I can't figure out what that means. This is Twis, this week in Science, episode number 566, recorded on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. This smells like science. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with a little space, shouty moths, and a buggy interview, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. You are what you eat, so the old saying goes, or so the old saying once went. And in many respects, this tidbit of condensed wisdom remains true enough. Yet most old sayings, despite all of their condensable wisdom, are woefully lacking in details. But that's the part of being an old saying. Keep it short, make it true-ish, and move on to other halftruths that get you through the day. Science is a tester of truths, the older the better. And halftruths in the eyes of science are like half-cooked meals or half-read books, unsatisfying in unfinished form, in anything but wise to proceed as if they were. In the example, you are what you eat, yet keeping with the considerable condensable form that we've updated with the slightly different new saying of, you are the microflora in your gut and should feed them accordingly. And as far as new sayings go, it lacks detail and is only halftruth best, so in order to give greater context to this tidbit of wisdom, we offer you, this week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge that I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in Science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in Science. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome once again to another episode of this week in Science. And today, tonight, this moment, we have a great show ahead. Tonight, we are joined once again by Josiah Zainer. Hello there. Yo, what up? We're doing a science show. Thanks for joining us. We have a great show ahead. Tonight we are joined once again by Josiah Zainer. I hear me, I hear me on your computer. There we go. So tonight, Josiah, who is biohacker extraordinaire, if you remember from his previous visit, we discussed his work creating a DIY crisper kit for the kitchen biology enthusiast. This time, he'll be joining in our regular science discussion and we're going to talk with him in the second half of the show about his recent personal DIY adventure in microbial transplantation. That's right. He DIY'd a fecal transplant and attempted a full body microbiome transplantation. And I'm very interested and afraid to hear how you DIY something like this. Well, Justin, if you're ever gonna make Jackson flies, Poo Pills a reality. This is good research for that. I'm attesting. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's gonna be a place. Yeah, so tonight we are going to find out all about it. But also on the show, we have tons of science news. I have stories about atmospheres near and far, sleepy science, and I've got some other stuff in there. Justin, what do you have? I've got a new old ax, a tale about lizard tails, and a memory gene. And a memory gene. Oh, very cool. And Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, in the animal corner today, I have very shouty moths. And then towards the end of the show, I will quickly chat about public opinion leaching their way into science and conservation and why that might not be a terrible thing. Public opinion isn't always bad. Yeah, wisdom of the crowds kind of thing. But yeah, I am looking forward to that conversation, but let's get on with the show. So right off the top of the show, there was a wonderful press conference this week and some papers released by various universities related to NASA and NASA scientists. And what have they done? Well, Kepler, that wonderful telescope that has been looking out into the universe for exoplanets has found some more. They have verified 1,284 new planets. And so the numbers keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Every time they have a press conference, they're like, we found five exoplanets. We found 900 exoplanets. We found 1200 exoplanets. So with Kepler, their statistical methods just keep getting stronger and more accurate and they're able to really take their predictions for what the light curves would look like. So predicted curves for actual planets, transiting stars versus stars that are orbiting each other or other signals that they could be getting. And so now they are matching these signals up using statistics. They go, okay, this is the one we measured and then this is what we are looking for. How do they match up? And by doing that, they've been able to accurately find a number of planets. So the July 2015 Planet Candidate Catalog identified 4,302 potential planets, but these 1,200 or so, their probability of being a planet is right around 99%. So even more than 99%. So they're like, we are pretty certain. This is a pretty certain result that they've got. Additionally, in this result, they- There's gonna be a war started over that. Is there? One planet will be like, you only thought we were playing at 99%. That's right.  We need more statistics, better statistics. I don't know. If you talk to biology and physics, they are already having that argument. And then, if you wanna think about planets that are out there, I know most of us are interested in Earth-like planets.  Well, in this batch of planets, they have 550 that could be, that are, they think are rocky planets like Earth. So based on their size, their density, they're probably rocky and not gas giants. Nine of these orbit in the habitable zone. So now we know of 21 exoplanets in the area of space around their star in which water can be liquid, which gives us some new neat targets to look at. And there are some, there's a future satellite mission in 2018, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is going to use this method to monitor 200,000 bright stars and look for planets. And they're thinking that this new exoplanet satellite is going to be even more accurate and find even more. And they're just thinking like, we get the satellite up, we get more up there, we're going to look at the skies and basically just see exoplanets around stars. Is this the perfect science to be in because it literally, like you can never find all the exoplanets, so you can always write a grant next to your like, still looking for more exoplanets. Yeah, you're never out of a job for sure. That's, I think you're right on there. Absolutely, I need to find more exoplanets. There's more, I just need to look in this little area of space. We haven't looked in this area of space yet. Let's do that. Let's do it. Other cool stuff. So Viking, the Viking lander in the 1970s that went to Mars measured a small amount of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. However, nobody's really measured that since. And so people have been like, really how much oxygen is actually in the Martian atmosphere and can we figure that out? Well, NASA also has sent up its SOFIA, 747, it's a stratospheric observatory for infrared astronomy, modified Boeing 747. And now you're probably looking at me going or listening to me and saying, okay, 747 and you're talking about Mars. All right, what's going on there? Well, SOFIA goes up to 45,000 feet and takes observations, infrared observations of the sky above in infrared. And so they're observing the far infrared wavelengths and they detected a small amount of atomic oxygen on Mars. They, SOFIA instrument in the 747 on planet Earth looked at Mars and went bingo, that's the signature for oxygen. It's not a lot because of course there's no photosynthesis going on there. But and it was only around half of the oxygen that was expected based on what Viking had found in the 70s, but they think maybe what's going on is that they're based on the season, that there are perhaps fluctuations of oxygen as different gases come out of frozen substances on the surface and various chemical reactions take place. So this is another really cool one. And then going from a Martian atmosphere we can go to Earth's ancient atmosphere. Researchers found a really interesting new way to measure the Earth's ancient, ancient atmosphere. And when I say ancient, I mean 2.7 billion years ago. That's a long time. It's a long time ago. And do you know what they used? Air bubbles in lava. So they looked for ancient lava beds because the lava has dissolved gases in it. And so the lava kind of bubbles up. So as a lava comes up, the gases that are dissolved in also fizz out. And so there are bubbles. If you ever look at a lava rock, not obsidian, but other lava, you know, if you look at the lightweight lava rocks, they have bubbles in them, right? They're little holes. And that is from them very porous. You can pick up a giant rock and you look like you're doing this great active strength, but it's because it's so porous that it's not dense at all. Right. And so the lava cools very rapidly, especially if it's near at the time when it emerged from the Earth was near water. That would have cooled it very quickly. And so they looked for these lava beds that had not been eroded too much. So still had a lot of their top layer, just had soil put on top of them or something and had maintained their structure. And they looked for these lava beds in Australia and they found three or so lava beds that they took samples from. They took these samples and they said that really, just like when they got them back to camp, they were looking at them and they're like, oh, wow, this is interesting. They can measure the size of the bubbles to be able to determine the pressure from the atmosphere that must have been weighing down on the lava. So the bubbles with a lighter atmosphere would be bigger and the bubbles with a heavier atmosphere would be smaller. So they looked at them and they were like, okay, let's take this back to the lab and do some comparisons and some measurements. And basically they confirmed that Earth's ancient atmosphere was less than half as dense, as thick as it is today. So the question that this raises is, okay, back then Earth apparently had liquid water on it and it wasn't frozen, but if you don't have the greenhouse gases or the dense blanket to hold the heat in, what actually heated up the air to keep the water liquid. And so now this confirmation that the atmosphere was probably fairly lightweight and maybe had a bit of nitrogen in it, but not enough nitrogen to really take up the brunt of the greenhouse gas roll that it plays. It's this big question of like, okay, what was happening back then? So some people have brought up the idea that maybe there was a lot of, this was shortly after the early bombardment, maybe there was still heat from a lot of volcanic and Earth activity, so maybe the Earth itself was producing the heat that kept the water liquid. We don't know. I thought it was the nuclear war that the Tatans were in. That could have been it too. Oh, those nuclear battles billions of years ago. Yeah, so I don't, it's a big question and nobody has the answer to it yet, but it's a very interesting historical question and I mean seriously, air bubbles in lava? This is brilliant. I mean, in 2012 they were looking at fossilized raindrops and now they're looking at fizzy bubbles in lava. They're gonna figure out the ancient atmosphere. It's awesome. Yeah, it's clever geology for sure. So clever. All right, so that does it for me for the start of the show. This is This Week in Science. Justin, what you got? It has been said that a dog is man's best friend. Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's simply too dark to read and if you are a stone-anged man before the domestication of wolves, who can't read at all, then what could be better company than a roughly crafted axe? Australian archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest axe in the remote Kimberly region of Western Australia. An axe fragment found that is no bigger than a thumbnail. So this isn't the whole axe. They didn't find the axe. They found a thumbnail which they say dates back to the Stone Age period around 45,000 to 49,000 years ago, which is right around a kind of sort of just after humans first settled Australia. That number is put usually at about 50,000 years ago. And it's also more than 10,000 years earlier than any previous ground axe discoveries, which is also even in that many, many, many years before most of humanity started to become axe-wielding stone age peoples. That kind of came about 10,000 years ago is when the stone axe was really a prevalent thing amongst modern man. This is a University of Sydney Professor Peter Hiscock is the lead in corresponding author of the new analysis of the fragment and it's published in the journal Australian Archaeology. He says that the axe reveals that the first Australians were technological innovators. This is Quoty Voice. Since there are no known axes in Southeast Asia during the Ice Age. Wait, don't get Australian accent. I really can't do my Australian accent is really bad. I'll try it. I'll try a Quoty Voice for the Australian. Since there are no known axes in the South Ice Age. It's just terrible. It was good. It was good. This is the, I know we're gonna sub-tangent reference. So I say raise up lights. Raise up lights. You need raise up lights. Why not electric shaver? Right, and that's immediately British. I can't stick with it. Yeah, all right, bring the science. Since there are no known axes in the Southeast Asia during the Ice Age. Discovery shows us that when humans arrived in Australia they began to experiment with new technologies inventing ways to exploit the resources they encountered in the new Australian landscape. This little axe fragment was initially excavated, excavated in the early 90s.  They had food scraps, tools, artwork, all sorts of artifacts from something called the Carpenter's Gap, a large rock shelter known to be one of the first sites occupied by modern humans in Australia. Nowhere else in the world do you get axes at this date. So here's the thing though.  