show for show for show podcast you're here for the podcast do you come for the podcast or did you come to watch me eating dinner up to now both every time like it's part of the show now right now identity for a new a new entry yeah or watch me blow my nose is the other thing that's awesome or apply it lipstick all right we are on the air everybody we're so punch-drunk we're hanging out in person I'm telling you you can get jet lag and not leave a time zone it's a thing once you're on a plane jet lag starts okay world let's do this podcast thing I see identity for in the chat room he's not not right here anymore he's up there in Seattle now 3 2 this is twist this week in science episode number 716 recorded on Wednesday April 10th 2019 seeing the whole thing hey everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your head with a black hole Philippine fossils and screwy sperm but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer caution it's that thing you use when crossing a busy intersection that instinct to look both ways the native navigator in your head that whispers warnings when the future seems uncertain ignore it for a moment because ahead there are certainties that no amount of caution can prevent ahead there is a journey and adventure and a mystery to be unveiled that no amount of hesitation can predict ahead there's only discovery discovery that will change everything you thought you knew about the future and the past discovery that will challenge who we think we are and what we thought we were capable of the sort of life-changing discovery that is never temporary and yet only possible in the present moment and caution free discovery is just the sort of thing we promised to provide here on this week in science coming up next I want to know what's happening what's happening what's happening this week in science what's happening what's happening what's happening what's happening this week in science Good! Hi! Kiki and Blair. Good science to you too Justin, Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in science oh you guys they're not in Portland anymore you're important but you're not in Portland yeah you're still lucky to still be there how did you how did you get that gig that's amazing Patreon patrons work work on it move us up there yeah that's right bring everyone to Portland it was sure fun last week we had a lot of fun in the theater what a great night but we're back again that was a blast yeah so good but this show we keep going so we're back again for another episode and I'm I'm really thankful that we are back because this week the news so much mind-blowing stuff so let's let's just jump right into it I have stories about what you know I'm gonna talk about that black hole that's just it I've also got some really interesting autism test results and if we get to it some Chinese monkey brains it's gonna be great Justin what'd you bring I have a small tiny story about an entirely new human that was discovered that's that's gonna be fun a perspective on how to be of the planet not just in it thanks to some recently deciphered Cherokee inscriptions and Blair for Blair you know why wanting to live longer maybe completely baddie Blair what is in the animal corner well I brought some screwy sperm as you mentioned before I brought some cricket dating advice and I brought the cat meow looks like for those of you who are watching right now if you're listening you can't see this but Blair has also brought a dog yes I am dog sitting hello to Bert this is Bert there's Bert hi Bert and he he requires constant attention so I relocated my laptop to the couch for the show I'm happy to oblige podcasting well pet sitting all this and more on this episode of twist okay jumping forward if you have not subscribed to twist yet why haven't you we're everywhere you can find good podcasts and we're on YouTube and Facebook you can find information at twist.org okay let's talk about the biggest news of this or possibly last century like this is huge yeah the finding by an international team of researchers who who took who took the earth and turned it into a telescope but they were able to image a black hole yeah if you what am I talking about I am talking about honestly one of the biggest physics achievements of this day and age Einstein predicted certain consequences of relativity that should hold up not just where we are in our part of the universe but also at the edges of black holes and with his theory of relativity this is kind of one of the final tests to be able to look at a black hole and see how light behaves around it however black holes are big and they're far away and our most of our telescopes were not up to the task of imaging a black hole we have pointed the Hubble telescope in the direction of galaxies that we think contain black holes in the past but just gotten the movement of stars around a dark area in the sky we have seen the movement of dust and gas the explosion of jets of material from central areas all these things inferring that there was a black hole in a particular place but since the telescopes haven't had quite the resolution to be able to actually look at a black hole what the researchers did is they they networked a bunch of telescopes over the surface of the earth and in networking all those telescopes they were able to use in ferometry to be able to create a more powerful virtual telescope and it increased the resolution power of all of the telescopes to be on the scale of the earth allowing us to look much more closely at a black hole now people might be thinking about other studies that we've talked about this this one going on we've even talked with researchers about this event horizon telescope that was being created and everyone said oh we're going to be looking at the black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy aren't we we're going to look at that and the researchers did look at that black hole Sagittarius a at the center of our own galaxy however our black hole is really dynamic and there's a lot of stuff going on there which has made it much more complex to tease out the view of the black hole itself at this point in time but they wanted to present what they had found and they also looked at a black hole called M87 in a distant galaxy about 60 I think it was 60 billion light years away really far away and it's massive it's an extremely massive black hole that is bigger than our solar system some 60 million suns worth of black hole it's huge so it was kind of and it's not too big and so they're able to look at it and look at the way the light traveled around the black hole and if you have not seen it yet I highly recommend looking at Veritasium's video describing how the light moves around black holes he does a great job describing it but really black holes and Justin you and I've talked about this before there they're not just a hole in space time it's you think of it like a sun or a star that's causing a spherical area of space to be affected now light if we were to shine a light from earth directly at that black hole it would not bounce back once it hit the event horizon the gravitational pull of the black hole would just suck that light right in there and there would be nothing on our cameras it'd be like where'd the light go there's nothing there that's where we're on the other side of not necessarily so if you shoot light around the edge of the event horizon it will be pulled around the back side of the black hole and then that light will return affected by the gravitational pull of that black hole and so what what they ended up seeing in this this inforometry when they're pointed their their telescopes this virtual telescope at this point in space is not the black hole itself but rather a ring of light from all these photons traveling around the black hole and coming back out the other side so that we can see them illuminating dust and gas and other things in the area nearby and so in any sense this is a momentous momentous achievement the researchers have said that they call what we see a shadow and it is a shadow in a in a sense in that there's a black area in the middle but when you look at the image of the black hole it is something of a reddish ring with a black disc in the center and that reddish ring is what the shadow is it's not the accretion disk it is actually a light shadow this shadow that is being scattered by the gravitational forces of the black hole and by looking at that light shadow we could determine the mass and the gravitational field in the exact event horizon for this particular black hole so amazing it is so amazing I people have we've talked before like have we ever seen a black hole in the we've seen stuff around black holes but we haven't seen a black hole until now now people will forever know what a black hole looks like and the next step is to continue studying this but also to continue with the algorithms and the data parsing for our view of Sagittarius a the black hole the center of our universe in if you've seen the movie interstellar if you could there's a vision of what a black hole would look like that was that that was advised on by physicists who work on black holes and they said if you're going to make the black hole this is what it needs to look like based on Einstein Einstein's theory of general relativity this is what lights going to do when it travels around it and if we could increase the resolution on this view of a black hole that we have it would look very similar to the image from the movie so this might be a silly question but what I'm really questions having trouble figuring out so what a camera would see and what our eyes would see if we were in front of it ourselves is that the same or is that different so what this with the camera this is what a camera this is what cameras these radio telescopes that are taking an electromagnetic information are there there are cameras and light information and that is what our eyes would see as well there would be a dark area surrounded by light that could be perceived and it's dark in the middle because it absorbs everything yes yeah and it may it may be somewhat in the in the you know there are probably going to be differences when and if we ever actually get close to one of these things but at this point in time the idea that we see this light and there's this dark area that we don't see if that dark area says everything that dark area is all the information and well and there's a little bit more information there too because there's a brighter side in this this photograph if you will of this black hole that we we know we're catching a bit on the edge of its of its rotation and so that brighter bit you see down below is is sort of telegraphing the angle at which the rotation of the black hole is in relationship to us if we were seeing it from a proper profile of that rotation you would expect that glow to be equal all the way around yes absolutely seeing it a bit on the edge there's a brighter side and a darker side and and and and I think really like this picture it looks like a cat eye kind of it does I mean some people are trying to say it's like you know the eye of Sauron yeah I think we've got other images that are closer to that