Welcome, everyone. Oh, I just got the It's Live from Identity Four in our chat room. Kevin Unique is waiting on Twists and Godot. We're here. Shoebrew says we're live five by five. Fantastic. Well, we are just about ready to start our show after this wonderful day. Today was a wonderful day. I'm full of happiness, and those of you who are joining us right now, thank you for being with us tonight because I know there are other things, celebratory things that people could be doing and watching, and if you've chosen to spend your time with us, we do appreciate it. It's a good day for science. It is, Gaurav. Indeed. All right, Justin, are you ready to start a show? Yeah. Were you able to get your fonts, your text, at a size that you can read? No, but I kind of know what's there. It'll be fine. That's something. It's all right. Yarps. Yarps. I feel like we're on a little diagonal slide. Yeah, we're going to do it the other way. There we go. Are you ready to go? The beauty of non-mirrored video. That's very... Yeah.   All right, you ready, Justin? I think, yeah, absolutely. This is how our show always starts with a little hemming and hawing and putting it together and... And we will begin the show. Do I seem quiet? I haven't done anything to my audio levels. That's so weird. Some weeks a little quieter than others. I turned myself up just a little. Just a little bit. Let's see if that works a little bit better. One, two, three. We're ready to go. We're ready to start the show. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's do it. Beginning the program of our live twist broadcast. What you see here in front of you today may not be what makes it into the podcast. So enjoy what you see. In three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science, episode number 808, recorded Wednesday, January 20th, 2021. Science loves palindromes. Hey, everybody, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we will fill your head with old cloacas, protection and hope, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. We are living in interesting times. Well, this has always been true to the people alive and some other times. This day in this age will be of especially key interest to future historians, future historians who will be tasked with figuring out how our society's got to where we will be at the time when future historians are tasked with figuring out our present future foundations or their future present foundations. It gets confusing. Anyway, we will look back someday on this time and try to figure out what happened. Will this be the age where policy discussions are conducted by people with knowledge, interest and commitment to making a better world? Will this be another era of war and destruction? Will the actions taken by humans today lead us to a rational world of reason, technological innovation and scientific discovery? Or will we continue to see truth, facts and knowledge further discarded in favor of the fervently low information-minded, the faithfully foul-mouthed, feckless mobs with upper-decker mentalities? Will the future historians cringe at our next 50 years? Or will they rejoice us as pioneers of a future they hold dear? The answer can be found in our recent past where it seems anything can happen. All the possibilities are still laid out in front of us. We are living in interesting times and nowhere has that made more clear than right here on This Week in Science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to let it happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to find the knowledge before that. This. This. This. Welcome to this. This was me not hitting the button fast enough. Welcome to this. Ah. What is this? Good science. Yeah, good science to you, Justin Blair and everyone out there. I am just, I guess, excited to be here tonight on this auspicious eve of palindromes. Huh? Yes. One, 2020, 2021 is a palindrome forward and backward. Our episode 808 is also a palindrome saying forward and backward. It's like the palindrome of the day. What does it all mean? What does it mean? No, literally, what does the word palindrome mean? We could go into the etymology of the word but really it's something that is the same forward and backwards. But if you listen to this show backwards, it will not be the same. So let's get started from the front and move to the back to the end. It's the beginning of another great episode of science. We've got all sorts of great science news today. I have stories about the importance of water, cats and mosquitoes, and lots of AI learning. It's gonna be great. Justin, what do you have? I have fungal farming ants, hidden brain functions, pulsed laser technology, and a duo of twin studies or a twin study of duo of twins. It's not just two studies. Well, there's at least two studies but they are on twins and the microbiome sussing out allergies. All right, suss it out. I like sussing out allergies. Give twins allergies. No, we'll find out what this story is about later. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I have bad news about marine protected areas, sorry. I also have rotting food.  That is a find. That is something special. It is a paleontological goldmine that we will discuss later. Wow. Oh, I hope we do. We will dig into it later. Good, good, good, good, good. But for now, for those of you who are not yet subscribed, you can find this weekend science at twist.org, our website where we have episodes and show notes. We are also on YouTube, Facebook, and on Twitch live streaming YouTube and Facebook. Look for this weekend science on Twitch. Look for Twist Science, T-W-I-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. And you can look for this weekend science. Anywhere podcasts are found to look for twists as a podcast and subscribe. Let's dig into that science. Are we ready to do that? Let's do it. Let's do it, I think we're ready. Okay, I want to start us off with hope because today is such a hopeful, auspicious, like I said, palindromic day, but beyond that, today was the day that the 46th president of the United States of America was inaugurated. And last Friday, President Biden, he wasn't yet president, president- President- Elect. Biden, yes. He announced his choice for science advisor and head of the office, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. This person is Dr. Eric Lander. Dr. Lander was on Obama's Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and he co-led the Human Genome Project, which gave us the first sequencing of the human genome and MIT's Broad Institute, which has been in competition for years for CRISPR technology against UC Berkeley. He is a firebrand of a scientific leader, a bit controversial in some areas. There are questions as to whether he knew Epstein in any way, shape, or form. Considering he is in the same echelon of scientists that Epstein gave a lot of money to, but he has so far not had many links in that direction and has just shown an amazing ability to lead, to bring teams together to get science done. So this is exciting. In addition, his position has been elevated to the cabinet level for the first time in history. This puts science at the table in the room during important policy discussions. So first science, very excited. Hope. Additionally, Biden's scientific administrative team was announced last Friday and it consists of a diverse array of well-qualified individuals, including science historian Alondra Nelson, Francis Arnold and Maria Zuber, Francis Collins and Kay Koizumi. In a letter reminiscent of Roosevelt's 1944 letter to Vannevar Bush that pretty much set science and technology priorities for the next several decades. We've still, it created the National Science Foundation and really set our priorities for 50, 60 years. He asked Lander to advise on public health threats, to advise on mitigating the impact of climate change, keeping the country a world leader in innovation to use science to improve social equity and strengthen the US research enterprise. Additionally, Biden has set forward his $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan that includes $400 billion for a national COVID-19 vaccination and testing program based on advice from world-class leaders in public health and science in the hopes that science will pull us through this pandemic. Can I also mention that an hour ago, the United States officially got re-entered into the Paris Climate Agreement? This is fantastic. That is also really good. Funny thing. So we actually haven't left it yet. No, we did. We did last year. No, we actually... Technically, we did. No, we said we were leaving, but there's a year that has to pass before you can actually be... It did. That happened. That happened. We lived through that year, Justin. That was COVID. That was the whole last year. Yeah, yeah. My point is that the actual day when we would be leaving is tomorrow. The actual day, the first day we could actually leave it was tomorrow. And the joke was, if Biden wins, it's like it never happened. Okay, Justin, Blair is now fact-checking your comment. I see her eyebrows in fact-checking mode. So Blair will bring that up, but what has happened today is historic for hopefully bringing science back into a level of import in our government and the policies that are agreed upon by the people in power. So, Justin, you were close. It was the day after the election, not the day after the inauguration. So we left on November 12th. Oh, okay. So still it's... So we had to rejoin. It was a short respite, but the important thing is the entire time that was happening, we weren't working towards the goals of the climate agreement. Well, yeah, but everybody was because we were all nailing it better than we had. But the idea is now it is acknowledged again. We have rejoined. We can all work together to meet emission standards again. Good. That'd be great. Still important. And another important thing to point out was there was a rollback of vehicle emissions, but it didn't roll back California's standard. And since so many states just copycat what California does for their state emissions rules, and the auto manufacturers weren't gonna go and make five different versions of emissions for California, for the United States. So they just made the cars to the California standard anyway, which was the higher standard than the federal to begin with. So nothing happened there either. Well, I'm excited. I am looking forward to seeing what will be done when we have a fully staffed and fully running office of science and technology policy. Yeah, this is all very encouraging stuff. So we can get back to where we were, but then the really important part is to then continue moving forward. Yes. Let's move forward, keep making progress. Step one, let's get back where we were. Yeah, all right. Justin, tell me about these ants that you like. Oh, how do we really do this? Ateen ants? Ateen? Ateen ants are farmers. They're farmer ants. They grow fungus as food, pretty straightforward, pretty smart, pretty, you know. One of those things too, we talk about animal intelligence. Here's agriculture at the ants level. So they have some farm hands that help them do this farming. And those farm hands are bacteria. And these bacteria produce metabolites that protect the fungal crop from pathogens, mostly from parasites, but those parasites are usually like other fungi that would devour them. Research is important in ACS central science that they have identified the first shared anti-fungal compound among many of these bacteria across Brazil. And they think you could have some medical applications. So the Ateen ants, they originated at some point 50 million years ago in the Amazon as one species. And they have since evolved in spread across South and Central America into 200 different species. All of these ants are doing the fungal farming, one of the interesting things is that the bacteria that they have have been thought not to be making the same metabolites, these little helper molecules. So finally though, they have discovered common ones across the 200 species, the majority of them at least, from region to region, which point to a conserved purpose. And this is Monica T. Pupo and John Clardy. Colleagues wanted to find out if any of the anti-fungal bacteria metabolites with that broader distribution have any potential uses. In a study, the bacteria from ant nest at multiple sites in Brazil, the team discovered that nearly two thirds of the pseudocardia strains produced a potent anti-fungal agent, which they called adenimicin after the ants. The discovery marked the first time they'd found these sort of broad geographic distribution. What was sort of interesting then, it was they used it in fighting Candida, abacans infection and mice comparable to as old-hand anti-fungal treatments that are used clinically, it worked as well, making it actually a potential drug candidate. So here we have, here we have this ant that's doing agriculture and the bacteria it's attracting are creating anti-fungal agents to protect the fungi that they've been farming that may one day help save human lives. So well done ants of South America, thank you very much. Well done with you and your fun guys. Hmm, it's like a party. That's awesome. We need all the antifungals and- And what a fun place to find it too. Yeah, totally, totally. Blair wanna bring us into our next story. Yeah, I have bad news. Oh no, it's okay, we've got hope. We've got anti-fungal hopes and now- Let's skip your story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, no I have unfortunately some real talk from Australia looking at the Great Southern Reef. This is not the normal just the berry reese dying. No, no, no. So this is looking at the Southern Reef and specifically looking at the effectiveness of marine protected areas. Marine protected areas are basically like nature preserves, national parks, stuff like that, underwater. They are supposed to be protected space for marine plants and animals so that they can have undisturbed wild space because just like with animals on land, if you allow people to do whatever they want in these spaces, the biodiversity will suffer in a bunch of ways. And so this is specifically looking at partially protected areas. So there are marine protected areas, marine reserves that allow some forms of fishing. So they might restrict fishing on certain species that are of ecological importance or endangered or use a specific place as a breeding ground or any sort of thing like that. And so that is their attempt to create more marine protected areas because it is easier to pitch that and to get it past and to have compliance if there's some leniency on the rules and it's not just stay the heck out period. But this research looking, this is coming from University of New South Wales found that these partially protected areas basically don't help at all. So fully protected areas, no take or sanctuary zones have more fish hired by diversity of marine life and they were an attraction to coastal users. So there's also ecological benefits to people being interested in seeing these ecologically rich areas as part of ecotourism, which is a whole nother conversation which we can get into another time. But what they're saying is that these partially protected areas are considered now by these researchers to be something of a red herring of marine conservation because they distract from the more effective protection. 