How do they know it's an axe? Well, based on the polishing of it, they say it was a polished, it was a crafted and then polished edge of this axe that then came off after resharpening. So they must have, and it doesn't lay out the corresponding reasons they come to this discovery, but it must be something they can recognize from other axes. Now what's sort of also interesting is some of the oldest axe usage is in Australia. It's all in Northern Australia. The Southern Australians. Right, they didn't use axes, right? For a long time. That's like a thousand years ago. Yeah, so there's this huge gap of time. It sort of reminds me when the Inuits got to Greenland. They found that there were already Inuits there. But those Inuits were on the brink of starvation and they were freezing to death. And it's because they dressed themselves in seal skins and there was behind them, there's like herds of musk oxen, but they didn't hunt them because they were dirty animals. And they were like those that came over and said like, no, what are you doing shivering in seal skin? There's musk oxen. Look, watch, they're covered in fur, they're warm. So it sort of reminds me of this. You have two populations in Australia who perhaps didn't, either didn't communicate much or it's also possible, as they cite here in this study, that it's possible that those leaving the north or the western north with axes were heading into more desert-y, wide-open territories where either the materials to make the axes were less plentiful or just the necessity. Yeah, the necessity, it was more spear than club country maybe. It just seems to me like it's one of those things. An axe is a quintessential tool that serves many important purposes. So it's just like a case of conversion evolution. They came up with an axe multiple times because it was the best version of a sharp, stabby, choppy thing. Yeah, and probably just an evolution of having a scraping tool. You know, it's like wouldn't be great if I had a scrape, I could just scrape the animal in the first place or whatever it is. They also, the previous oldest axe in the world was found in Japan about 35,000 years ago. So this is putting that back 14,000 years or so further back for our first axe. And it's an interesting thing because yeah, it's co-a, what you call it? Convergent. Convergent invention. Yeah, exactly. These are two territories were separated and no trade routes and over very disparate periods of time sort of came up with the same invention here. And then across the rest of the world, axes sort of showed up along with agriculture about 10,000 years ago. It's so interesting that it was like this, a couple of instances, so 50,000 years ago or so in Australia and the North and then 35,000 or so in Japan and then not really a lot. And then 10,000 years ago agriculture axes. Yeah. It's like, all right, bam, axes. Suddenly we're chopping down trees, we've got all this stuff that we've got animals that we're ranching and we've got things that we need axes for. And so the axe became, it proliferated. It proliferated, but perhaps in different ways. I mean, I figure like sort of the first cultures that come up with the axe are surrounded by stone and perhaps using stone tools to do things. And I see like the agriculture thing as the axe perhaps evolving out of other implements that they're already utilizing such as to plow things with. It's something that's already sort of showing up in a different form as they go about doing the work that they do. And they go, oh, I can re-tool this and chop with it as well. And then they have an axe as opposed to I need something to hunt wild baboons with or whatever it is. Whatever, I still don't know. Whatever they were hunting at the time. All right, this is This Week in Science and do you guys know what time it is? No, really, I don't know what time it is. Oh, it's about, I think it's time for it to play as the Animal Corner. Woo-hoo!  She loves our creature. Play that song. Five-bed, billy-bed, no-bed at all. Wanna hear about animals? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That's a girl. That's a girl.  What you got, Blair? Oh, I have one pretty cool story in the corner this week. And it's all about tiger moths. Tiger moths. Tiger moths. Tiger moths are, they're pretty interesting looking moths. Like other moths, they're awake at night. And like other moths, their main concern is not getting eaten. The main thing that will eat them is bats. And there are lots of animals out there that have, they have what's called aposematic coloration. And that's a fancy way of saying bright colors to scare away predators. So a good example of that is a poison dart frog or a coral snake. But animals, if they have some sort of evolutionary trait that will kill animals that will try to eat them, they don't want to have to use that defense right away because then they are dead. It helps the rest of the species, but it doesn't help that individual. So it's beneficial to them on the individual basis. If they have a warning attached to say, hey, don't eat me, I'm poisonous, then they don't get eaten. And as a species, they're avoided. It's a win-win. So this is something that's really well documented. Back almost 10 years ago, a couple of professors, Bill Conner and Jesse Barber, discovered the first ever aposematic acoustic signals. So that sounds that warn predators that they are not good to eat. Right, so normally it's, you have these bright colors like the yellow and black of a wasp or the monarch butterfly coloration. That's like, don't eat me. But, so these moths are like, ah, hey, don't eat me, don't eat, hey, literally, don't. So how do they make these sounds? That's what I want to know. They are actually acoustic signals that play into the echolocation that bats use. So it's very similar to that. It's kind of on the same frequency of bat acoustic signals. So they're ultrasonic to us. And they are right in that normal range for bats. And it's something that previously was only observed in a lab, but now the breaking news, new research from Wake Forest University has found it in nature for the first ever time. So it's called Acoustic Aposematism. And for them it works because it's dark at night. And so the visual signals don't work. So they are able to ward off the bats just with these ultrasonic signals. So what I found particularly interesting about this is the main researcher found what he calls a nonchalance continuum. What's particularly interesting about this? And that means nonchalance, right? It means you just kind of don't care, right? And so in this case, the moths don't dive out of the way. In most moths, they do evasive dives and spiraling flight when a bat is nearby them and about to capture them. But a lot of these tiger moths, a lot of the time, they didn't try any of that. They just hung out, made their warning sounds, and kind of relied on the sounds to keep the bats from eating them. So they had essentially no fear, I guess. Yeah, so because they were expecting that their sounds were going to help them avoid being eaten, basically. Yeah, and looking a little bit closer at these sounds, it looks like originally these sounds evolved just as a warning, but that the sounds have grown in complexity over evolutionary time, and that some species of these moths actually have a sonar jamming function. As well, yeah. So not only did they say, hey, don't eat me, I'm poisonous, but on top of that, they say, hey, don't eat me, and am I over here, or am I over here? Oh, you can't tell where am I? So this is actually what I thought this would be. I see, I don't think they're saying I'm poisonous. I get that the sort of perhaps the coloration of them already says that. But what if, I mean, I don't speak moth, and I don't hear high frequency, but I'd be really curious to see if the signal that they're sending back actually represents them as something else that we don't know what that is, right? Like, I'm not even a moth. Like, you've just, I'm signaling back as though I'm a bird of prey, or whatever it is. That would be mimicry. Yeah, like it would be. That actually is something else that's a completely separate study item. So I would guess, and I don't know for a fact, because we don't have the main researcher, Nick Doughty, here with us. But I would guess that they did some basic tests between this previous study almost 10 years ago, and now to make sure that this was a unique sound that was not a mimic of another sound that bats come across. That would be my assumption. Based on the fact that in these past 10 years, they haven't then come out and said, oh, this ultrasonic signal that Tiger Moths did in the laboratory are similar to blank. Right, right, but mimicry, but I was almost thinking of it in terms of camouflage. Like, if by them making this sound, if they're preventing themselves from being identified as a moth. That's interesting. I would say that based on their body shape, and the way that echolocation works, it'd be pretty hard for them to come across as anything but a moth, unless they were jamming the echolocation abilities, which is what they found out towards the end of the study. Yeah. So the jamming element, for sure, is a weird kind of camouflage. It's kind of like reverse Marco Polo, but it adds an extra element to this very intense adaptation to avoid an animal that doesn't, as far as we can tell, care about coloration in their prey. But again, this is an animal that the individual doesn't wanna get eaten, but if they did get eaten, the bat would get a very bad stomach ache at the least. And so in the end, make that mistake a few times, that bat is still gonna avoid that moth. Right. This is trying to bridge that gap. Yeah. Yeah, so they weren't listening. We still keep getting eaten. Yes. There's gotta be some way to let the bats know which type of moth we are, because we know we don't go down well. Yeah. I don't know.  Right. Right. It's just worth it just for a little while. Yeah. Maybe they need to play some really terrible music outside of that chicken restaurant to keep you from going in, maybe. So we didn't learn today. I'm loving the comments in the chat room currently as we're talking about this subject. There are some pretty funny ones. Marco Moth says, I'm a tiger. Yeah. Instead of Marco Paul. Marco. I'm a tiger. Yeah, so I find it interesting that they have these timpanic, these timble organs that they use for this. Like they've got these specialized organs that help actually make this sound and that they've evolved this sound defense, which is just amazing. Yeah, which does take it to a whole other level, that they didn't just, they didn't already have the ability to make similar sounds and they changed their sounds to identify themselves. But no, they developed a whole new structure to get this done. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating. Moth's going out of their way to not be dinner. Moth, Moth. I'm gonna taste bad. You're not gonna like me. Listen to me, listen to me. Listen, listen to me. At first, Blair, I thought you said tiger mobs. And I was a little bit excited. I think I was excited for the tiger mobs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have liked to have heard about tiger mobs. That would have been kind of cool also. And I'm not sure how bats would eat mobs of tigers, but that I'd be interested to hear about as well, yeah. And I'm also glad this was not a story about tiger mobs. Yeah. That too. It could fit with any animal behavior. They probably do make aposematic signals in many ways. Very likely. I think we should work on that for a study. We should work that out, yeah. All right, everybody. This is This Week in Science. We are wrapping up the first half of our show, and we are going to head right into our break. Stay tuned, because coming back, we're gonna be talking with Josiah Zainer, who is here with us to talk about his personal experiences in transplantation, transplantating. I can't even speak words today. In transplanting his microbiome. This is DIY to the max. And so I hope you stay with us to hear this amazing story. We'll be back in just a few moments. Things you've heard with more than a line of reason shows the way. Hey, everybody. If you are listening to twists or watching us, I do hope that you think about what we bring to your lives and maybe how you can help us out. Help us out. Help us keep this show going. So we have merchandise you might enjoy. 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Your cold disappeared after just nine short days. All thanks to the words on the whole earth displays. Now due to the juices and pills and the creams. And we're back with more of this week in science. Oh yeah, we are back and our guest Josiah Zainer is here to talk about his personal experiences. We've had Josiah on the show previously. He used to work at NASA as a synthetic biologist but since being on the show, he has gone rogue. He's gone freelance. He's started a company and he's doing a lot of self-experimentation. I mean, maybe this has to do with finding oneself, but uh... This also, if this goes viral, and I hope it does, this could be the new bucket, the ice bucket test. Right, right, right. This could be something that we see showing up all across this country. Uh-oh, we've gone incognito. And now he's gone incognito in our video stream. So what he has done, since we spoke with him about his DIY CRISPR kits that he was creating and he's also CEO and founder for the Open Discovery Institute, the Odin. And he is doing a lot of self-experimentation. What he's done in a nutshell is that he took somebody else's microbiome, the external and the internal, and he tried to transplant it onto himself. So, he put pills and smeared his skin with microbe samples. Why, when, how, and how'd it turn out? Anyway, he's still here so he can tell us about it. Thank goodness. Josiah, how are you? Ah, I'm actually doing pretty good. Yeah, no, so I don't know if many people have read the article on The Verge or anything like that, but it is probably one of the most crazy, it's surreal experiences of my life. Like I can't even begin to describe what went on, like how it went on. And I try to put it into words and it just doesn't do any justice. Fortunately, there are some people who actually are creating a documentary about this whole process. And that, I imagine, will be really sweet to see, but yeah, it was just a crazy experience. Yeah, so I first learned about this. You posted the link to the article about your experience that was written and published by The Verge. This article, the journalist was with you during your experience and kind of captured it all through the lens of her own mind. Now, I'd love to ask some questions about that, but let's just start from the very beginning and find out, okay, why did you decide to transplant your microbiome? What drove you to this DIY extreme? I was gonna get that thing on my back looked at, but actually, the reason I did it was because I felt my Medichlorian count was too low and I was hoping to increase it. No, it was actually, I don't know, I've always been fascinated with sci-fi type of stuff and like futuristic type of stuff and it's kind of too early to genetically engineer myself without severely hurting myself, so like engineer my genes and things like that. So the next coolest thing was to engineer something that was a part of me that I probably wouldn't die if I messed with and that was my microbes. Also, I suffer from like a lot of, well, not a lot, I guess everybody suffers from certain health issues, but I've suffered from gastrointestinal stress for like the past 10 or 15 years.    Oh, no, not at all. I was thinking about it for like a year and like planning and prepping for like a year before. No, I mean, it was one of those things where when you have like a bad attack, you know, you're pretty much in bed or like, you can't work, like I couldn't go to work at NASA or I'd have to go home because you're just like every five minutes, you're going to the bathroom. You're incapacitated, yeah. It's like, ah, you either spend all day in the bathroom but when everybody gets all those emails that are like from your phone, you know, you know.  