in space but this is it is it's a it's a little it this is an eye into black holes and I into space it is something that will now define for everyone from this point forward what a black hole looks like that that picture might end up in a textbook it will end up and for all of those humans who are within earshot well he looked at a black hole at that point in the on in history and this the planet of science and everything else it's just so and my my favorite part of this also is not just that we looked at a black hole but that we turned our planet into a telescope to do it yeah that part that part is out of control oh clever humans and let's never fail to impress let's also I'm gonna let's go to who did the science as well and how the press conference was done proper credit was given to the scientists who did the work and one of the astronomers who created this image is a 29 year old assistant professor woman and I apologize because I did not have time before the show to put in my notes and image to share on this video podcast or time to put the exact her exact name and where she's from and what she did but she devised three years ago devised the algorithm to link these these this data together to be able to create this image yeah and there's also some great work out there the Chandra X-ray observatory also observed this black hole at a similar time that the event horizon telescope was looking and so they've got some really neat factors of scale imagery that are out there so this is this is going to fill our imaginations and our conversations for some time to come that's awesome it's amazing we saw a black hole humanity you rock let's all put together good job humans cosmic perspective we can do something that's just awesome and awe-inspiring yeah to see these things I want to see more now let's get more moving on from that though let's talk about autism so Justin I believe you brought a story couple of years ago about some researchers who attempted fecal transplants on children with autism yes yes well the results of that study are out yes and they're and they're and they're amazing yes this study published in scientific reports called long-term benefit of microbiota transfer therapy and autism symptoms and gut microbiota these are from Arizona State University researchers and they effectively demonstrated that the results that they talked about two years ago which were short-term results and they said well we did a fecal plant transplant we saw that there was a different we saw there was a difference in the gut microbiota of autistic children versus children without autism and as many stories end when we tell about this stuff more research is needed yes and thankfully in this case more research was done was done they kept the study going and in this so that the children had less microbial diversity in their guts than children without autism and there were fewer benevolent or good bacteria also then then there were not so good bacteria and so they did the fecal transplant two years ago and saw hey it changed their gut microbiota and some of the parents said it looks like their behaviors are changing and some of their symptoms are less two years later all of the family and this is a long-term study all of the families reported in all of the families kept going nobody dropped out of the study which is almost is unheard of for long-term studies they found a 45% reduction in core autism spectrum disorder symptoms language social interaction and behavior at two years post treatment compared to before treatment so they they were getting better not just that they improved right after but over the last two years the children got even better their symptoms were lessened even more and the gut microbial change that they saw was fairly well maintained just the fact how how much your gut is connected to everything else in your body is just every day every week I feel like we're learning more and more where the when you go in for your annual checkup the first thing is going to be to check out your microbiome and to go from there because it is all related and this is a huge huge thing that if you can if you can make things a little bit easier just by adjusting your your gut bacteria right and this is the reason that they they went into this idea was also that not just that micro microbes are more and more implicated in that but also that autistic children very often have gut problems that there are digestive system issues in general leaky gut and other things and this is where a lot of links between dietary changes and other efforts have have played in to autism treatments. So there's another link that's sort of outside of this study that I find interesting as well which is that the other end of what is typically found in the autistic spectrum is parents or other the other it's same genes but other aspect of it is people who can handle large volumes of information very efficiently so you there has been there's been correlation between autistic children and parents who are doctors or involved in information technology and this sort of a thing right so that the the fact that none of the parents dropped out of reporting on the study probably is correlated to the fact that whatever their professions are allows them to maintain a financial stability to keep participating in the study because massive life changes don't prevent them from being able to keep being involved. So so there I don't know if you didn't follow it. So there's a there tends to be a wealth associated with information handling. Oh sure. Yeah and and that allows what might be correlated to being able to continue to participate in report to a study as a thing you do along with everything else that life throws at you. It's it's it's outside of the study but I think that's an interesting side thing to this is that we don't know that for sure. No we don't know that for sure you don't know you don't know. Yeah. No no but we do know for sure that like for instance Palo Alto at the height of the information age was also a hotspot for autism. We know that it seems to run in families of doctors and people involved in IT and people who have been in that industry. It has a connection to information handling upon that spectrum that's very fascinating. So so it's a study within a study that hasn't been done and I'm correlating but speculating. That's where we go. Yeah. What we do. But with the but with the study itself the exciting aspect here is that not just there was a 45% decrease in symptoms compared to baseline at the start of the study 83% of participants were rated as severe autism autism. At the end of the study only 70 17% were severe. Wow. That is transformational. 39% were mild moderate and 44% were below the cutoff. That is amazing. Okay. So now we have to also ask there's a follow up to this. This is a small study. Yeah. Right. This is promising. Who was the vehicles? Who was the vehicle source? Like who is that? What was the vehicle source that we all should be vehicle transplanting that had that transfer? Well, but see it's dependent on who you are. Is the... No, but it's... This is the thing too. It's just like it's at the very... This is what the cutting edge of science looks like. We have a result. We don't understand it. Yeah. We don't really know. It's good. There's something good there. We got an amazing result. We have no idea why. We have a lot of discovery ahead. This is what cutting edge looks like. You have beginning and you have end and you like what you have. You have to figure out what's going on in the middle that's making that happen. Yeah. They're going to be looking at trying to get a larger sample size, get more individuals involved. There were particular interventions that helped to transform this MTT. They call it as a therapeutic for autism spectrum. In terms of where they're going next, they do know that they have given particular dosing and timeframe for the treatment to the patients already. They're going to keep working on dosing and duration to see if they can get even better benefits for different people that maybe some individuals need booster treatments where others didn't. I have a question. I don't know if you have information in front of you about dosing and duration. Do you have that or not? My curiosity is about how well the microbiome transformed. Did it self sustain or did they require continual dosing, if you will? It wasn't continual. They pre-treated individuals with vancomycin, which is an antibiotic to kill. They did a bowel cleanse, a stomach acid suppressant, and then the fecal microbiota transfer daily for seven to eight weeks. This was 10 weeks of treatment total. That's it. It's hard stop. Two years later, we're still seeing wow. Yeah. That's amazing. I guess we don't know yet if the microbiome is directly related to autism or if being on the autism spectrum makes you extra susceptible to irritation from gut issues. Right. We don't know causality. This does not indicate causality in any way. What it indicates is that it is a potential for treatment, and that is all that it indicates. Right. As we said, we still need more study, but this is very promising. Very neat. Yeah. Either way. Very good to know. Very good. I'm going to correct myself and answer the question. The woman I was trying to talk about in the previous story about the black hole, Katie Bowman from the California Institute of Technology. She's an assistant professor in the CMS department. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the Event Horizon Telescope at an MIT grad. And it was like, actually, we don't need this telescope, but we need an algorithm. I got it. I got this. Nice. We had some great science being done. This is this week in science. Justin, what did you bring? Oh, yeah. So from one mind-blowing set of stories to another, the braided stream is a term that we've used a few times, mentioned a bit on the show, as an analogy for human evolution. But before I get into that, here's the dictionary.com definition. Just so we can, because I don't think we've done this, what we meet, what is meant by braided stream? It's the actual thing. So braided stream, a stream consisting of multiple small shallow channels that divide and recombine numerous times, transforming a pattern resembling the strands of a braid. Braided streams form where the sediment load is so heavy that some of the sediments are deposited as shifting islands or bars between the channels. So following the analogy downstream a little bit, we can sort of picture humanity throughout the ages as the waters that are going and braiding and as these little island sandbars that appear within these braids as specific species of humans that existed at certain times or places depending on how the gene flow of the streams merged and moved on. Hopefully that provided a picture of what braided stream means in terms of evolution. And while in most contexts we speak of humans as being the humans, the current humans, us as we like to refer to ourselves, we know that there were many more experiments in humanity than just us and that many of these were actually living on the planet at the same time. We've got to sort of run it down a short list, Neanderthals, Denisovans, some