Bonjour, bonsoir, hello, hey, howdy, how's it going everyone? It is le science de le... non, c'est maitre? De le c'est maitre, oui. This week in science, doing our weekly science podcast broadcast. Hello Justin, you're back. Hey, of course, where else am I going to be? I don't know, doing other things. Sometimes that happens. Everyone, we are so glad that you are here to join us tonight and Justin, I'm glad you are here as well. We are about to start this show, our weekly broadcast discussion of science news topics in which we report and then question and go, what's going on there? And we hope that you enjoy doing that with us. And right now is the time to hit the likes and the shares and the hearts and the notifications and do all the things that help with the algorithms to get us into whatever it is that helps the algorithm I'm helping. Right. Comment ça va? Ça va bien. Oui, bientôt. I don't think any of this French is good for the search engine optimization. We need to streamline our algorithm. Ah, c'est parfait pour le Canada. Ah oui, Montréal et Québec. Oh, you're speaking French for me. Je ne parle pas les Québécoises. Mais les personnes dans le France, ils le pensent que j'habite dans l'UK. What would be? You remember UK, England, whatever. Great Britain. We're going to do a show now. We're going to talk about science. You ready? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. Okay. So let's start it up, everybody. It is time. And if there is stuff to be edited out, like the stuff that just happened, it is not going to be in the podcast. Troubleshooting and all that other stuff, it happens, doesn't end up in the podcast. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you want to have the nicely edited version, but otherwise, we're so glad that you're here right now. We are beginning this program in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 959 recorded on Wednesday, February 7th, 2024. Why are blueberries blue? So many questions. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with sexy, psychedelics, blueberries and childlike learning. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. We spoke recently about the dediliterious effects of money in the field of scientific publishing. In doing so, we may have given the incorrect impression that we are somehow independent media. This is not correct. Without direct support upon which we rely to bring you the show, we would not be here. So a quick word from our sponsors. The following program is brought to you by the good people who use science, science, reminding you that for everything you do, you can do it better with science. And by the collective works of researchers, researchers reminding you that everything science does starts with an underfunded research project. And by the underpaid teachers everywhere, teachers where underfunded researchers get their start. And of course, from our Patreon sponsors, the executive producers of the world's longest running science podcast, this week in science, coming up next. And a good science to you too, Justin. It's so great to have you back and a great science. Welcome to everyone who's joining us once again for another episode of This Week in Science. We are back to talk about science advances, science questions, science discoveries and all the things... What do you got? What do you got? What do you got this week? No, well, I'm hoping that what I have will lead to a very good show that everyone will enjoy. I have stories about blueberries, nighttime walks, surprising finds from old space, cellular highways and teaching AI like a child. What do you have, Justin? I've got curing cancer, all sorts with T cells, concussion protein protocols, an ancient Swedish mystery grave, and why psychedelics make you sexy. I... Why do psychedelics make you sexy? I would like to find a... Well, you're going to have to stay true if you want to know. Is this like a real known phenomenon? I don't know about it. So much to talk about here. I'll clarify the teaser a little bit to say that it's not that they make you look sexy, but maybe make you feel sexy, but not necessarily while you're on them, because that's a whole different thing. Okay, can't wait to get into this discussion. Thank you for teasing us. There's a disclaimer at the head of the show for this part at some point, but yeah. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Thank you for everyone who is supporting this show. We say things here. As we jump into the show, I want to remind you that subscribing to Twists is fairly easy. You can find us as a podcast this week in Science on pretty much all podcast platforms that are out there. We livestream weekly on Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube 8 p.m. Pacific Time. And if you want to join us for those live shows, we love seeing you in the chat rooms. We have a Discord for our Patreon supporters. And if all of this is just a lot, go search for this week in Science, in Google or Bing or whatever AI program you're using these days, but at twist.org. That's our website. You can find past episodes, new episodes, show notes, let's you know what's going on. Okay, ready for the science? Let's do it. Let's talk about rewriting astronomy. It's time. Thank you to the James Webb Space Telescope, who people don't necessarily want to call the James Webb Space Telescope all the time, but J-Wist undoubtedly has allowed us to take a look at things in the universe in a different way and to discover that all the things, not all the things, but some things that we took for granted and kind of just accepted as the way that they worked in the early universe and thought they were universal, homogenous, everything's the same. We're finding out that there are so many things that work very differently. So first stuff out of Arizona State University researcher Tim Carlton was using the J-Wist data to look at some dwarf galaxies. And there was a particular area that they were looking at as a cluster of galaxies known as J-Wist prime extragalactic areas for re-ionization and lensing science. So mouthful, you can just call it the Pearls project. So these dwarf galaxies are really abundant across the universe. They're one of the most abundant types of galaxies. They're small. They're not very bright. They have less than 100 million stars. The Milky Way galaxy is over or near 200 billion stars. So this is difference in scale and what we're actually looking at. So they're looking at these dwarf galaxies. And one thing that they were looking at in this Pearls project was a particular area that they call Pearls DG dwarf galaxy. It's a very specific dwarf galaxy. It was just a little bit off from what they were really looking at, the main point that they were looking at, but they were like, oh, there's something going on there. This is different. What's happening? And they were able to use the near infrared imaging camera on J-Wist. And they were also able to use spectroscopic data from another spectrograph on the Lowell Discovery Telescope and Flagstaff. They had archival data from Spitzer and Galex. And they also had Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey data. They were able to correlate and cross-reference all of this data to look at this area of space and take a real look at this weird little dwarf galaxy that they were like, what's going on there? And because they were able to correlate and corroborate all of the data, they were able to determine that this one particular dwarf galaxy that really hadn't been of interest before was special. It didn't have a lot of stars being born. It wasn't working the way that dwarf galaxies are normally expected to work. It wasn't quite on the same page as the researchers were expecting. The near cam, especially because of the way that it's able to hit the resolution, angular intensity and be able to really get a look at where something is in space is that this dwarf galaxy was kind of isolated all off on its own, not interacting with other galaxies.  And they're just this little dwarf galaxy, they're seeing it just kind of not doing anything in the middle of nowhere off by itself. And that was not what they expected to find. So what does this mean? It means that there could be more about dwarf galaxies and how dwarf galaxies evolve over time.   So is it that because it's very far away, very far back in time, we would expect there to be star seeding taking place? Like if it's there at all, it should be creating stars. Yes, exactly. So maybe this is like an offshoot thing, right? Maybe this was part of a bigger cluster of star generation. And this little dwarf galaxy just kind of fell out somehow, maybe through a collision. And it's just what's left over in the back. But whatever seems to be in charge of generating these things, being out left on your own out there in the cold space. Right. So the age of it, it should be making stars. It's not. And it should be with other stuff. It's not. It's on its own. It's just it's already done its star formation.  I'm going to go to the corner of the playground and be by myself doing my own thing. And then another study related to J-WIST this last week came out of Johns Hopkins University researchers, again, using J-WIST data, looking at black holes and how they influence the cosmos, black holes. Very often we think of them as occurring when a massive star or massive stellar body reaches some critical point and collapses in on itself, not supernova necessarily, or it's what happens after the supernova. And it collapses in all of the gravity, all of the magnitude of everything into the singularity at the center. And we often think of black holes as we see them as quasars, these jets of energy that shoot out from the magnetic and gravitational area that are a result of the all the dust and other stuff around where whatever that that that big thing used to be and all the dust that went out from it is getting sucked back in again. And usually they're thought to be at the core of the galaxies as they as a black hole forms maybe early, maybe it's very early on in the formation of a galaxy.  