When you move all of your little office knick-knacks into the restroom, that's probably time. So you, okay, so you made this decision, there's a need for it, which is good. This wasn't just, this wasn't, because now that way you'll be able to see if there's a difference from this. If it was just out of the whimsical desire and you do this and then you're like, oh, well, there's no real change if you didn't have some sort of an imbalance to begin with or some sort of something going on that could be addressed. So then you decide, okay, I'm going to do it. And there's a sterilization part of this process. You took antibiotics, just started. Did I hear this, is that correct? Yeah, so despite like all, so there's other health things that I've dealt with. And so, and also I wanted to explore kind of the sci-fi thing. So I thought, well, you know, just a fecal transplant would be helpful, but to be really helpful, I wonder what would happen if I tried to wipe out my whole microbiome and replace my whole microbiome.  What happens if I just try to wipe it all out, replace it with somebody who I knew was healthy? Would that make me healthy? And this is the thing, this is what a lot of the studies in mice has been indicating that gosh, everything from, you know, all sorts of obesity and GI tract issues, you do these swaps and there seems to be this market change that takes place. Well, not only that, like people have started to associate it with like mental health. Like if you go to try to donate to like open biome or something like that, if you look at their survey, they ask questions like has any of your family or you know, family members ever had mental health issues? Like they look not just at you, like even if your family members have mental health issues, they're thinking about, scientists are thinking about all this stuff, like it's crazy. Right, well there are heritable aspects to our microbiome and we don't know exactly how that works yet, but like there are genes that are involved in supporting the bacteria, there's like this co-evolution. And it's also the neighborhood that you come from, right? So it's like the idea that your genes, even if they were markedly different, I mean, even if you're adopted, I would assume your microflora was gonna look a lot like the family who adopted you because that's what you're gonna be interacting with the most. No, they've shown that, that like you share, they've shown some crazy things. You share a lot with your dog apparently too. Yeah, yeah.  When you move into a place within like two days, you completely change the microbiome of the habitat that you're in. And if you live with somebody, you share a microbiome with that person obviously because you're touching the same things, you're sitting on the same things, you're interacting like partners and things like that even more so. So like we really, and it's this crazy thing that like if you break up with somebody, if you change relationships, I can't even imagine, right? Like it could affect your microbiome, your microbiome is affected, it's super important. I need to get back together. So you really do love me? No. I've been on the cheddar all the time since we broke up. We really need to get back. I probably shouldn't have, we're gonna have to edit that in post right there. Yeah, we're going to. Language for the radio. It seems like a noun, not a noun. Can we not, it's shit, no. It was funny because at NASA we also worked, I worked on, we call it the N-C-2 resource utilization. So it's recycling things in space. And one of the big things that people really hadn't figured out in space is how to recycle solid waste, human solid waste, poop, shit, feces, whatever. So we'd be discussing writing grants about this stuff and nobody would know what to call it because it would always elicit a smile or a giggle from somebody. It doesn't matter. Even the scientific technology is no good. I feel like feces is pretty stool. I think it doesn't, I think it doesn't work. I think it doesn't work. I don't know, I guess, I've desensitized. I deal so closely with feces and stool every day of my life, so. So let's get, let's get.  So, there's this need that could be filled. There's this desire to do the experiment. You started with the cleanse. You, did you do the nettle? You did antibiotics? You gargled with rubbing alcohol? I don't know, that's, don't do that at home. Yeah, so it's, I don't know if I should say this on air, but I mean, it's not like, it's not public information. Like, you can get antibiotics fairly easy on eBay and other places. Like, they don't check. A lot of times people will mis-mark them, so they'll sell them as like, say, like fish antibiotics or like dog antibiotics, fish antibiotics. Okay, but wait, here's the thing. Wait, wait, wait, wait, don't share too much. But this is, this is, this is hitting home because I recently had to do like a heavy antibiotic for the first time in my adult life. And I lost my, my, I used to have the best ever microflora and they've recovered nicely. But for the period after, it was the worst horrible experience because nothing worked the way it normally did or was supposed to, right? So, so post cleanse, I get there's, there's nothing there. And that's probably a rough spot by itself. So then, so then what was the replacement? How did, what were these, it sounds like there was more than one version. There was, there was a skin thing. There was a, did you take a pill? Was it supposed to? I don't, I have no idea. So I took antibiotics for about three days, heavy doses of broad spectrum antibiotics. And I also, it took a shower and then took an antibiotic shower. So you know like 12 monkeys type stuff where you're like being scrubbed down in the shower. So for like an hour, hour and a half, I just scrubbed myself with sponge and antibiotics cause people say like bacteria gets deep in your skin and it's like hard to remove. So that's, that's basically Blair's normal shower routine. Come on. You got it. It was, it was really brutal. Like I don't think I could do the experiment the way I did it again just because of the antibiotics. Like they are just so fricking brutal on your body. But my goal was to pretty much give the new bacteria the best chance to colonize my body. And if I didn't do that, they would have to compete with all the current bacteria. Compromising, yeah, you're compromising the environment that you're, the experiment that you're trying to work on. So I didn't think that would, it would work out as well. But it was, it was rough. Like really rough. So the Verge article, the, the woman who wrote the article, she kind of wrote it from this perspective of, you know, made you seem, you know, very punk rock. You're showering and doing your scrub down. But then made it sound like, I don't know how trained in the sciences she is, but she made it sound as if, okay, you put on a clean white t-shirt, but then just put on a pair of jeans. So, like as if- Okay, so let me, let me tell you. She made it sound as if you hadn't thought everything through. No, so. And it just, it made, it made it come across as if like, oh, there was a little bit of the flying by the seat of your pants, which I don't think I'm guessing that you weren't actually. No, so there's like movie, there's like, you know, so I view the Verge article as like the movie version of the story, right? So they're trying to write and tell a story. Yeah. They're not trying to tell everything exactly how, like we discussed all the things that are in the article a lot of times. And obviously they can't write about our discussions or write exactly what I said. Instead they try to use little quotes and little comments that I said to like make things seem a certain way. So it came down to this choice where it was like, what do I need to be sterile in this room? And I thought, well what are the things I'm gonna spend the most time in?  And my pants completely laundered, completely clean, sterilized, everything like that, never touched by human hands after they were laundered or cleaned or anything, right? Always in gloves and everything like that. Talked about this lots of times. Half the experiment, I didn't even wear them cause I was in the hotel room by myself, you know, and it was warm and whatever. So I'm sitting there in my boxers, ordered fresh and clean, on sheets that are fresh and clean, and a t-shirt that's clean.  Right, no, in the article, I mean I was reading it and having spoken with you before, I know you're thoughtful and that you've thought out the details. I mean, that was what I would expect from you. But then the article made it sound as if maybe you hadn't and maybe you're just this renegade who's just, you know, you're not really gonna go all in for the experiment, but I don't know, it didn't, I- Because they also mentioned like, oh, why didn't Ariel, the reporter she mentioned, well, why didn't you try to transplant the genital bacteria? And I'm like, look, I can only sample certain number of sites on my body. I don't have unlimited funding, right? It's like, I'm focusing on certain things, my skin on my body, right? My mouth, my nasal passages and my gut. I set out 77 samples. It would pay $4,500 out of pocket for this, right? I guess I could've done another 10 samples on my junk. Well, well, and to be fair, and to be fair, except for myself and Don King, perhaps, most people's genitals are already a collaboration of everything they touch throughout. Exactly. Because they wash their hands after they go to the bathroom. Even though they've been touching door handles and surfaces and phones and shaking hands with people all throughout the day, they go and then touch their own junk as though somehow that didn't need to be protected. That's why I always wash my hands first. But, yeah, so. Yeah, but I mean, it was like, so there's two things that could happen. One, some of the bacteria left over on my genitals spreads across my entire body and ruins the experiment. The other is that it does absolutely nothing, and all the bacteria I'm putting all over the rest of my skin colonizes my body. And it's also the conversation of like, it was so hard finding a donor. Like, I can't begin to tell you how hard it was. And then to ask somebody, like, look, dude. How do you even reach out? Yeah, it's so weird. I got a little favor to ask. Yeah, exactly. You know, I'd just like send a text message to a friend and be like, do you have any blood-borne diseases, any stomach issues, or any... Can I get 10 years of medical history real quick? And then also, can I have some feces? And do you already have a large, freezer-safe, Ziploc bag? Or do you need one to be provided to you? Yes or no? Yeah, so when she talked about this, I was like, look, like, I don't think it's going to help out the experiment. Like, nobody's going to be like, oh man, he did his genitals. I'm totally convinced now. No, they're going to be like, well, what about the skin on your forearms, the skin on your hand? Like, that's the skin that's the most in contact with things, like the skin on your legs. What about the other parts? So I was kind of like, really? You know, I felt like they were just trying to find little holes to be like, this guy's crazy. He's a loose handle. He's a maverick. So and this wasn't a study where you lived in some square, white, cleansed, bleached box in a lab for six months before and six months after. This isn't like this thing that exists in a vacuum. This is an exploratory study that someone did on themselves that seems like a very brave thing. And I think that it's, you know, all this is is enough to then want to do more, just like so many scientific studies that we talk about. We always talk about the limitations with studies. And in the end, we talk about next steps. And you know, I'd love to hear about what happened as a result of all this and what kind of your ideal next steps would be after all of this. Yeah, I know. So I guess I didn't know what to expect. I guess what I expected was things like my mouth and my nasal passages, they probably wouldn't be colonized too well. Your mouth is changing constantly. I mean, there's lots of papers that show that like, you know, it's super fast adapting and changing because it's subject to so many different things all the time. Right, like did you stop eating while you were cleansing your body? Well, I mean, I didn't stop eating, but the antibiotics really messed you up, so. And I wanted to like, I wanted to subject myself to semi-normal environmental conditions, right? So like, everybody is exposed to food. So obviously I could have, you know, had a sterilized protein shake every day to try to make sure that I was never exposed to any alternate bacteria, but I felt like that wasn't a reasonable human experience. Like, no human would experience that. So I ate, you know, semi-normal food that I would eat. Yeah, I think maybe only guys, only people in Silicon Valley who are into drinking Soylent all the time. I know. Right? Live off of Soylent for like a week. Yeah.  And what was actually super, super crazy, so, you know, you do this, obviously the data is super complex, right? So you do what they call 16S metagenomic sequencing, and that's basically, you sequence the specific part of bacteria that's kind of variable that allows you to identify what, you know, kind of genus and species the bacteria is. So you have this huge table of all these bacteria for every sample. So you do these, you know, complex statistics to compare the samples and what they call principal coordinate analysis. I don't know if anybody's listening knows about that, but principal coordinate analysis basically can show how related these complex samples are in like a distance specific manner on a graph. And it was really interesting and really cool because it showed like before the experiment, my gut was completely different from the donors. And then after the experiment, it was like really, really, really similar. And not only that, like a lot of the issues I was experiencing went away. I lost, it's crazy, this is one of the craziest things that kind of scares me. I lost like 10 or 12 pounds and it just like keeps coming off. Wow. Trying so hard to lose weight before. Like I was working out like three times a week, like, you know, eating tofu and like 300 calorie meals and carrots all the time. But it wasn't, right. And it wasn't what you were eating though, right? It's what was in your gut that was. I haven't even changed my diet really. Like it's crazy. Like actually my diet has changed. What's super weird, super creepy. This is super creepy. Like I've never eaten sugar in my whole life. Like I've always been kind of like, oh, whenever anybody would offer me sugar or cake or anything, I'd just like, no, no, like, I'm a savory person to the core on everything. All of a sudden I just started craving sugar. Like seriously craving. I've never experienced that and it was so creepy because it's like super addictive. I didn't know that's what people experience.  