of whom we just learned that really might not even be Denisovans but might need to get renamed something else, Homo Floriansis, that's the little ones, those cave dwelling hominids. Homo erectus was even around concurrent with a lot of this, not to mention red deer cave people who are still trying to figure out what, where, how they fit in and we need to find some more about that mystery there. And of course us, right? That's about eight hominids depending on how you count it on the planet at the same time. And now, something else has been added to the mix. Ooh, a new player on the field, eh? Human Nine. That's like Planet Nine. International team of researchers uncovered remains of new species of human indy-philippines, just not far from Indonesia where Homo Floriansis was shown. The new species which I am reading and have not heard pronounced yet because I can't be getting this wrong. Homo Luzoensis, named after Luzon Island, they found a 50,000 year old fossil which consists of not a whole lot yet. They've got some, an adult finger toe bones, they've got teeth, a child's femur. So they have, they have elements of this hominin that are distinct to be a new hominin. So part of the problem is they can't quite tell, like this is a Professor Piper of the Australian National University says the findings are representing major breakthrough which is obvious now in our understanding of human evolution. But he also goes on to say this size of the teeth generally, they're not always reflect overall body size of a mammal. So we think Homo Luzonensis is probably relatively small. Exactly how small we don't know yet. We would need to find some skeletal elements from which we could measure body size more precisely. So really an awesome discovery. This is, so the extremities, hands, feet are remarkably Australopithecine, like that's a really ancient human. It's like a 2 million year ago human to be finding like elements of in the Philippines 50,000 years ago. Also intriguing is the Callow Cave where they found this near there they had previously found rhinoceros rendering, rhinoceros that had been chopped up with stone tools. That discovery was dated at about 700,000 years ago. So this isn't just we have just found the physical evidence of a recent which also coincides pretty decently with the time when we know the current modern humans were traveling to this region. But we now have and in time frame that we also have for Homo Floriansis, the Hobbit people we have some evidence of them 700,000 years ago. There looks like there was stone tool use 700,000 years ago butchering rhinoceros in the Philippines, which is also just by itself interesting that there were rhinoceros in the Philippines. Even if you forget the rest of the story that by itself is significant in its so yeah, so new humans. This is also fascinating. We talk about like you said the braided stream all the time but quite often but it's still shocking that there could have been even more diversity like oh wait so what's going on now there's only one only one. But is it because part of why we're only one is we think because we're all of them because we think we're all of them well and we found we've learned sense. This is the adding to the story is that we find that a lot of humans have Neanderthals and we find that a lot of Neanderthals have and some humans have some and then there's some combo overlap there so it's well most humans are current human, Neanderthal and Denisovan and until we actually get code from Homo Nalati, Homo Floriances and this new one we don't know what part we are of them because we couldn't directly see what that contribution was so the more we discover these ancient other humans in 700,000 years Neanderthal was a significant enough of a discovery to find that there was a 400,000 year cousin that we intermingled with again. This is twice almost the age of Neanderthal in difference and persisted and co-existed with the current modern human. Yeah but part of it is that it was an island and so there's this huge overturning of thought about humans evolving on islands and very similar to Homo Floriances is that this Homo Luzonensis is shorter in stature very smaller, more diminutive and that this smaller size could be that kind of not dwarfism necessarily but this evolution on island evolution based on limited resources or limited range Certainly and Homo Floriances was very much connected to as a potential dwarfism of Homo erectus this is going back further and saying a 2 million year old hominin might have made it to the Philippines and encountered island dwarfism over that span of time over that span of time and they were larger got stuck on a log ended up on an island and then shrank and then may have concurrently co-existed with our vision of current modern humans and because we don't yet have because this is a recent discovery we just found that we don't yet know whether or not that fed back into the current chain flow like this is so many amazing stories within this one discovery Blair you say it probably did but if it was an isolated island population species then it did not necessarily not to maybe the largest of groups but you also have the older evolutionary group potentially would have but not that more recent Luzonensis so yeah I guess my question is when were modern humans first found in the Philippines approximately probably in that range of about 50,000 years ago is when we started hitting those regions so that's why this is interesting because forget everything else about the story but just know that there's two hominins on an island nowhere else to go nobody else to dance with and try to tell me that something didn't have great so maybe you know some people might need some updates to their 23andMe profile pretty soon we're gonna start no this is true we're going to start adding a lot to the 23andMe that people might not have suspected could have possibly been there amazing and also that the Guinness Book of World Records small esteem is either from the Philippines or Indonesia it's somewhere in that region I'm just saying that's interesting I'm not saying it's connected but it's probably gonna I'm not saying it's gonna be it's speculation you know what I think it's time for right now what's it time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair what you got Blair oh my goodness this is like a return to the Blair's Animal Corner of old I have a story about mating and I have a story about sperm so so the first story all about sperm brings a new meaning to the term of getting a new meaning a new meaning a new meaning a new meaning to the term of getting screwed that is because this is all about bird sperm shaped like a screw this is from Ph.B. student in University of Oslo Ph.D. Hanna Nyborg Steustad I got a little lesson nicely done thank you very much in how to pronounce that O in the middle she wanted to look at the peculiar spiral shape of songbird sperm she looked at 36 bird species from house sparrows to tree swallows looking at sperm shapes in particular quite a few of them had spiral or corkscrew shape sperm and they also happened to have a very high average swimming speed those species also tended to have abnormal or damaged sperm so the first part of this study was published in the journal evolution in July 2018 that was looking at the speed of screw shaped sperm but what just was published this week was the adjoining article looking at the association between sperm shape and sperm damage so looking at these two studies together it looks like there is a tradeoff between swimming speed and robustness of sperm this tradeoff could help biologists to understand why there are so many sperm shapes there are thousands of shapes of sperm in the animal kingdom why they really just have one job and they've had it forever so why would there be this vast difference wouldn't you expect that over evolutionary time there would be a sperm that came about that was so good at its job that's just how sperm was streamlining absolutely so back in the class because I have a question so I don't know a whole lot of fun animal facts but and you correct me if I'm wrong but it ducks this has nothing to do with their appendage that's like the obvious question because it has nothing to do with the noodley appendage this has more to do the intermediary organ is not involved with this is that just totally random so there's an answer to that in this story just so the reason that the sperm is corkscrew shaped it would appear they figured this out by collaborating with mathematicians which I love like hey call it the math department and go you want to help me figure out the sperm thing so they took physical factors such as drag viscosity and size and modeled all these different types of sperm shapes and they found that the screw shaped sperm cells moved forward when they spin so it's as if they are drilling into female fluid so the fluid that the sperm has to move through to reach the egg is viscous enough and thick enough and sperm is so tiny that they actually really struggle to move through this heavy fluid so they are they are screwing through this thicker fluid through the female canal to get to the egg so in this case that is why that's happening with the ducks that you were asking about before the female organ is also shaped like the male's intermediary organ so that is just a shape matching system so that's totally different this looks like it's a fluid dynamics question the fact that it was in birds so is it just ducks that have that morphology that's a great question that I don't have the answer to they are the most famous for that but we can dive into that question in the after show perhaps but in this case with the sperm they are drilling through this liquid to get to the egg faster but where this gets interesting is that the screw shaped sperm is in fact more prone to abnormality and damage this study was not able to figure out why the best guess so far is that it's somehow related to oxidative damage because sperm cells in particular are very prone to oxidative damage which leads to abnormalities that have been observed in previous studies but there is no there's no known reason that a shape would affect risk of oxidative damage yet so that's where the more research comes in but we do know for sure now is that in the in these animals that they were looking at in these birds the spiral shape the screw shaped sperm is faster but more susceptible to damage which is why you end up with this huge kind of rainbow of types of sperm in the animal kingdom because you are trying to it looks like this is a real pro con it's a race for the winner right so is it better to have more sperm that is more fast or more durable do you want a select number of really good sperm or do you want lots of sperm yeah and this goes back to the study from a few weeks ago about the sperm that was didn't you have a study on an old sperm not the ram sperm that was reinvigorated that was frozen for 50 years that was a cool story but there was another story that discovered that there was a difference between really old sperm and younger sperm in their viability yes the dad was older yeah the specimen creating the sperm as he got older the sperm