69% of marine protected areas are open to some form of fishing. And this research found no social or ecological benefits for partially protected areas relative to completely open areas. The ecological data revealed that fish species richness and biomass were higher in fully protected areas but not higher at all in the partially protected ones. There were 1.3 times more fish, 2.5 times more fish biomass and 3.5 times more large fish biomass in fully protected areas compared to open areas but there was not a difference for the partially protected areas. So it's part of this like when you have a partially protected area, I'm assuming like you can fish but the fish have to be over a certain size perhaps, otherwise you have to throw them back, kind of a thing. And then that takes out all the big fish and so then you start creating a man-made natural selection cycle where all the big fish genes are being pulled out and you might have fully grown ruts that then become the main breeders. I don't know, that could be something like that. That could be it. It also probably is just that the marine ecosystem is complicated. And so even if there is a species that is not declining in number, by impacting that species, there could still be a trickle effect on the rest of the food web. Not to mention that if you're allowing fishing activities, period, there is by-catch, there's disruption, there's all sorts of things that happened to the ecological space as a result of fishing. Plus you're selecting for something that people want to eat. You're not taking a percentage of everything that exists in this group. It depends on how the fishing happens though. I mean, that's always a question, but yeah. Yeah, but I mean, you're usually going after a human food fish. And so you're not- As opposed to starfish. All right, yeah. If you were just taking like, we're gonna take 10% of everything that's there, that work, the food web might still stay relatively intact and the balances might still be there and life might still go on as it would.  Well, but there's that, but there's also the fact that a lot of fishing techniques are not selective. And that's really the other piece of this is you might actually be taking 10% of all biomass without realizing it. I think, and I think that would be fine. That's what I'm saying. I don't think that is the case. Yeah, I would actually have paid better than just being selectively taking off the top feeders or the food courses or whatever it is they're going after. I think it's interesting too, thinking back to your story about pandas from a week or so ago, about the idea of a protected area that's protected for maybe one species as opposed to a broadly protective area that in which there are lots of ecosystems or niches that are encompassed in that. And how does that whole food web, how do all those animals interact with each other? And if you've got your partially protected food, your protected area, you're not really protecting everything in there and or if you cut it off at a certain point, then things inside get protected and then they swim out and they're not protected and... Yeah, I mean, I think we had a story not too long ago on the show where I talked about how a marine protected area can actually benefit marine species that are inhibiting a much larger inhabiting, sorry, a much larger area than just that marine protected area because it creates a refuge. And that is, again, it comes back down to just fully protecting specific sanctuary spaces for entire ecosystems. Yeah, if we're gonna do it, let's do it. Let's protect them. Yeah. I don't know. Let's protect a whole ocean. That would be good. Yeah, deep sea miners might have something to say about that though. But yeah. You wanna talk about catnip and cats? Yeah. Yeah, cats on catnip are crazy. Yes, cats on catnip are totally crazy and it's really fun to watch your cat freak out when you go ahead and give them a little bit of catnip and researchers have shown that there is a particular compound in the catnip plant that the cats are responding to and it activates the cat brain's opioid reward system. This was just published in Science Advances this week. So catnip and silver vine, which is an herb that's even more potent than catnip that's found in Japan and China in the mountains. So if you wanna go ecosystem, ecotourisming, hiking up mountains, looking for something to really excite your cat, we could look for silver vine in Japan and China. Anyway, napetalactal, this is the compound that is responsible. Napetalactal, it gets in there, it activates the opioid reward system and your cat is actually becoming high. It's a psychoactive state. The researchers wanted to know exactly what was going on there and they also, there was some other research that found that this compound, this napetalactal, is also an insect repellent, right up there with DEET in how useful it is.  Oh no! They wanted to know the answer to the question of do the cats use, do cats just use catnip because it excites them and gives them a high or do they use it because it also has an insect repellent property? And it turns out that they can't answer this question completely because you can't ask a cat how they evolved this catnip. Relationship. But when they had cats that these cats were sedated and they stuck them in the mosquito chamber, if they had been rubbed in the napetalactone, half, like 50% less, half of the mosquitoes, the amount of mosquitoes attacked them. So cats may be, wild cats even, may be using catnip and silver vine not just because it makes them happy but because it keeps the biting and scratching insects away. But is one an unexpected byproduct of the other? That's what- Right. So could you distill out catnip that doesn't have mosquito repelling powers and see if cats still mess with it? Right, if they would still use it. They haven't done that and that would be a very interesting next step in the research. One aspect of it though is they gave the cats naloxone which is a drug that inhibits the effects of opioids. This is my next question. Yes, and the cats are like, I'm fine, I don't need to rub on the catnip. Oh, so they ignored it. They ignored the catnip once they had been given an opioid blocker. Yeah. So it kind of sounds like the mosquito repellent is an unintended bonus. It seems as though it is and maybe it is this physiological impact and then perhaps cats, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, these cats enjoy the benefits of insect repellents as a side effect. But this is still a question under investigation but it's very interesting. These researchers though have moved forward into patenting a mosquito insect repellent that uses this nepetolactone. That's really great. Yep.  I know. Sloopy, sloopy, sedated cats, box of mosquitoes. I'm picturing the outdoor barbecue with the tiki torches made from this compound. And so like, yeah, it's great to keep some mosquitoes wet and then suddenly all the neighborhood cats are coming around. No. Yes. And then they knock them down and then the whole neighborhood goes up in flames.  This just becomes. I don't know. Gary Lubert is asking, is this getting an Iggy and Ig Nobel? Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Per chance. Yeah, it's a fun study into this fun effect that we enjoy with our cats. And who knew? There is a little bit of a real benefit besides your cats just getting crazy. Yeah. All right, tell me about these twins. Oh yeah. This is a study out of a University of Chicago on twins, sets of twins. So it's two twins. Does that's how they come? One with food. That's the two pairs. Imagine that. Imagine that. So you're just saying two, not four. Cause at first I thought you went two sets of twins. So the thing is there's like something. Just two individuals related to each other. If it was just a study on 26 twins, you don't know if it's both of them. One person who happens to be, it's a very, and there's also two of these studies. So it's very confusing. Oh, okay. Now we're at 52. Okay. Yeah. So what they selected for was sets of twins, two peoples, one who had a food allergy, one who did not. So this is our results are being published, were published earlier this week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study grew out of a prior research in the Nagler Laboratory University of Chicago on fecal microbiota transplants in infants. So they took the fecal microbes from healthy food allergic, sorry, healthy and food allergic infants, and they transported them into mice. So she, what would happen? Turned out the healthy infants, the infants who didn't have the food allergies were able to pass that on to the mice. Aha. So there's something in the microbiota that is connected to allergies. That was a fascinating study. In this study, this is quoting Catherine Nagler, Professor of Molecular Engineering University of Chicago. In this study, we looked at a more diverse population across a large range of ages. By studying twin pairs, we had the benefit of examining genetically identical individuals who grew up in the same environment, which allowed us to begin to parse out the influence of genetic and environmental factors from then the microbiota. So after, went to a conference, Nagler ran into Kerry Nadeu and they decided to collaborate on a project. Nadeu had been conducting a study on the epigenetics of food allergies, had already collected fecal samples from twin study participants. Nagler's lab then jumped in doing sequencing on the samples collected from these 13 pairs of twins with and without food allergies, as well as an additional five pairs of twins where both twins had at least one food allergy. Research team looked at which microbes were present in the fecal samples, as well as the metabolites, metabolic products of microbes. And they also looked at some stuff from the house, the dietary sources, they looked at a whole bunch of, this is Nagler again, we desperately needed biomarkers to understand the immunoregulatory function of intestinal bacteria. Metabolites give us clues as to what bacteria are doing mechanically to regulate the immune response. This approach identified 64 distinct sets of bacterial species and metabolites that are set apart from, between healthy and the allergic twin groups. So we're starting to dig into the populations of bacteria. We're drilling down to the population of bacteria and the metabolites that they're creating that are different from one case to the other. This gets also at the question of whether it's genes leading to that gut ecosystem or whether or not it's what you eat. And so what people have eaten over a long period of time could lead to these discrepancies, healthy gut versus allergic gut. And then you can, then we can drill down and take genetics out of the question, right? Is that what's happening? There was that one study we did several years ago that was all about dishwashers. Do you remember that? Where there were more food allergies in homes that had dishwashers. This is in, gosh, I wanna say it was a Danish study. It was somewhere Scandinavian for sure. But it was an interesting question of then how much exposure actually has to do with it, which would feed into the microbiome, of course. And we, oh gosh, was it, what's his name? Albers, Albert, the physicist, UC Davis, we had him on the very beginning of the show. And we had, he grown up in the Black Forest of Germany out in the outdoors and has very few allergies. And I think he was talking about other family members who were indoors having, but that's been a thing that we've seen over time too is indoor kids versus outdoor kids, whether or not you have exposure to animals. So yeah, the more sanitary the environment, the higher the rate can be of having allergies. So what's very interesting too in this is then you have, okay, it's nutrition, you are what you eat, that determines everything. That was sort of the month of rolling time. And then Janice comes along, was like, no, your genes determine everything. It's not what you eat, that's not enough. It's also your genes that determine how you, and now we're getting to the point where like, whoa, back up. Genes, you've got to have to have nutrition, you're also important for some things, but actually it's the crew on board spaceship you in your gut. It's actually pulling the levers and determining what your health is based on what you eat.  