You want chocolate. You want chocolate. And I'm like, what? Where is it coming from? So the donor, does the donor have these same types of sugar in the diet? And his body lean. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's why I picked him. He's super fit, intelligent. But yeah, I didn't even know that. I asked him afterward and I'm like, hey, so like, do you ever have like sugar cravings or anything like that? This is after the experiment. I didn't even know about it. I asked him afterwards. And he's like, dude, I can like finish a box of Oreos in one sitting.  That's how I feel. So it was crazy. Other things like my skin, during the experiment, my skin bacteria, which I want to experiment more in the future, my skin bacteria, during the experiment, became really similar to his. So I have these graphs and stuff that I've been posting on my blog and joseiaszainer.com so you can read more about and see all the data and stuff like that. My skin bacteria became really close to his. But then once I moved home, you can see my cats and my girlfriend and stuff like that. They moved towards me and I moved towards them. So it was like, I went from before to the donor and then I moved back home. And then we all kind of met at this place where we started sharing our microbiome again together. It was super strange and interesting. Wow. It is what you would expect. I mean, you would hope that if you sterilize yourself appropriately and then put somebody's microbiome on and in you that you would end up taking on that microbiota. But then there's these interesting questions of what we're talking about genetic heritability. Are you not predisposed to carry these bacteria? Would your body just fight them off and get rid of them? Would it cause more health problems? And these are questions that still need a lot of work, but it's just fascinating. Yeah, no, no, these are long term. So the final sample I took was probably a month after the experiment approximately, maybe within a few days. So that's as far as we've seen so far out. But as the experiment went on, I moved closer and closer to the donor. So at a month, I'm closest. Before that, I'm far away. But I think it's so interesting just because the effects were so drastic. I try to be as unbiased as possible.  I tried to keep a diary of it. And it's crazy how drastic it was that the effects is kind of creepy beyond that. And it mirrors greatly a lot of this research that we've seen done in mice with these dramatic changes after the fact with fecal transplants. And I don't know that we've covered much, if any, of these on humans. So this may actually be our first, at least on the show, human trial. Well, so there is a lot of, like all the human tests kind of up to this point. Well, there's a couple of recent papers published. But most of them have been in relation to, like, there have been very few in, like, other transplants besides FMT, fecal microbiota transplant. And those have all been in relation to clostridium difficile, C. diff, what people call it. It's a bacterial infection. Because that's the only thing fecal transplants are approved for in the US. So you can't, like, do a research experiment without that kind of stuff, really. But yeah, there have been very, very, very few experiments, because, like, no. That's one of the reasons I want to do this, because there's so many people who suffer. Like, literally so many people, just like me, where you go to the doctor and you're like, look, there's blood in my stool. I'm going four times a day. What do I do?  You're like, really? Doctors are mechanics. They're looking through the Tribal Shooting Guide for your model and year, or whatever the year is that they graduated medical school, basically. Is the Tribal Shooter Guide that they have to flip through to try to tell you how to fix things? Yeah, and it's so many people suffer. In fact, there's like this whole community of people who try different DIY, just fecal microbiota transplants, just to try to help themselves, because it's people suffer and nobody knows why. And it's interesting to think that there's possibly a, I don't want to say a cure or anything like that. I'm a single person, just a single experiment. But there's possibly a huge impact from the microbiota. And you can take a healthy microbiota, and it could possibly affect people in drastic ways. I feel almost like I cheated, especially with the weight loss thing, because I was trying really hard to lose weight. And all of a sudden, all the pounds just came off. I feel almost like, whoa, I cheated. And to think that people who suffer from having not being able to lose weight, maybe it's more complex than just throwing body chemistry. Maybe it's this microbiota that they can't get rid of. Right, and again, this is a lot of research is backing up that idea. To the point where it's like all every single one of these bazillion dollar diet fads that we see pass through, come and go, different programs they want to put you on, and you have to buy these certain products to eat this sort of stuff so you can lose the weight, it's sort of, I'm looking, I'm rambling to find the proper analogy.  And I go over there and I say, what are you doing? He says, I lost my key.  And I say, is there a chance you lost it anywhere else? They go, oh yeah, I left it inside the house. But the lighting's bad, it's better out here, so this is where I'm looking. It's as though, it's as though, all of that is futile activity, because the actual location of their issue is someplace much darker, like inside the body. So did you get identification of actual bacteria, like the species of bacteria that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the family species, everything. Yeah, so. So did you find out like how many, eventually it came from your cat? No, but what was kind of interesting and cool, you could see the cats like before and after, and we all kind of met in this place, which was really funny. So like. And the cats were watching me. So they're coming, it might feel better too, yeah. Here's a follow up on that, the difference between you and the donor, are we talking about just different species, or is it different sort of ratios of the same bacteria? Yeah, I mean it's everything, right? So it's hard to just say like different species, because obviously, when you do the 16S sequencing, there's hundreds, thousands of different species, possibly in the sample. So yeah, it's different species, but it's also different ratios. We'll try to break it down in lots of different ways, like diversities of major families, like a lot of people talk about the firmacutes and the bacteroid deadies and all these different things, but it was on many different levels that we were different. Because the other thing that would occur to me too, is it's maybe not even so much that you need to replace it with a different species of bacteria, it could be getting the ratio different, and maybe the reason that the donor's ratio was in this healthier region is because their version of those species are slightly more robust or better competitors, and might be a little bit better at maintaining that ratio. Oh, that's cool. That's cool, yeah, so that's the skin plot. So you can actually see, so the lower numbers are kind of like earlier in the experiment, and the later numbers are later in the experiment, and so you can see like as the experiment progresses, so 61 is the donor, 49 is me, after the hotel stay. So you can see after the hotel stay, before I moved back to the apartment, me and the donor were really, really similar, whereas before the experiment, like 5, 12, 17, I was really, really... Wow, okay, so that's you, okay. Then you can see over on the left-hand side, like 57, 67, that's like the reporter and my girlfriend, and then you can see like 58, 76, 72, 76, that's like me, my girlfriend, and our cats. So that's like after I moved back. So you can see like after the experiment, like things just kind of coalesced to where we all started sharing our microbiomes. But you moved significantly from your initial biome starting point. The graph it shows, you've moved along the x-axis significantly, and while you're maybe not as similar to the donor, like when you're 61 and 49, you're very, very similar. So right after the transplant, super similar. And then you're still kind of in the same y-axis area. Totally. Yeah. Totally, yeah, so like at the end, I wasn't, like once I moved back home, I tried my best to like repopulate my environment with my new bacteria, like, and you know I was like rolling around on the bed and like wiping myself on the couches and stuff, like get my skin bacteria all over it. Oh my gosh. So I have a question too. So somebody was asking in the chat room, if your cats acted differently to you when you got back, but really what that brings up for me that I am fascinated with is if you notice a change in your body odor, or perhaps that might be a question for your girlfriend. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I don't, I actually have not asked anybody that, which maybe I should. Yeah, I don't know, but I, you know, somebody on, I did a Reddit AMA, and somebody asked me if my farts smell different. So I asked people that, and as far as I can tell, no, my farts are still smelling approximately the same. This is fartish.  Here we go. Yeah, so the poop one is really cool because you can see over time, so I'm a little, during the experiment, you can see I'm a little all over the place, 11, 10, 28, 31, but then you can see my microbiome starts to kind of level off, 40, 45, 51, 52, 50, 50, and then you can see 59 and 60, that's the donor, they like basically overlap the right next week. But then you can see my microbiome 50, 52, 53, how it moved like right next to them over time to kind of like be really, really similar as compared to before nine, 19, 11, they're all up in the opposite corner. So coming for the gut microbiota, I'm talking about species and proportions of them, is there anything that you notice like in terms of like, you know, disease causing or inflammation causing bacteria? Are there any links with the species or strains that you had before and what you have moved to now? So hold on, so Ed, the weight loss, it's been kind of the same rate, I haven't really measured the rate, but it's kept going down. I mean, I've been trying to fight against it a little bit to be honest with you, because it's kind of scaring me, so I've been like- Eating the Oreos. Yeah, I've been like a little bit more food, but so it's kind of leveled off around 160, a little under 160 pounds, but it's on this downward trajectory that I've been fighting against. As you were saying, Dr. Kiki, yeah, so like my firmacutis, which has been associated with a lot of different things, it was very different from the donor. But that's just, it's hard to say because it's just like a whole family, like firmacutis is like a whole family of bacteria. I tried to look at more specific genus of bacteria, but I mean, I'm no expert on this stuff. I've been learning as I go and been consulting with some people at MIT, but it's like, it's hard to pinpoint, even in big studies, like what the exact cause is. You know, people say like, look at the Phidobacter or whatever, that's what they put in like Activia and like look at some fake old vector or whatever. But it's, there's so many species of bacteria that it's like hard to pinpoint exactly what is causing this stuff, you know? Right, so really like, what you need to do is like take your data and just give it to some microbiologists who study gut microflora. You know, like there's some data that's come out suggesting that there are like, like microbiota genotypes, that there are like certain groups of people, certain types of people have certain types of microbiota. And so maybe, you know, people who categorize this stuff, maybe they have, maybe somebody have a better insight on it. I think it's one of those things is kind of like trying to understand how our brain works, right? You can focus on one gene and you can say, look, this gene does this thing and it's associated with this. And I think people are starting to do that with the microbiome a little, whether like this bacteria is kind of associated with this, but it's a community, right? A bacteria, the bacteria in your body and your gut, it's a community and each other species can affect each other species through quorum sensing, through a number of different ways. And it's just like, it's one of those things, I don't know if we'll ever really be able to completely grasp in our human minds as opposed to like, look at this graph of like, all these bacteria that connect in like all these different ways and like, here's this thing that does this and maybe this. And there's general trends that people have shown, but like, I don't know. Well, in the short term though, the words of wisdom and that sort of, that half truth, a bit of knowledge that works is this friend of yours, right? Like, we know that worked. We don't, we may not know why. We may not have all the specifics to it yet, but we know generally now, there is definitive links between microbiome, maybe something to the cravings, that you experienced certainly with the metabolism of the food, right? Certainly in preventing inflammations or other issues. So we know that the link is there. And as we narrow it down over time, this is sort of like, perhaps at first, like discovering new exoplanets, you know, plenty of work ahead.  But like, I had to get over that during the experiment because I was taking these samples, fresh samples orally in order to make sure the bacteria were completely preserved. They were in gel. I kind of wanted to ask you about that, but I was afraid. Yeah, how was that? I mean, yeah. Do you put them in gel caps? What did you do? Yeah, yeah, I put them in gel caps. I mean, you get over it pretty fast. You get over it pretty fast just because it's... No choice. Yeah, no choice. Yeah, and you kind of set yourself up in a really good situation where you were so uncomfortable from all the antibiotics that you were like, I will do anything to make this better now. But it was like, so the plan was actually to take the sample, to keep taking fecal samples or FMT transplant from maybe a week or two after, but after the transplant, after I got back home, maybe for a day or something, I took some samples, but then it was just so destroyed. Like, I had heartburn and my body was so tore up. I was just like, I just want to curl up in a ball and lay here, not do anything. And not take poop pills anymore. Yeah. And so I'm so glad it worked out in the end because that was not the original schedule for the pills, but I just like literally, I had zero willpower left to do it. But it would have been terrible to have it not work at all having gone through all that stuff and destroyed your body. Yeah, it would have sucked, but I think that's also kind of part of science. And I think people could have learned from that also and maybe somebody else could have done something better in their experiment in the future to improve upon it. But I think great failures are not necessarily always bad, but you are right. Like, if... Personally, it would have been a bummer. Like, I seriously started crying. I was just like, oh, good Lord, like not only do I feel better, but I'm glad like the data backs it up and I'm glad like this experiment wasn't just like complete suffering for a negative result. Exactly. So what do you, I guess part of Blair's question from way back was like, what do you hope to get people to learn now and like what are you gonna do moving forward? Are you going to do this again?  