Internet! We are live. At least the internet tells us we are live. If you're watching right now, you know that this is the live podcast broadcast of This Week in Science, the live taping. Anything and everything that you see during this YouTube, Facebook, online, I don't know what it is we do here, live thing. Extravaganza? Extravaganza, it is always an extravaganza, will not necessarily be what you hear in the podcast because I edit it. The podcast gets hacked and cut because I do that nowadays. But we may say other things. So if you're here, that's awesome. You're part of the secret club. Thanks for joining us. Okay, YouTube stream is live. So we're going to start the show in a three, a two. This is Twist. This week in Science, episode number 781 recorded on Wednesday, July 8, 2020. How to test for COVID. Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki, and today we will fill your head with perky ears, killer coconuts, and COVID, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.  Accept that for now. You'll be celebrating alone. If your time is worth saving, then you better start masking or just chill out at home for the cases they are spreading. Prophetic lyrics from Bob Dylan, a man so far ahead of his time that even he may not have understood all the words to his songs. And while misquotes from folk singers can be just as reliable a source of information on the epidemic as the White House coronavirus task force, there is real information being looked at by scientists, scientists attempting to save the world from a fate worse than death. What's a fate worse than death, you ask? Being too sick to tune into another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough, one place to go. Dr. Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about science because that's what we like doing here. We love talking about the science every week with you. So thank you for joining us once again. All right, the show ahead. We've got some great stuff in the lineup. I have stories about Neanderthal genes, counting hummingbirds, and gene editing. We're also going to be joined by a guest tonight to discuss testing for COVID and CRISPR. What do you have for us, Justin? I've got ears. I've got luminous blue variable. And why would you date might not really matter? Huh? In the end, it doesn't matter. Is that science or is that just where you're at right now? No, no, no. This is purely scientific study. What you think you want from me doesn't matter. All right, Blair, what's in the animal corner? I have coconuts. I have venom. I have Alan. I'll tell you what that means later. And besides this one that I'm playing tug with right now, I also have a story about dogs. So many dogs. So little time as we jump in the show right here right now. I want to remind you that if you are not yet subscribed to the Twist podcast, it's really easy to find us online. Just look for This Week in Science in all of the podcast players that are out there. Find us on YouTube, on Facebook, and you can get to our website by visiting twist.org. All right, now let's get into the science. Let's start it off with some quick stories. Right off the top, I want to tell you about a Neanderthal gene. Do Neanderthal genes predict COVID-19 disease severity? Oh, I saw it. Oh, okay. No, not. But Facebook told me so. Yeah, don't listen to Facebook. But this recent preprint that was in the bio archive, highlighting here, preprint, not yet peer reviewed study, describes a genome-wide association study at GWAS finding that describes a genome that wherein a stretch of DNA in people who tend to have more severe outcomes probably came from Neanderthals, from our ancestors somewhere way back. So there's a high percentage of this particular mutation in people in Europe, about 8 to 10% of people in Italy tend to have it. And surprisingly, Southeast Asia has quite high percentage of this mutation. What does the gene do? How is it involved in the viral process? No one knows. We have absolutely no clue. It just changes whatever the usual base is into an A, an adenine. So this mutation doesn't necessarily predict if it's going to become severe. But if you do want to limit the spread of this disease, social distance, wash your hands and wear a mask. End of story. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have anything to start, Justin? Preprint. It's just, you know, it's just a matter of time to like post it note, found on a desk from a guy who attended university. Just that maybe. Okay.  Many animals, including dogs, cats, horses, mice, other animals, bats probably, have various species of monkeys can actually even do this. That will move their ears, articulate their ears to pick up a sound to some interesting sound or something that catches their attention. Their ears will sort of move in the direction that sound to better pick it up. What about humans? Research team based in Hardland, Germany has demonstrated for the first time that we make minute unconscious movements, attempts to redirect and reposition our ears. I can't see you. You can move your ears a little bit. We articulate, we'll put our hand, right? We'll actually use our hand to force our ears to articulate towards the sound. But we have muscles, sort of vestigial muscles in our ears that are attempting to reposition. Really fascinating. So neuroscience professor Daniel Strauss has shown that the muscles around the ear become active as soon as a novel, unusual or co-relevant sound is perceived. This is quotey voice of Dr. Strauss. The electrical activity of the ear muscles indicates the direction in which the subject is focusing their auditory attention. It is very likely that humans still possess rudimentary orientation system that tries to control the movement of the penis. That's the visible outer part of the ear. Despite becoming vestigial about 25 million years ago, this still exists as a neural fossil within our brains, published in the journal E-Life. I love the idea of a neural fossil that it's this vestigial throwback that well, yeah, once upon a time, we used to be able to move our ears around, can't so much anymore, but they still really want to. They still try.  