And that gives them the seeded microbiome that they need to eat eucalyptus and process it. So this is kind of related to exposure. We were talking about exposure before, we were talking about how clean things are in your house.  Yeah, you could also just have a share the couch with your family. Okay, yeah, that means that's the good thing. Anyone who has an animal eats a large amount of their hair. I'm sure I get cat hair on me all the time. I also have my family that I live with and we are sharing things constantly and anything that becomes hand to mouth is potentially introducing new bacteria.   These are all things that are going to impact that population. But it's an interesting idea that you could reverse food allergies with perhaps a different microbiota, which is a good time to plug. Dr. Justin's not a real doctor. Who pills? Allergy-free, except for bell peppers. So, you get most of them in there. Cinnamon is just, I don't know if it's an allergy or just disgust. I think it's just inherent disgust with cinnamon. That's correct. So this is the first author, Ryubo of PhD and now Research Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh to narrow down from thousands of bacteria to specific species as candidates for future therapeutic interventions. One dimension of data is not enough. Bringing together data from multiple dimensions is the key. In our study, we harness the benefits of both high throughput microbiome sequencing and metabolic profiling techniques. We were able to nominate two specific species, each involved in distinct metabolite pathways that can be prioritized as potential targets for future research and therapeutic interventions for food allergies. And I do, Ryubo says, we can't say that this has caused an effect relationship, yet it looks, but it's, this is one of those causes. It could be part of it. It's part of it, maybe. But this is how you know where to look, right? But we can say there's an association with disease and health. So now we can start to ask, what does this mean? Future, so there's, What does it mean? Future research projects are of course being planned on this, but how amazing would it be for all those folks out there who are suffering from one or two or multiple significant food allergies? Their health is on the way. Nice. What about people who are suffering from bacterial infections? We taught you talked about your new antifungal from ants, but what about the possibility of either creating new antibiotics or refreshing antibiotics to get over bacterial resistance? New study in nature chemical biology out of the University of Illinois, Chicago, a couple of different labs, Yuri Polokanov and Alexander Menken have been working together for several years on antibiotic resistance. And they've been specifically focusing on a group of antibiotics that are called macrolides. And macrolides include antibiotics like azithromycin, erythromycin. I think there's some more in there. Clarythromycin, they're all the mycins. A lot of mycins. And when the researchers started this recent investigation, they started digging into the structure of the bacterial ribosome. It's been known for a while that macrolides bind to the ribosome. Somehow the drug binds to the ribosome and prevents new proteins from being made. So the bacteria can't grow, they can't replicate, reproduce, and ta-da, no new bacteria. And ta-da, no new bacteria. Your body is able to defend itself and you get better. But what happens with bacterial resistance? There is a molecular change, a mutation that shifts the structure somehow so the antibiotic can't get in there and bind to the ribosome anymore. And so they went high resolution and looked really, really closely at what was happening. What they discovered is that the structure of the drug, no sorry, the structure of the ribosome was becoming dimethylated. That means there is a little part on one of the amino acids that's in the ribosome that got two methyl groups, two CH3 groups added to it where before there was none. And as they were looking into this change and what that meant, they discovered that water is the binding agent for the antibiotic to be able to bind to the ribosome. That when that, those methyl groups aren't there, water can come in and because of its polar nature, bind to the ribosome and then the antibiotic grabs on. And that's how the catch is made. But the mutation that allows that methylation then keeps water from being able to bind and the ribosome can no longer attach. And so now these researchers are thinking, it's a very exciting thought. They are thinking that they will be able to move forward and hopefully be able to create new antibiotics or be able to go in and refresh antibiotics to enable them to get around this methylation problem. So that water can remain the binding agent. But it's so great, it's just amazing to me this one little change, it's not a huge change. It's this one little change that just keeps water from getting in there. It's like, no water, no, no, not today water. It's amazing. And that is what is threatening an entire group of antibiotics from being useful anymore. But now we have a direction to go. This is a completely different model from what has been hypothesized in the past. So it's like this completely new direction to go. New antibiotics, could be great. Dig in there, dig in there to those molecules. Dig into that science. This is This Week in Science. We are here with our science. Thank you for joining us. Once again, if you are interested in a twist shirt or a sweatshirt, I've got a sweatshirt on today, you can head over to twist.org and click on the Zazzle Store link, browse our store and help support the show. Thank you for listening to twists. All right, everybody, you're ready to come on back and talk about COVID. Yay. Do you have goodness for us this week? No. Nope. No. All right, proceed. Yeah, thanks, okay. I would love to give you good news, but the news just keeps kind of being a little depressing. A variant has been discovered in Brazil and was reported this last week that this variant, we've talked before about some of the variants that were discovered in the UK and South Africa, this new variant though, instead of making transmission higher, what it seems to have done is escaped from antibody immunity. What this means is that people who have had the virus, who have had the disease previously were getting infected again because it had escaped from the antibodies that their bodies had produced in response to the infection. And this is one of the issues that we have discussed with relation to this virus is that as the vaccine effort is going out, we're trying to race the clock, the mutational clock to get people vaccinated so that the virus will go down to low levels in the population and not really be as much of a problem. As we said, the more that it spreads, the more that it mutates, the more the chance that it will escape from vaccine immunity, which is a very similar thing, but the vaccine immunity is very specific to the spike protein. Well, and I mean, if we had done a better job of controlling community spread, then even if there were localized variants, then you could kind of isolate and control spread of that specific variant. But because it's just kind of all going everywhere unbridled right now, it's very difficult to isolate and restrain spread of new variants. Yep, it is very difficult. And so I'm hoping that around the world, vaccine rollout can go more smoothly, more quickly. And also here in the United States that we can institute more tracking and testing so that we are more aware of what kinds of variants are showing up in our population at a much more high resolution level than we currently are able to see. It would be pretty amazing. But regardless of all this, human behavior is the cause of the spread of the virus. People to people moving around, that is how the virus spreads, right? We go out, we breathe on each other and virus. So there have been some studies, one coming, let's see this study here, one study out of the Journal of Econometrics looked at the causal impacts of masks, policies, behavior on early COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Their conclusion was that if the United States had adopted a national mask mandate early in the pandemic, 47,000 lives could have been saved before May 1st. And if you want to extrapolate that out, do what we're dealing with right now, you can do that math yourself. Feel the need to go into that. And then additionally, a paper in the Lancet out this week that's separate from a mask mandate, but just relied on personal reports of people's mask use and social distancing. They were able to correlate those behaviors down to local regional levels and improved control of the SARS-CoV-2 viral spread in those areas. So the more people in a particular region reported wearing masks and social distancing, the better that that region seemed to fare in terms of the number of people infected. So I don't know how to say it any other way. As long as the vaccine rollout is happening, it is not the silver bullet. There was another study that I couldn't find this, that I lost the link to it, but the logic makes sense. You can save more lives by people continuing to wear masks and social distance than by focusing on high priority vaccinations. When you vaccinate somebody, you are vaccinating and protecting that one person. When you wear a mask, you are protecting everyone you come in contact with. So the math there, I just wanna put that in your mind when you're going out there and maybe you can, as the vaccine rollout happens, talk to your friends, talk to your family, try and find out if they are hesitant about masks or social distancing, what could help them to potentially adopt that behavior a little bit more because we can help each other? I mean, I get it. Everybody's sick of it. I'm sick of it.   We all wish we could be with each other. We wish we could eat out at restaurants with our friends and family. I get it, but you can't just give up. You can't just give up. And I am seeing that and it's really frustrating and I won't go on and on about it, but in my community, in my apartment complex, I think we have like a 95% compliance of social distancing and mask wearing for the last six, eight months ever since they started telling us to wear masks. But in the last month, it has dropped off where it is unusual now if I see someone wearing a mask and keeping their space for me when we are walking around. Oh, it's like a really bad time. The worst has been.   It's the worst has been in numbers, but it's also the worst has been in compliance that I have seen anecdotally.  They're just giving up, but you can't give up because if someone hasn't died yet, who you know, that doesn't mean it's not gonna happen. That just hasn't happened yet and you need to protect those people around you. Yeah, protect the people around you. It's very frustrating. It is frustrating. And it's kind of like I've talked about it as an analogy to like running a marathon before, but maybe it's like rolling a stone up a hill. And we're about halfway three quarters up and past the halfway mark, but we've been pushing that stone up the hill and suddenly we're just like, I'm tired. That stone is just gonna roll right back down to the bottom and we're gonna start all over again. And I don't wanna do that. And my rant remains the same as it has for the last nine months, 10 months. Don't push the stone. What are you doing outside pushing stones up hills? Stay home. Staying on for six weeks. Yeah. Everybody. And it's done. If we could. Stop. If we could. It could be over. Oh, we can't afford it. How's that working out? How's that working out? The half measures. How's that working out for everybody? Well, I mean, people wearing masks. Here's Stephen Ray saying kind of like the mask haven't been sick for about a year and a half. And we are seeing people wearing masks and social distancing. Flu rates are going down. Common cold rates are, this is working a bit. It's just this virus is more infectious than those things. And so that's the problem, but we just have to keep it up. You can do it. We can do it. We can do it by helping each other, having conversations that are hard conversations. But we've come this far or you've come this far. Your family, your friends have come this far. Don't let them. Don't let them stop now. Don't let everybody.   That's what I'll do today. It's just a terrible idea. Don't give up on being alive. Hey, wait, now I didn't get to comment on this yet, but the first story you brought seemed to indicate that even if you've been vaccinated, do you might at some point need to get a new vaccination of a different vaccination later? Possibly. Possibly. It depends. Going to keep going. Possibly. It's not a for sure thing, but these mutations happen all over different parts of the virus. And some of these mutations, then the B117 virus have led to increased transmission. Also, the South African virus has mutations in what's called the 501Y.V2 variant. And it's mutations at E484K and K417N. These are just locations in the virus. These are changes in the surface protein spike and have been shown to reduce how well monoclonal antibodies combat the virus. Additionally, there is also E484K, which reduces the potency of convalescent sera from some donors 10-fold. So these different variants, these different mutations, they have differing effects. It depends. We are using the spike protein for the virus, for the vaccine at this point in time. That's what all of the vaccines are, are the spike protein. So if mutations occur in the spike protein that change it enough that your body no longer recognizes it as what it has created protection for against, then it could potentially escape. So far, and the thing about like natural immunity is that your body could create, it's like, I'm gonna create an antibody for the finger. I'm gonna create an antibody for hair. I'm gonna create an antibody against this thing. Your body's just creating whatever it sees and comes in contact with. It could create an antibody for. But in the lab, it's been escaping. It can, but at this point in time, the vaccines that we are rolling out are still good. For the most good virus. Yeah, yeah, still don't get the vaccine, the virus in your neighborhood. Go get the vaccine. Yes. We'll work just fine. It will work, it still works. We may have to change some of these vaccines to reflect mutations in the future. This could be a yearly vaccination, depending on how fast mutation rates go. Who knows, we are still, we don't know enough about this virus yet. Which reminder, that's how flu shots work. So that's already something to do. Yeah, we keep getting our COVID and flu shots all in one. Maybe, who knows? Who knows? But let's move on. Let's move on away from our sad icky COVID news. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for spending your time with us. We do appreciate you being here for these discussions and for science. If you like twists, please share twists with a friend today. As we come back now, we'll all come back now, you hear? It is time. It's time for that part of the show that we love to call Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair? Why did it get? Don't. Okay. Buy a pet, mail a pet, no pet at all. If you want to hear about these animals, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels, they're not on the floor. Yeah, Blair. I have, speaking of icky, I have a really icky story, but it's actually really cool. It's about beetles. Beetles? Yeah, beetles that are scavengers.  And this is a recent study from University of Connecticut, looking at burying beetles, which are pretty big beetles. They're about an inch long. They're black with orange markings.   That sounds super appetizing, Blair, thanks. They'll take a dead mouse, they'll take a bird, they'll take a hole, they'll bury it, they'll pluck its fur, the oar's feathers, they'll roll it into a flesh ball and cover it with delicious goop. But why do they do it? So it has previously been assumed that it has to do with delaying the decomposition of this food.  And so the new kind of hypothesis was that actually it was to reduce competition amongst scavengers as well. So the way that they kind of tested this was, so anecdotally, they kind of thought that there were less maggots, there were less other creatures kind of going after this dead decomposing goopy meat, yum. But so the way that they actually tested this, scientifically, is they collected the gases wafting off the dead hairless mice. And the researchers then compared the gases from those that were preserved by these beetles to those from untouched carcasses. The beetles, the beetle prepped carcasses gave off much less of a gas that they describe as onion smelling. Then that, and that usually attracts the bearing beetles to the fresh remains. They also discovered that it increased in another gas from decay that is known to deter insects that feed on dead animals were building up on these prepped carcasses. The next step of course was to drop off dead mice in a Connecticut forest and to see how they were found, if they were found, if they were devoured by other animals in the forest. And they found that the beetles' rivals were less likely to discover the ones covered in goop. Goop. Yep. So here's why this is interesting. Kind of like the catnip story from earlier. Is this a dual purpose thing that these beetles are doing? Is one a side effect of the other? What is happening here? Did they spread it with this goop to preserve it? And then it just so happens that it became less desirable to other animals or were they hiding it from other animals and it also surprised, preserved the meat or is it a dual purpose thing from the start? We don't know. That's always one of those questions. Yeah, did it just, it all happened together or is it, yeah. Or and, and. Oh, the goop protects it. Great. Dare I ask, should I cover my food in goop? To protect it from, from Brian? Yes. No, no. To preserve it is more what I was thinking. To preserve it, yeah. I'm sure if I covered it in smelly goop then nobody else in my home would know it existed including the doc. But really it'd be about preserving the food you see. So actually, no jokes aside, you could potentially see a practical use of this information because you could in theory find something about this goop that is so good at preserving meat that you could apply to human food. Right, beef jerky without being jerky-ish. You could also find something in the smell that deters other animals and use it in some sort of pest abatement. As far as the other thing- Is it masking the scent of the decay from the thing it would want to eat, right? So that's a good question. Is it, is it masking it? Is it converting it? Or is it, is it eliminating it? Right. Sounds like there's less of one smell but there's more of another. So it could be both. But if you've got something big and you need to eat it, so we know that some animals like mountain lions will bury their dead. They will cover dead animals in a bit.  So, you know, if it's sitting there and it's being preserved and it's also preventing it from being eaten by other animals, you have your storing food.  Nope, you're putting it underground. Yeah. Yeah, this is good. But the goop, I want to know what the goop is made of. So do I. I want to know what is in the goop.  And it's, the chicken is amazing. It's delicious. I guess you don't know what I mean. I'll take your word for it. No. Yeah, Mr. Vegetarian. Yeah, there's that. But also just that sounds like salmonella soup. I don't, anyway. It's fine. It's not. No, the fat, the fat preserves the meat for a while. And so it sits and preserves it a bit, but then you cook it. And there's something too, the goop that you put your, your bird in and cook it. It's confit. That's what it's called, confit. The innards in Greenland have a fermented bird dish, which I think consists of digging a small hole, throwing the bird in it, putting a rock over it and coming back a month later or something like that. Oh my God. Oh boy. It's like lots of ways to prepare the things that you eat. We humans are no different. I'm sure actually that, that beetle goop food is probably more sanitary than a lot of things. Yeah. Lovely. I want to know what's in the beetle goop. Beetle goop, beetle goop, beetle goop, beetle goop. We'll find out some day in the chilling conclusion. Do you want to be further horrified? I have another horrified story for you. Okay. This is about electric eels hunting in groups. That's not scary. Accenting electric eels. Yes. So this is a study from Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. And this is looking in the Brazilian Amazon River Basin. And they discovered a small river fed lake, filled with more than 100 adult electric eels, many of which were upwards of four feet long. Of course, electric eels are not true eels. They are a type of knife fish. And they have previously thought to be solitary creatures. They witnessed the eels working together to herd small fish, tetras, into tightly packed balls. And then groups of 10 eels would split off, four to 10 eels would split off, form cooperative hunting parties that looked kind of like wolf pack hunting or killer whale pod hunting. And they surrounded the prey ball, the ball of tetras, and launched simultaneous electric attacks, which would stun the tetras into submission. Actually, it would stun them so hard that they would fly out of the water and smack back into the water, totally stunned. Wow. It could be eaten. And so this is a stunning finding. It's stunning indeed. Shocking even. But so the crazy thing here is first of all, pack hunting in fish, very rare. There's only been nine species of fish seen to do this on planet Earth, possibly because we're not very good at studying fish and their natural habitats in a lot of ways. There's a lot under the ocean we don't know about. So perhaps just we haven't found them yet. But ultimately, this is a new thing. There's only nine other species at this time that have been found to do pack hunting. And they first saw it. They thought it was totally anecdotal and maybe just a fluke in August of 2012. But then as they were studying the Amazon River Basin, in October, 2014, they found it again. They settled down. They logged 72 hours of observations of these eels in this river. And this is at dawn or dusk in the twilight hours. They would interact with each other. They would begin swimming in a large circle. This churning circle would move these tetras into tighter and tighter shoals into these balls. They would herd them from deeper ends of the lake into shallower ends of the lake. And then some of them would break off and do the shocking thing and the tetras would go flying and all this kind of stuff. And it took about an hour and contained between five to seven high voltage attacks. So this is something that, yeah, that's like two points make a line, right? This is why they feel like it's definitely happening. How widespread this phenomenon is, is kind of up to question because in terms of interviews with locals all over the Amazon River Basin, there hasn't really been reports of this. And you would think that a hundred eels shocking in groups, in kind of shallow water, like three feet deep water, you'd hear about that from locals. So there's a chance. Yeah, they really hadn't. So there's a chance that this is pretty localized, pretty individual, pretty unique, but it also is possible that people just aren't seeing it. So this is a whole new thing that they're looking at. They've launched a new citizen science program to try to locate if there's more of these aggregations happening. And this citizen science project allows users to report sightings and log observations themselves in Brazil. And their next step is they hope to collect tissue samples and mark individual eels with radio tags to understand if they're related at all, if there's a genetic information passing thing happening, if these groups are related to each other and that's how they hang out, if there's hierarchy. And they want to take direct measurements of electrical discharges in order to see their maximum voltage to determine whether eels might also be using low-voltage shocks to communicate with each other, to orchestrate these kind of complicated events. Because we're not orchestrated. I'm looking at that little bit of video that we replaced up there and you can see there's the fish sort of in the middle getting circled by one group of eels. That kind of has them, it looks like cornered up against the shore somewhat. And then on the outlet there, there's a couple of eels hanging back. And why are they hanging back? It looks like in case anybody breaks the perimeter, if the perimeter starts to break, if they lose containment, they have some backups that are waiting sort of like a defensive backs or a safety in a football game, like waiting back there for the, if the run game escapes the front line, they're ready there to regain containment. And I mean, it really looks orchestrated. Like, wow. Eel castrated. Yeah, no strategy, it looks like a thing. Yeah, the last step of the study also is they do plan to collect eight to 10 eels and bring them into a facility in Germany where they can conduct controlled tests and that then they could later replicate in the field as well. So this seems like a pretty well-designed effort to figure exactly what is going on here. And one of the researchers does mention that they'd been shocked by these eels plenty of times in their scientific processes. And the shock lasts about 2,000ths of the second, but is enough to cause a painful muscle spasm that could knock a person off their feet. And this is one eel. So if you have...  I did a little bunch. Yeah, it'd be pretty crazy. And if you've ever been to a fish hatchery, when they are collecting fish, they go in with electric paddles. The people who run the facility, they have these massive electric paddles that they push in, they put into the water and go, this is, and zap the water and you see the fish jump out of the water and then they're belly up on the surface, knocked out for a moment so that they can be collected for eggs and other things. Yeah. Well, so let's hope that the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Fish Research Associate, C. David DeSantana can use his expertise, his previous shocking experience and his now laboratory electric eels to find out exactly what's going on. Take it to the lab, Mr.... People eat electric eels, are these being hunted otherwise? Or do people avoid them? No, that's a good question. I would leave them alone. I'd leave them alone, but the thing I was thinking about, like maybe why nobody's like witnessed this behavior is if they are a food thing and you're coming across and I was like, oh gosh, there's like seven of them right there. I better start pulling them out of the water with sticks. You disrupt the behavior pretty quickly. Right. So, I mean, a very quick Google, I have not fully vetted this. It makes it look like knife fish and electric eels specifically are not often eaten because there's not a lot of suitable flesh to eat. So, anyway. Just follow those electric wires and see what happens. Yes. The battery wires. Cutter on the battery for sure, the transistor. Sort of as the battery leaks because they're like in saltwater, right? Yeah. Anyway, it's so good. I have one last story in the animal corner that I had to add last minute because this was breaking news. And this is that the first dinosaur butthole ever discovered.  