We are live you know some weeks some weeks you would think that we had never done a show before that I'd never built a studio before that you know why is this chair here go away this is where I am tonight everyone I want you to know full transparency it's time for the show foe show one two three no this is the full live broadcast of this week in science it will be edited what rhyming a lot show okay this show will be edited to make the podcast if you like the full thing watch this if you want less subscribe to the podcast okay are we ready we're ready let's do this in three oh wait hold on we're live so you can't curse just smile my computer won't let me into it using my using my password and my computer my computer changes the password on me my computer never changes the password on me this is how we don't get YouTube viewers I've never loved you gonna tell you right now I love you I love you YouTube I love you Facebook I love you Twitch I do I love you all thank you for being a part of this I finally made it work yay you know caps lock that is a tricky little button starting this now foe reels foe reels in three oh two this is twist this week in science episode number 811 recorded on Wednesday February 10th 2021 digging up science bones hey everyone I'm dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your head with limbs bones and vampires but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer when you think about it whatever it is you happy to be thinking about keep in mind that the thing you are thinking about has been thought about before if for example you're thinking about how to get a rock out of your shoe without having to remove the shoe chances are somebody has thought about doing this before it doesn't mean that others have spent time thinking about how to get rocks out of your specific shoes with your specific feet in them but certainly others have encountered a similar situation may have even found solutions so whatever occupies your mind think about it then find out what others have thought about it taking on ideas solving problems with sets of solutions is always better than going it alone nowhere is that more true than when talking about this week in science coming up next I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough I want to one place to go to find the knowledge I seek good science to you Kiki and Blair and a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in science we are back oh yes the full team is here to talk about all the science that we loved this last week and I have stories about fins to limbs fractals in vision a little bit of carbon cycling action and maybe some I got bones and brains and things like that lots of fun things this week Justin what do you have I've got the wrong I've got the wrong story up last week is what I had what week is this okay what I bring oh yeah I've got a big step in conch a warning for humans about evolution Google translate fails why marketers are worried and why marketers are worried about political polarization polarization that's not it has nothing to do with carbonated soda no no no no that's carbonization yes Blair what is in the animal corner I have stressed animals I have upside-down dragonflies and baby vampires baby little fangs moving in to the science show if you have not yet subscribed to this week in science please do you can find us all places podcasts are found and on YouTube Facebook and Twitch look for this week in science or twist science we are out there our website is twist.org all right let's jump into some of that fishy business are you ready for fish stories mm-hmm I have an evolutionary story for you it started before the fin-rayed fishes the teleosts and the four-limbed mammals that became us once upon a time we shared a finny and sex ancestor it was kind of finny four-limbed it'd like to crawl around and then it lost that crawly ability and was like I'm gonna be swimmy and fishy oh it went the other way yes so once upon a time this ancestor had lots of little bones leading out from the shoulder joint and those bones were connected with tendons and muscles through ligaments to those bones and mammals use that to create limbs front limbs humans now that's our arms and our shoulders that you know have issues because they're not the best design but they're pretty good they work okay amazing shoulders are pretty okay how nice for you but this ancestor at one point fish were like nah I don't need those front limbs I just need a little tiny pectoral fin and they're like I'm swimming just keep swimming just keep swimming right and the bones became less segmented and they lost the musculature they lost the tendons the ligaments all the connectivity and the bones just shoot straight out from the shoulder joint as the race and those are the fins basically the bones sticking out and there there are muscles between them don't use two bones don't use two bones if one is good yeah if one is good so these researchers just publishing in cell the journal cell they have done a bunch of different experiments which are really interesting to kind of get to understand what happened genetically to lead to this differentiation of the finned fishes and the limbed animals so they took these fish and zebra fish which are a part of the teleosts and they they applied a mutagen they mutated the fish basically from the wild type forced their genes through a mutation and then bred them a couple of generations with back into the wild type phenotype again and what this allowed them to do was look for weird mutants weird mutations and they found that there was one individual of the second generation offspring that had a limb instead of a fin it looked like it was starting to grow limbs and they went huh that's the one and so then they went back to the genotype gene sequencing and did a bunch of of knockout and knock in experiments to play with a couple of genes that they didn't originally think would be involved in in the process of of differentiation of the limbs so we know that hawks genes are involved in creating limbs and fingers and toes and all these kinds of things but in this process there are a couple of other genes that are involved they have to and a wastle bee and they determined that mutations in those genes that are further downstream and had never previously been thought to be involved in limb differentiation turned on a hawks gene that led to a gain of function basically taking these fish that have not had limbs for 400 million years and giving them the ability to start differentiating new skeletal bones with musculature and muscle insertions so creating joint joints within their fins so what they're what they're saying is their research is pointing to this latent ability in fish that if some something were to arise that would create a mutational event for finned fishes they could potentially evolve limbs again they still have the genes that are involved in that and then adding on to it what it also says is hey there are these genes that we never thought were involved in these arm bones before but now here they are what other genes might be involved that we never thought were involved I just simply didn't know that all these fish were from something that had crawled around on land first I didn't even know that that was like that's amazing by itself the ancestors the common ancestor of the tetrapods and the teleosts yeah like a swimmy crawly common ancestor yeah a swimmy ancestor that had had more jointed limbs in the front more bones and limbs yes yeah but it's pretty interesting that you can take something that is you know it's separated from us evolutionarily by 400 million years and hey they can still give it it's like the giving chicken teeth yeah pyramids that were done like 10 years ago right we can still do these things yes evolution is crazy but we're learning more all the time tell me a story Justin silent for some 17,000 years discovered in a cave some 90 years ago then quickly forgotten in a dusty box in the musty basement of a lusty French natural history museum for the past 80 years a lusty French history museum I was trying but now now a large sea snail shell has been rediscovered but this large sea snail shell or conch if you will is no ordinary shell or conch if it was an ordinary conch I would likely not be telling you its story as conches usually live very uneventful lives this conch however was found in the Pyrenees now if the Pyrenees were islands this would still seem like an unremarkable story however the Pyrenees are mountains really big ones that separate France and Spain in these mountains there is the Marsalis cave which is 120 miles from the Atlantic Ocean and altitude of about 6,890 feet above sea level the cave itself is 330 feet deep and it's got artwork on it covered in artwork 17,000 year old human artwork on the walls very unique specific sort of ancient artwork it's depictions of like bison and animals and everything and that that sort of typical trade but it's all done in these red dots like finger-sized dots like they did this sort of like color by dots to make these the caves were discovered in the late 1800s they excavated then the greater area outside the cave I think in the 1930s and around the mouth of the cave they found a large sea snail shell what is it doing there well oddly it was decorated with the same red dots that comprise the cave art and had a few small sort of unnatural looking holes at the tip meaning this was picked up from the ocean 120 miles away carried for that 120 plus mile track up a mountain on foot decorated modified carefully to have a hole in it and and and it can be played so did they push air through it or did somebody put their mouth on this thing so somebody put their mouth on that they so you hide a musician so they did do a slight modification because later versions of these have been found or more recent versions have been found that have a sort of mouthpiece that gets attached to it so they think the hole is actually a place his two tiny holes that were drilled in are designed to attach some sort of mouthpiece but oh there's the sound so it's got they were able to get three distinct you notes out of it but you got a picture this thing is also being if it's being played in a cave and by a musician who's had a little bit more time with it they may actually be able to belt something out and in the the acoustics in there you know and so anyway and then to know to know that like oh here's the shell I know what to do with this I'm gonna walk it 120 miles up a mountain carve some holes and make it into a thing means this has probably been you know going on for a while this this is the oldest at dated around 17 18,000 years this is the oldest conch wind instrument ever found and it is so the research on this is published in the journal science advances pretty fun story of another one of these you know discovered 80 90 years ago 90 years ago was discovered and quickly ended up in that box in the basement how is it we just need to open up all the dusty boxes in these museums there's cool stuff in there can we just get somebody to hire a bunch of graduate students to go into the boxes the shelves the drawers I wonder how many of these are because of COVID though because you can't really travel it's a lot harder to do fieldwork and so you're just like I don't know but this is kind of this has been the kind of a trend for years where somebody finally gets around to cleaning something out or looking into a box or you know a PI or somebody in charge says hey why don't you go look through this area and see if there's anything interesting I'm sure there might be and then you say something and they know and it apparently hadn't occurred to the original people the original researchers who had discovered this excavated excavated it they thought it was interesting that it was there that had these markings I guess but