That's right. I bet there are little vests. I want somebody to search to find out if we can wiggle our tails. Yeah. Do our muscles still want to wiggle our tails? It's kind of funny too that there's a department in your brain. It's like, oh, there's an interesting sound. Okay, pull levers, fire off the neurons. Let's get those ears turning, even though there's nothing going to happen. Oh, such a sad let down. Tell us about the coconuts, Blair. Oh, it's not good news. So, you know how as of late, there's been a lot of talk about how palm oil is evil and you shouldn't use palm oil. And we've talked on the show about how sometimes it's more about sustainable palm oil, because it's kind of impossible to get rid of it completely. Well, this University of Exeter study is saying, forget the palm oil. It's actually coconut oil that might be more damaging to the environment than palm oil. So, what's interesting, I didn't know this, but impact on threatened species per palm oil was measured by the number of species affected per square hectare of land used. But if you instead look at the number of species threatened per million tons of oil produced, so if you're not looking at the amount of land it takes, but how much product you're getting out of the space, it's actually way worse for coconut oil. So, coconut oil affects 20 threatened species per million tons of oil produced, but palm oil affects about 3.8 species per million tons produced. Olive oil is about 4.1 and soybean oil is 1.3. So, coconut oil is actually pretty impactful if you're looking at the number of species per the amount of product that's created. That's most likely because coconut oil is usually grown on tropical islands, which of course, due to what we know about islands and island biogeography, there's a lot of species that are unique to those islands, and so there are a lot more threatened species on islands just in general. So, once you kind of throw that all in together, coconuts turn out to be kind of a problem. But the reason I brought this story is not just because this is interesting and this is new information, but I think there's two ways to look at this. There's, okay, palm oil was bad, but actually coconut oil is bad, so like, palm oil is not that big of a deal, coconut oil is the problem. Or we can start thinking just about how we make food in general, because I think it's going to be really hard to find anything specifically things that come from tropical climates that aren't impacting species. So, not only do we need to just look at food closer as a whole, but I think also we need to take the burden away from the consumer because we didn't know that coconut oil was bad. We thought getting coconut oil instead of palm oil was better, but really the products should be better. I would still want to see the drill down and find out if coconut water or other coconut byproduct is also getting harvested at the same time, because then if you're just doing it on a product per thing, maybe it changes that ratio a little bit. I'm just, no matter what, I'm not giving up olive oil. I'm using that for everything. So, like, unfortunately, that's a hard line for me. But you might be buying your olive oil from, yeah, olive oil in the central valley, there's olive oil in Italy, there's olives spread all over the place. They can grow up pretty dry climate, so maybe there's going to be more olive oil in the future. That's interesting. You would think that palm oil and coconut oil comes from the same places, no? Yeah, so the coconuts are more tropical islands and palm oil is more of a rainforest. So, yeah, a little bit different. But still, if you are, you know, tearing up forest, burning and, you know, raising what used to be any kind of forest that was biodiverse to put in a monoculture of whether it's palm trees or coconut trees, it's going to be bad. So, yeah, I think your point, Blair, is well taken. That's one of the best arguments for a corn oil. They grow so much corn in places where nobody wants to live. Where we already destroyed the environment. Long time ago. Long time ago. Everything was flattened. All the rest of the nature was killed off by DDT. It's just for corn now. There's nothing else growing there. That should be fine. Moving on from corn to carbon, let's talk about where does carbon come from? Carbon, it makes up all of the organic stuff in the solar system, in our galaxy, in our universe. So it's the main molecule involved in organic life. So where does it come from? There's been a debate as to which stars produce carbon in the astrophysics community for a long time. But now there's paper out using the Keck Observatory to observe the spectra of white dwarfs in open star clusters in the Milky Way. You see Santa Cruz astrophysicists have determined that there is a lower limit of size for a star to be able to form carbon. And it is one and a half solar masses. That's it. One and a half solar masses. So sorry, son, you're out. Our son isn't going to cut it. But anything that is just half again as big will probably create carbon with which to seed the universe with more life. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of neat. But it's all based on spectra, light spectra that they were able to observe to be able to figure out how much light stars were putting out, how old they were, and determine, they found that they had these, this particular group of stars that they thought should be a particular size, but they were bigger than they should have been according to all of their estimates and the way that we think of star life cycles progressing.  And then as they get puffy, the stellar winds come and gently blow the carbon away. Blow it out to the universe. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, carbon comes from stars that aren't our son. Tell me about dogs there. Oh, yes, dogs. Well, we know that the age old saying that, you know, one human year is like equivalent to seven dog years. Yep. It's wrong. I knew it was wrong. We all knew it was wrong because a year old dog can have babies. So that's not right. So anyway, the UC San Diego actually did a study looking at 104 Labrador retrievers for a few weeks old to 16 year old. And they were able to kind of develop a formula for dog age. So human age equals 16. L N dog age plus 31. So the natural log. So it's a logarithmic function. So basically you like, you grow really, really, really fast.  And you're just old for a long time. So a 12 year old lifespan of a Labrador equals about 70 years for a human. So that works out. But that also means that if you're just, if you're six or seven years old, you're 60 years old. So like the second half of the dog's life, they're elderly. So it's a, it's a pretty big bang.  Retirement. They're good. Yeah. They're ready to retire at the age of four or five years old. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. They lived a full life. I could have retired around seven. Yeah. I was like, ready? Yeah. Now. Anyway, we knew the seven to one thing was bunk, but now we have a, um, um, an actual. Yeah. So there you go. So find the equation. Plug your dog's agent to the dog's. Yeah. And figure out how old they really are in human human years. Oh, humans. Who should we date? Justin. Uh, well, new research coming out of the university of California, Davis, I think it's pronounced, uh, suggests that people's ideal partner preferences. Do not reflect any unique personal insights that they have about what they're looking for. The paper titles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Negligible evidence that people desire partners who uniquely uniquely fit their ideals was published last week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This is quotey voice of Jan Sparks, who's a former UC Davis, doctoral student and lead author of the study. The people in our study could very easily list their top three attributes in an ideal partner. We wanted to see whether those ideas were appropriate. We wanted to see whether those ideas were appropriate. We wanted to see whether those top three attributes in an ideal partner. We wanted to see whether those top three attributes really mattered for the person who listed them. As it turns out, they didn't. In the research, more than 700 participants. That's actually a pretty decent size. Uh, nominated their top three ideals in romantic partner. Attributes they threw out there were funny, attractive, inquisitive, down to earth, whatever. They reported, uh, their domestic desire for a series of people they may have dated and had romantic partners. Some were just friends. Uh, participants experience more romantic desire to the extent that these personal acquaintances possessed the top three attributes, which, uh, so there you go. So actually it looked on the surface according to Paul Eastwick, professor of the UC Davis department of psychology and the co-author of the study on the surface. This looks promising. You say you want these three attributes and you like people who possess those attributes. The story didn't end there. He also then compared strangers assessments with their top three and applied them to these people and they worked just as well. So basically it's in the end we want partner partners. This is Sparks. In the end we want partners who have positive qualities, but the qualities you specifically list do not actually have any special predictive power for you on who you'll be attracted to. So just real quick, I'll give, I'll give you a little bit of personal experience with this that actually makes sense with this is that I spent many years trying to online date and I did one of the things where they make you take all these tests and fill out surveys and match with people and I never had a good date on that site. And the ones where I actually met someone including my future husband was, uh, the one where you swipe around and meet somebody a couple of days later with very little information. And it's because I got to get in front of them and see if things clicked quicker. But if you like, like when you sort people into these boxes ahead of time, who knows if I was meeting the right people or not that other way. They have it. They can fit all the things that you like that you say you like, but then, you know, maybe they, they, I don't know, play with their toe hair or something. When did this ever happen to you? I never got far enough to find that out. So they have an analogy, which I really like in this, in this article where they talk about going to a new restaurant.  