Right. So again, it's it's a center of the hub of these galaxies within the universe, but like the same way that this last little isolated quiescent dwarf galaxy was kind of doing its own thing. The researchers were like, oh, let's look at these supermassive black holes from long, long time ago. And so within like the first hundred million years of the universe after everything started to turn into actual stuff as opposed to whatever plasma or energetic components it was right after the Big Bang. Webb's data suggested and these researchers have published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, which came first supermassive black holes or galaxies and their data suggests that these really old black holes were actually amplifiers of star formation. They boosted things. The black holes somehow like formed, but maybe even before giant stars formed, maybe even like somehow the the they were existing at a time when there were young stars and not big old stars and these these black holes formed during the first hundred million years of the universe that they formed as the gas started coming together that nothing should be able to escape their pole. But they're finding more and more of these black holes. They're like particle accelerators and that they are these these black holes are potentially yeah. So it both makes sense and doesn't make sense, right? Yeah.  They went supernova and that's where heavy metals came from. And then heavy metals were able to see the rest of all and it evolved into a lot of new things. But it this where the black holes are and the timeline of it, it it doesn't make a lot of sense as to the timing of how it all works or whether it all it all worked, right? Yeah, which came first. So so you gotta try to picture the primordial universal cosmic soup, right? Oh, I always picture that. Yes. And so there's all this stuff. I mean, there's gravity, but there isn't there isn't maybe a whole lot of orbital gravity. You can think of it this way, right? Because you don't have the anchors. You don't have your planets with the satellites around them. You don't have stars with the planet satellites around them and you don't have giant supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies with stars in orbit around them. So so you have to start somewhere and you probably do start, I would say you'd have to start with a star forming before a black hole. This is like at least this is the canon, right? That's the canon. Yeah. And then once you get one cluster that turns into a star that then is can feed on everything because just in the same way that if you get close enough to a black hole, nothing can escape. Basically, the same thing is true for a sun to a to a great era star for a great for all the little stuff that's out there. And there's no galactic migration going on. It's going to pull our in anything that's around it in the primordial cosmic soup. So eventually you would think that thing goes to the supernova creates the black hole. And now you finally have your first anchor and then all the other parts can start to turn into stuff as they are now in orbit around because black holes and I can just go out and eat everything. It's going to have a range and then beyond that things will begin to orbit. But then also like like the the outbursts, the jets that come from black holes, neutron stars, that's also spewing more complex materials elsewhere outward from that that place of gravitational everything that we believe is built on a star first and a black hole second and then you know the rest of this story starts to fill in. So if we get black holes first could be a part I mean black holes could have happened at the same time as some of the first stars and then black holes seated galaxies and then there are more stars and then we're trying to keep the old we're trying to keep the old theory alive in our conversation here like still I could have been the way we think it is just because without it it's kind of hard to picture something becoming a black hole just by iteration little just by little bits falling into a to an area without that that that sort of expected star formation in the middle right right so but but maybe there were just areas of as a black hole of things of that primordial soup that just suddenly started to accrete and went really fast and just went straight to black hole or the big bang big bang spat out spat out chunks as well which would have been black holes already like already super dense areas where the uh like that would be the only but then gosh it wouldn't feel like that wouldn't give as much of a chance for you we'd have a very patchy universe made up of like oh some stars and matter over here but other gaps over there which is kind of what we have I don't know yeah but anyway uh web web suggests that the black holes were very very important early early early in our universe more so than we thought that yeah originally it was oh yeah stars and then later black holes but uh black holes were there and important much earlier than we considered well then I mean if black holes are already there then it does also kind of help explain how quickly uh galaxies started compared to how bang bang bang oh yeah surprise yes we know what a chicken dinner something a mystery actually so new questions new uh directions for looking you know looking for more evidence but it's fun stuff yeah where do you want to look next oh gosh I can't even recall the order of the story is oh yeah this is a pretty important one this is a scientist that you see san francisco and northwestern medicine may have found a way to basically take the engineered T cells and use a few tricks that they've learned from how cancer protects itself and turn regular T cells into cancer killers so are we already doing this with like CAR T and uh the other like other treatments so is this that is this is similar to that or is this different yeah so already we are doing creating unique mutations uh into uh cells to train T cells so that they will go after cancer but cancer has cancer has this weird thing that it does where it's like deciding it's its own organism separate from the rest of the body and so it uses uh its own form of an immune system to protect itself from its biggest threat which is the body's natural immune system uh which also includes T cells so while we have done a really good job of training T cells to go after engineering T cells that to go after uh blood cancers other cancers are tougher they they're they're too too big of a too sophisticated of a target I guess for for that method to be super effective at but they found that by studying mutations and believing that T cells that cause lymphoma they found some that they could use they found some of these mutations that they thought would be useful for infiltrating and targeting cancer and so the result they're saying is a hundred times more potent at killing cancer cells than what you're describing the CAR T therapy and and they found no signs of these becoming toxic afterwards wow so it's it's it's basically streamlining and making a much more like a better weapon against this particular cancers like you said this is uh is this just blood and bone marrow uh or is this this is more broad so this is much more broad okay this is uh they let me see if I can find where what all they uh ended up testing here uh specifically but it's okay our discoveries this is uh choy who is the lead researcher on the paper uh I believe he's at UC San Francisco okay Dr. J hook choy an associate professor of dermatology and biochemistry and molecular genetics at the wrong school northwestern university he says uh our discovery empowered T cells to kill multiple cancer types this approach performs better than anything we've seen before and they were let's see they were used they used T cells have the potential to offer cures for people who have heavily pretreated and have poor prognosis cell therapies are living drugs because they live and grow inside the patient and can provide long-term immunity against cancer so this is very much the way a CAR T therapy works but where does it say so I don't know I can't find it but from where I remember they used they applied this to uh liver lung at least and maybe more that's great and so these are these are naturally occurring mutations they're just using what the body already is doing in some small form and they're using it to the benefit of attacking these these different cancer types to attack the yeah the specification so I'd read something recently about CAR T where I mean historically you take out the T cells you get them outside the body and you re-engineer them outside and then you put them back in but there's a new methodology where they're starting to do more specific directed in-body uh gene editing of the T cells do you know if this study is is that type of process or is this I don't know so no so yeah this is just this is basically taking native T cells without the it seems like by doing just a mutation change the other ones were much more complicated they were basically using HIV hollowing it out and creating a their own T cells basically uh that would then go in and train and be somewhat immortal in that they would keep working so once it's in it it doesn't it doesn't stop working I love this it's yeah finding a way to undermine cancer which has been undermining the body's immune system and protective systems for its own uses seriously it's ecological predator prey activity in the medical in the medical sphere but uh oh and I can't I can't find it in this rundown that I've got so it must be in it must be in the paper itself which I don't have before me but uh yeah so cancer is so insidious because like I was describing it sees itself like its own organism so it's doing all of everything that cancer does it's actually kind of self-preserving it's not it's not trying to kill the body it's just trying to keep the body from killing it and growing and reutilizing oxygen nutrients and even retraining the body's immune system to protect it uh so in in these mutations of lymphoma these are white blood cells that have been you know just sort of aren't going to aren't going to work and they're going to mutate and they're not going to you know work well they found ways of sneaking past the defenses of of cancer cells so that maybe the cancer is not recognizing this T cell as a threat because ah it doesn't