was not as good quality yeah so there's all these questions of cost benefit and weighing pros and cons what is it that you need for this particular strategy there was another study that I will just mention in passing this week about the testy size versus ornamental elements in primates and that there was a direct trade off there do you need more do you need larger testies because there is sperm competition happening or do you need ornamentation because there is direct competition for mate access happening right so in in the animal kingdom I mean you have this set resource amount you have the set energy amount you have these these set kind of parameters of what you have to work with and where you allocate those resources can be very different for different species because there are different challenges for different species and it all comes down to those costs and the benefits and how does the balance play out right and are you going to use those resources speaking of balance and resources this leads in perfectly to my next story which is all about the cricket dating scene so this is from University of Exeter I love this study because it was a study looking at nine years of demographic and behavioral data from wild populations of the annual field cricket gylous campestris I don't know if it's a hard G or a soft G but the field cricket in nine years of this data they were looking at these animals in the wild and they wanted to look at the ratios of males to females in a given season mating season next to the rate of aging of the males so even though crickets don't live very long they only live a few weeks they still experience physical decline as that time passes so the question is do you age faster or slower when there are more females around now there's a leading theory about this across the animal kingdom are they are they particularly like nagging or like this are they particularly friendly to be around like are they chill chicks are they like anyway the leading theory for why animals fall apart as we get old is that we use up our energy on reproduction instead of bodily maintenance so is this use it or lose it scenario the main life here is to procreate so knowing that you're going to use up all of your energy as time wears thin trying to procreate as much as you can so that's kind of the main theory if that theory was right you would expect that when males have to compete more for females they should age faster therefore if there's more females would they age faster or slower they would age slower because they would have less competition there would be more females to pick from they wouldn't have to compete so so savagely for a group of females right so the population of critics in this crickets in the Spanish meadow they studied this where years varied in the number of males and females in the ratio they found that battling with rivals is more of a drain on males than mating with more females so their mating success increased when they had more females and it looks like their competition decreased so deterioration with age was measured by how much the males chirped which was the direct measure of how a cricket is doing because they do that to attract females and warn off rivals so if they're chirping that means they're still feeling good enough to mate which means they're less fragile and they feel chirpy right they're feeling chirpy in years with equal numbers of males males experienced rapid decline in chirping but when females outnumbered males there was no decline at all man if you want to live longer surround yourself by a bunch of women no actually it's cut down on competition is what that's really about so if you want to totally extrapolate this to the human condition which I would not suggest because it's crickets I would say that it would be the stress of competition so you have to find a way to reduce yourself to reduce the stress in your life that's what this is about ultimately and if you're a cricket the number one stressor is trying to get that mate in the three weeks that you live so my extrapolation here that's three weeks that's it that's all a cricket gets that's it big bang boom short life as in most animal stress conversations that we have stress is really really powerful and this is just another source of stress in the animal kingdom you know how I am looking forward to getting rid of some of my stress how? continuing on with the show we are done with the first half the second half is coming with many more stories we've got Chinese monkey brains the second half I know Justin's got some more stories Blair as well more stories coming back after these messages patience are the 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we are back and now it is time for that segment of the show that we call this week in what has science done for me lately what has it done what has it done we ask you and here is our letter for this week Shane writes in to say my wife often tells me to shorten my time in the shower but I enjoy a nice shower her theory is that we shouldn't waste energy but my supposition is that if I'm enjoying it maybe it's not a waste it's hard to know what to feel without data though a friend of mine told me that I should just look at my gas meter and see how much gas I was using for the hot water I did that but knowing how many cubic meters of natural gas I burned didn't give me any intuition about if it was a lot or not apologies for the metric measurements you don't have to apologize Shane this is a science program it's certainly easier for calculations I also live in the Netherlands where we use a civilized measurement system instead of a camel force per cubic or however you measure natural gas in the USA these days that quick search was not super helpful but I did find out that natural gas is mostly methane and has a mass about 0.7 to 0.9 kilograms per cubic meter I realized that I remembered enough high school chemistry to figure out that methane CH4 has a mass of about 16 and carbon dioxide CO2 about 44 so I could do some simple multiplication and figure out how many kilograms of carbon dioxide I was emitting per shower a little more math it turns out that when I shower daily it emits about 210 kilograms of carbon dioxide in a year putting that into perspective that's about the same as burning 105 liters of gasoline or as Justin would say about 105,000 milliliters of gasoline something like 28 gallons for Americans anyway, thanks to science I can now shower it guilt free without care for my carbon footprint well, if not exactly guilt free at least with an amount of guilt put into the proper perspective and that's what science has done for me lately you can also just circumvent this entire issue put a solar panel on your roof and use solar power for your shower so yes you can even reduce even more guilt and put a gray water system in your house so that you're using your shower water for other things then you're really not hurting anybody by taking a long shower look at all these productive responses see, there are solutions to everything perspective is very important but gaining additional perspectives is good as well I mean, but I think a lot of us many people I don't know exactly, but I think many people don't consider how much energy it takes to heat their hot water to take a shower so if you take a five minute shower versus a 30 minute shower not only how much water are you using but how much energy are you using during that the difference in those two showers and it can add up over time depending on how much you like those long hot showers absolutely but I like the solar idea you don't even necessarily need a solar panel it just could be a system that uses solar energy to thermally heat the water I have a solar shower for camping that uses that but I think also it's a good reminder that in the scientific community we're starting to recognize that these tiny things it's better than nothing but it's not enough to turn the tide on big, big problems it's those larger things that we have to tackle that actually is going to make a difference, right? And that's exactly what social science has done for me personally in my conservation education realm is recognizing that I'm not the bad guy for talking about climate change and also driving a car that's just a recognition that there's a system that's failing there and we need to work on the system it's not me as an individual that's messing up so you can like your shower you can like your car but maybe we should get rid of the gas-based energy system maybe we should use our cars and for other energy you can have an electric you can have an electric water heater but where does that electricity come from? Can it be solar, water, wind a reusable renewable resource? Yeah, there's a really great graphic about it. Let's blame it on the system telling people telling people to be environmentalists by swimming upstream is not going to get everybody on board you need to change the direction of the stream so everyone can move with the water together in the right direction. That was very deep. Yeah, only if you're in the middle of the stream. Anyhow true true if you would like to send in your own what has science done for me lately response send me an email kirsten at thisweekandscience.com or send me a message on our facebook page facebook.com slash thisweekandscience there we are there Justin what story are you going to talk about now? So this is researchers who have recently interpreted Cherokee inscriptions in Manitow Cave in Alabama these are inscriptions that took place during the Trail of Tears so this was a massive time of crisis for the Cherokees who were being displaced from lands that they had occupied for millennia Quoty voice of Jan Simick President Emeritus of the University of Tennessee system Distinguished Professor of Sciences Department of Anthropology these are the first Cherokee inscriptions ever found in a cave context in the first from a cave to be translated Talking Stones Cherokee Selibian Manitow Cave Alabama they tell us about what the people who wrote on the walls were doing in the cave and provide direct link to how some Native Americans viewed caves as sacred places so part of it is a description of what is referred to as a ceremonial event what we would in modern terms put into context of sports they had a game that they played that was very much like La Crosse with the stick and like a puckball kind of a thing and it's sort of interesting one of the transcriptions kind of speaks to the level of sport that took place in 1828 we who are those that have blood come out of their nose and mouth so this is not not this was a game of fierce competition but there's another aspect of this there's a Selian inscription written into the stone that is written backwards and this is Simic again part of the inscription which reads I am your grandson written backwards into the stone and the take away from this is that the Cherokee who inscribed this talking to the earth as if it was a predecessor and writing it backwards so that it could be legible from within the earth I found nice to be just an incredibly powerful perspective on how they viewed their place being of the earth and not simply in it or on it but