If you pick out something from the menu, then if you get the wrong order, if you get somebody else's order, that's it. You have just as good shot of having enjoying your meal. If you order it or somebody else ordered it, like you can almost, is it like we all want the same things and then we can't. Yeah. Yeah. The things that we choose tend to be, basically people are boring. No, we're actually not that diversely interested in it. Just don't be, we don't like jerks. I think that's probably one. And we like people who are nice.  I'm just going to put it out there for people who are dating right now. If you act interested in the other person, that's going to go a long way towards getting a second date. Just, just put it out there. I always thought it was if I showed how, how flattered I was by their interest. Oh yeah. I don't know about that one. And then of course, if you prescribe to my suggestions of dating, make sure that they smell good. Cause that means genetically you're a good match. That's right. Oh, I will absolutely attest to microbiome being more important than anything else. Exactly. Microbiome can make decisions in life. This is getting away from the science though. That's right. Twisting. Let the twist hosts figure out who you. Here's what you do.  If you like them, that's your microbiome saying don't talk. Don't waste time with the surveys. Don't share interests and politics. Don't talk about anything. Just kiss first. If you liked it, you'll be fine. But maybe ask if they've been exposed to COVID first. Oh yeah. Right now, these are things we need to think about. Keep your mask on when you kiss. No, that wouldn't. Moving on to some gene editing. There is a big study out this week in nature for the first time. Researchers have developed a system for gene editing that might be able to cross the mitochondrial membranes to enable single base changes, a C to a T to a single strand of mitochondrial DNA. The system uses a bacterial toxin called D-D-D-A that is broken into two pieces and linked to a DNA targeting sequence called TAIL. And if it is proven effective and non-toxic, that's a big part, it might lead to treatment of mitochondrial linked genetic diseases, which right now we really don't have a way to treat that easily. There are egg nucleus transfer that has been used where we hear about three parent babies. But for the large part, gene editing that mitochondrial membrane doesn't let CRISPR-Cas9 get in there, doesn't let anything happen. So, yeah, big news. Big, it's exciting right now because hey, it could work someday, like 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now in the future. I think it moves a lot quicker. Yeah, I feel like things are moving pretty fast these days. Like you hear about that. Yeah, you hear about like that's the 50-year, 10-year, 5-year down there. Oh, really? Somebody just took that idea and ran with it and now there's a kit. You can, on a bench top, you can do this now. Wow. And it's on you have three reagents and they're different colors so you can't mess them up. Oh, this is okay. It'll be a lot easier than I thought. Yeah, I know things are going faster now. I hesitate at this point in time to ever put an estimate on how long it'll take for things to actually make it into use in humans. I don't know, just from starting this show 20 years ago people talking about there's going to be a cure for cancer in five to 10 years. I was doing the stem cell podcast a few years back and I'd be like, oh, everybody would come on the show. This will be ready in five to 10 years. We still have very few stem cell therapies, right? Yeah, it's really not a thing. There's things that are tough. Yeah. I would say with CRISPR, for example, the first patient in the U.S. got treated last year for sickle cell disease and she's doing so well. So it's pretty exciting to see a technology that came out in 2012 now being used already, so successfully. So I think things are moving faster and it's really exciting. Well, also we were talking about for the longest time like the $1,000 genome. And now we can do it for spare change and instead of taking 10 years and a billion dollars or whatever it was, it's changed and it can be done overnight. So we've broken through a lot of these mechanics already. Yeah. Yeah. How far will technology take us? If you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science. And if you're interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of merchandise like a face mask, you know, maybe you can get a twist. You can get a twist branded face mask, one with some of Blair's art on it. If you go to twist.org and click on the link to our Zazzle Store. You'll be able to browse our store and find cool items that profess your love of twists. Share it with the world and also help support the show at the same time. All right. Let us move into our interview. Tonight we are joined by Dr. Enrique Linshow. Dr. Linshow is a postdoctoral fellow in the Doudna Lab at UC Berkeley developing novel methods for CRISPR gene editing.  He knows the things. A technical co-lead. He's a technical co-lead for the team developing the innovative genome genomic institute's COVID-19 testing lab process. And he is the co-founder of Camino Anciencia, a Latinx science podcast. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah, really glad to get you on the show tonight. So tell us a bit about your path from, like kind of how you got started in science and how you ended up working on this, in this effort to test for COVID. All right. Well, it's a little bit of a long, long story. Let's get it. I was born and raised in Costa Rica. My parents are from Taiwan. So they just emigrated to Costa Rica in the early 80s. I think they just were looking for an adventure. They were thinking about changing their life. So they just left Taiwan and left everything behind. Their culture, their family, they had no support from their family. They were just like, let's go to this small country and the other side of the world. And let's just start there. So it was really a really awesome place to grow up in. So much rainforests, beaches, volcanoes, so much nature. And I think I was really lucky. I grew up in the 90s. And that's the time where we had a very famous Costa Rican, Franklin Chandias. He's the first naturalized astronaut from the U.S., a Latino astronaut to go into space. So I grew up in the 90s and he was going to the space. He went like seven times, I think. So we would see him in billboards, on TV, in the newspaper a lot. And it was just so inspiring and it made me believe that even though I was growing up in a small country with maybe limited scientific opportunities that I could reach out for the stars and I could also go and follow my dreams as well. So then I kind of became a little bit obsessed with DNA when Dolly the sheep was cloned for the first time. I just thought it was so cool that we could do that and it made me interested in learning more about DNA and what we know about DNA and what we can do with DNA. So I just started reading a lot about DNA. And then I actually got a scholarship at the end of high school that allowed me to go to Germany to study. And I chose physics because you know that curiosity, I really wanted to understand what are the basics of the world, what are the questions and what are the ways we can understand the world with equations and math and all of this. But I always kept my interest for DNA so I got lucky and I started working in a lab that does DNA origami, which is using DNA to build tiny little things, little machines at the nanoscale. It was pretty cool but I did not understand biology at all. I was like, how are we going to put this into a cell and I had all these questions that physicists couldn't answer. So that made me go a little bit more into biophysics. And then I joined a lab that was working in epigenetics, which is a little bit the study of how DNA organization in the nucleus informs how function pretty much or the identity of the cell, how the organization of DNA within the cell can affect different processes like disease, resistant to disease. And I was just fascinated by epigenetics and I got the opportunity to come to the US and do my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. They have a really, really great epigenetics institute and I joined the lab of Shelley Berger there. She does really awesome work where she's studying how epigenetics affects everything from Alzheimer's to social behavior in ants and cancer. So I kind of got interested in more of the cancer aspect, looking at protein immunotherapy, for example, and how epigenetics influences resistance to therapy there. And then from there, finishing my PhD, I was really interested in going into genome editing. Having worked with DNA for so long, I thought it was so cool that we were able to manipulate DNA actually directly. And I just thought it was really cool and I was a bit intimidated about the big labs, but my PI at the time encouraged me. She said, there's nothing new to lose, just apply. And apply to the big places and then I got an interview with Jennifer Doudna and that was so exciting. So then that's how I ended up here. I actually joined in August of last year and it's been amazing. Jennifer is such a great person to work for. She really promotes independence and bringing my previous knowledge into my projects and also allows me to kind of grow the projects the way I'm interested in. So it's been really great. Yeah. And I can't help but always point this out. Jennifer Doudna who's basically invented CRISPR. Yes. That her last name, Doudna, if you look at it, is do letter U DNA. That's not supposed to happen. If you wrote that into a screenplay, you have to change that. You're making it unbelievable.  But yeah. I have seen people with shirts that say, do you DNA? Yeah, DNA. She does. But from the physics perspective to what you're doing now, I'm fascinated by that progression because I've always had the perspective that physics really underlies everything. It underlies how chemistry works and chemistry from there underlies the biology. So in making that transition, did starting with physics give you, how do you think it's affected your perspective on the work that you do now? I think it's really interesting. I would say a lot of physicists wouldn't consider me a physicist anymore in terms of the work I do. But I think there's something really interesting about being trained as a physicist to understand really the nitty-gritty of problems like biological problems or questions. And sometimes you go very, very into the small details of everything. And it's easy to forget the big picture. But I think for me, it provides a different way of thinking also because my training never really, I never