No, I mean, my goal was kind of just to push the boundaries of stuff, get people talking about like, hey look, this is a possible treatment for people. It can possibly help people. It can possibly change people's lives. And we have strange restrictions for clinical trials and all this other stuff that's preventing people from getting help for lots of reasons. And in literally one month I've gone from struggling to like, you know, my life has improved so much. And obviously it needs further studies. Obviously it needs a lot more things, but it's like, it's trying to show the opportunities out there, not just in this transplant, but in so many drugs and medication and CRISPR and all these things that like we need to really think about, there are people dying all the time, every day suffering all the time, every day. And it's 15, 50 years, 100 years, whatever it's gonna take for that clinical trial to go through really, you know, reasonable. I don't know. Yeah. In the future, I think the skin thing was super cool. And I'm kind of sad, it didn't work because everybody, there was a recent paper that came out in Cell where they didn't, they filed 12 people over like a year and they were like, your skin microbiome doesn't really change that much or something. And obviously I think that's a lot because of recapitulation of your environment, right? Your skin microbiome on your bed, it's everywhere.  But I really, really, really think that it is possible to permanently change my skin microbiome. And like you think of the opportunities, maybe super cheesy things like, what happens if I could have permanent bacterial deodorant?   Why do we have to have bacteria that make us smell bad? Like there's no reason, it's just kind of evolutionarily that's what happened, right? Why don't we have bacteria that make us smell good? Things like that, you know, maybe silly things but maybe better things, you know, bacteria that secrete sunblock or sunblock for our skins or like bacteria that improve our health in some way. But it's like, I really think it's possible to change our skin microbiome more for the long term and I think I'm gonna try to push for an experiment like that in the future. Well, I mean, stuff like that with the, you know, basic microbiology and CRISPR genetic splicing, maybe we can. I mean, we know that hippos release a natural sunblock, you know, so maybe we can find out what gene is responsible for that, put it into a bacterium and then it's just something that goes into a tube that you wipe on yourself before you go out into the sun.  It's natural part of your microbiome, like, why can't our microbiomes evolve? Why can't we? That's a big question, yeah. Also on my big question list is what was the time frame between the donor sample and the gel cap and was the refrigeration involved or? Yeah, so it was a day. So I got the donor sample a day before I started using it and yes, it was refrigerated, so I took it over a period of week, obviously even refrigeration bacteria will grow, so I didn't want to use it for longer than a week. A lot of times what they'll do is they'll mix it with glycerol and they'll freeze it. I really didn't want to freeze it because I felt like even with glycerol it could kill some of the bacteria and I was thinking about it more in terms of a community because the bacteria really are a community so I wanted them all to live and be fresh and healthy. So I got rid of the poop after about a week. I froze some just in case for future use but those ended up getting all tossed and stuff like that but yeah, it was a week just in the fridge. So this is important. So if you're ordering Dr. Justin's, not a real doctor, poop pills, they're gonna be sent an express next day mail, already in capsule form and you have to take them immediately as soon as you receive them. This is a really good food source for bacteria. So they should survive in the mail, right? They should be okay. Right, exactly. Oh my goodness. All right, the show is running long. We still have some more science to go. Josiah, thank you for telling us your story and I hope that this moves, like I think it'll open up at least some interesting conversations about do-it-yourself microbiome stuff for the fecal microbiome transplants and even for testing people figuring out what's in their environment and doing stuff on their own and there's the book and everybody poops, so. I'd ask the, have anybody contacted me? It's interesting because the academics are so, I mean I won't mention any names or anything like that but the academics, they don't want you to mention them. I've had help from another number of academics and like talking to academics about these experiments but they're all like, don't tell anybody, like everybody wants to, don't tell anybody I'm involved with this crazy guy, it might affect my career or something like that. So, but yeah, no, I have been talking with serious researchers about this project and about the outcomes and how that can be lead into future studies, so for sure. Absolutely. All right everyone, this is This Week in Science. We've got some more science.  I was gonna send this into a second break, but. You're gonna send this into a note. There's no time for breaks.  I wanna get through these last stories in in under 10 minutes. Let's do this. If you try to catch a lizard by the tail, you're likely to end up with a lizard's tail as the rest of the lizard scampers away unharmed, though momentarily tailless, only to soon start growing a new tail. It's one of nature's most unique defense mechanisms. It's also one of our greatest potential treasures. If we could harness the power of regeneration in humans, we too might one day be able to grow tails. In a study published in the scientific journal BMC Genomics, Arizona State University in Translational Genomics Research Institute Scientist for the first time identified three microRNAs, which turned genes on and off and are associated with the regeneration of tails in the green anole lizard. Using next generation genomic and computer analysis, the interdisciplinary team of scientists hope their findings will lead to discoveries of new therapeutic approaches to switch on regeneration in humans.  Actually, the finger back, but one of the things, and I guess, this is one of those things is one of the parts of the human body that doesn't regrow easily is cartilage and specifically knee cartilage. One of their main focuses here is to find a way to utilize these genes in the therapy that could regrow knee cartilage and spinal tissue. Oh, that's a spinal tissue would be a big one, yeah. Major accidents type thing. So they've identified them and the next steps in the process is to figure out a way to utilize them. Hey, Blair, you had a story about lizards. You wanna follow up with lizards? I have a story about reptiles. Reptiles. So this is, I just have a couple stories about public perception. So the reptile story is pretty interesting. Researchers from Oxford University and Tel Aviv University looked through good old Wikipedia and they were looking for what the most popular quote-unquote reptile species were by search. And... Iguana, Iguana, Iguana, Iguana. Komodo dragon. Komodo dragon is number one in all languages. Wow. So the idea is that probably has to do with the fact that it's a quote dragon. So it has to do with mythical interests as well as sci-fi, fantasy, and then also natural stuff too. But the overarching thing that was very interesting was the top 10 reptiles based on English, for example, were the Komodo dragon, Black Mamba, Saltwater crocodile, King Cobra, Gila monster, Cottonmouth viper, American alligator, Leatherback sea turtle, Nile crocodile, Boa constrictor. Now all of those animals, except for perhaps number eight, the Leatherback sea turtle, and number 10, the Boa constrictor could kill you. So overall, and this happened in all the languages they looked at, most of the reptiles searched for were super dangerous. And in the article and in the paper, they talk a lot about how this relates to kind of just looking at public perception and where you spend your conservation dollars. Maybe public opinion should go into that. Overall, they also found it interesting because it covered a wide swath of the families. About 67% of the 88 reptile families were covered by these top species. So they spanned this huge amount. It wasn't all in one area. What I see when I see this study is the reason that reptiles get such a bad rap. There are so many people afraid of reptiles and people that don't wanna save reptiles.  They don't think about going herping and just looking under logs. Yeah. No, they don't wanna catch little skinks. They're worried about getting their leg bit off by a Komodo dragon. So I think this is very interesting because that also didn't go into any of the reporting that I saw about this article at all. Nobody mentioned the fact that this might be the direct cause for the bad rap that reptiles get. And it's not the Komodo dragon's bite that kills you. It's the anthrax infestation. Right. Nope. Recent study just about five years ago found out it was actually venom. Venom. Yeah, so all these years we've been saying no, it's all these bacteria in their mouth just about five years ago. Venom. So moving on from the public perception, don't you think kids would find those things scary? What a great segue, Kiki. So this is, I am so excited for the story. This might be one of my favorite stories of this year so far. So a study out of North Carolina State University pulled adults, pulled students and pulled conservation scientists on what the priority of conservation topics are based on different categories of species. So the five categories were species with declining numbers, species that are important in nature, wild animals that live nowhere else but in North Carolina, so endemic species, wild animals that people like to watch and wild animals that people like to eat. So it was 400 third and fifth graders from 16 public schools were surveyed to see where they would put their conservation dollars. They were actually told to divide a set amount of money over these conservation efforts for wildlife in each of the categories. And they had, conservation scientists do this, they had adults do it and they had these students do it. And what they found was that the children's rankings looked a lot like the rankings of the conservation biologists and the kids top priorities and the ones that they sent most money to were species with rapid population declines and then species that had important ecological roles. Adults actually had completely different priorities with endemic species at the very top. So this is interesting on a couple levels. First being kids know way more than we give them credit. Once again, kids know what's important. And then on top of that, the question that I would be very interested to find out is do they lose that as they grow up or is it a generational difference? And if it's a generational difference, that means we have a huge win in conservation education. We're actually teaching kids a lot. That's an interesting point. Yeah, maybe we are teaching better. Maybe the educational programs are improved from decades ago. Yeah, but if they're losing that information, that's also a really important thing to look at and find out why and how we can talk to adults about this to keep their interest in what's important. So I know you follow the C-stars a lot and you've talked a lot about C-star wasting disease. There is news out now that there's high survival for C-star larva on the off of the Pacific Northwest. So data from Oregon State University suggests they might be making a comeback from the wasting disease researcher. Bruce Menge said in a statement when we looked at the settlement of the larval C-stars on rocks in 2014 during the epidemic. It was the same, or maybe even a bit lower than previous years, but a few months later, the number of juveniles was off the charts higher than we've ever seen as much as 300 times normal. So potentially this is a big win for C-stars. Hey, Justin, did you have a story about brains or something, memory? Yeah, so they made a connection between a particular gene that produces a protein that may be involved with Alzheimer's. It says here, when we experience something new, cells in the hippocampus fire in a particular order. Later, these same cells fire over and over again in the same order to repeat the event which helps consolidate the memory so that we don't just forget it. Meanwhile, slow gamma activity occurs during those ripples of activity that organizes the firing of the cells. If this activity is disrupted, the playback will be disorganized compromising the memory. The slow gamma is sort of like correcting. It's sort of like the person who's there off stage during a play when somebody forgets their line and pauses a little too pregnancy who whispers the correct, oh yeah, I know where I'm at. Okay, and then I continue going again. So they found this E-APO E4 protein sort of changes the activity of the hippocampus and mostly in the slow gamma. So the ripples, the replays are still taking place, but it's that slow, that sort of correcting for Mrs. Slow Gamma that seems to be impacted by this. And so researchers hope that now that they know the slow gamma activity is being disrupted and what could amount to 80% of Alzheimer's cases, this is something that they can now look to correct. Right, because if you have a target, like a gene, then you potentially can make a drug for it or some kind of drug. You don't have to necessarily counter, you just need to counter the protein that this gene is enabling to be produced, right? So it's either knocking it out or supplementing with something else. So there may be ways to attack this. And my final story for tonight is related to sleep as we get to the end of the show. I hope you're not sleeping, but if you are or if you're getting ready to sleep, maybe you're using an app or if you're planning on traveling someplace where jet lag might be involved. A sleep app? Yeah, there are sleep apps. You can use your phone or wearable tech to track your movement. No, to track your movement and kind of figure out when you're sleeping and when you're awake. Because