writing it so that the earth could read it from its perspective anyway an incredible find this was also to get to the point of a transcription there were scholars from the eastern band of Cherokee Indians in the united Ketua band of Cherokees and the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma who contributed to being able to give a proper transcription to these cave writings which is not a typical Native American thing too it was in a time of sort of being uprooted from that ancestral land and there is also another aspect of it is writing something in stone is also sort of seeking a bit of permanence that this message will be you know immortalized while everything else is in flux, transition and chaos so couple of really yeah a couple of really important lessons wrapped up in this otherwise simple language translation that was discovered what an important find but just bringing bringing also snapshots of those that historical time that giving us insight into the real people that were there that's something incredible thinking about memories this doesn't have to do with memories from the earth this is memories in our brains as we all know as we get older memories starts to falter somewhat well today not today actually April 8th sorry about that April 8th in nature neuroscience researchers published a study in which they used transcranial stimulation with electrical current on older brains and they got those brains to improve their working memory to the age of say 20 year olds so this study looked at 42 people aged 20 to 29 years old and 42 people aged 60 to 76 they compared working memory tasks in the different age groups and found that older individuals were slower and less accurate at remembering things based on that working memory recall they also didn't identify little differences between pictograms little pictures when you look at those two pictures what things are the same older people had a harder time finding those differences they also found looking at brain activity that the older group had less synchronization of the frontal and temporal cortices and we've talked about on the show previously that there's this emerging hypothesis that there needs to be electrical synchronization that the frequency of firing of the neurons in these different areas of the brain has to be synchronized for them to work together and for them to act well together in this memory formation type of way or memory or recall they used what is called tax which is transcranial alternating current stimulation for 25 minutes on all the individuals they found that nothing really changed in the 20 year olds that stimulating the brains of the 20 year olds it didn't have an effect on synchronization it didn't have an effect on their working memory they were still just 20 year olds however the group that was 60 to 76 years old they synchronization between their frontal and temporal cortices improved and along with that improvement there were also benefits improvements to the working memory tasks and also the finding differences in the pictures task which is something I want to be able to do when I get older so sign me up so this is like getting your wheels aligned in your car it's just like recalibrating but can you feel it when they do this? yeah but not bad it's like slight electrical stimulation it's electrical stimulation it's probably a little tingly but 25 minutes feels like a long time but I mean you do other things sometimes 25 minutes I mean what if you are able to do the stimulation while you sat and read a book or watch television or did some other task and it was just like oh time to put my thinking cap on and you just did that the researchers are interested in the idea that this kind of treatment could help to reduce some of the limitations of aging but also they're really interested in how it could improve aspects of age related dementia and something that we have also talked about on the show before related to frequency of firing is an Alzheimer's treatment that uses light at a particular a strobe light at a particular frequency that seems to improve cognitive function in Alzheimer's patients in this study with the tax stimulation that it helped for a while and the effect lasted for almost an hour but then disappeared and so it wasn't a lasting effect it helped the older brains act younger for a short period of time but then they couldn't hold on to that synchronization that something has already happened that the neurons are like I don't want to talk to you anymore I know what you're gonna say I've heard it all before but if you did it for an hour would it last longer right but what I'm wondering also is we don't really know how the that light stimulation is improving Alzheimer's patients with which also does not seem to be an effect that lasts it's something that when they treat with the strobe light there seems to be an improvement in Alzheimer's symptoms for a short period of time but then it that dissipates as well so maybe what's going on is the light is in training neuronal firing that allows synchronization which is alleviating some of these symptoms in Alzheimer's and this is direct electrical activation going bam you guys talk to each other so maybe one is direct and one is indirect in a sense I don't know but this is some I'm wondering if this is something that could be linked some interesting result the issue with this one is that 25 minutes for an hour of benefit that's not a very good cost benefit right sitting around for 25 minutes for an hour so you know ending on how good that hour is it might work so here I'm imagining I'm you know going on 80 and I know I have to hang out with a bunch of 20 year olds right you're like having lunch or something yeah I'm going to prep I'm going to stimulate my brain but then you're like Cinderella at midnight as soon as your hour is up I'm going to get away now I'm going to get slow you're like what's your name again uh oh I got to go yeah I mean this doesn't get at what will keep brains from losing that synchronous activity in the first place and then is there diminishing like if you do this over and over again is it less and less effective over time or more because otherwise just put it in a hat I'm worried all the time a big flowery bonnet yeah or a fedora I love it I love it better if every every old person is wearing a flowery bonnet you're like oh I just thought it looked nice but how's your husband Gerald and your daughter Christine and your dog like you got it all right exactly it's just names and you just don't stop listing names of people who are associated with that person it just becomes a relevant conversation so but this is important if we are going to figure out a way to live longer yeah I mean if we want to live longer we want to live longer better we don't want to start our cognitive decline at 60 to 70 to 80 years old because of this asynchronous activity and then live to be 200 that's not going to work out very well yeah so this is the kind of thing that you would want to stop but the whole thing the whole idea of living longer is completely bad to begin with not so much yeah no it is absolutely according to the University of Maryland researchers who analyzed the evolutionary tree of bats and found that a majority of bat species they looked at the DNA of majority of bat species and found four lineages that exhibit extreme longevity now this is extreme longevity in terms of bats so there's this correlation apparently between mammals their size and their longevity we humans are pretty large mammals and we have a lot of other things going for us that allow us to get to 70 80 90 year lifespans elephants 70 years is completely achievable orcas can be healthy happy 50 60 years old there's a lot of large mammals that exhibit longevity if you happen to be see a field mouse your longevity is in the neighborhood of three years and with a reasonable graph of size to longevity we find correlation pretty solid however this is a this is according to Gerald Wilkinson a biology professor at University of Maryland the author of this paper that was published today however if we lived as long as bats adjusted for size human lifespans would be 240 years yes so why did these animals live so long why are they beating this system they looked the DNA tried to figure this out so the work described in the research paper concluded that horseshoe bats long-eared bats common vampire bats and at least one other lineage of mouse-eared bats lived four times longer than other similarly sized mammals they also found that high latitude home range and larger males than females could also be used to give a sort of predictive correlation to lifespan so this is quotey voice of Wilkinson scientists are very interested in finding closely related species in which one is long-lived and one is short-lived because it implies that there has been some recent change to allow one species to live longer this study provides multiple cases of closely related species with varying longevity which gives us many opportunities to make comparisons look for underlying mechanism that would allow species to live longer so they have what you could essentially say is the similar code of genetics within these species and you have these outliers of longevity and then you can sort of look and compare between these and see is there is there a segment of code is there a segment of genetic change between these and that's a very easy thing at least to narrow down to pretty darn quickly so this is this is a fascinating fascinating specimen of subject to study within these bats so researchers found that hibernating bat species located more extreme latitudes live longer than those closer to the equator Wilkinson said the researchers can't say for sure how latitude is actually impacting longevity mechanism is missing but their study suggests it may have to do with how these with these bats ability to lower their temperature yeah so makes sense is the hibernation thing when you lower your body temperature you lower your metabolism that and you also lower your ability to have stress because you're like hey I'm sleeping and we know that hibernation is an excellent opportunity to heal and that animals actually can lengthen their telomeres during hibernation which would make perfect sense there yeah and one of the bats which is sort of the outliers the vampire bat which which they're saying here at least the vampire bat is very unusual for a mammal in that it can let its body temperature rise fall dramatically throughout the day so it's almost as if the vampire bat is basically a reptile right but yeah kind of but it's also like it I don't know I saw it as like it can go through a mini hibernation state in a sense on a daily like I'm not going to spend three months doing this part of the day I'm going to go into this state and I'm going to spring back and like like activate it noon hibernate at night yeah and because not all adaptations extend lifespans some actually shorten them being able to have this wide range within bats should help us narrow down those elements those mechanisms that are actually important for longevity interesting and if we figure it out we may be hibernating to live longer lives let's