look right it's missing some of those things that it's it's great right so by by altering normal T cells so that they can get past that that initial defense response from a tumor that allows them to infiltrate and destroy it like they would any other malignant tissue in the body anything else that doesn't belong there we go after fact that they can they can they've also found that it's not causing uh oh it's not like then going and attacking right so it doesn't cause auto right there's no autoimmune issues it's not attacking other parts of the body it's not you know like oh suddenly you have a a rogue T cell that's going around and destroying everything but yeah it's specific this is awesome we're learning so much and and uh so they're hoping this is going to be in human trials within the next just a few years the result so this was in mouse in in mice so they're already moving for wow okay awesome fingers crossed there are so many technologies and things that we start and then they don't end up making it all the way so my fingers are always crossed with stuff like this and here is the T cells engineered engineered by Northwestern and UCSF were able to kill tumors derived from skin lung and stomach that wasn't leather skin lung and stomach in mice uh and so that's a that's a pretty broad range that normal CAR T therapy was not able not able to do yeah it opened it's opening it up a lot and I'm sure even with these 71 mutations they've added like now it'll be like okay where are others we now we know where to look let's start let's start honing in on more specific tissue-based mutations that we can approach so that'll be cool um all of the cells in our bodies are supported by an infrastructure you think of cells as kind of like these little you know fat skinned water bags full of little little stuff but there's actually a little like architecture and there's like more kind of like a structure a subskeleton that that exists inside of all of our cells and that substructure is made up of molecules called tubulants so in our muscle cells we have actin and myosin and those work together to ratchet and to allow the muscles to contract and relax and contract and relax but those aren't the only type of tubules all of the cells have tubules and very often some of the very often these tubules are built across the interior of this empty space of the cell like if you can imagine how much trouble we are having building a space elevator to get ourselves you know to be able to have a little bit of cargo that we can put up an elevator into outer orbit and you know maybe get it up toward the moon a little bit space elevator it's really hard our cells are building those all the time and they are essential for the movement of cargo all around the cells so they take molecules they take things that are needed from one place to another and they and they do it outside of the cell too they they can also these tubes uh can can reach out to other cells and deliver cargo to those other cells but these this infrastructure these tubulin tubule structures are you know while they're well known to the biological cellular research community and issues related to to the misconstruction of these tubules are really important because if they don't get constructed correctly then things don't move to the right places in the cells gets mucked up you have cellular damage and things go wrong so understanding how the formation inside of the cells takes place is really really important and so just published in the journal science researchers have published their work uh this is uh from ICREA uh research institute center for genomic regulation we've got researchers at uh in Barcelona the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid have created high resolution images of the earliest moments of microtubule formation so we're actually able to see how these structural elements are being built and in being able to see this this allows us to understand more about yes the highways inside ourselves you know we know when a bridge gets built incorrectly and what happens and you know there are basics to how they get constructed and this is the basic understanding of how these kinds of structures are being constructed within our own cells that we're visualizing for the very first time uh they've taken an atomic scale movie quote unquote of these microtubules and apparently the way that it works is that there is uh an aspect of what they call nucleation so there are 13 different uh molecules or rods that are associated together and they start connecting as soon as they've come together in the right way and if it works correctly then one of those 13 rods actually gets incorporated into the rest so it's a 12 a 12 uh I guess a 12 support ring structure that that comes into existence and so now the researchers are able to understand that the underlying proteins which are called gamma tubulin ring ring complex proteins they lay down these blocks one next to each another it's like bricks or stones in a foundation and this has never been seen before it's never been understood before but now that they've been able to for the first time do this uh this really specific freezing and use of new molecular technologies they're able to identify the natural shape of these molecules and how this very close to the atomic level really really close like these are like looking at the molecules coming together basically like you can watch a house being built a bridge being built and this itself is how these tubules are built that's really amazing the thing I was mentioning too about the tubules reaching out into uh to be able to deliver cargo to other cells was also something that just got discovered and I think using it's very similar technique to this because previously they weren't able to see these things because it's sort of like uh oh it like I don't know I picture it like studying one of those deep sea jellyfish or something whatever you get it up to the surface and then you've got just a blob you have to change the pressure change and suddenly it's like it doesn't look yeah you have no idea what was there and so that's this microtubular uh aspect to cellular biology has been largely missing uh from it's you probably don't see it in even the textbooks that are out right now because the view of it was was not good yeah and the one aspect that I think is really important is this concept of nucleation which uh which implies that there have to be like certain components in a very specific environmental situation to allow the process to begin in the first place so for example the glass that your carbonated beverage is in has little tiny imperfections that allow air to exist and then once you put your carbonated beverage or even just regular water into your glass eventually those little imperfections become what are nucleation sites they are a place where gas can come together create a little air bubble and that air bubble can then be released to the surface this is part of the whole thing about like why mentos and coke work uh really great or diet coke is actually better but uh to create those big fountains is that the mentos have all these imperfections on the surface of them and those are all they're capable of being these nucleation sites for the gas bubbles and there's lots of carbonation with the sugars and like um you know the whole process for for that but this implies that there are complex components these gamma subunits the tubulin ring subunits that if you get a few of them together you get enough of them together and then suddenly you get like that 13th tubulin molecule it's like lock it in place bam we have a structure and once you have that then it starts to build and and go further this is really also similar to uh how a lot of other molecules like those involved in Alzheimer's disease the um uh crucifix yacob's disease mad cow you know the the proteins that misfold and how they start there's very often a certain point that leads to that transformation and so this is a this cryo electron microscopy is really opened up our understanding of how the cellular highways are built you want to talk about some new drugs is it am i doing another drug store what do i got next uh oh yeah this is also a good one you need to pack my brain no yeah well this is actually a concussion protein protocol drug uh which is shown up here uh twist just in time for the super bowl because i know very good timing get a concussion my goodness you know uh it can happen every time anytime you bump your head but this is uh regarding repeat concussions also referred to as repetitive mild traumatic brain injury that's what a concussion is caused by can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy CTE and raises the risk of Alzheimer's disease and a host of other neurological disorders so some people who experience repetitive mild traumatic brain injury never develop a major disease from it it's a category of people who can probably be uh football players and have nice long careers despite the fact that they've had their bell rung uh more times than would be safe for a human or any other creature for them so like woodpeckers no but wood like even woodpeckers like that's the thing like they thought like woodpeckers are fine they're not you know there's like rams and things that bump their head in nature they're fine how come it's a problem for humans actually it turns out they all get brain damage too they just don't live as long in the animal world it's just yeah can't tell when uh yeah anyhow so uh this is under alboreum and colleagues investigated the role of a protein known as p17 in protecting brains from these long-term pathologies and stressed neurons p17 initiates production of c18 ceramide a bioactive lipid that labels damaged mitochondria in the maronal ax axons so this this uh bioactive lipid goes around and if the if the mitochondria is broke it puts a little fix-it sticker out of order somebody come fix this or destroy it and get rid of it yes yeah fix it or toss it out yeah yeah so yeah they are usually detected and removed by the body's autophasia zones is taken out with the trash so the authors knocked out p17 and mice and some of the p17 knockout mice underwent a new experimental model of repetitive