Has been analyzed. I'm sorry. The colloquial vent of dinosaurs. What's a colloquial vent? It's a butthole.  Yeah, so a collaica is the all in one as it is. So it's the common urogenital tract. Yes. Yeah, so it has the reproductive stuff. It has all of the executory exits there. And it actually comes from the Latin word for sewer. So that's the collaica. Reptiles have it, birds have it, amphibians have it, fish have it, lots of animals have collaicas. We're one of the unlucky ones that do not. The collaica is- It's not unlucky though. Is the muscular chamber. The usually what you see actually superficially is called a vent, which is where there's the parting and the scales or where there's the area that opens to allow for the exit of various items. So anyway, that also means that there's not a lot of apparent physiological difference externally between males and females. There's no external genitalia. So it's a lot harder to tell for example, with dinosaurs unless there's some other sort of dimorphism like males have these giant horns and females do not or something like that. It's a lot harder to tell male and female dinosaurs apart in paleontology because of that. So anyway, regardless, this is just the most perfect preserved collaica. It's the best these researchers have ever seen. This is not a peer reviewed article. It was not published in a journal. This is really just the breaking news that this thing has been discovered and looked at. So what I'm about to tell you are ideas from some scientists based on observing this perfectly preserved collaica. All right, so first of all, there are these two small bulges by the back area which are very reminiscent of musk or scent glands that we currently see in crocodilians. So that's a good idea that potentially these dinosaurs had that. So this, sorry, the type of dinosaur, which I did not say is a cytokosaurus which is a bristly-tailed Labrador-sized, which already I'm in, horn-faced dinosaur. And it was a relative of Triceratops. They lived in the Cretaceous period from about 145 million years ago to 65 million years ago, somewhere in there. And it was found in China, this specimen. They were previously studying it to look at skin color. So they were trying to find proteins and other identifiers where they could extrapolate what color dinosaurs are because contrary to the bedsheets, books, and sweatshirts I had as a child, oh, and my Chuck Taylor's, they are not orange and purple and pink, although I would say they were. Anyway, this collaica on this little Labrador-sized, horn-faced dinosaur, the cytokosaurus was so well preserved. So first of all, they think they saw these scent glands, but also they were able to see, there's actually a preserved poop in it. A coprolite. Yes, so they think they might be able to get some information out of that. I'm sure they will. And the other crazy thing is that the outer regions of this collaica had a darker shade of melanin than the rest of the underside of this dinosaur. So either it was a type of visual display, like in baboons, or an ant potentially, it could provide antimicrobial protection. And this is where I was not aware of this piece of science that exists, which is that in humans, there's melanin in certain parts of the body that never sees the light of day. I know where your brain is thinking, that's where my brain was thinking as well, but actually they are referring to the liver. The liver is full of melanin, and that somehow helps it with microbial infection. So that's the other idea here is that, yeah. So that's all very interesting. But anyway, just this perfectly preserved collaica. They don't know if it was a male or a female because the soft reproductive tissue that would be inside were not preserved. And so they're not sure what sex it was. But they do think- But they've got the vent, and they've got this melanin. And they have the scent glands. The other thing is based on the shape, location, all this other stuff, they think that they also had copulatory sex. So not just egg laying or- Not just a cloacal kiss. A cloacal kiss. So you have the cloacal kisses that birds do, which is they just press their cloacas together. But then there is actually copulatory sex, which is when an organ exits the cloaca completely and then more standard stuff. So anyway, that's what they think, but who knows. And again, this was all, this is all pre-publication, pre-peer review. This is all just kind of conjecture based on this perfectly preserved butthole. It's, well, you can't call it that because it's like the Swiss army knife of all the down there stuff. But Justin, there was a poop in it. I think I'm allowed to call it that. There was. I guess in this case, that's the function it was probably about to render next. Come on, you don't want to be on record here as being anti-fun, all right? Cause this was fun. When it's just in the science fun police. I know, what happened? I love the idea also of how many birds have displays where they puff up their tail feathers or they have some kind of display dance where their tail feathers go up or they expand their wings where there's a dance where they strut their stuff and show off those tail feathers. So yeah, I'm imagining this Labrador sized bone faced dinosaur now doing a dance display and showing off its hind quarters to a potential mate. Yeah, I love it. Could be, I don't know, that's a fascinating. More dino butts, we need more data on this. Yes. I want to hear more about the poop. Am I the only one who wants to hear more about the poop? I actually want to hear, I want to hear more about dinosaur sex, but that's just my take out. Yeah, so did they analyze the poop? Not yet. No, that's gonna be awesome. I can't wait. The poop will get analyzed and it will probably have metabolites of hormones. It'll probably have evidence of food that was eaten. There'll be so much information in that poop. Yep. We will know what that dinosaur had been up to. Yes. Can't wait. I don't know, and maybe if they have other bones, they could, I don't know what the rest of the fossil is like and what they have, but if they have other individuals, there's the possibility of determining whether or not it's male or female based on comparative anatomy and pelvic shape and things like that. So even though the soft tissues of the genitalia have gone away, there is potentially other information out there. And I know they have to use the fossil for real science, but when they're done, may I just suggest candles or chocolates? Because those are things that currently are done with the derriere of individuals. Do you know about this? What are you talking about? No, it isn't. Yes it is. We'll talk more about it in the after show, but there's impressions that are taken from certain areas to make chocolates or candles. There was a lot of news this week about candles coming out of valentine days coming up. That's why. Celebrities, nethers also. So I'm just saying how cool would it be to have a dinosaur cloaca candle? I would buy it. That's all I'm saying. Justin is rubbing his eyes. I don't understand. I need more coffee. I'm not following anything. What are you talking about? Don't go anywhere.  No. Justin also used to be like, we'll talk more in the after show. Justin, don't go anywhere. You're coming up next right now. I have to say thank you for being a part of This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for this show. We hope that you are enjoying it as much as we are. And if you are able, head on over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link to become a supporter of Twish. Twi- of Twish? No. Twish. Yeah, you know, Twish. Twish, yes. To be a supporter of Twish. Your support helps us do what we do every week and it also helps to bring a somewhat sane perspective to this crazy world of misinformation, hopefully moving forward.  I don't know, but with your help, we can reach more people and grow the show and continue to do what we do, bringing you the show every week. And at $10 or more a month, we will thank you by name at the end of the show. So head on over to Patreon, click that link and select your level of support today. Thank you for all of your support. We can't do what we do without you. All right, Justin, it is time for you to tell us about brains. Did you want to talk about brains? Yeah, I think there's a super interesting story. This is going to talk about the human brain specifically, which has about as many neurons as glial cells. The glial cells are then broken up into four major groups. You have the microglia, astrocytes, NG2 and oligodendrocytes. Oligodendrocytes. Oligodendrocytes. Oligodendrocytes, yes. So what do do oligodendrocytes do? They are support cells for the brain. These are all astrocytes, oligodendrocytes are part of the brain's immune system. They are part of short distance electrical transmission. We are learning so much more about these cells that we just thought were like packing peanuts in the brain for a really long time. And so the oligodendrocytes, that's the insulation tape around the axons, around the electrical current sending ones. The wraparound axons, which are the extension nerve cells which send the electrical impulses. This wrapping prevents short circuits, accelerate signal forwarding. Thus we have very few forest fires started by axons because they remain well inside. Yeah, so these are the, when they wrap the neurons, they are called myelin. It's the myelin sheath. And that's the part also of the neurons that gets damaged in multiple sclerosis. Yes. This is a Professor Christian Steenhauser from the Institute of Cellular and Neurosciences, the University of Bonn, Germany. We have now been able to show that oligodendrocytes play an important role in the distribution of energy-rich molecules compounds, nutrition, that they're actually doing more than just, even though they're not sending electrical currents themselves, it seems like they are transporting partially, what is it? The converted sugar, the energy-rich molecules that power these neurons, they keep them alive. This is apparently, this is the Kodi voice, Christian Steenhauser. This is apparently, especially true in a particular brain region, the thalamus. Thalamus, aka the, sort of like the router of the brain. It's like all your sensory signals come in from the eyes, the ears, the skin, and then it gets forwarded, like an email that you program that you haven't used forever, but you still wanna get some of the emails from it, so you have it forward to your new one, forwards everything to the respective responsible centers in the cerebral cortex to do the actual analysis of the sensory input. That's when we realize, oh, information is coming in when it gets to the final destination, but so the thalamus is controlling, sort of like this, like a router-y sort of thing. So as long as the astrocytes form closed connections, they build intercellular networks through tunnel-like coupling, molecules can migrate from one cell to another through these gap junctions. A few years ago, Steinheuser and colleagues were able to show that there are also all the dendrocytes in these networks in the thalamus about as many as astrocytes. The cells form a huge network in this way, which neuroscientists call the panglil network. That means across the glial or comprehensive glial. Now the regions, however, networks consist predominantly of coupled astrocytes. We wanted to know why this is different, says Dr. Camille Philippot, whose courtier voice sounds very much like Steinheuser's. Our research demonstrates that the high-energy compounds travel through this network from the blood vessels to the synapses, and the odendrocytes seem to be indispensable in this process. So they tried it in mice. In these mice, the energy molecules were no longer able to reach the synapses in sufficient quantities. Same was true of the astrocytes lack the appropriate connection links. The thalamus apparently requires both cells for transport, Steinheuser has worded. So it's just an additional function to a part of the brain. The little wrapping, it's doing more heavy lifting than we thought it was. It's more than just insulation. I feel like with the brain, the more we study, the more we learn, the more it's like, oh, it's so much more complicated. These cells are doing this thing here, and they're doing this thing here, and yeah. The more we learn about it, it scares me.  Just like you mess one thing up and it all kind of... There is a bit of that, but because of redundancy and the networked nature of the neurons, there's wiggle room. Yes, yes, there's fail safes, there's other stuff. It can compensate given enough time, but it does feel very interconnected and intense. But findings like this, the glial cells that we used to think really didn't have much of a function at all to discover that they have these really important support roles that allow for normal neural transmission to take place, that they are there to support and make sure that all the... You need nutrition? I've got nutrition. You need a sports bar? I got that for you. These are like the glial cells are there, like the cheerleaders at the side of the road at the marathon. Here's your energy juice. Okay. And they're really able to do more than we thought once upon a time. And they are involved in a lot of disease. And by understanding these aspects in their support roles, we'll be able to understand better how they... Where things go wrong and how we can fix them. Brings. Next story, lasers. Can it get any better than lasers? Yes. Yeah, where are they getting pointed at? Better lasers. Pulsed lasers. So pulsed lasers is exactly what you think it is.  