had that much biology. I come into this more with some naiveness where I don't really know what's already known. So then sometimes my questions are more like, oh, why don't we do this? And then people are like, oh, well, this doesn't make sense because of this and that. But sometimes the ideas that I have because I don't know what's completely known turn out into new ideas, which I think it's a cool way of how interdisciplinarity can actually provide new perspectives. Yeah, absolutely. So there was actually, the head of the genome department, genomics department at a lab I was working at years ago always said that one of the biggest curses in science is people who assume that they know stuff because they've been, they heard it or it was assumed knowledge at one point. It was assumed knowledge at one point and it got taught that way and it's been taught that way. And then so people stopped looking into it because it's just assumed that some point and that knowledge could be 50 years old when it was developed and people have been just assuming that it's correct ever since and never pursuing or testing in these areas. So there is a superpower of being able to black out the assumptions that people are making from stuff they've learned that could have been passed down from an experiment 30, 40, 50, 100 years ago and starting fresh and just asking the questions and following them where they go. And now with your work in the Doudna lab and with the Innovative Genomics Institute so are you working for your postdoctoral fellowship? Are you working on CRISPR based questions or are you working on other things? And then I guess we'll get to talking about COVID and whether CRISPR comes into that in a second. So I am working with CRISPR. I'm really interested in technology development. So one of the things CRISPR does really well and that we, I think the public understands really well is that it can go to a specific site and cut it really well. But what it doesn't do that well is allowing us to introduce things into that site. So if you think about, for example, some diseases there's genes that might be mutated. So what you want to do is just, if you have two of those copies, you can cut out the one that doesn't work well and that could solve your problem. But if you have a disease where you have two mutated genes and you want to replace one of the genes with one that's correct, CRISPR is not that good at doing that yet. This paste function, it's only really good at cutting. So my interest coming into the Doudna lab was really how can we improve CRISPR-Cas9 especially in other CRISPR systems to make this pasting function much better? I'm sorry if you hear my dog barking in the background. No, that's fine. My cat is elsewhere in the house meowing like crazy. So we're good. They're probably meowing and barking at each other. I thought that was a really interesting analogy you make. I mean, it's the cut and the paste. And it would be kind of like the way that CRISPR-Cas9 is right now would be like having a really bad word processing program that you'd cut something and paste it in. You want to paste it in specifically someplace else but it might paste it in there and in other places in your text and maybe incompletely. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, I think word is a really good analogy because if you think, for example, about the human genome with its three billion bases, if we put it into word at a maybe size, font size 12 times new Roman, we would have over a million pages of just your genome letters, let's say. And then CRISPR has this ability to go almost anywhere within those one million pages and you can put your cursor into almost anywhere in there and CRISPR can find that site and cut it. And that's already so amazing. But then bringing something into that site is another challenge that's on top of that, pasting something into there like the right word that you want. Right. So we know that DNA is wrapped up. It's wrapped around these histones and from your epigenetic work, I mean there's that aspect of accessing the genes that are in there. How does CRISPR, how do you open it up from that like fully wrapped up kind of like there's no transcription or translation happening here, form? So that's a really interesting question and something that I'm also interested in is how epigenetics comes into place in gene editing and how these nucleosomes and the histone modifications that they might have can affect gene editing processes. Hi. So for example, what we know or what some papers out there have shown is that when DNA is really, really compact and has histomarchs that are known to be in very, very compact areas which is called heterochromatin, what happens is that CRISPR cannot immediately access those sites but given enough time, those sites will relax and CRISPR will be able to come. Sometimes this place nucleosomes are moved in and enter and cut those sites but there hasn't been I would say that much research around what for example different histone modifications can do around gene editing and that's really something I want to pursue as I continue in the Doudna lab and then maybe with my own lab in the future. Yeah. I mean I imagine that's moving forward for any gene editing that would happen in adult cells that are outside, maybe cells that are outside past there, they're doing cell division. How would you make changes to those cells? At this point, are you, is it focused mostly on developing cells on those that are