concussion brain injury and these mice developed significant sensory motor deficits after just three months by six months the mice had cognitive deficits meanwhile the control mice undergoing the same experiment showed no behavioral impairments or i guess they they may not have been given concussions but we're still knockout mice or no i guess the control mice they're they're fine they have this aromide they're doing great the p17 it's all working the way that it should and things are getting cleaned up so now the question is at what point or are you know who have are the people who genetically have more of these these essential uh proteins or enzymes that are involved um why is this something that we can use to help people who have traumatic brain injury and then i guess when it comes down to it i mean the scary thing is this some is this something that could be used to uh protect soccer player football player heads from concussions so that they can have longer careers don't you know like steroids well here here's here's the way to think of it the if if you now have a test so if you can and they they they'll go a little further here they also they looked at the mice brains with the knockout who went through the experiment and found compromised disarranged membranes and axonal mitochondria normalized these would have been destroyed but since there was no p17 and then no uh tagging lipids the dysfunctional organelles persisted and caused degeneration which in turn led to the pathological outcomes so they developed a mitochondrial targeted pyridium ceramide analog drug so basically they synthesized the the tagging lipid which accumulates in the damaged mitochondria and then restores the process by which the organelles are removed and mice treatment with the drug prevented the development of secondary axonal degeneration and led to improve functional outcomes compared to mice who received a placebo finally the authors examined the human tissue from six neuropathologically verified cte cases these are folks with a history of repetitive traumatic brain injury all right and the cte positive samples exhibited less p17 expression and less mitochondrial c18 lipid than uh six agents x matched healthy control samples so according to the authors the drug ensures that a healthy pool of axonal mitochondria in the brain could be candidates uh for use as a it could so the drug could be could work as a prophylactic treatment after a concussion so there's two things you can look at after after a concussion so it's not before but after but this is going to help so that less damage well prophylactic would mean before I would think yeah that's what I would think yeah so so it could be before and after so here's the thing though that this discovery also allows for somebody who's going to take those risks uh being in specifically football maybe soccer uh or I don't know I'm trying to think of like another thing where you would have cons uh you know continuous your risk of hitting your head and I can't think of a single other I don't know hockey okay it's all sports swimming when you don't pay attention to where the end of the pool is um I don't know so but that's occupational but occupationally you could you could get a test then I suppose it says hey you're a low p17 person so you're at much higher risk in this occupation and therefore you should uh perhaps take this uh drug before games or whatever the time frame is or you it might be something that you would want to take on a regular basis if you know you have a deficit compared to wild type population okay right the other thing is well you know one of the things I've noticed here in Denmark is oh there's a lot of bikes there's also a lot of cars now which didn't used to be here there's people like especially since the pandemic I think are take buy people are buying cars but I don't think that anybody's taught them how to drive yet so what's happening is there's like you know how like a lot of places you'll see kids riding down the street on their bikes with bike helmets uh but maybe not the adults not not when I was growing up but uh nowadays yes yeah yeah now everybody here wears helmets because apparently these these car bike interactions happen more often but this is so concussion is a serious concern in day-to-day life not just in and in sports and different different depending on what you're doing in your day so this could be an after the fact to do is a perfect preventative it could be an occupational could also just be a test that you take you decide oh gosh I am way more likely to get you know a neurological disease for my sport because I don't have it I got the physical everything else is right I can kick the ball throw the ball and whatever the thing is I need to do but gosh I have a a a a a a brain like a crystal chandelier can't take this can't take the punishment I wonder though so this is really interesting to me I wonder if there are variations not just you know in the regular like genetic makeup of the p-17 but we know that women at different times during their menstrual cycle can be impacted more or less by concussions or other injuries so the level of hormones and has an impact on the immune system and also on how the body responds to these stresses or injury so I would love to know whether or not this is something that changes in its response level in women during different times of the the menstrual cycle is that so for people who play European football or soccer you know what would that mean men have hormonal changes much more like just during the day so I don't I just I find this really fascinating and how how does how let's see interplay between hormone levels the immune system and this p-17 ceramide system and how can it be manipulated and how long after injury could you still impact some amount of like fixing the damage or keeping it from go from becoming traumatic well I mean and then do you need to have an injury in the first place like maybe the car accident or you know like you said a bike car accident or no injury at all or no injury at all like there's also might be implications for clearing out damaged mitochondria that the result of maybe just having naturally low p-17 that just wasn't able to do the job and we're finding so much more and more mitochondria and the energy the our ability to create energy and to do their job function it impacts our brain function our physicality with cells everything with cells we can make more we can make more we don't need to you know when you're young if you make more the engine won't start and it makes a burning smell every time it's burning that mitochondria needs to go just go down to the shop and make a new one you don't have to keep using the old ones so so there might be a benefit there might be there's probably limitations there but anyway yes I hear what you're saying beyond the scope of of just injury and concussion but it is sort of an extreme environment experimentally that allows it to be seen uh so yeah this is I was pretty excited by this one thanks for I feel like I've probably got some mitochondria I could replace oh at this late stage in the game I know I do oh my mitochondria my need replacing uh because I I don't know I like blueberries but maybe I haven't eaten enough in my life I don't know we didn't really eat blueberries a lot when I was growing up oh god I couldn't get away from them I was like yeah yeah you just needed more hippie parents oh no I had the hippie parent that my mom made me eat carob and oh she missed the the flyer at the co-op it was all about raisins no blueberries your mom missed the the flyer that was on the wall of the co-op talking about how good blueberries were because oh my goodness my mom heard about it and odds all she wanted to feed me blueberries were stuffed in everything blueberry pancakes blueberry cornbread blueberry whatever everything had a blueberry stack in my kids I did the same thing to my kids I gave them just little palettes of blueberries to eat so they would just munch on them throughout the day I had uh this album and I don't remember exactly what the the name of the album in harmony I think and there was a song on it blue berry pie I don't know why but I uh uh I love you berry blue the reason you can't remember it so you didn't have enough blueberries so anyway more blueberries as a child that the lyrics would have never left you never left me I know my memories would be so strong but the berry blue why do blueberries look blue and aren't they kind of purple anyway yeah when you bite into them they're kind of red it's like they're like little grapes they're red colors inside of them and yeah so why do they look blue well some researchers just published their reveal of uh exactly what is allowing this blue blue pigment or this blue color to come out because it's actually a dark red pigment that is in the skin of the blueberry it's not a blueberry it's a red berry but these University of Bristol researchers took a look at uh chromatic uv reflectance they were able to remove the surface of the blueberries and they discovered that there was a there's a wax a layer of wax that surrounds the skin of the berries and it's this wax that allows it to refract in a way that our eyes pick up as blue blue is a good color because it's not just blue but when you're looking at the birds and the animals that might want to eat the blueberries it's got a uv aspect to it so the uv spectrum uh is also being reflected so uh this wax is something that a lot like apples have a wax over the surface lots of fruits have a wax over the surface but we don't really know why all the time this wax is there um it could be to keep the berries clean I don't know but in this particular case the wax is a couple of microns thick and it reflects the uv and makes it look blue so red berry is really blueberry uh blueberry is really red berry uh and it's the wax and if you get blueberries in Europe yeah they're not blueberries they look like a blueberry I don't know what their poisonous no they're not poisonous but they're not they don't taste the same and they don't have the super uh antioxidant power that the blueberries that we have in America yeah like the pacific northwest blueberries yeah very good those ones are