other than that they hadn't really put a whole lot of thinking to it now since that time because this would have been in the 20s or whatever when they when they first found their 30s when they found this since then we've seen lots of examples of conch being used as instrument so it may just also be an update in the in the ability to perceive the other uses of it let's update things more tell me a story please I'm stressed a lot of mammals in South America so this is a story that is definitely at first you you might consider it a bit of a well-dubbed but I'd like to just explore it for a moment here so this is looking at small mammals in South America's Atlantic Forest and it it's certainly rodents and marsupials and they wanted to see what kind of stress these animals were under especially the ones in areas going through deforestation the hypothesis was that animals in deforested areas would show higher levels of stress than animals in more pristine forests and that's what they found this was from the Field Museum in Chicago and Chicago State University small mammals primarily rodents and little marsupials tend to be more stressed out or show more evidence that there are higher levels of stress hormones in their hair specifically in smaller forest patches than in larger forest patches they trapped 106 mammals from areas ranging from 2 to 1200 hectares so that's about the size of a city block to 4.63 square miles so pretty big difference and the critters that they looked at they they took samples of their fur and that allowed them to look at more long-term hormone trends so if you if you just if you test blood or urine it's a snapshot but if you're looking at fur you're seeing a much longer term expression of those hormones so it's more than just I caught this animal and now it's stressed or this animal ran from a predator earlier today and now it's stressed it's there's long-term stress hormones hanging out in this animal therefore showing up in their hair and so they did find that stress hormones were higher in these hair in the hairs of these animals from areas that were being deforested and you know again this is probably a bit of a well-duh but it is something that's important to consider when we're thinking about impacts on species because there's the direct impact and there's an indirect impact the direct impact being they have less space they have to compete more they have less spaces to hide in they have less access to mates and the gene pool is narrowed all these sorts of things right the indirect could be that this is also making them stressed and therefore impacting their fitness in other ways and I will also just say real quick not all stress is bad short-term stress is good it actually that is stress is an important hormonal response that our body does and when it's not happening there's actually problems and so the issue is chronic long-term stress that doesn't abate and so that's really what they're looking at here I also just think about my own personal stress levels having less space over the last year and thought that was kind of an interesting what would you say that was what would be an example of chronic lack of stress is that like a panda is sure yeah it's more like so for example if if I just gave my dog her food in her bowl and her treats in her bowl and she got everything she ever wanted because I just handed it to her every day that would be lack of stress putting food in a feeder or a toy making her train for her food making her perform for food in some way or another is actually a stressor because she's going like I want the treat how do I get it what do I do so that is an example of a little bit of stress injected in to help with the mental physical just systemic health of a being okay I want the food give me the food I have stress every day eat how am I gonna cook it food for me my stress all right moving from stress let's talk about fractals man so fractals we may be familiar with because of Ben Wat Mandelbrot and the Mandelbrot set and the popularization of the idea of fractals as making up everything fractals are infinite infinitely complex patterns that repeat themselves infinitely so at the smallest scales you still find the pattern that is representative of that fractal and some Japanese AI researchers were thinking about the inherent bias that we see very often in the training of artificial intelligence and so currently if we are going to be training in AI what we do is we set it to a to a visual set of images from Google for instance a picture set something that has been created maybe it's landscapes maybe it's people maybe it's cats but there is a training picture set that helps the artificial intelligence figure out what lines are that differentiate between the subject of an image and the background or you know other aspects of vision what makes what makes vision turn into comprehension of a scene and its contents so these researchers looked at the idea of using fractals to train computers instead of potentially biased image sets because the images that we give to these computers potentially can be biased because of the because of who put the image set together because of the images that are included in it and to create something completely unbiased they thought hey let's try this out so they created a fractal training set and pre-trained their artificial intelligence vision intelligence to to see things and they said in most accounts it worked almost as well as using real images which is pretty cool and it kind of gets to the point found that it found fractals just as confusing as as we do yes as we do but found everything that we look at just as confusing as the fractal yeah I think that's probably more it everything that we look at is as confusing as a fractal but the the idea is that there are these infinitely naturally repeating patterns in nature treeloms are fractals clouds are fractals lightning is a fractal pattern just about broccoli is a fractal what yes when you have broccoli is broccoli all the way down broccoli is broccoli all the way down exactly but you find evidence of fractals throughout nature and so they they it's not perfect for sure they're not it's not a perfect teaching set but they did find instances where it was as good if not better than the the picture sets that have been created for AI training in the past and are like the standard sets there's like weird stuff like that Mandelbach set that's the one plus two is three so then three is it in but then three plus two so five is the next number then five then eight is the next number right so then it's are you gonna do the whole thing right now 13 21 what up no it's 11 I bet it anyway but the point is but you'll see those patterns like in that you'll see those numbers being heavily preference in the number of flower petals that are going to be on a flower are going to be one of those numbers you look at uh you look at the pine cones have like uh sort of spirals if you look at that the down end of them and the numbers of the spirals that they will have will be within that set like there's this huge array of things that you might not pay you that close attention to if you aren't counting the leaves and the petals on every flower that you go by but these numbers do show up over and over again with a great deal of uh preference in in nature so yeah yeah they are there are somewhere at the basis of all of this yes yeah and so the pattern you were talking about is the Fibonacci pattern that's the Fibonacci thank you thank you thank you yes and um but Fada in the chat room is also saying a Romanescu is a fractal a Mandelbrot Romanescu instead of regular fractal I think it's a repeating pattern but uh the Mandelbrot is the oh Gaurav Sharma is giving us equations in the chat room this is what you come to twist for so thank you thank you for chat room is good right now with the power two is that the power plus c okay is that the speed of light are you sure about that Fibonacci Fibonacci Broccoli yeah I got the wrong right but so the the concept I think the reason I brought this story is that I think the concept is very interesting because they're trying to solve the problem of the unintended bias in artificial intelligence vision systems in the vision visual learning systems what do that what do they identify are they identifying it because the training set was biased because humans made it or are they identifying it because they've learned rules about vision and what makes a thing a thing and um and so I think it's a very interesting way to way to address this problem and we'll see where it goes in the future it's fractals all the way down man yeah okay yeah I still it still feels like there was this math class one so if you weren't a science major or accounting I suppose you could do a math class if you're doing liberal arts I guess you could do a math class which was just going in and watching fractals it was like movie fractals and then you would discuss and that's all you did because they just were like you're never gonna do math we get it but you it's a requirement so here's something that sounds like math that's a movie you're gonna go watch that was at a college that was a college level course was watching fractals non major courses but it was it was one just to yeah you can't go further with this this isn't one of the steps in building towards a higher math but this will qualify for you to not do math again all right take me on to another story Justin what do you have this is a evolution yeah this is actually a warning for those uh from those who study human evolution they are saying we are far from done working on this we're not done this is actually quite you just mean this we're not done this the dog we're not done the human body or studying human evolution the understanding it understanding it yeah so this is actually a pretty uh pretty heavy hitting group this is experts from the natural history museum francis quick institute and the max plank institute for the science of human history they've gotten together teamed up to untangle all of these crazy data points that we're getting about home homo sapien origins an ancestry and the new paper published in nature they review our current understanding of how modern human ancestry around the globe can be traced going backwards which ancestors it passes through during that journey back with some specificity here and there co-auth this is my uh this is the part that got my either co-author researcher in natural history museum professor chris stringer said some of our ancestors will have lived in groups or populations that can be identified in the fossil record whereas very little will be known about others over the next decade that's the one that hasn't happened yet growing recognition of our complex origins should expand the geographic focus of paleo and its biological fieldwork to regions previously considered peripheral to our evolution such as central and west africa the indian subcontinent and southeast asia so the that that was the big big part they're finally kind of acknowledging that yes the the places in eastern africa where it's been very easy to find fossils because they're great at keeping fossils might not be the whole story of human evolution it's just where we've gotten the most data from right but yeah they're arguing that there's no specific time uh point in time can currently be identified with modern human ancestry where it was where modern humans were confined to some limited birthplace uh and that the known patterns of the first appearance of anatomical or behavioral traits that are often used to define homo sapiens actually sort of fit a range of evolutionary histories we got cousins everywhere if we're even us we might even be one of the cousins we might have gotten it wrong where we think what we think of our current origin might actually still be cousins to what what it becomes