human reporting of their sleep activity has been shown in laboratories time and time again to be entirely flawed. People think that, oh, I only slept an hour last night. I got up 40 times. No, you slept seven and a half hours, you were fine. So if you go to, very often the labs have a much different finding from what your actual perception or observation of your night's sleep is. So technology is allowing researchers to move forward outside of the lab because what they really wanna do is get real world information. How does sleep happen outside of the lab? Because a lab is a weird environment. How do people act in the real world? So University of Michigan researchers launched Entrain, E-N-T-R-A-I-N in 2014 and it's a free jet lag hacking app that gives you help in making your circadian clock match the time zone that you're traveling to. So it basically tells you when to turn off the lights and when to turn on the lights, when you should go to sleep and when you should wake up so that you can change your circadian clock and not suffer from jet lag as much. So they put this free app out there into the wild in 2014. A bunch of people downloaded it and started putting their data in. Researchers went, yay, data. And so they analyzed it. And basically they found that people were motivated to give good data because good data helped them get over their jet lag a lot faster and they were able to validate basically laboratory findings. So they were able to say, hey, we know what happens in laboratories and we just confirmed it with our data from all these individuals. So it's one of the first to quantify influences on sleep. It's a really interesting study and it's in science frontiers or science advances. That's where it is, science advances. Anyway, using technology to quantify sleep and help researchers learn more. I just know Einstein only slept three hours a year, right? A year, right. He could never have gotten all that thinking done if he ever slept more. Yeah, so apps like this might be really important for researchers. So this kind of biohacking stuff that's outside of corporations because corporate interests very often don't want to share their data with anybody. So there's all this data that's being collected but only being used for the good of the corporation and not necessarily towards understanding of sleep and helping people who work, do shift work or travel a lot or have strange or regular hours for whatever reasons. Wait to post Dr. Diki down with the corporation. I'd be happy to see what this app said because essentially what the classical wisdom is with jet lag and what I've always done that's usually gotten me turned around in a couple days is you just stay awake when people are supposed to be awake where you are and you try to sleep when people are supposed to be asleep where you are. Yes, but so there were a couple of interesting findings from this study. They found that people in Singapore and Brazil they stay up late and they wake at sunrise but so Australians go to bed earlier and then wake up at sunrise so they get more sleep and so they're finding that there are societal or cultural forces that dictate people's bed times and this is only something that you'd really find in with a global app. Yeah, that's very interesting. I hadn't even really thought about that. That makes a lot of sense. If you're in a place where bars don't close until 4 a.m. Right, New York City. Yeah, exactly. Singapore, Brazil, New York City, what are you up doing at night?  Very interesting society. Society influences us at many levels. Hey Josiah, when or where, not when, but where can people find you and ask you questions or send you ideas? You can find me on Facebook especially, that's a really good place. Just look up my name, Josiah Zainer or Jay Maddog Zainer. I think they both lead to this, just joking. Perfect. You can find me through my company, The Oden. If you ever want to do biohacking, just shoot me an email, The Oden We Rock. We're a biohacking collaborative and also company that tries to make science more accessible. But yeah, just hit me up on Facebook, that's probably the best place, if you're not my G-Chat friend and if I find your message, I will try my best to respond sober. That's a good goal, good things to try. All right everybody, Josiah, thank you so much for your time here tonight and for joining us, it was fun talking to you. It was super cool.  I'm doing good, that's the cool thing, I'm really doing really good and so I don't plan on it at all. That's awesome, that's great, that's great. All right everybody, we have come to the end of the show, I want to thank you all for joining us tonight and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Paul Disney, Kevin Parachan, Keith Corsale, Steve DeBell, Melissa Mosley, Jesse Moreno, Patrick O'Keefe, Jason Schneiderman, Rudy Garcia, Gerald Sorrells, Greg Guthman, Alex Wilson, Dave Neighbor, Jason Dosier, Matthew Litwin, Eric Knapp, Jason Roberts, Patrick Cohn, Chris Clark, Richard Onimus, John Ratnissnaughts, John Ratnisswamy, Byron Lee, E.O. 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For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts as well as other listeners. Yeah, you can also hit us up directly. Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. Justin at twistminion at gmail.com. Or Blair at BlairBazza at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in the subject line, or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twistscience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or undress, a suggestion for an interview at Haiku that comes to you in the night. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from today's show, remember... It's all in your head. Don't try this at home. 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This Week in Science. I have to show my special graphic break. Oh, right. I have our favorite book. Ag. Nice. I want some. What is it? Oh. His scotch he's drinking. Love for Ag. Nice. I've got some. Do I have some Loughwag downstairs? I might have some Loughwag. I've also got Obon, I think. Oh, are you serious? Obon's like my favorite. I know. It's so good, isn't it? Yummy. This Week in Scotch Whiskey. I don't know if Yoda has a story yet. He said he helped me increase my Medichlorian count if you know what I mean. I think he did help. Did you have to sterilize Yoda? I didn't hang out with Yoda much. Yeah, not at all. It was always weird, so there's this funny part. So originally, I was just going to do this experiment. And I was just talking to people about it. And they talk to people, and people talk to people. And people are like, oh, yeah, we want to write a story. And oh, yeah, we want to video document this for me. And I was like, oh, sure. I didn't really know what went into that that's never really happened. So at this one point, we're sitting there. The hotel room door is open. And I'm like, if you saw the picture on the verge, I'm there with no pants on. I have that top-on in gloves and a room cleaning lady walks by and looks in. And she's like, what is going on? What is going on? There's some dude in gloves cleaning the hotel room in a gown. Oh, it was pretty funny. That would be the weirdest thing. You order pizza for delivery. Did you get food delivered to your room while you were there? So it's like the guy, the person who delivers it, is like, hey, you're like, hey. I tried not to let people in because there was a bag. Everybody who came in had to put on PPE. They had to put on gloves, booties, and everything like that. Oh, my gosh. I was trying to keep it at least somewhat sterile.  So I can't even imagine what cleaning people thought. There's this huge bag. You leave a nice house cleaning tip? Booties and like, oh, my gosh.  Either that or you were part of that kidney harvesting ring. Oh, god. Oh, yeah. I'm wondering if they called the cops. They're looking for ice cubes in the bathtub. They called the cops. This is the children's book, Explaining Farts. That's what I'm showing you right now. I appreciate it. I think it's an apropos choice. Made me think of it. The gas we pass. So here's a question. So we were talking about not just like microbiome engineering, but also other stuff. Would you ever get yourself like, if they found a gene that could say like, I don't know, make you smarter. Yes. I'd do it. Yes. Would you get CRISPR genetic engineered? Absolutely. Without hesitation. Yes. No, really? Make you smarter? I would without hesitation. Would that change your personality a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. I'd be much more effective in my community. I don't know if I want my personality to change. Look, I wouldn't mind it. Because of all the things that they talk about, alterations of this, that, and the other, nothing seems to me absolutely more useful and more desirable than greater intelligence. And I think that. But is it worth the risk of losing your intelligence to try to get more intelligence? Yes. So if there were a slight risk of something going wrong. You run into that every time you pick up a book. It could be an author who's using bad information or terrible writing or getting into a television show that you think is really exciting for the first couple of seasons that you cram it on Netflix, only to realize you're in season six and you've been watching a soap opera. This many hours of your life have been wasted on a soap opera. It's no longer about zombies or political arenas or Viking history. It's now a soap opera about personalities and family vendettas. And you're like, ah. I should have seen this coming. No, without hesitation, I would say yes. Are you talking about The Walking Dead? Well, all of them. All of them. Every one of the. I thought Walking Dead went soap opera in season three. Actually, that's one I didn't watch. But everybody, it was actually a confession a friend made to me. It's like, I'm like, I couldn't watch it. I'm freaked out, but I can't watch horror films either. I don't want to see surgery movies. I don't want to see exposed human innards. I actually can't watch. I can't walk by the shop at work where they're working on cars, because I don't even like to see the hood up on a car and see all the inner workings. I'm very screwed about. It's the same thing as watching a video when they're doing open heart surgery or something. Oh my god. You heard it here first. Your car salesman knows nothing about what's under the hood. Nothing. Nothing. Just let it goes, and you'll be very happy with it.  You won't get sick. But I feel like intelligence is one of those resources that I'm always wishing that I had more access to. So yeah, of course I would. I don't even know what the therapy is. Just the headline got me. That was all it took. Yes, yes, I'll do it. Would you, Josiah? I mean, you've already done the DIY microbiome, but would you change your genes, if you could? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I would say yes. But I also, I kind of have that feeling like Blair, where it's almost like I'm scared of losing myself. But at the same time, I would totally want to do it like Justin. But at the other time, I'm like, man, well, I'm going to lose who I am. I'm in between Justin and Blair. Right, so here's the thing I would, here's the analogy that we've used previously on the show that I would use for this. Everybody's like, oh, I love my toddler. My toddler's so cute. They say amazing things and everything else. If you had to choose to give your toddler the intelligence that required for them to continue to grow and become an adult, then a teenager where everything goes back to square one, and then they retain reason again. With that question, it would be like child abuse, not to allow them to continue on the path of increased intelligence. And the analogy is, well, what if you had the ability to offer this to your family pet?  And so now you have this choice, like, do I? You're saying no. I get it. I get it. You're saying no. And my dog has her shortcomings, but no. In the context of a pet, it's easier to say no than it is in the context of a toddler. But if you, well, OK, maybe not for you, but for the rest of us black. Here's a good thing.  She's neurotic. So what happens if they were like, well, you could do this genetic engineering thing that'll make your family neurotic? Yeah. So if you could increase intelligence. And then looking back, we can always say we've loved being this freedom of personality that goes with our intelligence. We're like a river. We cut through mountains, and we forge the valleys. We make our path. But then at some point, we reach our maximum intellectual capacity. And we sort of become this marshy land, this swamp, if you will. Or just a little bit. There's no such thing. We've talked about that on the show, that there's no mental capacity. Well, there isn't. But maybe we're reaching the number of things that we can handle thinking about and considering it a daily basis, however you want to put it. But we couldn't just like this pool of intelligence that's sitting there. And to me, being able to increase intelligence, is I get the fear.  It just goes away. Well, that's what happens in the lake. We evaporate that same water, that same personality that forged this path that led to this lake. And then we hit this new mountaintop, and we come down as rain, and we form this new river that we never even experienced before. So I'm like, yeah, we would just be continuing the same path we were already on. It's not an alteration. I have no idea how you didn't do this microbiome transplant before me. Yeah. No, the reason is because I honestly don't need it. I am a five minute in the bathroom, done and out. The pinnacle of being successful.  