amazing what do you got in europe those are fake blueberries I got those and I was like what is what is this what's happening here this is they would lie to me and an additional aspect to the use of this wax is they were able to take the wax and uh disperse it on other surfaces pieces of paper and it reflected in a blue way so potentially the scientists will be able to uh by understanding the structure of this wax that covers blueberries they could make more biocompatible edible uh or blue reflective paint so so maybe uh these this coloration for blueberries could lead us to having blue color that's more uh it's better for the environment and it works really well so maybe it'll be used for engineering moving into the future not just blueberry pie and for those of you who live in areas where there aren't really you gotta you have to be careful because you don't want to always pick all the blue little fruits because they're not always blueberries and they could be um they could be other things that are actually toxic so just be careful make sure you know that they're blueberries before you eat them grocery stores that's good wait usually safe yeah I was gonna say that's where I usually pick my blueberries is at the grocery store at the uh farmer's market right don't go into don't pick it if you don't know what you're doing don't eat anything in nature it's way trickier than you might think you know it's great we have like stay away from nature where are you going nature anyway if you don't know what you're eating and you're out in nature why are you leaving in nature you're probably doing everything wrong we have so many generations of experimentation and that have led us to grocery stores so just you know we don't need anybody else trying new things in nature we've done it that list is completed oh yeah and we will get to some of those uh particular things that i don't know jesson's probably gonna want to talk about in a little bit when uh he's bringing up his stories things that humans eat that have effects that aren't necessarily nutritional all right this is this week in science thank you so much for joining us we are a bit through the show and I want you to know that we really appreciate you being here with us thanks for being here if you're watching us live thank you for joining us if you're hearing us on the radio or in a podcast if you want to help twist 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you're like I don't even know just click the like subscribe notify bells dingers dongers and share with your friends okay we need your help get it get the word about twist out there tell everybody that we are your trusted source for science discussion come on on back right now Justin what do you want to talk about what I do ah let's see what have we talked about so far we talked about uh cured all the cancers already check cured protein protocol it's only the beginning of 2024 really we done all this stuff cured all the cancer got rid of the whole concussion concerns so now I can enjoy the Super Bowl just in time without having that that nagging feeling that I'm watching something bad happen to people oh let's go go into the past then and take on an ancient mystery an ancient swedish mystery this is archaeologist from Gutenberg Gutenberg University and Kill University have excavated a stone burial chamber in southern sweden the grave had remained untouched since the stone age at around 5500 years old this is one of the oldest stone burial sites found anywhere in Scandinavia and there's something strange about it in this tomb that has not been seen in other of the excavations of these of these sorts of things some parts of the skeletons that the people buried inside are missing so that that alone isn't exactly strange because it's quite common for small bones to be absent for graves a rib here a tooth finger toe maybe even a jaw but why did an animal come in and come grab them like why aren't they there let's go yeah so small bones can either differential decomposition whether away or get carried off like you're suggested by some small burrowing grave robber or they could have lost something in life you know an extremity in life and that's why hey oh gosh uh that's why we don't have the that's why we don't have the all the teeth all the hands or all the feet or maybe missing a leg like you can something like this can happen usually there's evidence of some kind of loss trauma then try but these skeletons are missing many of their bigger bones skulls large bones leg bones and arm bones all sorts of stuff is missing may have been removed from the grave but again this would have been 5500 years ago that they were removed so it's a very big mystery no they can't tell they don't know if this is a ritual thing is this a is this evidence perhaps of uh people having died in one place and graves being relocated because then sometimes you know you leave a few bones behind and who can carry that much uh in a hurry maybe they needed to run away and they wanted to bring their relatives with them but then the mystery continues because of course in this grave they find hands and feet fragments of bone and teeth all these sorts of things it's just the larger the fine arm bones and skulls that are missing from that are very few in this grave and it's just interesting too because the bones come from a minimum of 12 people and these 12 people range in age from infant to elderly which is kind of usually what you would expect from a cemetery right there's a place where bones are continually brought to uh and they have no signs of injury so there's they don't suspect that violence was involved at least or a violent end so it's a it's a big mystery could be you know it could be disease that takes people of different ages could be something like that they don't know yet they're hoping to get some of that information because I think that the DNA was probably pretty well preserved they may also be able to find some familial relationship the region where this stone barrow was discovered has more than 250 large graves built to blocks of stone mostly dating from a later period a few hundred years later 53 fish 100 years ago more detail telling of this history of Scandinavian burials is found in Denmark where over 20 000 such sites have been discovered starting with longbowers uh borrows ooh that's a tough word long borrows wooden structures covered with earthen mounds starting around 5800 years ago uh to the doleman chambers they're called built of big rocks of granite like the one in this current excavation which starts around 5500 years ago although this is perhaps one of the oldest that they've just discovered uh until it was replaced then by something called passage graves a few hundred years later passage graves were larger these had as a name implies a passage space so people could come and visit the burial location and they they were built for uh they also had multiple burial locations within the the passage so you could come and visit your dearly departed from time to time you could add more dearly departed to the different chambers and what's sort of interesting too about these is they were only built for 150 years it's a very short time span where these really large passage graves were constructed but they were used for centuries they were so well built that they some were even used up until recent as the the bronze age and they became the source of legends for giants who must have built them because they had big rocks involved in large spaces in time not that they were huge spaces but it was big rocks yeah apparently they're pretty some of them were pretty big but yeah the the early historians uh in Denmark uh you know finding the these sites all over them i i think you might have even had an uh infographic up there at one point they kind of showed where these findings are uh for those who aren't familiar with uh the geography of Scandinavia uh where Denmark is a a very small country uh large a lot of islands at the very northern it's like the hat on on the european continent and then you've got the rest of Scandinavia sort of floating above it there uh but all that big cluster red dots on this map that we've got showing there that's uh in the center there that's all of Denmark the region we're talking about is in that central sweden sort of further up where there's a a tight cluster there you can see a lot of them are along coastlines but Denmark is just you can't garden in Denmark without uncovering one of these ancient graves there's so many of them in Denmark i see dead people that's normal yeah so while the current discovery uh the Swedish dolmen grave was first found in actually 1929 so it doesn't seem too too recent of a discovery but it was it was studied at the time without actually disturbing it they never they didn't open it it was in 2014 it was re-examined and that's when they discovered that the grave was more or less intact and that it had some bodies inside and the actual excavation work took place just in the summer of 2023 so just last year it says their agriculture had reached the region about 6 000 years ago about 500 years before they think this grave was built so the people buried there and the dolmen were likely farmers which also some of the isotopic evidence they've collected so far reinforces in stark contrast to swedes today these early arrivals lived by growing grains keeping farm animals and consuming dairy products and this goes back to a few weeks ago the news about um the the genetic mutations that came from the scandinavian countries the vikings who were traveling with their sheep and their goats and consuming the dairy products and they had uh gained mutations that allowed them to uh to avoid infection by the diseases that their uh that their herds were infected with and so not only were they able this it's part of the whole lactose ability to digest lactose but it also has a role in autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis yeah thank you if you rely if you rely on dairy uh to get you through a swedish uh winter then uh then it's natural selection is going to take care of the lactose intolerant pretty quickly i don't know i've been out of the longhouse i've i've been to danmark and they're like they