sounds like you're talking about a braided stream it very much is the braided stream uh but what they're also they're also sort of highlighting here is uh there's been enough mystery one of them is that that little binky bone uh from a Denisovan found in Altai mountains which is a Siberian cave right there's a Neanderthal there that was also found that Neanderthal from a different age that Neanderthal apparently had modern human history uh uh ancestry 200 000 year old fossil in the mountains of Siberia so the the out of Africa thing is still part of it but the when the when in what waves and what interminglings and yeah they're just basically saying that whole idea that there was a this then a this then a that then a this then a that even after the braided stream even after a lot of that braided stream took place still not done it's still going going to be more anyway I thought it was a fun warning that the next decade uh there's gonna also they say the success of direct genetic analysis so far highlights the importance for a wider ancient genetic record they want to continue to improve the the the ancient DNA retrieval biomolecular screening fragmentary from fragmentary fossils also to do wider searches and areas that they have not been looking at in the past previously they're always looking in the past where they haven't looked previously using sedimentary which is that that thing when they sort of dig into which I would love to that'd be one of the wonderful finds we might be able to get out of the caves in Mexico there's 30 000 year old caves that we're just discovering where they go out and go down into the sedimentary dirt and actually sort of filter that through a genetic sequencer a lot of noise but you can get they've gotten uh really good at getting signals out of that whether something is human or neanderthal or they can sort of date whether not that was uh different layers of sediment actually have human DNA somewhere in them it's just sitting there old spit waiting to be identified so yeah so if you if you want if you want to study this stuff and you're like ah all the good bones have already been found they're saying some dirt they're saying no no this this fieldwork is just at its infancy really this is the launching point yeah we humans are all over the planet now we didn't used to be but we haven't at this point in time gotten to the point where we're digging all the places where we used to be so that's really what we need more digging we just need to dig in the dirt some more everybody go back to our toddler hood used to be we keep having to go further and further back in time to say we weren't there and also then we also have to very clearly define who we are homoflorensis hundreds of thousands of years ago in places that we thought humans got too much more recently yeah i love it i i am looking forward to the future of human evolution fossil finds this is gonna be fun everybody all right i have a story about allergies first yes because i don't know about you but i personally for the last few years have been experiencing more severe allergies i thought you were gonna talk about i thought you were gonna say more severe toenails don't what allergies allergies is that what we're talking about okay allergies oh i'm reading in the chat room that's why i'm i'm reading in half hearing you and half reading the thing i said nothing about toenails no the tenor said toenails are forever sorry i was reading that while you're talking about teeth i'll stop teeth and toenails yes but i'm talking about allergies and i feel as though my allergies have gotten worse in recent years i am i'm aging so my aging immune system should be getting less reactive i was hoping that with age i would find fewer allergies in my life but that is not the case and i've been wondering like man they seem like they start earlier they last longer there's more going on and oh they're just bad what's going on it's been half the year with allergies at least well i am vindicated by a new study in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences that has yes yes found confirmation that our allergies are worse because the allergy season is longer there's more pollen being produced by trees their analysis of pollen count stations in the united states and canada between 1990 to 2018 finds that the average pollen season starts about 20 days earlier than it used to runs 10 days longer on average and pumps out 21 percent more pollen thank you for that sentence yes lordo percent yeah 20 percent more pollen some increase and there is a difference in which species locations while they're talking about all of the united states and canada the midwest and areas like texas are among those more strongly influenced by this change but the biggest increase has happened in the more recent decade so in the decade from 1990 to about 2010 there wasn't as big an increase in pollen or a length of growing season as there was between 2000 to 2018 and they predict that with climate change we will see even worse allergies it's not ending anytime soon so i do hope that we come up with some better allergy medications okay science get on it i'm that's that's what we're gonna need but yes the allergies they are on us and if you feel like they're bad they are they're getting worse thank you climate change and then my last intro study i wanted to talk a bit about a new carbon cycle that has been discovered in the oceans it's not just one yes it's in addition to the carbon cycle that already goes through the oceans but some researchers who were interested in the oils that are in the ocean they started looking at hydrocarbons knowing that there are oil seeps that are natural we have human induced oil spills there's all sorts of oil in the ocean and yet a few years back these researchers discovered that cyanobacteria in the ocean release a hydrocarbon called pentadecane nc15 that's 15 carbons pentadecane so they started looking at these little cyanobacteria and the pentadecane that they release and looking at the cycle that they undergo trying to figure out all right well we know that there are some bacteria that like to eat petroleum are they really related to the bacteria that eat these natural this naturally released pentadecane and so they started doing a whole bunch of work to figure out to quantify how much pentadecane is in the oceans and they determined that there's actually a very high quantity of this hydrocarbon in the ocean that these this is a big amount they're spread the hydrocarbons are spread across 40 percent of the earth's surface and yes there are other bacteria that eat them up they estimate from their study that the pentadecane is about two million metric tons in the water at any given time there would be more but because there are so many microbes that depend on this pentadecane that are gobbling it up and creating carbon dioxide for the cyanobacteria to use again in their photosynthetic energy producing cycle it's a new hydrocarbon cycle so what they've yeah so what they have put together is that this is a biological cycle wherein the cyanobacteria harvest light produce the hydrocarbon there's archaea bacteria and bacteria that consume the pentadecane produce co2 and then that goes right back in and so there's a constant cycle in the oceans and they did discover that these bacteria and archaea bacteria they don't like eating petroleum so it's completely different groups of organisms so that idea about using those organisms to clean up our oil spills that's not going to pan out so well but whole new hydrocarbon cycle that we had no idea was there because we spill things in the ocean all the time so when ships are going out to sample oil in the ocean they're not taking care of where their oil from there or their gas from their motor is leaking they're not paying attention to hydrocarbons that are being released from paint on the surface of the boat they're not paying attention to all sorts of factors and so this study they controlled for all of that they made sure they they drove their boats in at a very specific angle to the current and the wind they made sure that the engine was pointed downstream away from the area that they were sampling they didn't allow any creation or use of hydrocarbons on the surface of the boat while they were doing the sampling so that they could make sure that what they were getting was actually biological in nature but then of course they did um they did gas chromatography to determine that it was biological in nature but it they did they jumped through all sorts of hoops to do this work and discovered something new about our oceans yeah very cool new things for the ocean old things for the sea i'm singing songs now this is this weekend science did you just tune in yeah yeah this is this weekend science we are talking about science thank you so much for joining us hey if you want a zazzle shirt or a mug or something like that with a twist logo on it or a picture want to blares pieces of art yes head over to twist.org click on our zazzle link and you can help support twists and also be very stylish and enjoy your enjoy your twist gear faux show yeah hey hey i feel like i'm gonna be a meerkat going hey or uh oh hey uh wait what time is it yeah that's what i was gonna say it's time for blares animal corner with blaire what you got blaire i have some sleepy dragonflies that i want to drop upside down what yeah um this is study from imperial college london they wanted to know how insects that fly are able able to keep stable in the air so if you drop a cat for example they actually will rotate around the head to tail axis to get back onto their feet that's the thing that cats are famous for right is always landing on their feet so they kind of do a um a sideways roll like when you ask your dog to roll over um but a lot of insects and aerial animals have been seen doing something more like a head over toe barrel roll and so researchers wanted to see how dragonflies make sure they are oriented properly if they are in the wrong position how they orient themselves mechanically what's happening there and if it is a conscious or passive effort and of course this is just to understand more about the natural world but also of course to make better drones i feel like that's what it always is about when we're studying animals especially flying animals we're trying to make the make better drones which of course we are yeah um so sleepy dragonfly drones yes yes yes yes yes yes um so the way that they were able to test this and see exactly how dragonflies can orient themselves and and write themselves mid-air um is they took 20 common darter dragonflies and they put them i like to imagine they were like little vests but they had tiny magnets in them and they were covered in motion tracking dots like you use for like anti-circus would use to be spiegel and the lord of the rings right so it's like the motion capture suits kind of um so then they uh they would use those magnets to attach the dragonfly to a magnetic platform either right side up or upside down and then they would vary it with tilt on uh different subsequent attempts and then they would release the magnet into a freefall so that the the dragonfly had to then write themselves then they used the motion tracking dots to create 3d models of how the dragonfly moved and then they captured high-speed cameras of 3d images so that then they could reconstruct all of it afterwards and analyze and figure out exactly what was happening so the conscious dragonflies when they were dropped from being upside down they somersaulted backwards to regain their right side up position dragonfly dragonflies that were unconscious they anesthetized them they also completed the somersault but more slowly so first of all that means there is something going on that they don't have to be awake for it to work right so for then you're wondering