I cut the bread. Yeah. I've been 165-ish pounds for like 28, 30 years or something like this. I've been like the same. I forgot to ask you. I can eat everything and anything. I can eat fast food diets like binge-worthy. I can eat fatty foods. I can drink beer. I can do all of these things. And my weight doesn't fluctuate at all, and I'm still an efficient pooper. This is why I was so devastated for the month after the antibiotics because I had never experienced having to sit and wait for something to happen before. Like this is never where people are like, ah, you've got to bring the newspaper in there or something like, what are you talking about? Why are you hanging out for some duration of time after you've finished? Like you just go and you leave, right? So this is why I've never done it. It's literally, it could only have been a downgrade. Yeah, so all you need are the pill casings, and you're in business. That's what I'm saying. I do one day mail, right? Pill casings, one day mail. The name here is the making, right there. Not Dr. Justin. Dr. Justin, not a real Dr. Spookpills. This is the... He also sells snake oil. No, but I mean, right? There's all these things that sell, that are like homeopathy, vitamins, all these things that don't have to be approved by the FDA. I don't know what poop. I don't even know if it's qualified yet. No, it is, it is, it absolutely is. It's super litigious. It's a bio-hazard, yeah. That's what I was gonna say. Technically, you can't send it through the mail. Technically, you can't put it in your trash. Technically, it can't even go into your garden. Technically, you can't put this anywhere. And the reason behind it is the thinking that if somebody is sick, if somebody's ill, if you have a virus or disease or something, you don't want that to proliferate, so you gotta keep it completely out of society. So Dr. Justin's poop pills will come in a nondescript envelope that's definitely not a biohazard. You can freeze it. What happens if you lyophilize it, like freeze dry it? Is it still poop? Does it still count? So no, at some point you can actually, I think, call it fertilizer. There's gotta be just enough of a tweak. Like, at least that's how a, what do you call it? A solar, what's the thing when a solar septic system is designed where the poop basically slides down and has a glass thing where the sun hits it, turns it, dries it, and turns it into soil. So at the end of the process, you can put that in your garden because that's now soil, technically. Because the sun has irradiated it and the heat has also done its job in killing the bacteria, so it doesn't have the same. But then that means it's no good, yeah. So there's gotta be somewhere in between where you can. Well companies like Activia are making a ton of money selling people yogurt with one species of bacteria. So like, there's gotta be some, you know, that's where I was, it was the original plan for the experiment was to sell people my poop. I'm joking completely. But no, I've been talking about this on the show for like a year or two, like this is gonna happen one day, you're gonna be able, if you donate at the $20 a month level, I will send you under the counter. I am not endorsing over at all. Omeopathic nondescript pill, please do not open it. For $20 just in, jeez. What, is that too much? No. Oh, because I mean, I was gonna say there's a lot of prep work involved. Because before it was very concerned about selling your genetics to people. No, it wasn't. I was trying to sell my Catholic body count. Hang on, no, no, what are you talking about? I would show, I would gladly share my 23 and me with the audience, I don't care. No, this is number two in me. Number two in me. Number two in you, it's number two in you. My number two in you, that's the second website. My number two in you.com.  My, in you, in you, in you. Sorry. Oh my God, that's Pugert, oh my God. Oh, I was, Dave, I was about to say writer's on the storm. Writer's on the storm is my favorite door song. Actually, it's one of my favorite songs of all time. Because once you hear Jim Morrison whispering the lyrics over the lyrics or under the lyrics, you can't not hear it. Most people don't know. It has a little bit of a chilling effect when you're just listening to the song. Writer's on the storm, right? But if you listen to it again and know what I've just told you that he's also going, writer's on the storm. He's whispering over, under the lyric. You can't not hear it from that point on. And from that point on, all you hear is that whispering. You're like, how did I not always hear that in that song? That's so weird that it's always been there. And I've never. Justin, you're missing this. Oh, what's happening? How much is Twist Poop worth for a picture filled room? No, I said, I said $20 a month. You said $20, I said I wasn't hired enough. Each month you'll get a sample set. But you have to make sure you're there. You gotta tell me when you're there. It's gonna be next day of mail. You gotta take it immediately because you don't have like, or I could maybe pack it in ice cubes. I don't really know. I'll figure this out. I like Identity Force comment. I'll pay per episode to not get them in the mail. If you have a mailing address, I will be sending you an unsolicited. Aw. No, no. That is not what our Patreon sponsors get in return. So, when you can get a piece of art. But you can get a piece of art made by Blair. There's some of my microbiome on that. Touched by Blair. Oh, Ben Rothig. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. This is all, this is all toilet humor. There was something in the rundown that referred to John Oliver's reign. Oh, yeah, I watched that. I put it in there and said that I wanted to save it for the after show. So, this rant is something that I think we may have talked about a few times on this show. But it's one of the categories that we, when we bring it up, we also tend to mock it a little bit, which is, and largely they were focused on things that cure cancer and nutrition. Dietary advice. That's given, this is the science news that makes it to the mainstream media type vehicle, which tells you that eggs cause diabetes, coffee cures cancer, and. Oh, no, wait, coffee's bad for you. Oh, no, wait, coffee's good for you. Too many cups of coffee is good for you. Not enough is bad for you. And then, right, and it's this, it's the, these are the stories. Versus causation. And these are the stories that we don't bring you, because we could literally call this, this week in science cures possibly maybe down the road. We could call the show that because we've been doing this over a decade and it's been that story has been in the scientific press releases every single week. Yeah, which we do sometimes bring it, but we'll bring it to talk about that, especially if it's something that is resonated in the news a lot, then sometimes we'll bring it up to talk about that. Sometimes we'll bring it about, talk about that. And sometimes we bring about it, bring it up because it is an actual like novel approach, right? Or it is something that seems more break, groundbreaking than the rest and is more interesting in the amount of, or the weight of the scientific effort behind it. But in general, so many of the dietary things, and I've said this many times on the show, we've all talked about this many times on the show. Anybody who gives nutrition or diet advice and claims to know how this affects your body knows nothing. And the experiment, the reason for it is what we've been talking about on this show, Josiah, is your experiment. It was so unrelated to your diet, these changes that took place. And you were quick to note that you can't claim to know exactly why it worked, right? And so anybody who says this type of diet because people had this diet a hundred years ago or because this was tried at this commune once where they only ate this type, whatever it is, they really don't know the full cascade of data that's involved with it, so. I'm gluten intolerant, no, I gotta eat a paleo diet. Ah, no, no. Okay, to the gluten intolerant crowd, that's a real thing, though, that's a real thing. Not to the majority of people who have the bread. Not to the majority of people, the people who actually have that could die from gluten. Oh, absolutely. If you have your little leg movements because you had a piece of bread, it's probably not the bread. It's something else. Well, but also. If you were gluten intolerant, you would be almost dead from the piece of bread. Like, this is how bad the actual disease is.  And I eat a whole wheel of cheese, I might enjoy the process because I love cheese, but I am not gonna feel so great later. Unless you have been taking Dr. Justin's not a Dr. Pooh Pills because I can actually do that without any backlash. Well, I can. I can go for a vat of sour cream just like crackers, chips, whatever it is. And no effect. The wings taste the same, the guts fine, gallon ice cream, doesn't matter. Process food, I could eat McDonald's for, I could do that, what was that, sicko, what was the one where you just ate the McDonald's for a month? Oh, yeah. Super size me. Super size me. I could do that diet and just be fine. I don't know if you could though because he did actually supersize his meal every time they said, do you wanna supersize that? And he finished it whether he was full or not.  And to be fair, you're right, he did something that is as extreme as my diet can be and eating healthy food or unhealthy food or whatever you wanna call it. One of the things I don't do is I don't drink soda. I don't really have, I occasionally do, but I don't have a big affinity for it. So I don't do it on any sort of regular basis. So that might be one of those things that could have altered my microbiome if I was ingesting the same food over and over again. But where did this start? Oh yeah, so John Oliver does this fantastic rant where he's calling out the ridiculousness of the science that is being reported. I think the bottom line of it is that people are digesting their science news the same way they're digesting their pop culture and their current events. And that's in small sound bites that has been dumbed down and filtered several times. And in the case of some of the stories that they were reporting on, completely different than even the one off study. So if somebody even wrote a story, I think it was in the Washington Post about what I did. And they were relating it to this paper and cell. They're like, Josiah's experiment showed that his skin microbiota didn't change at all and that agrees with the cell study that showed your skin microbiota doesn't really change over time. And I was like, no, that's not what happened. That's not what happened. Did you look at the data? Like, can I talk to you about the data? You didn't even email me. You didn't even try to talk to me. Like, come on. You just wrote this story based off of a brief sentence somebody else wrote in another article. Yeah, and there's so much to take into account. One of the big things that he talked about, too, that he kind of glossed over a little bit but still mentioned is sample size, which is obviously a really important piece, right? And that's, we do try to mention on the show whenever we can if there's a very small sample size because then it's kind of just more of an anecdotal like, oh, look at this, maybe this needs looking at. The other thing I really liked from that piece was talking about how there's not a lot of funding or support or like sex appeal to doing repetitive studies, which is so important. And I was surprised by that. That's what science is based on, replication. Science might be based on it, but I thought really undergraduate studies was based on this, like I thought undergrads, like the whole point of being an undergrad was to try to replicate a grad student's study, like and see if you could confirm or deny their result. Like that seems like that should be the emphasis. Wouldn't it be fantastic though to, I mean for those of you, occasionally we throw out their sort of PhD thesis bait. Here's a great one, pick four or five one-off studies and recreate them and make that your thesis is the repeatability of other science that's going on out there, yeah. Well, and we have done, we have reported on stories of people trying to reproduce studies and obviously one of my favorites was when they say there's 97% consensus about climate change amongst climate scientists and a group of researchers actually took that 3% of studies that didn't agree and tried to replicate them and couldn't replicate any of them. But to be fair, to be fair, they may have been able to take 3% of the 90% and not been able to replicate them. But I think the point is too that there does need to be this effort made. And it does take place if there's a financial will to do it and the financial will to do it tends to be in pharmaceuticals. So when something has pharmaceutical potential, then you're gonna see attempts at replication, you're gonna see it attempt to move forward so that they can market a drug and those a lot of the time don't make it. They don't always make it from mouse demand. But for much of this, I loved one of the ones in the rant that John Oliver did was about dehydration being as bad as drug driving. Oh yeah, hilarious. And it was the 20 person sample and it also was like, I'm saying like, it was funded, sponsored by the rehydration committee of some subsidiary of Coca-Cola. This is exactly who you don't want doing this study. Whenever somebody's trying to sell you something or recommend you something, a lot of the time you look into where that, where, who is talking to me right now? Where is this information coming from?  You look at the carrier of that story, right? And then you decide, then you make your first snap judgment of whether you think that story is correct. And then you look deeper, right, beyond the headline. So I think it's just, there's a couple things going on. One is reminding people to look at the funders, look at the sample size, look at the procedure, look at the actual meat of what's being said and maybe the headline doesn't have anything to do with what the research actually was. But then beyond that, if I'm a morning talk show and I bring scientists say, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, don't cite my information, don't provide where my watchers or listeners can then find the information themselves, that's the part of this that I think is really lacking is that if I tune in to a morning show on television and they tell me coffee cures cancer and then they move on, it's really hard. What am I gonna do then? Just Google coffee cures cancer.  That won't explain what's going on. Yeah, sometimes it's so hard to find the original paper. They won't cite it. They won't put it anywhere in the article. You search through everything just to find and you won't be able to find it. Find that you'll come upon it and it'll say something completely different.  So my first act of terrorism would be, take this invent of gizais that, this sort of genetic therapy that makes people more intelligent and arbitrarily sneak it into water supplies.  That's a good plot for a movie or something. That's a good plot for a movie. Let's just kick back and see the results as they butterfly out through society of people, the general public, having higher intelligence and going, no, and it could even be like in the water supply of the announcer who's doing the story. Like, and so research would say coffee cures cancer and whoever wrote this is obviously skipping a lot of detail because I'm sure it's much more complicated than the information I just delivered to you and it's probably largely BS, but so yeah, take it what you will. That would be a fun experiment. I think there's a leader report without withholding information. I think you can say something like, you know, coffee cures cancer or in a study with rats where 80% of rats who were given caffeine in caffeine pill form had less cancer growth. I think that's fine. You can still report. I mean, it would be better if you didn't say coffee cures cancer, but let's be honest here. Are we going to change the media completely? No, we are not. No. They're still going to want those attention grabbers to talk about their content. Do you remember the study that had to do with the dark chocolate makes you lose weight? Yes, yes, and we had the whole, was that the same one where we had for a couple of weeks we talked about the controversy? Yeah, well it was a journalist who basically set the whole thing up and did this documentary and the whole scientific story was trumped up. Like he made the whole thing up, but newspapers, like at first a German newspaper or magazine picked it up and then some other outlet picked it up and then it was in self and shape and cosmopolitan and all these other outlets just started, oh chocolate makes you lose weight, but nobody had the reference. Like it just basically came out of thin air in this German newspaper. Right, and it also occurs to me that the rats in these experiments or the mice, depending, knew more about the experiment than the general public who were told about the result. Right, the rats of NIM. Yeah, so what's that like the general public? The rats of NIM, they were drinking the genetically doped water, right?   