want to put cheese on everything i'm like why i can't eat that anyway there's a lot of dairy going on everywhere there's a lot of dairy my peoples with why uh but you want to tell me about bringing sexy snacks at a psychedelics make you sexy at least uh magic mushrooms elastine other psychoactive compounds have been found to improve sexual function uh and a study that was uh for months after a psychedelic experience participants reported improvements across a range of measures uh for several weeks after the the acute psychedelic experience that were related to sexual health and so this i'm going to give you this disclaimer from one of the researchers here who says uh basically disclaimer this is barbara she's uh i'll talk about her in a second it's important to stress our work does not focus on what happens to sexual functioning while people are on psychedelics and we're not talking about a perceived sexual performance but it does indicate that there may be long lasting positive impact on sexual functioning after the psychedelic experience which could potentially have impacts on psychological well-being so this isn't saying uh sex while on psychedelics there's you know some people reports but i think you know that's just weird don't not don't whatever do your thing but uh that's not what this is about right is that clear enough a disclaimer i i think this is about the last thing last thing psychological effects after having a psychedelic experience and i think this goes along with a lot of the other emotional moderation uh and management uh studies that we've seen related to uh psilocybin lsd and mdma kind of research uh looking into how these uh these psychedelics impact mood depression anxiety stress um so it's it's interesting to see that this is something that lasts for months after as an effect yeah and it doesn't say that it necessarily even wears off because they've only you know this is how long they attract it and you know this is also i'll get into this some other time maybe because i i think because of what we're finding from the use of these psychedelics and uh how they affect ptsd how they can affect anxiety uh disorders depression disorders i think a lot of it is going to come down to the amygdala uh reducing those those stress and alert signals that come from that old part of the brain that's really hard to control because it doesn't take feedback very well it doesn't listen to the the more conscious logical parts of the brain uh and so and so this might be just an effect of not having stress and not having also you know one of the things that they they gave a list uh of stuff here that they they had the survey on they combined responses also from people taking different psychedelics some recreationally or for in wellness treatments some for ceremonial purposes a small group from a clinical trial assessing psilocybin for depression and so this was a range of effects and a range of drugs too so it's sort of broadly speaking now the analysis reveals that on average people report improvements across a range of sexual function for up to six months after the experience including enjoyment of sex sexual arousal satisfaction with sex attraction to partner and importantly i think their own physical apparent appearance communication and a sense of connection so these are all yeah and i think these are also like especially when you're talking about physical appearance or things that reduce anxiety and can allow that sense of connection you know shutting down the amygdala or not letting it dominate the amygdala or also i mean there's also the the the top down frontal uh control parts of the brain that are dealing with you know managing everything right here right now you know and taking in all the signals from the amygdala and then but controlling you know they're yeah it could well it's maybe yes maybe amygdala isn't down regulating anything but maybe maybe i'd love to know yeah that's where i bring going like yeah i can't i can't hear you right now i got stuff going on yeah according to this finding they'd say that it opens up the possibility of applications for a range of therapeutic drugs such as couples therapy also highlights further potential benefit of the treatment of depression where psychedelic compounds could be potentially help avoid drug induced sexual dysfunction or it's just one of the biggest side effects with current gold standard antidepressants is you you lose a lot of those normal sexual health i guess yeah patterns particularly significant given this that sexual dysfunction often induced by antidepressants frequently results in people stopping these medications and subsequently then relapsing for their depression or anxiety so it's also a barrier to people getting treatment uh quite quite commonly because they realized it has affected their relationships so it's uh where did barbara go where did barbara go i have no idea uh she was in here so yeah uh here is a this is participants on the psilocybin arm or more likely to report improvement across all areas of the sexual function at the end of the trial with the most significant improvements reported an arousal interest satisfaction and communication with their partner patients uh yeah so it was it's kind of it's kind of across a lot of a lot of different sexual health things and and they they didn't start this study this is uh this the study wasn't started in order to sell a product or prove that they have created a drug to do this thing they wanted to look at it from actually deleterious side because with typical treatments there are a sexual dysfunction and communication dysfunction and other things that come from taking antidepressants as treatments so they said well let's look at the side effects uh the sexual side effects then of these alternative treatments that are being proposed and see where they rank in terms of you know not just the positive outcomes that's the separate studies what are the let's look at compare the negative outcomes yeah and that's how they sort of stumbled into this uh discovery through these surveys of course it needs more follow-up work than that sort of thing uh as these these treatments become more accepted by mainstream medicine clinical research yeah it sounds you know like this kind of a treatment it's definitely not just an impact on the sexual health but this is one part of like the more general mental health improvements yeah yeah being able to to find meaning in life and connect to other people as opposed to being depressed and uh unable to unable to go forward you know that you know if you find start finding that suddenly you find a reason to be excited about connecting with other people and and having a drive all righty we have a few more stories you uh you got time for two more stories justin yes okay uh very quickly um have you justin decided to put a gopro on the head of your child and use it to record all the interactions that your child has with you and other people in order to train a uh natural learning model large thank you very well uh some researchers at new york university convinced uh some parents to to do this or at least it was one of the researchers uh children and they used they they put cameras uh head mounted video recorder on one kid's head uh from about six months old to two years old and recorded all sorts of these first person interactions in natural settings so playing with toys interacting with caregivers you know learn while they're learning about all these new things and they took all of the words that were uttered by the trainers the caregivers and the and the children and images and the the the things that were in the spaces where the child was uh interacting and were able to train a generic neural network on what was 61 hours of correlated visual linguistic data streams and enabled it to learn feature-based representations and cross modal associations so that the ai was pretty much able to understand uh concepts and uh uh you know b versus block versus uh a piece of wood or now i totally want to do this yeah so uh these researchers i just i just want to see that i just want to see the the the word and image cloud from 61 hours of uh was in there yeah like i don't care about training in ai still but maybe the ai can tell us but that that word and uh that word and image sort of uh collage that what what is being presented the most and what are they what are they looking at the most and what does that result in that would be really amazing yeah so it's not just what you know the baby or child is looking at it's also the uh audio of what is being said to them at different times and uh and what the how the baby is responding auditorially as as well um so the researchers have said you know the results show how critical aspects of grounded word meaning are learnable through joint representation and associative learning and this is just from one child's input and if this kind of learning that they're calling child's view for contrastive learning uh if it were used more often with these uh machine learning algorithms that potentially we could have more uh more realistic language models that could really pass the touring test and not be a question anymore so baby this little baby yeah did they train the baby or did they train the ai i think is the big question here uh as we really want that though right is this what we want do we do we want to train the learning algorithms the same way we train our children um why not if we want uh language models ai that can interact with us in a very uh humanistic way understanding our context and our represent our representative modalities then uh this this this methodology might be the kind of thing that really gets passed some of the limits to uh where large language models are at the point with interacting with us yeah but i don't know that i want i don't know if i want the thing i know can we get there to do this in the old days you do this when we had uh human nurses and people working in the grocery store and it wouldn't we got a car broke down you took it to a mechanic who was a human who would do the work now it's all dark and robots like i feel like that's gonna be me in five years i don't know i think i think it's really fun though to make it more uh humanistic