oh is it just an inherent piece of their body structure that allows them to write themselves almost like a punching bag that's weighted off the bottom right but the way that they tested that got a lot of science you've got to figure out a way to test this right they had to use dead dragonflies and then fit them with the magnets and drop them and see what happened and they did not maneuver at all when they were dead unless you know what you know what same thing was true when they did that study with cats yes exactly but if their wings were posed ahead of time into a position similar to something they saw a living dragonflies posed as then they were able to write themselves but there also was a little bit of movement around the vertical axis so they were they were a little wonky but if they posed them correctly ahead of time and they they kind of righted themselves and then of course they also for good measure you got to control your variables here they did in fact try a dead wingless dragonfly and it just fell what so who would imagine because dragonflies are dead i mean you got to check everything but i mean did they think dead wingless dragonflies were magic no i think i think they just had to control their variable hey on note did they do just the wings with no dragonfly that's that's the real test and until you've done that all of their results are invalid like a paper airplane right um but so their conclusion of course the reason for this story was uh that they their maneuvering relies on muscle tone and wing posture and that it is a passive stability so the the beauty of passive stability it's the reason that an airplane if their engine stopped wouldn't just fall out of the sky it's their design specifically so that they can coast for a very very long time fairly steadily with no engines so passive stability is the same thing that's happening here um and that lowers the effort of of flight the the kind of the energy requirements and it also is likely to have influenced how their overall body shape evolved and they also use that passive stability most likely to create an advantage as in general that's less energy and they're more able to recover from inconvenient events so here we go here's a dragonfly that's um being dropped just normal just on his way and then we're about to see one dropped upside down and he's gonna do his somersault look at me flip over there you go and then um here he is there so there's actually a a barrel roll so it's like he's diving straight down and then turns back around it reminds me actually of um swimming if you learn um I forget what it's called I think it's called a spin turn or something but it's what it's the fastest way to turn around when you're swimming you see this in the Olympics too right is you have to kind of go go upside down and then flip so it's it's funny kind of like that and then um yeah here's our posed dead dragonfly so it does still turn back around but there also is a little bit of twisting happening as well yeah and last due to the due to the wings themselves they're gonna have their own drag and their own own influence on how the airflow happens it's interesting that yeah just because just because the dead dragonfly with no wings yeah no wings just a very slow sad mic drop would appear yes anyway so passive stability is helpful for a bunch of reasons but what I think is also really cool is their next plan here this research team is to investigate how passive stability has an impact on their active vision because if you're not physically moving your body then it potentially would be harder or take more effort to track your movement with your vision right so there's there's a certain amount of of coordination that's tied with us if I'm walking in a particular direction and I make the conscious decision to turn I will also turn my vision in that direction right but if you're if you're being turned you kind of have to play catch up the whole time so there is a question of how their vision and their ability to continually track vision is affected by it being a passive stability and not active and then also their strategies in prey interception and avoiding obstacles if they're using passive stability so at what point do you kick in manual from autopilot to avoid an obstacle right before it's too late right right and so what's happening in their brain if you want to call it a brain really just like a little ball of nerves why are you why not so the brain is it's a ball of nerves it yes it is a brain but in terms of it being a brain like we consider a brain it doesn't have the same regionality or anything else that we think about with brains with insects it really is just a nerve fall but ultimately yes you can call it a brain but yes so this is very helpful when studying any animal that flies but also of course this could push towards better drones if you have drones that have passive stability and are able to write themselves just based on their structure without exerting energy that would be very helpful yeah without having any external control without having to without having to use too much energy also because with any drone energy conservation is going to be important or is this like as the like as the battery fails and you've got it 300 feet in the air you want it to find a way to sail back down that's the one that's that's the one your wingless dead dragonfly drone sailed to me nicely um yeah so on from dragonflies to bats um vampire bats here's your baby vampires this is a study that comes from the smithsonian tropical research institute and it was a study it's um it was actually part of a larger study looking at camera footage of vampire bats in a captive scenario they wanted to see just how bat relationships are built and how they treat each other um and and it was part of this larger situation and then this kind of interesting thing happened sad but very interesting there was a young vampire bat pup that was orphaned throughout the course of this study now this means there was camera footage and social dynamic data for days leading up to the event and then thereafter and so it gave a really interesting opportunity to give an entirely anecdotal instance a study a case study kind of of how an orphaned vampire bat is then adopted by another female so this as i said it was about a hundred days of surveillance camera footage from the sisonian tropical research institute and what happened was after this mother bat died another female stepped in to adopt the baby and in terms of bat terms obviously it's nothing legal going on but what that means is that this female spent a a long time a nor a much higher than normal amount of time for just a random female and baby both grooming and feeding this baby now let me explain here what this means this other bat started lactating and ended up feeding this baby milk she didn't have any babies but somehow this one this new bat was able to nurse this orphaned bat which is crazy so so let me let me tell you the whole thing here hormones yes hormones absolutely it's always hormones it's always so it was a 19-day-old pup her mother lilyth unexpectedly died and then she was adopted by another female named bd and shortly before lilyth died the pup was spending time climbing onto who would later become her adopted mother bd and this most likely initiated the cascade of neuroendocrine mechanisms that caused her to start lactating she's just physically a lot of contact with this other bat but as i said she wasn't pregnant she didn't have her own babies but she was already lactating the day that lilyth died so it's not even that there was like a vacuum of hormones and she filled it there was some sort of oh this other bat is dying and everyone around them could tell or that there was something else going on where the the baby was rejecting the mother or the mother was rejecting the baby and so the baby was getting pushed to this other this is the big question right is like what caused this to happen ahead of time but she was already lactating the day that the original mom lilyth died and after a little step in addition to nursing bd was grooming and sharing food with the pup more than any other female in the colony now when all this happened that's when they decided like oh let's go back and look at the footage from before this happened and so it turned out that bd and lilyth had been primary grooming partners already but bd was also lilyth's top food donor so remember vampire bats have this very cool thing where if somebody doesn't get enough food somebody else will vomit blood into the mouth of a friend it's a donation nice it's helping yeah and um you can listen back i'm sure you could search for it on twist.org but we did a really cool story about uh the dynamics of that and that there's an anticipation that um if i'm helping you today when you're in trouble then you'll help me later when i am in trouble there's a reciprocity involved if somebody does not reciprocate then they are less likely to get future blood meals so there's a very cool thing there just as a side note but yeah it's a complicated social thing is when they share these blood meals um so bd was giving lilyth a lot of donated blood meals but lilyth did not share very much with bd which is interesting i don't they don't really know what that means or or anything but interesting little anecdote but yeah in the end bd was helping the pup way more than any other female even before lilyth died and then thereafter so is this motivated by being in captivity is this a one-off situation does this happen all the time we don't know but here's a case study to look at to kind of take out into the wild and maybe into other captive groups and see what's going on i remember a story that you brought a while back also talking about the small kind of subgroups within vampire bats maybe it was flamingos maybe i'm getting animal stories confused um but there i i remember a story we've talked about the reciprocity before and how there's this trust between the bats and they build relationships based on that they're not going to know every single bat in their you know thousand ten thousand bat colony depending on how big it is they'll have a subset of individuals who are the individuals that they spend the most time with that they are really sharing their lives with and i would imagine that bd as it as the bat the mom bat declined became less able to feed the pup and the other the other bat just slowly started stepping up which is amazing yeah so the one of the reasons that vampire bats are such an interesting case for this is that compared to other bats they have incredibly high um investment in their ops offspring so they they had the grooming the nursing the donation of blood meals as they learn how to go get their own all this kind of stuff um it's it's such a high investment that this might be kind of a perfect storm for that that if if a baby has lived long enough that they're you know kind of well on their way to adulthood and maturity it would be pretty devastating to a group to have lost all of the effort that has gone in because it's also not a one-on-one so you don't want to lose your investment when you have so much going into that baby um it it makes nothing but sense to step up and take care of that baby if their mother is lost but it is interesting that they had created their own little social group already it's wonderful yeah it just it yeah it speaks to the social nature of the bats and the yeah and that willingness to do that so i want to get more about i want to hear more about this story like what happened what happened like when the baby grew up and left like did bd find somebody else to hang out with all the time or is bd like all alone and like what happened well i want to keep watching this is a three month study where they pulled these animals from three different sites across panama all of the bats were