Mitting light for these very short periods of time blinking on and off. They actually can have this advantage of being able to focus more energy than a continuous wave laser whose intensity is kept unchanged. I don't really understand why that is, but you can go YouTube and on physics learn about lasers if you want. Digital signals can be loaded into a pulsed laser. Each pulse can be encoded for a bit of data and you can transmit data with this. The higher the repetition rate, of course, the more data you quicker you can transfer across the thing. So far though, optical fiber-based pulsed lasers typically have had limitations in increasing the number of pulses per second above the megahertz level. So it's cool, but it's not really going anywhere. It hasn't for a while until Korea Institute of Science and Technology, KIST, which is kind of a great acronym for anything, announced that the research team led by senior researcher, Dr. Yongwon Song at the Center for Optoelectronic Materials and Devices was able to generate laser pulses at a rate 10,000 times higher than the current state of the art. Whoa, what did they do? Oh, well, this achievement was accomplished by inserting a dash additional resonator containing graphene into a fiber optic pulsed laser oscillator that operates in the domain of very low femto seconds. They put a little thing in the middle that helped like filter. Sounds like almost like a convention. Research transmission processing speeds are expected to increase significantly by applying this method to data communications in the future. So it has to do with something called a Fourier transform for resonators inserted into the laser oscillator, the wavelength of the pulsed laser is periodically filtered and thereby modifying the pattern of laser intensity change. Why does that work? Get a degree in physics and tell me because I don't really know. But here's that moment, you just need to know that it went from a megahertz to like 57.8 gigahertz repetition rate, completely overcoming limitations previously on pulsed lasers. Yeah. It's also the characteristic of the graphene they're using such that heat is locally generated when the lasers absorbed was exploited then to turn the characteristics of the graphene resonator by applying an additional laser to that device. So lots of lasers, ultra fast, pulsed laser resonating technology. So point is things can be faster, smaller, quicker, meaner. It's going to increase the googling speed at this point. We don't need 5G, we need 10,000G. If you increase how fast you can confuse your cat with a laser pointer, no. You know, there are some things that exist that take long rendering or downloading times. There still are these places that you can get into for data transfer and the rest that take what people today think is a long time. But by all the people, that was like, oh, it took a minute. And then the kids today are like, oh, a minute of my life is gone. We're not playing the video game on my phone. Yeah, but 10,000 times fast does sound like an incredible, incredible shift. Especially if it can be, if we're getting into the age of sort of machine learning and we're talking about data sets that would record, that even being able to feed the projections that we have for what machine learning is capable of, just being able to feed that beast, the data that makes it worth having machine learning is difficult. And it's impossible at this point. Yeah, and then we're also, if we also think about from a science, data transfer perspective, we have limitations related to how much information we can take from our large data installations like LIGO and Virgo, like CERN, like so many other of these massive scientific experiments that are producing huge amounts of data. And if you can transfer them more quickly, that would make cloud computing for a lot of massive data computational efforts potentially be easier. I mean, I'm just imagining how that could work. Additionally, we know that quantum, not quantum computing, but thinking about doing quantum communications and taking data from and creating quantum communication networks, perhaps this could impact that as well. Yeah. Make it more, that's cool. Yeah, it's also something that I've seen in all the fields working in biometrics around genetic data. There's a tremendous amount of information that is being worked with as the raw material. And if we ever have to download the entire climate change database from the government ever again, it'll happen faster. Yeah. Gosh, I hope we don't have to do that. I sure hope so too. I don't think it'll be a problem for a while. Yeah. Speaking of data and what we do with it, how about teaching computers how to deal with their own data? How do we do that? Well, researchers have been advancing a particular paradigm of AI algorithm training that is known as, wait, let me make sure I've got my words right, that is, there we go, general generalized adversarial networks. That's what it is. And classrooms of the future might have personalized curricula for students created by algorithms that learn themselves from these generalized adversarial networks that train neural networks to solve problems and do things. In a generalized adversarial network, what happens? You get adversaries, you set up one neural network to be the trainer who's going to give something, an image or a problem that's going to start the training process and then you have the learner who is going to try and learn. So, and it's adversarial because the training algorithm gets harder as it goes or tries to challenge the learning algorithm to actually learn and do better. It's kind of like education as it works in humans. And that's really interesting because this is with neural networks anyway. So these adversarial networks, you have the trainer and you have the learner. These researchers just published or presented on their new training paradigm. They're from University of California Berkeley that's called Paired and they couple their AI with an identical AI that has a different set of strengths. So you have the antagonist and the learner. And then they have a third artificial intelligence algorithm, design a world that's going to be easy for the antagonist but hard for the protagonist. And so the task uses these two agents back and forth to challenge a little bit and it gets personalized based on it's not just here do this task and not knowing what's going on. The training antagonist actually go, you're not getting that right. Let's fix this process a little bit for you and we'll help you learn by figuring out what exactly it is you don't understand if you could imagine the AI talking to each other in this particular way. So they had their programs reach a destination by navigating a 2D grid that had a bunch of solid blocks in it and the agent, the program has to, the AI program has to get better at being able to go through that maze basically through trial and error. But when the maps were too hard to get through and the AI couldn't solve it, they used this paired procedure and the protagonist attempted some difficult mazes if it trained using the two older methods, the protagonist didn't get, it didn't learn anything but with paired it started solving the mazes. So it started actually learning when it wasn't learning before at all. The researchers used a version of paired to teach an AI to fill out web forms and book a flight and with traditional neural network adversarial training that failed all the time, but when used with the paired method, it succeeded about 50% of the time. So this paired technique, they ended up setting it to an AI on 225 problems that no computer had ever been able to solve and their agent solved 80% of those problems. Wow. That had never been solved before by computers. And these are not, you know, these aren't problems that are like, these are weird computer problems that computer programmers try to use to determine whether or not their program is working. But the fact that they were able to solve these problems that had never been solved before using this new training method is really interesting. And they're thinking about ways that they can incorporate this new training method, which is really, it's like a teacher. It's like a personalized, it's a teacher coming in and going, oh, you're not, oh, I see, you're getting stuck on this corner here. Now, why do we go back to this corner and think about what it is about this corner that you're getting stuck on and maybe we can back up and we'll move this way and maybe you can solve the problem this way. And so there is something about this training that is much more educational and helpful to the artificial intelligences. And someday it could be that curricula are designed and personalized by artificial intelligences for people. I mean, I like, I'm immediately reminded of going to school in the 90s and having the reading packets that were color coded based on your reading level and your assigned to reading level. And you would read a thing and you would take a little quiz and then you would either get pushed up or you'd get pushed down. And so that was a very 2D version of trying to personalize learning for a specific individual. And then you can adapt as you go with each new assignment or whatever. But that's just where my brain was thinking when you were talking about this and thinking about having an AI be able to constantly adapt and augment your learning based on what you're getting and what you're not getting, right? And that would be so fantastic because that's what every teacher strives to do. But a lot of the time if you have 35 brains in your class it's really hard to do that effectively for all 35 at the exact same time. Right, yeah. And teachers have different ways to address this whether it's groups of students or having students work together or teachers do what they can. But yeah, sometimes maybe if we had AI working on our online curricula to personalize them for people maybe, I don't know, are AI teachers going to make sure more people don't slip through the cracks? Will they help teachers? Yes, that's more what I mean. We want them to assist teachers. Help the teachers. Absolutely. So you can work on your reading packet like I was describing, right? But if it's AI assisted then it might help hold your hand every step of the way in a way that an individual teacher cannot. Yeah, so it all meant fair abilities, of course. So, it's okay. If you're a teacher because you want people to be educated and this works better than having a teacher you should be happy to be replaced by a robot. I don't think that, oof. That's tough because a huge part of being a teacher is socio-emotional. Huge, huge, enormous. Like, I don't think that AI aren't there yet for people being able to. It depends on the teacher. Yeah. Learning, I guess my point is school is socio-emotional, right? And that can happen on the school yard or in the classroom or from your music teacher or from your PE teacher. It can happen from every, it really should happen everywhere. But yes, that is the part that I think you're gonna be really hard-pressed to find an augmentation for. I don't think so. I mean, I can see a lot of teachers who I would love to have replaced with AI over the years. Especially as you, this is, I'm gonna tell a quick story.  This is the fourth grade Quincy Elementary School of Quincy, California. Anyway, felt really sick. I told the teacher I need to go see the nurse.  And she went even, felt, I'm like, I have a fear.  She's like, you're fine, sit down. I got up and I went to the nurse's office. Did you learn something about yourself and how to deal with the people? No, no, I was just, so I went, I had a fear. How did he learn that he's anti-authoritarian? No, that's what I'm describing. He doesn't listen to teachers. We're even better. So I got to the nurse's office. I have 102 fever. Whoa. She's like, I'm gonna call, have you picked up from school? I'm like, okay, I'll be right back. And we're back to the class. I don't know what it was, like eight years old. Open the door to the class and yelled 102. And then closed the door. This, this tells me so much about you, Justin. This. 102. 102. But yeah, there's times when I think having a teacher there as somebody you can relate to and talk to and, you know, just even if it's small talk, making you feel comfortable in the classroom amongst a bunch of strangers, peers, and other. I get what you're saying, that that's an important factor to being teachers, but if it comes down to the education and sometimes I felt like teachers got in the way of that, even the structure of the classroom sometimes got in the way of that. Yeah. Absolutely. It depends on the student. It depends on the classroom environment. It depends on the teacher. And I grew up before they paid any attention to how anybody learned. Like these, here's the material. Here's my coursework. Here's how it's being presented. You jump in line to the way I teach the class and then you get something out of it. Maybe, maybe not. And I think most teaching is still done that way. Well, and meanwhile I dealt with new math, which was a giant mess. So. The old math wasn't much better. I'll just say that. It wasn't easier. And now it's time for me to talk about sleep. Make you sleepy. Oh, how appropriate. Don't, yes. I know I wanted to end the show on a couple of sleep stories that I thought were very interesting to have come out in the last week. Two studies out this week showing the important nature of sleep. One published in Science Advances by a group out of Northwestern University examined fruit fly brain behavior. And we're able to discover that while they sleep, there are fruit fly brain rhythms that are important to potentially get waste materials, toxic proteins, et cetera, out of the brain. And fruit flies are an important model for human neurodegenerative disease and other areas of study. The researchers, they found that the fruit flies had proboscis extension sleep. This is a deep stage in sleep. If you ever wanted to know how fruit flies sleep, there is a stage in their sleep, which is very similar to deep slow wave sleep, which we know is supposed to be very restorative for humans. During this stage, the fruit flies extend and retract their proboscis. So while they're sleeping, the fruit flies are like sticking out their little proboscis.  