go over 200 years sleep all the time I like it yeah but then like why are you staying alive and again though going back and forth it's torpor is that am I saying it right yeah so it's not necessarily hibernation is a really hard thing to achieve torpor is this sort of state somewhere in between like just having a good night's sleep maybe it's not quite having a good night's sleep but it's adjusting your metabolic rate for sure yeah and if there were some way for humans to take on the traits of other animals you know far be it from researchers to give other animals the traits of humans uh oh well here come the Chinese again with a with a very provocative study out of uh out of Kunming Institute of zoology and the researcher who led the effort being Sue a geneticist has taken human genes for brain development and transgenically inserted them into macaque monkeys this human gene is suspected to play a role in human intelligence now uh Dr. Sue the geneticist who led this study is known for looking into the genetics of evolutionary traits and so the basis of this question is at some point humans brains started growing and we got smarter what happened what genes did we get how did we change from the ancestors to who we are now what genes led the change and so what better thing to do than take some human brain genes and put them in macaque monkeys so my prediction is this study fails to produce a more intelligent macaque and let me tell you what the results of the study are can i throw out my why i think why i think that and it's because one of the theories at least on how humans became more intelligent was the fact that we ran bipedally everywhere right it's that whole forcing more of blood mechanical pump of one idea no no it is you can just you can at the end of this if this is not how the study comes out because i haven't seen this and over time that little mechanical pump pushed blood up to the brain and also the channels the blood the veins and the channels through which the base of the skull blood was allowed to flow to the brain increase so my prediction would be regardless of the genes that you change if you haven't gone through the hard work of evolving higher blood flow to the brain you shouldn't see a realizable effect right so is it going to turn a monkey into a human no but this is why they also didn't choose to do this study in higher primates they chose to do the study in a more distantly related animal the monkey which is still fairly closely related but distantly enough that they didn't think it would make a difference anyhow the research generated 11 monkeys and 5 of them survived they gave brain measurements and discovered that each of the monkeys have between 2 and 9 copies of this human gene in their in their brains and the and the monkeys had increased rate of brain development as they as they developed and leading to larger brains than monkeys that did not have the gene inserted and also slightly higher scores on behavioral tests of intelligence so it did work however they have bigger skulls and increased blood flow like I'm quite not quite right so it's still a small sample size this is 5 out of 11 which isn't even 50% we have monkeys performing a little better on test behavioral tests and not even having a few copies of the gene but not necessarily having everything they would need and is when you talk about transgenic insertions is that gene throughout the brain or is it in all the DNA or is it in just little bits and pieces the researcher says that for sure the number of animals is a limitation but they're not there's a solution more monkeys and they're testing other brain evolution genes he's looking at another gene called surgap2c which is a DNA variant arising 2 million years ago just when astralopithecus was leaving the scene and making way for early humans and this particular gene or moving the Philippines and the gene has been called the humanity switch and the missing genetic link for its role in the emergence of human intelligence early on however just because it's been found in fossils and modern humans fossil DNA and modernized humans but we don't know what the results are going to be however researchers researchers also looked at the monkeys that they had inside MRI machines and they found that the transmantgenic monkeys actually didn't have their brains developed faster than other monkeys but they didn't actually have larger brains so there was no overcrowding of the skull until you increase the skull size and the blood flow having a big brain will not help actually it would be like a constant concussion it would be like a terrible situation which is why they did do better on a short term memory quiz which is why I was very like I was going to say I'm utterly skeptical of the result but the idea that the development portion of it could increase that the pace of development could increase with this gene influx that's much more believable to me than there could be an overall increase in intelligence based on the gene without a complete infrastructure behind it so I'm less skeptical of their result based on that so it's interesting however there were many collaborators from around the world and this study was first published in national science review in a Beijing journal reported by Chinese media and now western scientists including one collaborator have stepped back from it and are calling the experiment reckless and question its ethics and whether or not we should be genetically modifying primates at all the question now though is the cat out of the bag or are researchers just upset that China has taken the lead in this area of research where they are not as limited as other countries in the steps that they take in genetic experimentation so I guess with some of these kind of like gray area studies usually I feel like there's a very clear reason or goal and for this one I understand they're trying to find this missing link right of intelligence but in terms of what you would do with that information that's the part that I'm missing oh no no to what end massive implications for for assisting humans in their own developmentally disabled humans perhaps so this is something that you might recognize if you identify it may be missing in certain humans you could create have all sorts of therapeutic people and everything else so it's a fascinating thing but I like your take on it my walk back of why people are walking back it might be more along the lines of I was really interested in this study so I participated in it and then I found out I might have repercussions at home in terms of being able to get grants so I need to walk it back just so I can stay within the safety of the legal construct to do with the research that's more what I kind of heard from the necessity of walking back I study you were initially for got a result from and then realized oh we published I didn't think I thought we were just doing research I didn't think we were publishing didn't know anyone was going to hear about it I don't want it on my my google scholar whatever yeah it's probably more along those lines yeah it'll be interesting to see especially yeah it'll be interesting to see where the research goes and whether they keep it in the monkeys or whether they advance this kind of research to primates and will this turn into a David Grinn uplift type scenario if any of you have ever read those science fiction novels I highly recommend them for addressing this kind of question of lifting other species up with genetic tools it's time for us to get to our quick stories at the end of the show I've got two metal asteroids I mean it may sound heavy metal now when you think of asteroids you know these iron asteroids meteors that crash down you get these iron ingots are heavy and they're amazing well you know they might also have volcanoes researchers have come up with an idea yes the researchers at UC Santa Cruz have come up with an idea that these metal asteroids may have cooled some of them may have cooled from the outside in leaving a hot molten interior that would cause volcanism and so some metal asteroids may have volcanic activity depending on how they cooled and we have a mission heading out to an asteroid named Psyche that should be a metal asteroid and we can get it out so this is going to be a potential test of that hypothesis pretty soon and then additionally another study found that what you eat might impact the effectiveness of medications that you take vaccines there is a common food additive called tert-butyl hydroquinone TBHQ that's fairly common it's used in frozen meat products cooking oils some fish fillets processed foods like crackers chips and fried snacks but not everybody puts the ingredient on their ingredient list so you don't exactly know what it's in but researchers with a couple of separate experiments had unvaccinated mice eating TBHQ in their food those that were unvaccinated were eating this stuff had more flu virus RNA in their guts than those oh sorry in their lungs than in mice that didn't eat it the TBHQ eaters also had more inflammation and increased mucus production deeper in their lungs than usual so we don't know how this additive for food may hamper your ability to fight the flu but this would be something that leads to differences in how flu vaccines or even just people are able to fight it off naturally just affect your immune system they think it increases an immune system protein called nerf 2 and that when that gets activated it turns down the volume on virus fighting immune cells in the body so you are what you eat eat for health maybe less TBHQ we'll see Blair tell me about the cats meow oh my goodness so you're a cat owner do you ever ask your cat to come go hey Stella I do I all the time by name does she come when she wants to so a recent study from Sophia University in Tokyo looked at how cats recognize or if cats recognize certain words that we say this was four experiments with 16 to 34 animals so not a very large sample size each cat heard a recording of its owner's voice or another person's voice that slowly recited a list of four nouns or others cat's names followed by their name and what they found was that cats perked up most when they heard their own name which means they are they are recognizing their name overall it does seem so even though your cat may not respond when you call their name they might not come when called it's because they don't care it's not because they don't know because they're cats gets right at the whole idea of cats you know cats don't care about anything human related people give no credence to cat intelligence so that's part of this too is that even with a dog you say they know their name they don't necessarily know their name they know that name that sound to mean come over here and pay attention to me so there is hold up it's a particular sequence of sounds how do we distinguish that from the sequence of sounds and response that humans have because this was like a funny thing that happened they only talked to a dog that only knew Danish everything that was spoken to this dog was in Danish I egospeed to that don't eat that come here now do you want to treat we only talked to the dog in Danish and I mentioned