unrelated they had never met before and um so i am not sure what happened to them so not even they're not even like uh oh interesting yeah so it's it's possible they were released into the wild it's possible the study is ongoing i do not know it's a good question i'm looking at i'm looking at a quote at the end did you did you read this oh yes yes you want to read it as a new parent myself i have come to realize the utter power of baby cuteness this is one of the researchers who said this i feel that my brain has been completely rewired most of us can understand the strong desire to adopt and care for a cute puppy or kitten or to take on the ultimate responsibility of adopting a child regardless of why these traits exist it is inherently fascinating to consider the neuroendocrine mechanisms that underlie them the stimuli that trigger them how they differ across species or individuals and how these traits might even be pre adaptations for other forms of cooperation there you go even baby vampire rats cute you know thanks i can't dissect the blood yes i could just go on and on and on but i won't because it's the end of the animal corner and i just want to say this is this week in science if you're just joining us or if you're watching it for a while and you were like what is this program this is this week in science we speak about science and the current news in science every week thank you for joining us thank you for listening to twist and if you enjoy twists consider supporting us on patreon or paypal if you head over to twist.org you can click on the support us on patreon link and that takes you over to our patreon community page where you can choose your level of support ten dollars and up a month and we will thank you by name at the end of the show and we do have annual subscription so you can you can pay it all at once once a year if that's what you prefer over on the website twist.org there are also links to paypal where if you prefer paypal you can pay that way but your support really does keep this show going and allow us to do what we do every week to replace our equipment to do outreach to try and reach new audiences and try and talk sense and science have some laughs be serious sometimes but it really does help us to bring it bring our perspective to this world that is currently very full of misinformation we try to be that credible sane perspective for you and for others and you can help us bring that perspective to many more people around the world thank you for your support we really cannot do this without you all right Justin do you want to tell a story about google what what's going on you are muted yeah i'll unmute myself for the rest of the show go again this is a study that finds academic research engines research engines especially goober scott goober goober i messed up research engines so the problem is it's it's search engines for research uh specifically google has one it's called google scholar there are some folks that wanted to study how the algorithm ranks things and you're not allowed to know like google scholar won't tell anyone how they rank these things now it's obviously has something to do with the quality of the work based on how many times it's been cited or how long it's been out there without being refuted uh i guess nobody really knows so the search engine optimization that is being applied to these things seems to have a preferred format and things that are not submitted in this format are were found by the study 90 of them to be almost completely invisible regardless of the quality of the work or how many times it had been cited what is that format turns out the format that is preferred is english that's not good paper's not in english study's not in english don't get shared don't get shared and this is through a multilingual search like it's not a english only search that this was done in there so apparently you can do both i don't know yeah study found the research paper is not in the english format it is a 90 chance of being completely invisible in multilingual searches uh study authors are members of the department of communication at upf barcelona to implement this optimization we need to further our understanding of google scholar's relevance ranking algorithm so that based on this knowledge we can highlight or improve those characteristics that academic documents already present and which are taken into account by the algorithm says raviara first author of the study so again google's not giving it up all google data by the way is the wet dream of communication majors all people who study communication want to get inside of the data stream of google and see what's really going on in the world they should definitely be allowed they want to know the algorithms yeah but what was interesting about this too is for the study authors applied an inverse engineering research methodology blah blah blah they have all these methodologies uh based on statistical statistics and correlation co-efficiency nonsense communication people have too many tools uh but basically what they found at the end end of it was that even when the searches were in the multilingual format for terms that were not at all language specific a uh the name of a molecule which is not said differently in any other language uh a copyrighted product which is you know the same in any language that you would you would put it all these sorts of things it still would put you would you if you were seeing a a language a paper that was in french or german or spanish with a thousand sightings it might be put way down the list with an english one that had 10 right so there's there's something aside from the specific search words that could be different in a language i get if you're putting in english words for your search you might expect something like that to happen but if you're specifically avoiding that and it's still happening then you might have a problem that's frustrating to me because i feel like the internet's gotten so good at translating things like yeah google translate is pretty good it's amazing google's job of translating entire web pages is really good social media platforms will now auto translate posts from people that post things in different languages and it's it's pretty accurate so that's it's pretty frustrating that that doesn't apply to this yeah so they they've published in future internet uh saying the chances being ranked in multilingual google scholar search increases remarkably if the researchers opt for a for publication in english uh which means i presumably these uh this paper was published in english i don't know why they would do anything else at that point yeah i mean this gets it a very you know central problem i guess uh in science publishing in the first place which is that the majority of papers are written in english if authors do want to try and get uh broad international pickup citations of their work publishing in english in uh in an english language journal is going to usually get them much more uh much more coverage than otherwise however there are national language based journals for you know all disciplines and i know this is this is very interesting um when it comes down to it because we've talked for so long about english being like the language that everyone speaks around the world it's the one that you know so why not but this the the prioritization uh even of a paper with a higher impact factor published in a journal with a higher impact factor with more citations being less prominent on these google searches just because they're a different language that's it strikes it's something like bias yeah well that's exactly what i was thinking too right is that like how many different ways have we said that if if there is any homogenous nature of a group of people doing research there is bias there there is a slant in the results whether you realize it or not even if it's just uh people studying bird calls and finally women going you know female birds sing too yeah well yeah uh you know current current facial recognition uh will identify a white male faster than anybody else i think that's gonna i think that's gonna at some point change to a uh a chinese male because they're going to be utilizing the technology more but there's still always this inherent bias of whoever's sort of creating the thing right uses it uh in their homogenous group first and that's how it sort of gets provided um so i i i kind of get like why this is a big problem you know the the way it's the way the paper the communication folks sort of looked at it because they are at barcelona they're looking at in terms of hey this is not giving enough exposure to people who are writing in their own languages and you're not being able to see research in your native language that might be relevant to what you're doing um but it's it's just such a massive drain also for all research if you're just trying to find anything related to your work and it's i mean 90 completely invisible like falling below the even register of being able to track it in google scholar that's a big problem yeah there's a huge huge disparity yeah yeah so speaking of disparities what about political polarization oh yeah this is a fun story especially after uh going straight from one to another i like it i see where your mind is this week this is it might be a political polarization is having far-reaching impacts on american life according to uh the university of wyoming and five other universities across the country who are uh they've uh this is papers that they've done appears in the journal of public policy and marketing and of the american marketing association so this is marketers and business people talking about how polarization might be a bad thing and that's how you know it's really gotten bad yeah when the when the people whose job it is to yeah strong reaction yeah the pigeon hold you into a certain specific person that will have a strong reaction and they're like yeah this is actually not good oh so anyway they go on i'm not even gonna go through all this they're pointing out some stuff the that is sort of interesting i guess that the political polarization is real that different sides of the political spectrum are now overlapping less and less on what were maybe shared issues or shared concerns i think the environment might be one that was a pretty well shared concern at one point between whatever uh the research is shown that political identities republican democrat liberal conservative help determine people's behavior attitude perceptions those identities can be reinforced by people selecting social groups with shared belief systems consumption of media that only align with those beliefs beliefs even creation of group specific shared reality that sounds familiar doesn't it oh yes it does yes group specific shared reality uh this also makes it more difficult for elected officials to effectively govern that's due to the number of factors including a lack of trust and scientists and policymakers as well as a too much misinformation in the world way too much so yeah one of the things they go you know they also point out it's bad for some businesses they pointed out to goya beans my pillow yeah my pillow guy got involved in politics that's all he did and there's a backlash home depot the owner home depot there was a backlash uh even though he doesn't control the company of home depot chick filet got boycotted for some stuff seems to be all for conservative causes that they've listed here the hobby lobby at one point yes yeah yeah many uh ultimately according to researchers consumer welfare suffers because of political polarization so the those who market to consumers are like hey this is not good for you try something else uh one of the things they point out those finances people will take less money to work for a company that they politically idealize that they have a political