Not during that stage of sleep, or I don't know if they're dreaming, but what they think is going on is that the pumping motion is moving fluids and that is possibly triggering the motion of fluids through the little fruit fly brain and to the fruit fly version of the kidneys. And so they say that this PES proboscis extension sleep facilitates waste clearance and aids in injury recovery. When they impaired this phase of sleep, kept them from being able to stick their little proboscises in and out, they were less clear. They weren't able to clear an injected non-metabolizable dye from their systems and became more susceptible to traumatic injuries. So fruit flies, deep sleep, proboscis pump and brain clearing. Additionally, another study that is from Penn State researchers and looked at REM and non-REM sleep in mice discovered, this was published in E-Life discovered that blood vessels in the brain become more dilated during REM sleep and then even more dilated in non-REM sleep then compared to when the mice are awake. And they think that this vasodilation of the blood capillaries again, very important for flushing out the brain. Yeah. So sleep, it's important.  Huh? Huh? I'm just thinking about, I'm gonna think about little fruit flies. Well, isn't sleep also when your brain does a lot of the like clearing out long term or short term memories and either putting them in long term storage or ditching them. So they're also doing that kind of like Marie Kondo cleaning of your memories as well. So it's a very cleansing ritual sleep. Sleep is. I would recommend 10 out of 10 stars. Would recommend. Yes, for adoptive science. We have a letter, a question from a listener. This week in science questions. Hey guys, first love the show. I started listening when you interviewed my friend, Dan Hummer, and have been hooked ever since. I'm curious if you can help point me in the right science direction. And shocker, it's a COVID question. How will we be able to evaluate if vaccinated people can be carriers for the virus or not? I'm thinking I'd like to propose this question when my spring medical physiology class starts in a week, frankly, I'm not even sure. So any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for all y'all do. Hope you are all healthy and as well as can be for pandemic times, Sarah. My first instinct is that we need to have access to anonymized but tracked medical record data because that's it. There's millions of people who have this. So it'll show up in a doctor's office on a test at some point. We just need access to be able to study it. Which sounds easy, but it's harder to think at least in the States because of the privacy around medical records, sometimes being able to track an individual's progression over time is as easy as that sounds can be very difficult. And then add to that though, contact tracing. So if we implement more rigorous contact tracing and can determine who infected people and if those records are, as you're saying, the anonymized vaccination data or if people allow the fact that they've been vaccinated to be taken down on record during some of that contact tracing, that contact tracing interviews, then that could lead to it. But yeah, it would take a... Hopefully people are trying to do this. I hope they're trying to get access to this data. I've been doing a lot of research on this obviously because I have some very specific skin in the game because my husband works in the ER and is vaccinated but I am not. And so there's been all this conversation with the fact that general understanding is we don't know. So we are assuming that if you are vaccinated you can still spread. But so what I read was that the initial studies on the efficacy of the vaccines didn't really look at this question at all because they were fast forwarding warp speed towards being able to deploy vaccines. Now they are looking at this question. And most research on this right now that I have seen is all about viral load. So just like you test the efficacy of a mask a particular type of mask by seeing how much virus gets from somebody's mouth into the air around you they are looking at if you get quote unquote infected does the viral load increase and are they shedding virus into the air around you? Because if COVID just gets into your body and you have the vaccine and it's like it's on a surface, right? Like it's not replicating, it's just sitting there. The likelihood of spreading that further from it being inside your body is pretty low. It's more of a question of is it replicating in your body and you're just not showing symptoms? And so my understanding is it would take really intensive testing and it would be longitudinal. They'd have to see if over time is the viral load in your body increasing. Yeah, I think viral, I think that's another really, really important way to test it. The final possibility would be to do purposeful infections. Right. So. Yeah. That's like something that we have to talk about really. Put vaccinated people together with unvaccinated people and see if and how many infections occur. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm a data point because everyone's using PPE as best they can but there's still COVID positive patients in the ER where my husband works. He's wearing PPE, they're wearing PPE but there's still a possibility of exposure and then he's coming home to me. So there's, we could be a data point but we'll see. Yeah. But yeah. And like you said, this was not part of the initial studies because they just wanted to see that the vaccines worked to protect people. But hopefully more of this data will come out as more vaccines are tested as we have more people getting vaccinated. I mean, this stuff is a rolling process. And yeah. Well, and if Justin's thing had worked like if everyone had shut down properly this wouldn't have been as relevant of a question because people who had to be exposed because they had essential jobs could get vaccinated and everyone else would stay back home. So it would all be much less relevant if the shutdown had happened more fully. Yeah. But yes, now we're having to ask this complicated question. Now we do have to ask it but thank you so much for writing in Sarah. It's wonderful to hear from you and I hope that you have, that you do ask this of your class. Anybody else out there who has a question doesn't have to be about COVID. Could be about any sciencey thing. Ask us a question at, where do you want to send it? Oh, to my Facebook account, This Week in Science is on Facebook. You can ask us there or you can send me an email Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. Yeah. This was pointed out to, during the inauguration, there were people there like Biden was attended. All vaccinated. Who has been vaccinated and was wearing a mask. Maybe he's only had the first shot, I guess maybe there's a second shot to come so there's not the full, maybe that's why but the other part of it is, yeah, there may be getting advice at that level that even though you're vaccinated, you still need to wear it so that you can't spread it or it could just be, hey, you have to set the right image. Can't really tell. No, I mean, no, that's the current, that's the current thing they gave Biden a mask when they vaccinated him. They said, don't forget now, keep wearing your mask. Yeah. I know he's had his second too so they're still telling him, wear the mask so you can't catch and spread. Correct. Yep, wear it. Send us an email, ask us a question. We love to have questions from you. We've come to the end of the show. We've done it. We're there, we're at the end. We have done it. I would love to thank you all for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. I do hope that you enjoyed the show.  Shout outs to Fada for help with show notes and social media. I'd also love to thank Gord for help manning that chat room and keeping our chat room fantastic. Thank you to Identity Four for recording the show and keeping that going. Oh, I forgot to open my thing that I made from last week. Hold on. Here I go. I would also like to thank our Patreon sponsors and the Burroughs Welcome Fund for their support of TWIS. Thank you too. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, why is this sharing? It's not being nice. Oh no, my computer just decided, am I still here? Yeah, you're fine. Okay, great. Then I'm gonna move to this other computer. So at least we keep going. The thing that I tried to do did not work. Pointing at the Burroughs lady. So there was an awkward moment. Nope, nope, okay, okay, here we go. Thank you too. Woody MS, Andre Basette, Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunn, Vegard, Chefstad, Hal Snyder, Donathan Styles, AKA Don, Stylo, John Scioli, Guillaume, John Lee, Ali Coffin, Gaurav Sharma, Shubru, Sara Forfar, Darwin Hannon, Donald D. 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For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. You can also sign up for our newsletter. Yeah, yeah. You can also contact us directly. You can email Kirsten at kirsten. This week in science.com. Justin at twistmedia.com, or me Blair at BlairBazzettwist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in that search with line or your email will be spammed and filtered all the way into, let's say a myelin sheath. You could say that. I'm a well-preserved dinosaur's cloaca.  I'm a well-preserved dinosaur's cloaca. Also, you can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist.science.ac.doctorkeke at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview, I could, it 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 the show, remember... It's all in your head. Week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. It's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop. Got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I think in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science you may just at understand the philosophy. We're just trying to say it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote and I'll try to answer any question you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour of science is coming your way to what we say in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. That is the end of the show, you know. It's the end of the show. The end of the show. My Google is not responding. Hmm. Trying to share my screen locked up my Google Chrome and it's amazing that I'm still broadcasting. That that that I'm still streaming to you. That's good. My screen is not responding and I'm getting this blue spinning wheel. YARPS Yeah. I'm wondering if I just need to shut this window and if that will fix it. Which means that I will be gone for a couple of moments. Can you hold the fort? Hold the fort. Okay. It's all you. Maybe. Nope. I got to just cut.  Let's see. I'm looking in the chat room. It was very cool to see so many living presidents in one place today. That was neat. I'm glad they were all vaccinated. It does make it a little less scary.  Oh, look at me. I'm here again. Oh, there you are. Move myself and add myself. It's still done. I need a clarification on something that came up during the show. I've been still back in my mind still trying to interpret something you said, Blair. Talk about the chocolates and candles. I'm picturing they were using cloakers as molds for chocolates and candle holders. This is what my brain came up with. That was Blair's suggestion. May I screen share this? No. No. Okay. I'll just put it in this. You can put it in the web chat. You can put it in the chat. No, you cannot.  Just a piece of chocolate. I'm talking about using your own rear as a mold for chocolate. That is what you're talking about. Yeah. Thank you for not sharing. Are you in the web chat? No. Okay. Let me put it in the private chat. I'm not going. It's okay. It's in the private chat. But then also because then it's worse then people are going to google it on their own and find it back. There's a whole other thing. Kids, people do weird things in the world. I'm going to use clinical terms but I'm not trying to be dirty. I have to unclean this. But there is another thing. Did he just hang up entirely? Did he just hang up entirely? Oh my goodness. That's very rude. That's rude, Justin. It's just a part of biology. Come on. And then there's a whole other thing where there's a kit that you can buy to make a silicon mold to later make candles or chocolates or chocolates but it's often used for candles but you can make a silicon mold of your vagina. It's the other thing. That is a thing you can buy. Nope. Then you can make so I just say candles. It would be neat to have a candle from a dinosaur from butt fossil. I don't know. I think that would be really cool. See that? That would be cool. That's what I was saying. No, Cheryl, not the goop thing. No, although that did remind me of this whole situation but see that was supposed to be a candle that smelled like... Justin's back. He didn't leave entirely. I thought you completely hung up and weren't going to come back. That looks like what? Gwyneth Paltrow's Nethers. Why would anybody make a candle that smells like their butt? No, not her butt. Oh. No. I still think no. Cheryl, yes, and it blew up. Somebody bought one and it exploded in their apartment. No. I have a couple of things to say. Just real quick. First of all, who bought that candle? There's a whole... She has her thing called Goop which is like her lifestyle blog, I think. And now it's also like an online store. So it was part of that. I don't know. Well, people, it's not a real doctor. Poo pills, by the way.  