younger, I guess, more pluripotent stages? Yeah, so at this point my research is a bit focused on that but there are people who are interested in how you can use CRISPR for example to edit neurons and things where cells are not replicating and that brings its own challenges, especially even how do you deliver a CRISPR system into a neuron through the blood-brain barrier and all these other questions that make it very challenging but I think as we move on, these are really important questions we need to tackle. We already have something that cuts really well but how do we deliver it to hard places and how do we make sure that we're editing the right cells? Yeah. From our chat room, Kevin Unique is wondering what you mean by relaxing when it comes to the DNA sites on those histones. I guess when you think about all the cells in your body, they all have the same DNA but it's pretty crazy that some cells make a tooth, for example and some cells make skin and other cells are cells in your heart that can move. So really what underlies this is that some parts of your DNA for example, the parts that would lead to making a tooth are compact and very well packaged so the DNA can't be read and other parts are relaxed and open and you can come and read the genes that are important for making a tooth, for example, or making skin and that's pretty much what I mean with relaxed DNA. So instead of being tied up in knots? Yeah. They're chilling out. They're more open. Open to suggestion, really. Pretty much. From the work that you're doing, so there's CRISPR-Cas9 which was the original, now there's CRISPR-Cas12, Cas13, there are these different variations with the CRISPR-associated proteins that go into how well CRISPR does its job and I've read a bunch of studies that are still questioning whether or not our body is going to defend itself against CRISPR and the CAS system and whether or not this CRISPR-Cas system is the gene-edding system that is going to take us into the future for treatments related to disease or for whatever we want to use it for. Yeah, so I would say one of the areas in the doubtnet lab that continues to be very strong is identifying new CRISPR systems and one of the ones that came out recently from our lab is CRISPR-Cas5 or Cas12j and this is a really small one that was actually found in a bacteriophage. So a virus that infects bacteria instead of the bacteria itself which is pretty cool but there is definitely this question out there about whether we'll have immunity or our bodies will react and kind of turn down CRISPR if we put it into the body and it won't be able to perform the functions that we want. So I think there's still really a need to identify more and more variants because that would allow us, for example, to test if a patient has already been exposed to the bacteria that were carrying a specific CRISPR system and then we could administer a different kind of variant that that patient has not seen before and hopefully because a lot of these treatments are supposed to be a one-off where you just treat once and it's cured then you wouldn't have the problem of being re-exposed to the same variant over and over again. Do you think that CRISPR has more of a potential as just a useful tool for molecular biologists or for actually addressing human health problems? I think it has a huge potential for both and we're seeing it in both areas. For me it's amazing to see how fast CRISPR has gone to all the labs in the world. I was recently talking to researchers at the University of Costa Rica and they were talking to me about how they were using CRISPR to kind of modify some crops that they were looking at and some pineapples and tomatoes and it's crazy to me that this technology that only came out a few years ago now it's everywhere and I think it also speaks a little bit to the democratizing technology that it is because it's very cheap and it's easy to do as well. It is absolutely the backbone of biotechnology and biopharmaceuticals. All of the drugs that you're going to be seeing come out that are causing cures are going to be produced in this way. Whether or not it can be used directly, we're already here Kiki, this is the problem. We're here. We're already here. However, being able to create really specific targeted drugs or therapies, CRISPR outside of the body being utilized and bio and pharmaceutical and then applied to the human body is probably the most efficient route to do it. And it's already extremely productive, extremely productive right now. Yeah, I would say right now that's the safest approach we have in terms of delivery where we take out, for example, T-cells and then we put them back after we've engineered them using CRISPR. But there's still a lot of challenges into just administering CRISPR directly into someone's body. That's a great example. Car teeth therapy turned the AIDS virus, it turned HIV into a leukemia cure. How do you take, we've got this, putting these things, it's just that's incredible the re-engineering feats that have been already done. But yeah, but in a way then, the necessity of that interaction and that brain barrier and all of the challenges of doing the editing in human can be overcome just with delivery methods, with workarounds, which in some ways seems maybe at the end less important whether you're direct, although, and it's been the argument of we've, am I sub-tangent too quickly, hang on. You're sub-tangent.  