symbiosis with or whatever that they believe reflects their political views yeah it fits their identity absolutely their identity they'll take for low take lower wages uh to and also even to work with politically like-minded people they will slightly over hire higher paying jobs um and of course this can happen in in a any direction politically uh it also says people have the potential to prevent people others from becoming friends uh who have different political views which they think can lead to a less intellectually diverse community health-wise health-wise your political views can affect health do you think we've seen pretty good examples of people having political idealized identity politic views of handling a pandemic this is the one i thought that was the most interesting though societal interests for instance this is quoting for instance beliefs relating to global warming affirmative action wealth inequality and gun control often tend to reflect individuals political affiliations rather than a deliberate processing of relevant information that results in evidence-based decision making in addition the broader negative impacts of these policy areas on society as a whole have the potential to harm individual mental and physical health over the long term yeah affirmative actions really bad for people's mental health is a long-term policy is so even in their attempt to describe the ill effects of politicization in society they have absolutely biased and politicized their own paper a bit i mean there is you know if you are within an individual within a political sphere of influence that is diametrically opposed to your personal beliefs your political leaning then that is going to add stress to your interactions to add stress to the way you think about things so it can influence mental health and and general health i i absolutely see how this could how this could be possible for for either side so that there are these larger scale aspects it's not just people talking with people it is this larger scale influence on individuals individuals influence the whole and the whole influences individuals that makes sense yeah yeah i think that is the the the big difference too is that um our political and societal ideals are on display for everyone um and you know i think about the the generation prior to the internet and social media and you could have a friend that was a 180 from yourself in terms of political views and that i think the the different ends of the the different sides of the aisle were closer together than they are now of course which part of it but also you didn't you could choose to not talk about that and it you also didn't have their views up in your face every time you logged into facebook or something like that and so it would be much easier to kind of have a dissonance i think within a relationship yeah i want to know how marketing can fix this how we can use social psychology and marketing psychology and how we can use it to turn it around and get people get the get the you know you know what used to be the the apple versus um pc advertisements that were you know very yeah yeah pecy versus coke pecy you know these societal schisms right you know why do we start bringing brands together showing how you can have integration and you can have cooperation and i mean i've seen those i5 corridor commercial no no no i'm just thinking about you know the i don't know they're like pizza hut and taco bell places that are like together but they're not competitors that's the thing they're not real competitors all right then i want to see i want to see vending machines that sell coke and pepsi so that is actually uh i think that might be some of the some of what they say they suggest some measures to limit the effects of polarization they including reducing the spread of misinformation which we've talked about as well use messaging techniques that try to bridge different values of liberals and conservatives yeah so uh you know maybe have a commercial with like a box wine and then like you know a bogel or something um box wine and a six pack i don't know limiting the length of political campaigns that sounds pretty cool but at the same time they say uh polarization has been shown to increase voting and political participation which is actually i think is the problem i actually think i think there's i think those part of what happened in those oldie days when you didn't have as many friends talking about politics all the time is because nobody knew about it or cared about it and i think people were complacent also and they yeah people complacent but comparatively people people are talking politics without the policy right involved at all it's sports teams and not endpoints yeah i like it better when they weren't participating whoever they are left and right like well i i think it would be amazing for people to be talking about local policies you know what about the reservoir up the hill what about you know the salmon runs in the local news doesn't cover it right but it why that is another issue and that is media and all yeah okay culture we got to get back to the science but yeah yeah but yeah i i agree interesting interesting study that you have brought there yeah i have well i don't think i do i would like to have happy bones as i grow old got some studies here for you i would like to have happy bones but we do know there is a certain proportion of individuals who end up with osteoarthritis hey kiki real quick yes oh i gotta turn it to me you're gonna have the camera on me the whole time you're talking because if you can i'm gonna try to lip sync it okay you can do that but i don't know if it'll this is what happens clip clip clip uh let me talk about bones i'm gonna talk about happy bones i want to have happy bones as i get older i imagine you do too many people end up with osteoarthritis which is a deteriorative condition in which a lot of people think that it has to do with bone injury and then cartilage getting thin and it's just more and more wear and tear that people think is the problem but according to some new studies it's not necessarily just wear and tear there may have been injuries early on that triggered inflammation and a change in the metabolic profile of the joint so that it changes from a nice happy joint with happy cartilage to a point where the uh chondrocytes where there are cells within the bone within the cartilage that start basically eating each other they're like we are in danger we're going to we're going to destroy more bones and these researchers at Penn State University were looking at bones and osteoarthritis and this condition in which the cartilage deteriorates and they determined that there is a a point at which a gene becomes involved called GSK2 and this gene encodes a protein that grabs on to a cellular receptor in the membrane of one of these chondrocytes and in doing that it overstimulates the cartilage destruction so the GSK2 is very involved in destroying cartilage and these researchers they're like oh but hey look at this antidepressant called peroxetine that is a GSK2 blocker let's just see what happens with the cells when we put this antidepressant on knee bones and knee cartilage whoever would have thought you want to put an antidepressant on my arthritic knees make them happy i i don't know it worked they have seen that the antidepressant peroxetine is successful in blocking GSK2 in the cartilage and in a mouse model of osteoarthritis recovering cartilage so that the cartilage actually grows back this is like the medical equivalent of finding a conch in a drawer in a museum right yes yes oh we're using this thing for this but maybe for this other thing maybe for this but it might work for this other thing and that's the other point to this is that peroxetine is already approved by the FDA for safety and we know that it is effective in treating depression so they won't have to do any drug safety testing and they are in the process of applying to the FDA for clinical trial approval to test this antidepressant against osteoarthritis in people they're going to move directly from mice to humans they showed that it uh worked on human cartilage cells in a petri dish we know that it works in a mouse and they're like hey let's just take this to the clinical trial level because we know this drug is safe so let's see if we can do this the one thing that um i that it didn't say i that i couldn't find information about was whether or not people who take peroxetine as an antidepressant have less problems with osteoarthritis as they age and i think that would be a very interesting question to answer i'd love to know that yeah yes timid tenor prozac kills cartilage that is off label on the knee prescribing so it's very very yeah it's pretty exciting pretty exciting news um and then my last story for the night is about depression we've gone from prozac for peroxetine for knees and cartilage to how your dad might be to blame for your adult depression i mean in some cases for sure what yeah so this is another mouse study published in the journal science advances researchers were looking at uh epigenetic changes in sperm and how they affect mental health um and in the study they exposed male mice to a bunch of stress for five weeks to the point where the mice started showing depressive symptoms so depressed my depressed male mice adults and then they let them sire offspring and they compared the offspring to a control group whose dads had never been stressed out and they did they found that these mice that had depressed dads um they didn't show depressive symptoms normally but then when they were exposed to a mild stressor they got they got triggered they became depressed they they showed depressive symptoms increased immobility decreased weight and um and so the researchers in this study think that this appears to be linked to small RNAs in the sperm and these these molecules they're regulating development and other aspects of health as the as the fetus is developing even through they are transmitted along with the sperm during fertilization and that these small RNAs um as a result of it increased corticosterone cortisol levels in the fathers are changing the kinds of small RNAs that are passed on at a particular time and um then those are related to anxiety disorders depression in the offspring so um we'll we'll see how this you know whether this can whether this passes passes in the same way for humans we don't know that this works in the same way but it is very interesting to see this kind of a link in mice you know of an ant a social cognitively advanced uh creature yeah so so these aren't being reared by depressed dads so this is this is very this is a very interesting nature versus nurture sort of a study here because obviously in humans it's gonna be both it's gonna it's not very likely both are you going to absolutely be able to point to behaviors that you may have learned from or experienced from uh being having a depressive or stressed parent uh father uh but separate from that you're still going to be on the hook for it even if you somehow managed not to be directly involved that's really wild I think I think thankfully my pops most not have had much stress my pops I'm gonna have to go ask because he's actually a pretty chill guy and kind of makes sense that even you know that we we didn't have that close and upbringing so there is that removal of nurture totally yeah you're an end of one Justin so yeah like I am like in a way I'm like yeah he's always been relaxed and chill in the face of pretty much anything and I kind of have taken on that too interesting although yeah I mean this is not completely causal this isn't like oh 100 percent your dad stressed out that's to blame you know your dad is now it is now it is now if you have no no don't take that away from people geeky now they have uh somebody who they can blame dad