Just make that clear. Don't yuck other people's yum if it doesn't hurt anybody. Is my whole thing. Here's the other thing. You were mentioning the silicone molds? Yes. I've worked with silicone molding before. It generates a decent amount of heat. No, no. In order for you to make... So, for example, when you make a mold of a thing, you don't usually go straight to the original thing. You use plaster pairs. It's obviously not plaster pairs. There's a whole kit. But you'd use plaster pairs to make an impression. Then you'd put wax in that. Then you would use that to make a mold. So there's multi-step processes. So I don't... I have not researched it.  I don't know. But it's something that can be done. But this is what I'm saying is use that technology to make me a dinosaur cloaca candle, please. That's all I'm saying. You could make all sorts of dinosaur fossil candles and other... That idea. I like the idea. We went off on a tangent because of where the idea came from for you. Yes, Stephen Rain in the chat room. New episode of How It's Made. Yeah. That's gonna be a good one. That's gonna be a really good one. Mm-hmm. Nope. Yes, I must admit I am not well-versed on any of it. Oh, you know what I could make as part of my lifestyle, Bran? Huh? No. No. I think what you're thinking about, I'm gonna tell you right now, also exists. Yeah, it does. I'm sure. It certainly does. Yeah, this will be... Hot Rod, this will not. I mean, maybe dinosaur fossils coming to a twist store near you soon. But none of it, no. No other stuff. No, no, no, no, no, no. I want... We're a science show, people. Seriously considered. Seriously considered buying a life-size T-Rex skull replica. That would be really cool. You said the word life-size and I got very scared and that it ended great. It ended wonderfully, yes. Okay. It was, I think, 10 grand. I think it went down to like 6 grand, something like this. But it has like a whole mountain kit and everything. And it's huge. It's a full-size... Is that the one that Nick Cage owned? Because I know that he was auctioning off a T-Rex skull. Oh, maybe. Octioning off all of his personal possessions. Remember that? He ran out of money because of the choices. Poor Nick Cage. Oh, and now he's doing really hilarious stuff. Is he? On television and movies. Yes. There's the thing he did a bit on the use of curse words. Yes. The origin of curse words. I think it's hilarious because he spends his whole bit using the F-word in different intonations to express all the different meanings you can get from that single. Mm-hmm. But what's hilarious about him being the one that does this is one of my favorite things about him is he got the script for The Rock. Which is this him and John Connery. And they go to Alcatraz and there's this whole There's a bio weapon. Yeah, he's not even an agent but he's the one that's got the expertise. Stanley Goodspeed. But he had he was like, yeah, my kids were just at the age where they're going to be watching my movies. And he went through the script and edited out all of the curse words. And came up with other things to say throughout the whole script. And if you know that going in, it sounds like the TV version where they've thrown it like the, oh gosh when you're supposed to like when stuff's blowing up instead of the curse word that was said. Well, they allowed that. And he did it. He was one of the biggest stars at the time. And so he got away with getting this done in the script. And if you know it going in, you pay attention to it in that movie, it's hilarious. It's just another element that makes that movie. It's I think the only thing I really liked about that movie as far as I can remember. But it was brilliant. I love that movie. There are versions you can get that have been edited that way for kids where It was the TV version of it. It's like family. It's like edited for families and it's yes. Yeah, but that it's on Netflix, the history of swear words or something like that. And it's great. The one I want to see is Jiu Jitsu because I love bad Kung Fu movies. But this one's Jiu Jitsu not Kung Fu and the trailer looks awful and wonderful at the same time. You need to see the trailer. You do. So wonderfully good bad. Good bad. Although we're going to talk just for a moment about the martial arts as physical combat. Has the martial arts sort of been de-listed? Because you got this I don't see the cage match fighting techniques and it always seems like it's these weird street fighters that just come out and punch people and win these things. And the guys is all like the cool moves and the stuff and they're doing the Kung Fu Jiu Jitsu thing. Eventually just get taken out by somebody who punches people really hard. I don't know. I think yeah, if you look at the if you look at the what's going on in actual hand to hand combat techniques that come from all of these that people learn, but ultimately it seems to come down to somebody who's better punching somebody in the face. You talking about the cage match stuff? Yeah. That's different. The ultimate fighting. Whatever the thing is called. It's usually like like one of the couple of the least ones that I've known have been like the champions were like Miami or Irish street bar fighters. Like just backyard brawlers who somehow became the best fighters against all these people with all these medals for competitions and doing these circles and they were like I'm a triple quadruple black belt and this guy grew up in a rough part of Scotland. Bam! The guy with the rough part of Scotland punches him hard and the other guy falls down. It's I don't know. Which is I had this friend in high school who had been studying all of the martial arts and he had like the fast punches. He could show you different ways. He could throw you to the ground really quickly and it was like always very impressive. And then he took his first wrestling class thinking all of his training was going to come and he'd be good at wrestling and he just got beat right away and badly all that. And he became a wrestler. He's like this is where it's at. This is where it's at. Because nothing that I have learned in all of my years of taking all of these classes really prepared me for somebody grabbing you and bringing you to the ground. That was the Gracie's and nothing would work. That was the Gracie's who started for the mixed martial arts. The MMA stuff marked. The Gracie's were doing jiu-jitsu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and they were doing the grappling stuff and the Gracie's combined a bunch of their jiu-jitsu with kickboxers and boxers and so people started mixing all these things together but I think it was the Gracie's that really got it started and it's fierce. It's fierce. It's brutal. I like watching the fights every once in a while. Well, yeah. You've got like a black belt in something now. You're like a... Is it Kempo? Taekwondo. Yes. The way of the fist. Taekwondo, it basically means I'm going to punch you now. No. And they say this that people who have been trained in martial arts will come up to me now and prove that there's a fighting style works on me. Any fighting style will work on me. Just so you know. It's not a high bar.   You gotta stretch out a little bit. I can kick and punch and kick. Yeah. If you're on the street, though, you can always just run away. The cage match, you're kind of stuck.  I actually did learn two pieces of martial arts that I have found effective. They were both from Kempo Karate. One was a Glock with the hand another was a block with the knee. And I found if you ran at somebody and you did both of them and then you play them and keep going. Yes. Very handy technique. Very useful. Track is actually my martial arts. Being able to run. I love what is it? Aikido. It's supposed to be the very like energy redirecting martial art. It was Jean-Claude Van Damme's martial art. Was it Jean-Claude's? Yeah. I was getting confused with the actual martial arts of Frank Dukes, which was the Ninjutsu. Yeah. Because of the Bloodsport Commitay. It's fun stuff. Fun stuff. I did make a kendo. Was that the one with the hip people? Kempo. But we didn't get to use actual swords. We used these wooden sticks.  But from what I could tell, the class was basically to give the more advanced students people to beat up with sticks. Right. I was like, I'm done. Am I paying money to get concussed? I'm out of here. Oh, Segal. Thank you, Ananuki. Steven Segal was Aikido. Yes. That's the two guys, those two fighters. Both of whom I think ended up with like drug problems. Oh. Well, like Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan is amazing. Also claims to have broken every single bone in his body. If you've seen the outtakes from all the movies that he's been in, I can believe it. There are some movies where you watch the outtakes and then like you realize that at some point halfway through the movie, he did a stunt, broke his ankle, and was in a cast for like the rest of the filming. And you're like, wait a minute. He does have my favorite martial art movie scene ever. I think it's called the brawl movie. It might be wrong. But his grandfather has told him he was not allowed to fight. And so when the thugs come to start stuff with him, he's sweeping up the shop and accidentally hitting somebody and then he's doing the dish. He's moving that. He's like, he's continuing to work. I'm just doing my work. Yeah. That's his level of slapstick to it. That's fantastic. He's brilliant. He is a massive star in China and I think he's one of the richest he's like, he's among the richest people in China. I think I heard somewhere. That might have been true in the late 80s. But I think that because he's a producer. He's a producer, a director and a singer. And so he's like this. He's sold so many records in China. Yeah. Hold on here. Segal lives in Russia now? Is that true? Segal is in Russia. He did always. He did always have like this weird Russian entourage thing going on. I heard about this. This is a story on LA. He had like this weird Russian mob entourage thing going on all the time. Okay. So actors in the world. He's in the top 20 richest actors in the world. Jackie Chan is. He's somewhere around $400 million. And he deserves it. Yes. Hanging off of the side of buildings and stuff.  Segal. Segal. Segal. He's a segal. No. Oh, Kendo is the sword fighting. Kempo is the sticks. There's a Sadie. No, Kempo is a karate. Kendo is a karate. Kempo is a karate style. That's the one I learned. Kempo karate. I learned a little bit of Kempo. That's where I got the blocky block. Yeah. Kendo is the concussed new students until they have a thick skull or leave. Mom, let's go to bed. I would like to get back into martial arts. I have not done martial arts in a long time. It is fun. You have enough marshals going on right now. I have a martial. I have a marriage in the martial arts. That's a cute little piece of hair there. I got an alfalfa thing going on. I do. That's fantastic. Kendo swords. Thank you.  I'm just very happy to have had a very nice day that didn't seem to have violence when it was expected in places and there was a lot of... Do you know why you didn't have any violence? Because it was expected in places. Yeah. But I'm very... Today was good day. Let's have more good days. I would like to have more good days. Let's go to sleep so we can have a good day tomorrow. Yeah. So I can wash my brain. And I might not see you all next week. Yeah. So you're potentially traveling. I'll be traveling that day. Okay. So no mosquitoes for you. I got it. Let me know if you have any questions about mosquitoes. Hmm. You have a week to think about it. Okay. I don't know. Is it going to be about... I do have some questions about it. I do want to know how much of a pollinator they actually are. I had a feeling you were going to... I don't want to get rid of them. I don't want to get rid of them. But I will take the advice if they are a good pollinator to put up with them. I think that is a very... We want to know that. Things we want to know about mosquitoes. And I'll tell you more. We'll have more next week. Identity four. I was contemplating the answer to your question, which is why I hadn't replied yet. I think if you sent the audio because... I don't think that is useful in the moment. I think just sending the full file is best for me right now. I think if we start doing something... I got to think on it a bit more. I think I need to do more intros and outros that we record with each episode that would be then able to be cut in and cut out if we decided to cut shorter bits for the show. What you're doing is great. So I see a lot of shows that don't have intros for their shorts. They just start right with content for the short version. And at the very end they tag what the show is. Is that on YouTube or for podcasty stuff? Something about YouTube. I don't really listen to those. I just kind of have a lot of stuff on YouTube. So if we just like Jimmy Fallon type stuff. Do the clip. Do the clip. For more content, subscribe. Hit the like button right at the end. Yeah. Which is sort of a given now. Any way that if you like something you would do it. That might even be a little redundant at some point. Yeah. Identity 4 has a back pocket process if we want to get fancy. I like fancy. I think. Fancy or not fancy. This we can fancy. I fancy saying good morning Justin. Good morning Justin. Say good night Blair. Good night Blair. Good night. Good night. Good night everyone. Thank you for joining us on this hopeful Eve. And I do hope that you have a wonderful week. Stay safe. Stay healthy. And fill the world with science and kindness. Kindness. Compassion. And we'll see you again next week. Take care everyone. Be kind Sadie. Be kind.