout the night. I'm like, yeah, I rotate. I mostly sleep on my stomach and I'll have one arm under my head, the other arm outstretched and then my legs starfish out. That's, that's my go to, which I wonder all the time, like if I ever do have a baby, if I ever get pregnant, I don't know if I'll be able to sleep at all. Oh, you will. Don't you worry. Because I won't be able to sleep on my stomach. No, I thought the same thing. It was fine. Oh yeah. I sleep on my stomach too. I don't understand back sleepers. Yeah. When you're pregnant, you don't really have a choice and you get tired and you're like, I'm just going to fall asleep right here. That's fair. That's fair. Yep. Speaking of sleep, sleep is good for us. Yeah. Should we go do that? I'm going to go plug into my machine very shortly here. Yeah. Justin has to plug into a machine. That's an elite. Resistance is futile. Right. Oh man. You're going to be part of the Borg now, dude. Yeah. Borg. Borg. I've got to jam my finger into a thing and pull a tab, and then it's going to close on my finger.  Watch your mouth, man. I know it's the after show. You said the M word and then the S word. We got to go. We got to go. No, we got to edit this out. That's the first time I've cursed on the air in a really long time. I don't edit things out of this feed. This is the after show, but yeah, no. I still have said shoot after a nap. I should not have said shoot. Ship. Ship. Ship. Sure. Why don't you ship that sleep sensor someplace else? Because I'm going to be counting them soon. Good night, everybody. Hey, say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us for This Week in Science. We hope that you'll be back next week for more fun. This week was fun, wasn't it? Have a good week.