why were you so stressed out yeah no we don't this is not 100 percent we don't know all the details this is a mouse study it is very interesting though the passage of these epigenetic factors yeah with so much of these things that we've been learning about how these traits and things and reactions do get passed on through some bizarre genetic memory without mechanism but yet we seem to have I think this is the first time I really recall a mechanism involved in the not this isn't just a correlative they're saying we know the mechanism by which this is transmitting right the the mechanism by which um by which it's still awesome and you know this there are going to be people who have genetic pre genetic predispositions to anxiety and depression there are potentially going to be people who have less of a genetic predisposition but because of the environmental stressors that influenced dad mom before uh before you were made a person is made those environmental first uh factors can influence your development or the offspring's development and yeah but it does make sense that you know how it's passed down yeah not just genetic epigenetic that stress in life can influence the next generation I want to say there was a study that we reported on that involved grandmothers and something about food scarcity and it causing an epigenetic change in their grandchildren yes it skips a generation that was also fathers that was grandfathers uh grandmothers uh does i ever call it was grandfathers the one i'm thinking of at least is the oh gosh is it the is it dutch farmers timid tenor in the youtube chat room is saying it sounds like the epigenetic studies of norwegian families during famines so it might have been the norwegians and not not when it was it was well it might have been both actually come to think of it but it was uh they had to be everybody's starved at one point or another the grandparents uh it it what determined the rates of uh uh oh diabetes and a bunch of different factors could get correlated back to prepubescent feast or famine times for grandparents so it was if they've experienced this as a 20 year old it had no effect on the following generations but if it had before uh i think boys at 12 girls at 13 11 i don't know when things happen but for both it was uh but i think the strongest hits that they had found though that were when i remember were the grandfathers the grandfathers to the grandsons seemed to have the strongest correlation anyway anyway yeah um kevin unique is asking how can they tell this can they prove the mothers are not depressed i've never seen a mother not being depressed um um mothers are tired that's for sure but um what they were looking at were very specific measures of what they would consider mouse depression which are changes specific changes in behaviors that mice normally do um and the they were specifically altering what was going on with the fathers not with the mothers so hope hopefully you would hope that they did pay attention to the mothers and whether or not the mothers were just displaying any behaviors or if they were just normal mice so to keep it keep it all talking in the same vein uh steven reyn and the chat room asks what effects will this pandemic have depression has gone up uh in future generations i i can tell you uh one grandfather uh story when i was uh aged maybe three i got a fever i just had a kid called i had a kid called i had a little fever my grandfather cried unstoppably he could not stop he was absolutely in tears and and you know he's a cat that was born in 1910 and so has gone went you know was a young through as a child pandemic and went through that pandemic probably all these other things so part of him really thought getting a cold a child getting a cold meant they would die there's part of his reaction was that was going to be the end uh our medicine has advanced a long way since then yes we are so lucky that we are in the time we are in with the science the medicine um therapies and treatments are far and above where they used to be and yeah people survive a lot more now than they used to very recently it's been a little very recently but still if this pandemic had happened 50 years ago more people would have died the medicine the treatments that we're using right now we have less people would have died because there were fewer people there were few people we didn't travel as much and we were far more rural but but i to your point yes yes okay thanks for arguing with me it's great just trying to keep the numbers right that's keeping the numbers right it's just i feel like the number would be lower because it'd be less of us and i don't know about that more people would die in the hospitals let me tell you that anybody in the hospitals more people would die that's hospitals still had limits but anyway anyway i think we've come to the end of our show oh we have made it and i'm i'm happy that we made it through our show i was feeling spiky and aggressive coming into the show and i'm feeling much happier now maybe a little bit of that the the happy bone osteoarthritis antidepressant rubbed off on me i feel happy having having spent these last this last hour and a half with everyone so as we get to the end i'm kind of hoping that justin will be less frozen he's taking a nap he's just taking a nap like we're at the end of the show with the frozen justin there it goes i was frozen and he was frozen what is going on internet she's telling us it's time for bed i think that's right the internet says good night twist time to go up time to take it down i'm hoping that justin will come back so we can get through the very very end oh let me just tell a story because we are at the end of the show uh astronomers have confirmed the most distant object in the solar system it's called far far out i was gonna make a joke of those words and then you said that it really is named far far out i was gonna say is it far far away far far out wow yes it lies 132 astronomical units from our sun this is the most distant object that we have ever identified in our solar system it has a cool orbit because it goes way out and then comes in inside the orbit of Neptune so researchers think that it may have been nearby Neptune and got tossed out at some point but they they have been checking it out um with the Magellan telescopes in Chile to determine its orbit so it uh on average it's 132 astronomical units out um but then it goes as far out as 175 astronomical units way out and then into 27 astronomical units an astronomical unit unit being the distance between our sun and the earth so it's very distant very very distant out there one would call it far far out far far out exactly um they have provisionally dedicated it 2018 vg 18 far out um is they think it is could be big enough to be considered a minor planet but um they haven't they have it's provisional at this point because it's far out and it's hard to see you can't really gotta really do a little more looking at it extra hard yeah but it takes a long time to look at it because it's so far away the researchers announced uh they said far far out takes a millennium to go around the sun once so it's like look it moved you can be looking at it for years and it'll barely move across the sky because it is so far away so how do we know it's an orbit and it's not just like a a piece of detritus just passing through if it's moving so slow because we have been able to um identify from looking at it yeah i mean actually that's a really good question because it could also it could just be like passing through and get hooked a little and then ricochet out and i think shut out right yeah but because of its trajectory its velocity where it's moving how it's moving they are able to estimate um and also looking at its brightness how that changes which gives an idea of where it's headed in the sky um yeah they're able to map these things and estimate them and i'm sure at some point we will be able to go to these places and be able to really confirm whether or not they are truly part of the solar system but that as opposed to a visitor like oh oh mua mua right which by the way even though avilob says it is aliens we don't know it's aliens he's trying to sell a book so anyway i'm really upset with the media for piping his his fringe view out there over and over and over there was some sensationalist news about science this week that was very upsetting yes i i was i was all excited to bring a story about spinach sending an email and then i looked at it and not only was it like that's not what the story was but also it was from 2018 it's like what popular news right now why now what's going on you guys just wanted to say this spinach sent an email but really just like all right blair we get to finish this show it looks like jessen has lost his internet internet so so i will move it right along so we have come to the end of the show thank you all for listening thank you time for shout outs shout outs to fada for helping with show notes and with social media posts i would also like to give a shout out to our new script supervisor showrunner rachel thank you for being here tonight in the chat room and keeping an eye on things addition she's going to be she's going to be assisting and helping for here out from here on out so i'm very very excited to welcome rachel to the twist team thank you so much for joining us additionally gourd thank you for manning the chat room identity for thank you for recording the show and thank you very very much to our patreon sponsors for all of their generous support thank you too woody ms andre basette chris wozniak dav bun vegaard chef stad hal snider donathan styles aka don stylo john sheol a geome john lee ali coffin gore of charma shoe brood arwin hand and donald lundis steven alberon darryl my shack stu polyc andrew swanson fredas 104 sky luke paul ronovich kevin reardon noodles jack brang kerington matt bass joshua fury shon and nina lamb john mckeech greg riley mark hesson flow jean telly a steve leesman aka azima ken haze howard tan christopher rappin dania pierce and richard brenton menish melizon johnny gridley kevin railsback flying out kevin porter christopher drier mark mesaros ardeam greg briggs john atwood two fabulous thespians roody garcia dav wilkinson rodney lewis paul rick ramus matt setter philip shane curt larson craig lewitt landon mountainsloth jim drapo sarah chavis sue doster jason oldes dave neighbor eric nap e o kevin parochan erin luthan steve debal bob codler calder marjorie paul stanton paul w stanton paul disney patrick pecker raro gary s tony steele ulysses adkins bryan kondren and jason roberts thank you for all of your support on patreon and if you are interested in having us read your name at the end of the show head over to twist.org and click on that patreon link on next week's show we will be speaking about fungus february yes with a fun guy dr ivan liachko and he will be joining us to talk about gene sequencing and funguses and other fun things don't miss it that's amazing yeah we'll also be back on wednesday at eight p.m. p.m. yes p.m. that's what we do in pacific time broadcasting live from our youtube facebook and twitch channels and twist.org slash live hey do you want to listen to us as a podcast just search for this week in science remember podcasts are found if you enjoyed the show please get your friends subscribe as well yeah and for more information on anything that you've heard here today show notes and links to stories are going to be available on our website twist.org you can also sign up for our newsletter hey do you want to contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com justin at twistminna gmail.com or me blair at blairbaz at twist.org just be sure to put twist t-w-i-s into the subject line or your email will be spam filtered all the way into some knobbly knees missing some cartilage i guess ouch