this in passing my dog only understands Danish and the person next to me went wow your dog understands two languages and I was like no that's not how this works but I don't know that that's distinct from how humans learn and know things either like it's a sound it's the same except that because of our deep understanding of the English language I can tell you your name is Justin and you know okay that is the proper noun that means me what I'm saying is dogs and cats know their name they recognize the sound but they don't understand that that is their proper noun for their existence that is the differentiation so now I'm going to have to language with that grammar do you understand language with that grammar can we come to Stella so that is no no I'm saying they still know that means you come here now and that can still mean that only means me but it does not mean that is my name right identification identification with self self identification that is identification and we are at the end of the show we are at the end of the show there are dogs that can understand multiple multiple names for their toys correct and so how would you then quantify the fact that they can't understand that their name is their name but all the names for their individual toys and items belong to those individual toys and items that's hard to differentiate and that is a great question I hope everyone wants to ponder it I hope everyone wants to ponder it because we have come to the end of our show thank you everyone for listening thank you for listening shout outs to Fada for help with show notes and our social media identity for thank you for recording and thanks for coming down from Seattle last week that's awesome thank you to Gord McLeod and Ben Rothig who else is in the chat room who help with the chat room moderation and I would love to thank our Patreon sponsors thank you too Paul Disney, Richard Onimus Edward Dyer Stuart Pollock, Phillip Shane, Ken Hayes Harrison Prather, Charlene Henry, Joshua Fury Steve DeBell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele Craig Landon, Mark Mazzaro Jack Hall, Matthew Litwin, Jason Roberts Bill Kurzy, Bob Calder, Patrick Cohn Eric Knapp, Richard Hendricks Brian Condren, Dave Neighbor Aidan Jeff, John Bertram, Mountain Sloth Seth O'Gradney, Steve Alvaron Tommy, Dave Freidel, Darryl Maishak Andrew Swanson, Paul Ronevich Corinne Benton, Sue Doster David Wilkinson, Ben Bignell Richard Porter-Paris, Anthony Kevin Reardon Christophe Zuthnirak, Ashish Pants Ulysses Adkins, Sarah Chavez Artyom Dogchev, 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Please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news yes, but if you've learned anything from the show try to remember it's all in your head This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science it's the end of the world I'm setting up a shop got my banner unfurl it says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice know them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand This Week in Science is coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air cause it's This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to say the word from Japanese and This Week in Science is coming your way so everybody listen do everything we say and if you use our methods instead of rolling a die we may rid the world of toxoplasma ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy I've got a laundry 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 The help can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour a week This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head Because it's this week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science Somewhere along the way My computer updated and no longer opens other pages When I click on their links What a pop-up blocked But I want to open that pop-up You silly pop-up I could say always because I guess it's my website I trust my website You should too Hey everyone it's The After Show Dun dun dun I was texting Blair was texting we're all texting We're gonna text each other all over the place I think Justin got a haircut The next episode is a Balandrome That it is 717 Scientific palindromes You remember when Justin was gonna go get his haircut Right before our live show in Portland His idea of time is an interesting thing Yes he said we said hey We should really get up and go over to the theater Because he's what I did to get a haircut What? Why didn't you get a haircut We're coming to Portland I mean we have good haircutting places here Where you can have a drink and have a haircut But get your haircut He got his haircut Upsued And what are you doing flying out? It's not a palindrome We could have maybe I'll name next week's show Taco Cat I will call it Scientific Taco Cat Well then it's not a palindrome anymore Oh if I put scientific Yeah I guess not We just have to think of a palindrome with the word science in it That would be an interesting one I could do it I could figure out something Or I could just google it also The word science backwards does not sound pretty No No No Have a good night Fada Oh I'm exhausted I'm exhausted Today was a good day But I'm tired I was late this evening Which caused the show to be late this evening As part of the science communication organization That I help run Called Science Talk I try and get money for science talk And I applied for a local humanist society They called it an innovation grant Community Innovation Grant And I applied a few weeks back And I got a phone call that said We will need you to be at our facility for a meeting To present your idea to our organization in person On Wednesday, April 10th Oh my That's just wrong timing Yeah I was like oh But then I was the person who submitted the proposal And I was like okay we can do this And it actually did not turn out that badly considering Like I mean we weren't I wasn't that late tonight No Yeah Yeah you were right on time Right on, not that bad Yeah You were as I told the chat room You arrived in just in time I did I was just five minutes late To be fair though It's good I was asking for money from somebody And my own defense I was born 15 minutes late So the fact that I'm only five minutes behind Everything that happens on the planet now Is actually I've been catching up So it's taking a while Slowly getting into the same Time frame as the rest of you man Do you want to hear some fun palindromes? Sure Yes Eva Can I stab bats in a cave? What? Eva can I stab bats in a cave? Yeah This is my favorite Mr. Owl ate my metal worm I understand that these are palindromes They're also nonsense No They make perfect sense You just got to read way deep into them Taco cat however That makes sense to me It's just like Santa lived as a devil at NASA Also dammit I'm mad Oh good Dammit I'm mad Never odd or even That's good That's pretty solid Oh that is solid Doc note I dissent A fast never prevents a fatness I diet on cod Which you would have to do to make it a palindrome Oh my god I love palindromes I apologize for the early exit But I have to say goodnight That's okay I'm sick I want to go to bed You were looking sniffly And I too just had mentioned that I was tired Because of a long day So hey Santa Fe Sounds good to me We'll see about what See some hotter balloons Buy some turquoise That's all I know about Santa Fe Alright I've never been to Santa Fe It's not a direct flight from Portland No not from here either Albuquerque Yeah but anyway In the same state In the same state as Albuquerque But Santa Fe would be awesome maybe So okay let's see what happens there And then is there anything else that I need We should make newsletter Blair Yeah we need to do that Yeah we need to set up some things And get that going Because we have people on a list Made the list and now let's send it Yeah we have to flesh out the materials For sure but But it shouldn't be too hard We can just Yeah especially if you just do it Justin you want to write a little blog You want to write a little Yeah just send me a text reminder That I'm supposed to do something And I'll get it done In the meantime though I'm done What about oozy rat in a sanitary zoo That's good Okay I will Refrain from pushing any more Twist business on you Justin Let's say goodnight Goodnight Blair say goodnight Blair Say goodnight Justin Goodnight Justin Goodnight Kiki Goodnight everyone We hope to see you here next week And yes Ed's twitch session this Friday For sure I look forward to it this week Everyone out there Happy scienceing We'll see you again soon Thank you


Temos a Luz da Zatera Iberina de Ibama con nosotros, es ingeniera en Human Mate, unha de las agencias de walkers máis conocidas, está en ese centro en desarrollo backend e es unha fascinada de los sistemas de control e versiones. Le gusta a yoga, viajar e la fotografía e visita mochas walk-ups a lo largo do mundo. Non voy a enrollarme más. Un aplauso para Iberina. Can you do it? I barely understand what he said. I studied Spanish in school, but I kind of forgot most of island. So hi, I'm Iba. I work for Human Mate as work points engineer and today I will try to share some of my experience with debugging WordPress websites. I'm still a bit excited because I tried all these things in this museum.  So, as you already know, I love traveling, I love work points community, I love taking pictures of sunset, like thousands of them. I sometimes work like that, somewhere in a nice place with a view and my laptop, but that really doesn't work well with some new screen and so on. So most of my day I'm debugging websites. And let's talk about that. So once upon a time when I was a little kid my grandfather was dealing with fixing cars. He was really good at that because he knew kind of how everything looks like, how to debug it, how to find the problem. But they passed so many years and the cars don't really look like that anymore. The engines don't really look like that. Actually there's a pretty good example in the museum for that as well. So the engines kind of look like this now and my grandfather doesn't really know how to do that anymore because even if you know how the system looks like and how it's supposed to work, it's not like this so it doesn't. So it's kind of something like this with the websites. So if you know how the structure is, how it's supposed to work and what might be the problem, there are situations where you have no idea where to start. So if you have a problem with let's say a legacy project that you haven't seen and you need to debug it and find the issue, where are you supposed to start? First of all, never ever debug a production. You make a lot of little kittens around the world set and you won't sleep for days and different things like that. So even if it's taking time and it's how frustrating from time to time, it's a good idea to spend some time and create your local environment and in the best case scenario you have local environment, different staging servers and you have time and environments to test everything well. You can after set your local environment set some debug constants in your config file so you'll be able to see the errors. You can of course set WP debug to true. You can get a WordPress debug