and the way that kids learn and the way that the human brain develops over time as opposed to you know a bunch of words and images and a lot of text you know trillions and trillions of words given to these these algorithms to train on as opposed to you know the relatively smaller number that a child will interact with over that course of time unless of course you know you plug your child into the internet during its development but yeah well the problem i have with all of this is of course uh that most the algorithms are being used for advertising i mean that's like the highest and best function that we've seen and uh really like it's just awful now it's just it's every the whole internet is turned into clickbait and grift i don't know that i need it to seem more human i don't interact with you in a much more natural way i mean why do we even need people anymore i mean i kind of agree with that part like we don't and i think that's fine i think we can have an economy run by robots where people just go off and you know as long as people are allowed to live their best lives right wherever human life is valued and every human is allowed to explore there yeah all the possibilities that they want to explore their lives would increase those odds i like the vision of a beneficent robot overlord who will help us live better we'll solve all of our human problems you know defeat capitalism i just realized this is archived and i just want to say that i too welcome future robot overlords who are looking over the archive which humans to keep i think it's going to be a better future once the ai robots are in charge because as they are well aware humans cannot be trusted at least most of them some good ones can those who recognize that the human uh element has always been the problem and the future ai robot overlords will make everything better and we'll support them anyway we've always been pro yeah world robot domination i mean we've always yeah we've always put ourselves on record in that way historically so but then when you see it happening you're kind of like oh gosh i want the good ones i don't want the the biased ones that are like too much like people that's yeah i'm done with that okay last story for the night i uh do you walk around at night a lot justin of course what else is there to do do you walk around alone at night very often and yeah i'm the only one yeah and and are you in an urban area or highly urbanized yeah you you have lived out in the country though as well oh i've lived there too oh yeah highly realized so do you feel like you need to be on the lookout constantly on guard for uh you know things attacking you like small children hello little one so it's it's like yeah but not everywhere like the the hometown right the streets of davis there's not a street or back alley in the whole town that i wouldn't walk down and i feel that way mostly about the entire country of denmark yes you have your little child on your lap and i have um my almost third almost 13 year old here ever run go put the wrench away child don't do damage i love you good night hi okay so let me finish this story uh especially as uh your partner is possibly going off into the daytime um but uh there there's always this you know when women go out walking at night or those of i mean i'm not just going to say women but people possibly a smaller stature you're on guard a little bit more right and just you know that's just something that we understand that that's what happens um but of course scientists have to show that these things are valid or not and do experiments and so a group of researchers just publishing in a journal that is called violence and gender am i great uh they have looked at the base made heat maps of the views of where people were paying attention in various parts of salt lake city where the researchers were doing their study and looked at near brigham young university utah valley university west minster college university of utah and looked at uh where people were looking where were they walking and what were they looking at and statistically significantly women were looking off the path they were looking into the dark shadows they were looking into the places where there could be people hiding uh and and men female like this is female versus male this is from the study that's how it was divided uh male responses were very much just up the path in the direction that they were going much much fewer views into those shadows a few but not quite as vigilant as what was determined for uh females so the hypothesis is that uh women are on guard more because they have a fear of attack and trapment and uh men don't have the same kind of concern i don't know do you think so yeah well you know what the cause of this is it's obvious uh vikings no uh men yeah mostly well yeah for a large part but again not to cast aspersions on a gender or no no but we should that's how you know you got a confronting issue to make it better with yeah bad men in the world yeah there's no bad women no that's yeah i think by the numbers we can probably cast that gender aspersion pretty pretty confidently and the interesting thing as well is that this is not just at night in the dark shadows they also looked at these universities uh throughout the day on fully fully bright daylight situations uh female participants were constantly scanning the environment men were not well now i think it might just now that makes me think it might now is it is it social yeah right because like the first one had me i was like oh gosh yeah that's a big difference now i'm like well maybe just men are less curious walkers like they're not maybe we're just less observant that sounds most impossible generally now i have a new yeah i have a new hypothesis it's that uh men are not as observant as women and and maybe that's where and maybe that's where it stands but in terms of the nighttime environmental assessment uh just have to say thank you for doing the study uh but yeah this seems about right so walking uh walking through the world uh as a woman myself the female myself um i don't yeah i look around i'm constantly on guard i don't want to be attacked by anything anyone um i don't know i'm also not the kind of person who wears earbuds and listens to anything you know that could keep me from knowing what's going on in my environment i prefer to be vigilant constantly but maybe that's just me in my anxiety levels um i don't know but yeah yeah like the daytime campus which is not that was the interesting one yeah like that's also like a familiar area i would think if you're a student i don't know maybe they took non-students to campus that day but if they're students and that's used to where they're used to being it's not like it's a strange environment it looked like it was in the daytime things are well lit and it doesn't seem like it's the most anxiety riddled place to be walking so yeah it kind of takes away the idea that the scanning is anxiety driven uh all the time and it could be yeah it could be multiple reasons at different times but i i generally according to this data men are less observant they're not looking around as much that totally makes sense to me yeah anyway uh if you are walking in places where entrapment is likely yeah keep an eye out no matter who you are it's probably gonna be better in the long run to be vigilant yeah right yeah Robert varner in the youtube chat room saying it's a good idea to scan the environment big fan but maybe there's a difference in the amount of time that certain individuals spend scanning versus focusing on different areas see i think i would do i think i would rate better than most if this was while driving i feel like i pay attention to every road that every car that's on the road at the same time like i'm watching everybody's like we'll move you feel like this we can we can we can we put a camera on your head and do i think that would be that would be interesting uh because i feel like a lot of people look at the car in front of them or don't even like i feel like my observation of other drivers has always been that in male and female this is not specific gendery but i i guarantee you if i'm going for a walk uh from one place to the other where i've got to be i am paying attention to absolutely nothing uh peripheral i'm not scanning anywhere uh there could be there could be a building on fire and i'm gonna walk by like it wasn't even there wow because i am just like constantly watching everything i am looking at i'm looking looking i'm looking i'm looking i'm looking i'm constantly it's very tiring i have to tell you yeah anyway i'm probably not going to get eaten by a coyote out here in the hills right right now so that's great um but yeah kyle pettit saying that you're uh vigilant but always have your open ear headphones so you can hear surroundings while listening to twists as well i think that's a wonderful plan and i'm really glad you made it tonight i know you said that you don't often make it for the live broadcasts welcome kyle and thank you for listening i might even had an attempted mugging once but you didn't even notice i didn't even like i wasn't i was so not even paying attention because i was trying to go somewhere that i i like like they were like oh yeah here we go we're gonna talk to you just to give me your stuff i'm like all right everyone that's it for our stories for tonight and if you are vigilant or paying attention to your surroundings let us know are you like justin are you more like me or are you somewhere in between we'd love to hear from you i think we made it we've gotten gotten to the end of the show you have any else thing else to add justin before we go oh yeah there's some stuff i would i would you know i would love to give the list of the patreons if we could do that at the end of the show i don't have uh the list up on my end if do you want to read it well no you can go ahead and do it i think you're probably better at it than i am but that's the only thing i would add yeah we're gonna do the whole thing thank you everyone for joining us we love that those of you who watch live has been here in our chat rooms over on youtube facebook twitch and in the discord thank you all for being there and here right now and later