Oh right, yeah, that was like a whole other level of, so then all of our experimentation has to be gone back and looked at and determined the sex of the researcher, the ambient temperature of the room, the, what's, if there were any other environmental factors. Well, we were talking about, we were talking to the Jackson Labs researchers who provide these mice a week ago, two weeks ago, a week ago. And one of the things that occurs to me is we actually need a maximum standard for the handling of laboratory animals. I mean, and it can be above that basic husbandry that people want to feel good about animal research, but there also has to be a maximum for the results to mean anything compared to any other study that's been done. They have to be even more tightly controlled than they are now. They'll just give us better data. Somebody had asked earlier how bacteria survive a trip through the stomach, the acid environment of the stomach. And it turns out that bacteria produce amino acid decarboxylases to keep cytoplasmic pH above dangerous levels. They're periplasmic space, though. They have pH responsive proteins. There are certain species that have pH responsive proteins that are triggered by low pH and they will protonate acidic residues to shift. Yeah, they've got enzymes and they've got stuff that basically they're like, dude, acid, what? You're having some knowledge right there. There we go. Also they don't always have to because they're there. And in fact, there's some bacteria that sort of rely on harder to digest food, making it further down the digestive crack so that they have something to feed upon. Like, there's... Right, but then how do they get there without being dissolved and destroyed by the stomach? That's the question. And so basically, H. pylori also uses urease to break down, which is alkaline and neutralizes the acid around the bacteria. So basically they change their local area.  Boom, here we go. Knowledge, boom, boom. I think that was an interesting question. I had to find out. No bombs, no bombs, no bombs, no bombs, no bombs. No bombs. Identity four, you're funny. What are you guys? Variables. Periplasmic, it was pretty good, pretty good. What was your word? Yeah, what was your word from your story from earlier? It was... Eposomatic? No, but related to that. Oh! The two words, two words together. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which just made me think of just like slouching down the street. I can find it. Progressive nonchalance or nonchalant? Something with nonchalance for sure, Ellen. Nonchalance continuum? That's it, the nonchalance continuum. That's my, I think that's my favorite phrase from this show. Oh my goodness. Yeah, somebody said that was their new band name. It's good, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right, you guys, it's 10.30, Justin's not here. So, here he is. He's a raster, just like, I'm out, drop the mic. He's like, yeah, he's like, I gotta go do something. Maybe he's, yeah, he's taking one of those five minute breaks. Uh-huh, those little five minute breaks. He's like, this is a chance. Kiki's talking, I don't have to be here anymore. Yeah. Way to go. Yeah, way to go. I know, that's what I was gonna say, hot rod. Justin's not here, we should all leave. Yes, I'm pretty sure we've done that before. Where'd everybody go? I'm pretty sure that would not be the first time. I know for a fact, I've done that when it was just the two of us before, that I was saying goodnight and he was like, no wait, and then he left and then I just, all right, goodnight everybody. No, that's not what he's doing, Dave, that's not what he's doing. He's making some pills. He's like, I gotta get on this. Dr. Justin, not a doctor, not a real doctor. Poo pill. This is awesome. No, it's crazy how severely they screen these pills, like open biome and places like that. Like, I didn't, I just did, you know, I went and took their survey to see if I could be a donor just to see what questions they ask and it's like, everything. It's like, you could be a blood donor way easier than you could be a poop donor. Wow, that's fascinating.  So like, there's so many other different things that go into it, it's, wow. I mean, I guess the question is like, whether or not the poop is bad. I mean, it's a waste product, it's got lots of bacteria, so you don't really normally wanna eat it because of all those bacteria, because you don't know what kinds of bacteria are in it. Although, there are lots of situations. Yeah, coprophagy is broadly distributed across the animal kingdom.  So maybe poop has a bad rap, you guys. No, I'm fine with that. I was thinking about that during the experiment. I was like, why are we so disgusted by this? Like, you know, after having to be so intimate with it, like, I was trying to wrap my head around, like, why are we so disgusted by this? Like, what is it, the smell, is it the texture, what gives it that quality that just makes us, like, hate it, I don't know. Because once you get over those things, once you get over those things, it's kind of like, like now, so many people have read that story that was on the verge of like, oh, like gross, but cool, don't read this during lunch. But like, to me, it's like, oh, it's gross in it. Like, I didn't even notice anything gross. Like, is there something gross in there? I don't know. I mean, we definitely are habituated to think of it as gross.  See, and for me, I still find, I still find human poop to be, in theory, gross. But I have dealt with animals. I have dealt with every other type on the planet, practically. We used to have a game at our annual volunteer parties where you had to guess the poop and figure out which animal it was from. It was like, I have gotten intimately aware of the different types of poop there are on the planet. But yes, I still have, I'm a little grossed out when I think about having a kid and like, having to be touching like the gooey, runny poop. That sounds gross to me, but it's, you know, I've had grizzly bear poop under my fingernails and my gloves and my bags broke. Like, that was no big deal. Just washed my hands, washed my hands a couple more times, had lunch, like, whatever, right? I literally got, Aaron was changing an explosive diaper today, and she peeked around the corner with poo on her finger, and I was like, I need a little help. Hello. There wasn't a textbook change that's taking place over here. You need a little help. Pooh finger, fantastic, right? It's kind of interesting to say that, like, I am more terrified with my knowledge of toxoplasmosis, of cat poo than I am of any other poo, any other poo rates where poo likely should, but cat poo has this sort of like, neon red danger sign above it. Like, ah, this is, this infection, vector, run. All right, so, there may be something from our human history of, you know, disease transfer, something like that. I'm sure, I think that's very much what it is, is that it is a source of disease, and so unless you're an animal who, yeah. Yeah, and I think very, very often it is. More than what? Like sex, more than other things? Like, I don't know, right? I don't know, when we talk about places where disease, cholera and diseases that we don't really have in the first world anymore, it's because of sanitation. So it's because of having a place to put your poo and have your poo taken away. Being able to wash your hands, it's because of, you know, sanitation has played a major role in getting rid of disease. Totally. And there's also the difference like, your own byproduct, as you look back, you're like, oh, that's what that was, that just came out of me. Blush, right? The kid, the three old, making poo potty. Oh my gosh, this is a source of pride and joy seeing this, right? Going into a public restroom where somebody has left a deposit and not gotten it out of the way. Oh, what are you, oh, this is horrible. I gotta do this, this is my whole experience has now been affected by this, right? Like, we will have a different take. It's not generalized, it's very specific. I have a question, can you eat a diet where you never have to poop? No, I don't think so. I think you can reduce it a great deal, but I don't think you can. I don't think it's healthy. Too much of your nutrients are digested in the large intestine. I would think you'd have to, you'd have to poop. And I think you'd have much the same result as you would. We don't digest fiber. Has anybody ever, hang on. We do digest fiber, but largely in the lower intestines and this is why that's important, because they wait for undigested fibers to come through for them to even have something to, but I think the effects you would find on an attempted diet like that would be almost exactly like taking an antibiotic. I feel like you would be depriving nutrients to your microflora to the point of having the side effects like you were on an antibacterial treatment. That would be my guess. That's what the result would be. Your microflora would begin to shut down from lack of nutrients, maybe attack the body itself. It would be, that would prevent you from going too far down that path. Plus, you're also taking organs in the body and essentially restricting them from their function. I mean, I'm not a medical doctor or even a non-medical doctor, but I feel like it would be like lead to some form of diverticulitis or something where the intestinal walls would start to collapse or it'd just end badly. It's just like thinking about the things you'd have to do, get rid of in your diet to not poop. It would make me very unhappy. I couldn't eat raspberries. I couldn't drink coffee. Oh, coffee. Oh, coffee, it poops on all the other stuff. It doesn't poop. You can still drink coffee. Yeah, you go the other way. I just have coffee enemas. That's right. It's for your morning pick up. Oh my goodness. Okay, you guys, it's 10.45, almost-ish. I found poop.org, you guys. It's about time for the afternoon show. Sa-that-who-pooped-dot-org. Who-s-is-not-org-ish. You ever see that Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Who-pooped-the-Bed? Yes, yes. Yes. Oh my gosh, Always Sunny in Philadelphia is so funny. Why is poop so funny? That's another big question. We find it gross, and so then it's funny. I think because it hurts. I do. I think that's why. It's funny. I don't know why our heart's funny. Why do we laugh at that stuff? Look, look, look. Baroom. Baroom. And then here's a hippo fart. Baroom. That was interesting. I wouldn't have thought lion farts and hippo farts sounded the same. Yeah, well. Oh, here's my favorite page of the book though, it says, when you begin to fart after an operation, it means your intestines have started working again. And so he's all excited because he farted. Yay. That was something I forgot to talk about. I'm expecting the Lizard Tail story. Once we get the ability to regenerate limbs, I bet it goes like the way that C-sections have. Like how they're overutilized, but it's just because it's easier for the medical profession to kind of know how to do it. Oh, to be like, let's just amputate it and grow you a new one? Just grow a new one. You know what? I got this red tingly in my arm. You know what? It's probably nerve damage. Justin, have you ever seen what it looks like after it regrows? Have you ever seen what a Lizard Tail looks like when it regrows? As it's regrowing? No, when it's done. It doesn't look the same. It's stubby. It's not quite as functional. Well, you can do better through science. I'm trying to do the process. Oh no. Oh no, Kiki. I'm looking at that. There's this one graph that somebody made that I thought was really funny. It was like age at which people find farting funny and it's not in this, but I found another graph. Are those correlations? What are those? No, it's just a made-up graph that's funny. How much do I need to fart? Honestly, I'm at the top. Yeah. So the top is... It's a very big study. I need to fart. On a date is like the most... When you're all by yourself, it's like nothing. Well, we have to. All the day. Or while it's night and night. Nothing. Just a chat. If I could at the same time. Oh, if I cough at the same time. My need to fart seems to go up with how echo-y an area or room I'm in. Like it's hallways or like carports or something. It's just like that's when it's going to be the most impossible to avoid everybody knowing. I need to find that graph. It was so funny. It's not going to be that funny though. Yeah, well. Yeah, well, I'm ready. I'm anticipating. This is going to be a hundred percent. The left's so hard. That's right, that's right. I'm going to find it, darn it. It was on board panda, I thought. Alright, what did one belch say to the other? What? Let's be stinkers and go out the back door. What is up with all these hand pictures? It's because of the regrowing thing. Everybody's into the Deadpool creepy hand. They are all ventilation. But they're so cool. I'm so jealous. That's what I told Kiki. I was like, I'm so jealous you guys. I wish I could drink some beers and talk about science. You haven't even? I know what I mean like every week. Did you start doing that with Odin a little bit? I tried to, but I just too busy and it's hard to plan. It doesn't work out as well. I think we've changed our showtime a dozen times in ten years. No. I mean, I'm talking about from Tuesday mornings to Thursday mornings to Wednesday mornings to Tuesday nights to Thursday nights to Wednesday nights. We've had to change the time that we got together. The thing is, I don't want to try to put in the effort. I just want to come and hang out. Which is exactly the role that Kiki provided me. I just want to come out and tell fun. I have rules that she's given me. The rules that I have to live by are show up by this time. And don't curse, which I failed tonight. Oh yeah. Oh, and you have to bring a couple of stories. Oh, yeah. I have to bring some stories with me. Jealous of you all. We are un... You should start like the Avengers or the X-Men or something. Maybe