log on your local instance. You can also display all these errors and also you can debug the CSS and JavaScript. This is very useful from time to time if you'll be able to show you the error even in the beginning of the project. It's not showing you what the problem is. What you can do is to start to know how the system works. Even if you know the basics of WordPress and how everything is set up, still you can be really surprised how many ways to complete something that looks simple. So first step is to check the system, how it works, how the project is done, are all the plugins and WordPress updated. Sometimes when you update everything some of the projects will just magically disappear. Unfortunately some of them will magically appear but that's a different story. Then what you can do is of course to check the error log. So if you're lucky and you have all the debug son, you'll be able to see where the problem is. You'll see kind of something like this. Pay the web in whatever file on whatever line and you just go there, fix it and everything will be fine. But unfortunately in a lot of cases what is happening is that you are getting something invalid argument on whatever for each plugin PHP that you've never touched and not, no one of your team touched. So there is problem somewhere but you still don't know where that is. So what happens then you can check for plugin conflicts. I had a very interesting case with 64 gigabytes of work by something like this. Just a plugin downloaded was introducing the same filter as the WordPress call and it was printing here like that without any clue where exactly this is happening. So yeah, it nearly encouraged my machine when I started the project properly. Yeah, so you can just start disabling plugins and checking so you can at least know in which directory the problem is and then start debugging from there. If that's kind of helping you already know where the problem is but you still don't know the exact place what you can do is start from there was known instance of that problem like whatever its function name or even HTML tag or CSS class or something that you know about the problem and just start grabbing the things around the code so you can form the logic what is calling code and how the things are structured so we can go to the initial problem. What you can also do is use some of the pre-built PHP function like Vardom whenever work they will be able to show you the output of the functions that of course you need to debug and you can see what is exactly happening in the code sometimes Vardom won't be able to show you this because of some Ajax code and so on so every work is kind of more reliable for me you have to keep in mind that it is looking for a string so you need to print it if there is object or a way or something like this that you need to output like not helping yet you can use some debugging plugins like Curing Monitor which is very useful for this it is showing you very obvious how things work which cure is coming from where what is called how much time it takes if that's big enough you'll be able to see that it shows what is called in which template how much time does it take and so on so you'll be able to check all the errors also you'll be able to see the performance of your code and if something needs to be fixed or it's too slow or it's calling the different template if that's not helping of course if you like it you can try doing it with xdebug it's a very helpful tool for PHP debugging I'm not the hugestpan but I also use it it just needs to be installed with the table package manager you are using for your system and configured it can also configured in your editor or IDE system that you use I personally use Atom because it's fast and it has a lot of extensions for specific WordPress development and debugging and the only thing that I need to do is change some configurations for the PHP configuration file and then add something like that in the editor but there is really good documentation for that so you'll be able to find the exact configuration for your system and then you can also use several tools like that for the browsers that takes the bug extension for Chrome it's also very logical and helps you debug the problems from there I don't really use Firefox but it says that it does the easiest debug tool for it, I'll trust it so you can try this as well and also how it looks after that so you can go to where you know the problem is just put the bug point and it will start following the code until there and in the best case scenario show you where there is I'm not the biggest fan just because in Atom at least the last time when I tried there was no option to change most of the debugging it always starts from the beginning of the execution of the code which is very slow for me but it can be really useful in a lot of cases also if you use WPC-A-Y and you are writing commands for W, C-A-Y, custom things for it you can just make a small change in your bash profile and you'll be able to debug C-A-Y will take the bug we just now using WPG instead of WP it's very useful if you are creating your custom WPC-A-Y commands and you need to see where the problems are then and then if all that is not helping there are so many cases related to these things called permissions so I had cases where there is just random error in a file with all that said to here it's not helping and then you just realize there is a wrong permission on the folder and the file can't be called so it's just taking a huge time for it another very very useful thing if you are lucky and you are working on a legacy project you have a git system you have any actually version control system and personally big value git you'll be able to see what happened in the code when the problem started you'll be able to check what happened in the history and it's going to be really fast and easy to debug unfortunately that's not usually the case so it's a really good idea to just start and set up your version control system when you start working on a particular project there are very useful things about git like for example you can try git log if you know and then there are some commits you'll be able to see at least who did the change why, when and kinda you have a idea well to look because you can look at the particular commit hash and then check what happened there is other very useful thing called git blame what it does is that you can just give it a particular file I need to show you the file with all the changes kept on each line so if you know well your bookies you'll be able to see who when introduced it and so on and of course if there is a commit message and anything related to version control you'll be able to see why there's other thing that I love it's called git bisect so if you know when a problem was introduced you can check the difference between the commit that is bad where there is a bug and a commit where it was good so you can start, you can just tell it git bisect start and then you're telling git git bisect bad is that does the commit where the problem is and git bisect good where the problem actually wasn't presented on your project so then on every reload you can tell git if that's a bad or good state of your project and when you finish it will tell you exactly at which state the problem was introduced it's crazy useful I just told it that's about running all things and when what if you want to introduce something new in a legacy project you can just go down the code and check if you have filters and actions where you can add new features instead of just adding them to plugins and so on that you haven't developed you can go down you can check what filters you have where you can change functions where you can add a functionality also you can remove functionality after you identify everything because from time to time there is no option for example to remove a functionality introduced by a plugin or team but there is a way to cook it for its place and introduce your change you have to keep in mind if you use to remove filter you can't remove something that is not there so it's supposed to go every time after the filter that you need to remove it's kind of the same with actions another very useful thing that can save you all that writing tests so if you are very lucky the project that you are working has real tests you can just go there and test and you'll see where the problem is without thinking of that I am personally real finance code exception it's really useful too for testing so you can use it for checking all the functionality from user perspective it basically just goes in there and performs the same actions that your user is supposed to do it's really easy to write tests on it and also it's able to xelénium server so you can also test JavaScript and everything is very interactive you can see how open browser and performs all the actions and you'll be able to check where the errors are so all that's it there is really good advice in the end of it it's a really good idea to standardize all that procedure you can also use automation so installing it making a real really easy process to make welcoming styles really useful is to have the databases or just install them that will be see why you can also use automation stuff like Jenkins to go and check the code and there are so many tools to help you with that so it's a really good thing to have all that standardize so when a new person is coming to your team or to your project he or she to be able to start very fast and not spending time on figuring it out how everything worked to why it was done this way and so on it's a really good thing to write documentation they're very useful the ideas the details so you can install something like this and just write documentations for your functions are quickies in GitHub or whatever is useful for your team but just leave the other people some instructions how to handle the project what the specifics are why these things work this way because it's one of my favorite comments in Stackover for Ovoxs after three days or three months you won't remember how did that work and why so it will help you and others to have really detailed documentation of everything and that's it does anybody has any questions for you Verlina? thank you Verlina you said you don't like the XD bar tool could you give us please some reasons why? yeah I said so because in the editor that I really love to use the extension for it the book is not very useful for me that's a specific case otherwise I use it but in the setup that I currently have I just don't like it that much it's a personal thing I thought it was more about something on the timing execution or something like that yeah because that's it how the extension for it works I don't know how exactly XD can do that two different things some things I use it's debug for do the filing of PHP execution and I don't know if you use it or there is any tool to do that well I kind of would place things use square monitor because it shows very obvious how much time is taking very clearly where it comes what is calling code and so on as you said I'm personally not a huge fan of XD but that's my personal thinking and more questions so big applause for Verlina