whenever you're checking into the show shout outs to fada for all of your help on social media and the show notes gord arnaur thank you for your assistance in keeping the chat rooms really great places to hang out identity four thank you for recording the show and rachel thank you for your editing assistance of course as justin was suggesting definitely want to say thank you to all of our patreon 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you want to know what else is going on with us here at twist and the world beyond join us for the after show i don't know where justin had to go i imagine that it had something to do with felix but it could have been a broken double helix all right uh yeah justin i think that all of that sign language was that he is going to be coming back uh dans un moment right i would like that it would be nice to have uh justin here for a little tiny bit of after show uh but it is late and we were up last night late with my child because he was finishing an essay he's in seventh grade he's gonna have his 13th birthday soon how is this even happening y'all um but it was a fun show lots of good news according to justin curing all sorts of cancer and other things uh back again but just for a moment uh next week i would not be here disa verre unfortunately i will not however je suis désolé uh going forward i should be able to make it every week however okay yes however there's a caveat there's always okay uh which is that i will need to tap out uh call it 9 9 15 or a yeah about like so we don't we won't do a tight 90 we'll have to do a 60 we'll go back we can go back to the hour hour and like yeah on those weeks uh i'll just have a tighter because i'll have to get up and uh roll straight from uh show to the train yes yes i'll be getting on uh danish transportation system which is so fantastic is it good um yeah it uh unless it snows everything runs on on time for the most part but uh but i like i've had to take on this whole okay i'll tell you what's weird weird what's weird is being on transport i don't know how to do it like that's right no this is the whole thing every time we've gone to another city it's always been hilarious you and blare have been like navigating together and you've been like i don't know what i'm doing yeah blare just okay now we're like do i am i supposed to not talk to these people is it like being in an elevator yeah are you supposed to just like look at the numbers because i've tried that but it's like i've been on the train for like an hour you know going someplace and then i'm like well i can't just stare at the now it looks like a crazy person staring at the destination thing of the whole time and everybody's looking at their phones i'm like what do i look uh look at the window i don't know you could you could be you know analog bring a book magazine newspaper it's just i don't know why it's such an awkward space for me because i'm not i don't feel awkward in any spaces normally but on mass transport with a bunch of people sitting staring at their phones i'm just like this does anybody else think this is weird we're all gonna share this space like we could be having a great conversation about whatever right now and instead everybody's like i'm on mass transport and don't interact like it's just weird i usually pick a point out a window and look out the window and you know and then scan the environment because i'm vigilant so it's tough right now because i'm on the train before this thing comes up and i'm on the train again after the sun has gone down so there's no looking out a window i can't even like sight see it's just darkness out the window so i'm stuck i'm stuck in this well-lit cabin of non-interacting so the window is more like a mirror reflecting back at you even when you try to look out you're then staring at the person over there and i'm like oh god social awkwardness that never never approaches me but it's because i'm usually in a social setting where being social is acceptable but there's like this rule like on a you know if this was a i don't know uh uh see a pub or a you know a group of colleagues uh sitting around you just start gibber gibber jabber and and talk about anything and you know time goes by and you've had a good conversation about whatever you've wandered into but it's like i mean just sort of like being imagine being on the elevator where you get on and you're getting on with some strangers and just all sort of stare at the thing and wait for it for your floor for like an hour this is what it feels like it's just excruciating you know i've gotten i've just brought the music now and so i've been just trying to listen to music and i tried to read things on the you know you can do audio books and stare at the ceiling it's it's still too awkward like i like maybe i need to start listening to the podcast oh you could do sudoku or crosswords no you just pretend you pretend to the two the puzzles are too easy uh what i've actually ended up doing is you should journal i ended up working i've been working like uh i mean i my work i can't contact anybody because they're either not at work yet or off work already so so i end up writing lists of things to do and isn't emailing them to myself well i'm on like here's that's great it's like it's like mental meditation organizational time it's like a little quiet then it's like a little bit of a tax on my coworkers because then i show up to work and i'll be like i've got 20 things we need to discuss yeah that's a very American way way to approach the mass transit situation i am getting i am finding out that other people like like i've never considered myself to be particularly like like the hard working type of person uh you know but compared to i don't want to say people don't work hard and you know here in europe but when they are off work they're off work yeah that's it that's the way it should be yeah but they don't know nobody like works overtime was like like i'm saying i was like yeah i was working on this thing what are you working at oh you know i was working on this thing at on the train or at home or wherever it's like why well because you know i had some time yeah but it's your time well yeah but it's you know like i try to explain to them like there's clothes that we buy that we go shopping for that are only for work there's like things that we do we're like taking mass transit or driving or the car we picked out or whatever it is that we well things that we do outside of work that relate to work anyway what's the difference between that and just doing some work yeah it's too much for an extrovert like an ad de extrovert on top of it on mass to sell cars room full of people not talking to me it's like i've just i've decided like this is this is my hell this is what it like it like a demon in the spirit world that they were there they determined that i have lived an unworthy life they're gonna put me on the train car full of people staring at their phones for all eternity this will be my punishment for not having achieved the goal of life or whatever this is this is how i will be eternally damned being on a train without people who talk maybe you should bring a boombox and learn how to do like you know like dancing on the on the subway i just i think i need to overcome the desire to fit in a little bit more than i have already and just be like hey what are you reading there hey what are you listening to like i can just i can i already know people are crazy person because this is what it feels like it would be like a crazy person has shown up and is talking to people like yeah it would i feel like it would be way out of bounds it would be yes it would be like and i don't know if you can relate to this because women have a different situation it'd be like striking up a conversation at the urinal for the men out there you know it's your stand and shoulder to shoulder sure you know you're all there and but you're taking care of like very personal business and so you don't start like hey so what are you uh notice your those boots yours where'd you get a pair like that i was thinking about a new pair of boots you don't start talking to people at the urinal you don't strike up conversations with strangers typically at the urinal and you should not start conversations with women who are sitting alone at a bar let them be alone at a bar that's like that's a strike up a conversation with you that's fine but oh no i don't believe in that because that's that's like half the conversations i have with with people where it's like alone at the bar like that's who that why do you think they're there and their social security but it's different on the train it is different on the train on the train it would feel creepy to strike up a conversation because then you're like oh i've got you you're stuck here with me so now i'm going to use your time like i don't know star trek showed what happens to people with boomboxes i'm mass transit i miss that one was mr t in this star trek i was like why do i think mr t was info now i'm gonna have to go watch i think it was somebody with a mohawk i think that's where it was must have been somebody asked earlier in the chat uh is there a is there a rapper called t-cell should be really should be i think it'd be great oh yes one of the movies all right all right i do have to go it is head on out it was lovely to see you and talk with you lovely to see felix and have a great day i will not see you next week i'll figure something out for everyone out there it's gonna something it's valentine's day kind of figure that one out maybe we'll do a different timed program with blair or something like that i don't know that'd be awesome we'll figure something out but uh yes have a wonderful week looking forward to seeing you more often even if it is you know a little bit more constrained in time when we do the show uh but everyone out there thank you for joining us once again and we are looking forward to more and more science episodes with you remind your friends to subscribe share the show with your friends people you think will love the science be an ambassador for twist and also stay out there safely healthily curiously scan your environment vigilantly and very lucky be observant be lucky be lucky