achy you don't want it to go there you can also ping us on the twitter we are at twist science at dr kiki at jacksonfly at blairs menagerie and we really do love your feedback there's a topic you 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philosophy we're just trying to save the world this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science a list of items i want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness i'm trying to promote more rational thought and i'll try to answer any question you've got so how can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour of science is coming your way you better just listen to what we say and if you we can science this week in science this week in science this week in science where's justin he went away again he's here but he's gone this time it's not his internet oh goodness gracious thanks for a good show yeah that was a good one yeah that was fun it was fun this show always puts me into a good mood yeah it is good i may be feeling spiky and pokey or sad and depressed like little mice i'm gonna come on the show and it fixes everything that was weird what happened my no no no okay uh uh my drivers stopped driving they pulled over literally like so this is this is not the ideal setup i do not like my setup but i have a little like one of these type things i have an extra one because that one i keep expecting to break but it's one of these things like wi-fi antenna ideally usb things and it stopped and i've had problems with this one before so i'm like ah so i switched it out and that didn't work and then i'm like what is wrong and it turns out the ports were just stopped working the usb ports just quit i like switched i put my uh uh my mouse in there and then the mouse didn't work but then none of them worked none of the ports i couldn't get this the mouse so i had to shut it did you restart i just rebooted now yeah but uh why did it have to stop right at the end i don't know you had a wonderful look on your face oh no no sunny day at the beach here we go it was a sunny day sunny day it was a beautiful day up here and i really wanted to go outside and i didn't want to be sad and there's supposed to be a large snow storm coming to portland we're supposed to get a whole bunch of snow tomorrow night through sunday but i don't think anybody cares because we stay home yeah we're not going anywhere we're not yeah yeah it's uh subtree in life tonight did we miss a story about invertebrate magnetization no that was my dragonflies oh yeah that's all right i'm like wait a minute did we miss something no hey did we ever announce the thing was it too soon to talk about the no we didn't announce it on the on the podcasty podcast we should do that talk about that part of the thing that we're doing yeah so we had a pow wow with uh the dtns crew which if you're not familiar is that it's some sort of new podcast some sort of starting out that's talking about technology stuff because i guess people are also interested in that just not science the whole thing just like the technology right uh yes and so tom merit sarah lane roger roger chang we discussed um having a crossover show and we were trying to figure out exactly when we would do it and how we would do it and so we have decided that it is going to be a special show for everyone separate from the shows that we normally are doing yes separate special show that will be on saturday april 17th 4 p.m pacific time 7 p.m eastern uh so that hopefully we'll remind you later more people can come yeah we're gonna talk about this a lot as it's coming up and as we're going into it but the what we would like to do the hook what do you want us to talk about well if you're asking me i have a lot of things mostly the end of the oh so so it so the idea is that we would bring science stories with some tech in it and they would bring tech stories with some science in it yeah it's like chocolate with the peanut butter and the peanut butter with the chocolate it's gonna be so good and so it could be an individual article or a or a larger topic could be a topic but uh we also we yeah we want to things that you wish that maybe we covered a little bit more on the tech side but we don't because we're not technologists necessarily what would those be so let us know life had to work but we get you know topics if there are things that a lot of people recommend then you know that could be a topic that we all talk about for a little bit um but we want we want audience we want you our community and they're going to be asking the dTNS community for the same thing to get ideas so if you want to um you can email us you can send us tweets I mean we have a we have a discord but I don't go on the discord all the time we have one yeah you gotta go to the twist discord man I didn't know I didn't know we had a discord I didn't even know what a discord is see that's the yeah it's okay yeah don't worry about it it's not that I don't love you fans it's just I don't know how to where you are there's there's too many places to be but um but yeah we didn't we didn't pick a hashtag we really should pick a hashtag hmm yes what was the name of the show gonna be this this week in daily tech science news hour no I'll tell you I'll tell you I think yeah I think I like hold on where this okay Tom has been calling it the this daily week tech in news science show and and I have been calling it what have I been calling it I have been calling it this week in the daily science and tech news show podcast so right off the bat we have two different versions of the collaboration taking place since it's late what are the acronyms there well let's see we have got tdw t i n s s or t w i d s t n s p yeah I don't even know am I in I n s p or your nose and throat doctor I don't know nope um ENT EMT what yes and yes I used the word pow wow and I should be more uh that is me being old and I should be more conscious thank you for bringing that up uh they are generally more ceremonial it was not a ceremonial meeting we had a meeting we had a meeting of minds we did we had a chit chat we had a huddle yes gourd two awesome names that just roll off the tongue uh twinter what is that this week in oh this week in science tech edition I like it kind of puts us forward I like it this week in news I think we lost us again oh no yeah he's frozen I wonder what's going on with his poison happened again he said he texted mm p hacking for technologists saturday tech science science tech show so say the two names again I like that name again I'm gonna write them down were they well done let me get to it I can't say it this week in the daily science and tech news show podcast wait this week in daily silence in the daily science and tech news show podcast okay so there's one what was the other one this daily week tech in news science show okay I don't know about that one doesn't make any sense I like twid's yeah twd st nsp right isn't that it saturday tech science science tech show I see what you did there the longer one flows better it's confusing enough to be likeable in you like that I like it a lot saturday science tech mashup okay kill joy oh that could be like the stump gonna stomp yes oh yeah they name their pre and post shows right they have good day internet is their pre show mm good science internet good science and technology internet Kevin jones I give up I know saturday morning breakfast cereal is already taken we may come up with yeah the the twist dtns crossover show you can you can send us hashtag let's see hashtag crossover twist dtns mashup twist dtns crossover I don't know you got science in my tech you got tech in my science good science to all yes yes gourd I like that why are we oh how do I make things so complicated because oh yeah gourd yeah you're right gourd's right gourd's right it's good twist x dtns yeah gourd you got it that's it that's it that's the one oh yeah don't miss the show that's the main message we will have fun we will tell you more about it as we plan it we have time coming up but we're excited all of us together talking about things it'll be a big old round table I don't yeah except a not round table it'll be us in like there's six of us so it'll all it won't be brady bunch exactly how are we doing it are we doing stream yard that's another aspect that we need to figure out because they use skype yeah I don't like skype but then you know maybe their producer would be in charge because they have a separate producer and Roger producing but they have like a they have a producer producer who runs the show behind the scenes and that would be cool but stream yard is really nice they're like being able to see everybody we will we will figure it out we will tell you the links that you will need to go to we will tell you where it will be streamed to I mean hopefully it'll be streamed to every channel everywhere all at the same time that's the that's the goal yeah holly hollywood squares format totally mm dTNS with a twist haha Gaurav that's nice also I like it twist versus dTNS fate of the nerds Steven rain that is funny that's good yeah dTNS can bring in a few more guests I can bring in we can have up to 10 people on the show here if at any time we ever want to we can yes how is Sadie you said Sadie was sleeping is she there oh there she is she moved in yeah is she all good in the new house she's okay so we're um how are things going good very good it's the unpacking is kind of slow but luckily we're in covid so we have some time yeah but um it's not like you're gonna be having a dinner party cocktail party yeah no um but yeah she's just mostly getting used to all the new sounds and the new people and the new dogs she's just very like boofy out the window she's gonna bark at you there's noises you're gonna bark at my house all right I'm gonna go I'm gonna say tonight properly while I still can you just got here full reboot all over again that's a lot what's going on there find out what is corrupting your ports man yeah it might be power settings is something that I googled but it doesn't seem like I mean it went for like an hour and a half and then did it twice within 15 minutes so I don't know if it's really falling asleep ports it's just bad cheap computer cheap but I'm glad you were here I'm glad we were all here and we got to tell everybody about the twist dTNS battle of the brains thank you identity for and daily tech tonight show podcast episode bringing you all the science and the tech April 17th four p.m. Pacific tell the people then they had to tell us what to talk about yes and then we had to talk about the hashtags that we hadn't decided on and we were that was difficult but anyhow you know how to get in touch with us you know what you've taken hashtag hashtag yet yes yes but has anybody written um I hear tomorrow is uh women and girls in stem day oh that's fun we need it on the calendar I don't know why it's oh yeah introduce a girl to engineering day on the calendar yes we have that tomorrow is international day of women and girls in science so please everyone reach out and tell a a woman in science how awesome she is or uh if you know somebody who needs a mentor try and give them support you know in science let's uh let's make things go nicely it's also black history month so take keep an eye out for amazing black figures in science from from history who have against all odds helped us move our scientific understanding of the world forward it's for the rest of the month but next week we're talking about fungus February it's gonna be good but i'm looking forward to seeing you all next week because Justin what did you want to say say good night Blair good night Blair say good night Justin good night Justin good night kiki good night everyone thank you for joining us we really do look forward to seeing you again next week we hope that you enjoy a wonderful sciencey week stay healthy stay healthy