He's working through the logic here. I'm trying to accelerate the conversation to the point where there is a necessity at some point perhaps within families who have a genetic history of the disease to want to engineer the next generation not to have a malady that has been the family curse, the family shortening of lifespan, the family high rates of perhaps... You mean like sickle cell? The thing that it was just used for? Right, no, exactly. Those are the places when people talk about engineering children, genetically engineering a, you know, pluripotent stage future child, we freak out that this is about hair color and eyes, whatever the thing, but the real benefits are there for families who have suffered generational genetic disease. So those will be a part of this future. And it's true and for a lot of those diseases there is no cure and some of them are so rare that no one's actually investigating them. So this is a really cool avenue to think about these problems. I'm really curious what you're kind of most excited for in the potential future of CRISPR since there's so many different, crazy things you can use it for potentially. It could be something totally far out or something you're currently working on, but what are you kind of most anxious to see? Oh, that's a hard question because I mean, everything we see is DNA, so the potential is, well, not everything we see, but all the living things that we see are DNA, so the potential is crazy even if we think about climate change. I feel like CRISPR can provide some solutions if we think about how can we make coral reefs more resilient to acidification I also think genome modified crops are really important in some parts of the world where people are undernourished and this would provide a solution to climate change as well, not changing their climate. And then I think for me, I've always been really interested in the human body. So I think the potentials that I see for cancer treatments are just really, really exciting. So we'll see. And for COVID, possibly. So tell us a bit about the work that you're, is this a volunteer effort at the Innovative Genomics Initiative Institute and that endeavor that's being done? Is that all volunteer and what are you doing? It is a volunteer. Maybe just to start the Innovative Genomics Institute is this collaboration between UC Berkeley and UCSF and we have researchers from both places all working on genome engineering, which is pretty cool. There's everything from basic research that we discussed here up to medical treatments and food and other engineering. So it's a really cool place and I think one of the things that also attracted me here, there's a unique effort towards equity and access for all the technologies that we develop, including CRISPR technologies, but also for COVID testing, which we're doing right now. So we've developed in, I think this was at the mid-March, Jennifer Doudna had this meeting that was virtual where we were all looking at the numbers, everything was looking pretty bad and the numbers in the U.S. were just going up so fast. So she was... Don't you wish we could have those numbers back again? I know. I do. Definitely. But yeah, who knew what was going to happen. But at that point, she had this meeting where she wanted to ask everyone what she thought researchers and scientists could do with the resources that we have and the skills that we have. And then the discussion just kept circling back to testing. We need more testing. The government is not providing enough testing. And testing and contact tracing is really so important. If you look at countries that have successfully curbed their epidemic, well, their pandemic, they've used really aggressive testing and contact tracing. So then there was no testing facility in Berkeley, actually. And then Jennifer just decided, okay, this has to happen. And then I was at home, actually, because the shelter and place happened around the same time. And I thought, okay, I'll just be at home for a couple months. I spent it with my wife and my dog. But then I was also reading the news and looking at Twitter all the time. And I saw there was this ad from the IGI saying they were looking for volunteers to start this clinic and they were looking for people who do RNA extraction, as well as QPCR. And that's two skills that I've done for so many years. I was like, oh my God, first time that this skills can be used for something so direct. It's so useful. Yeah. And then I just signed up and then the next day I got an email asking if I wanted to co-lead this effort with another postdoc from the Delta Lab, Jennifer Hamilton. And with two other people, Abby Stahl and Conor Suchida. And then we just got to work. We got to the IGI. I think mid-March still. And it was pretty crazy because none of us had ever worked with clinical samples. We just had this idea of we need to make this happen. We'll do whatever it takes to make this happen. So we just started taking apart a sequencing room, taking all the machines out, going to different places on campus to roll machines into this room. And we had all these challenges like we can't get any carbon tubes. We can't get nasal swabs. All of this is while carbon tubes are made in Italy and Italy at that point wasn't doing too well. So we just had to design our own kit with a smaller tube. Oh, P-swab. Oh, I think my light died. But... Hey, wait, can I ask you a question? What did you sequence on? What was the sequencer? So the sequencing room was just where we pretty much look at when we're using CRISPR systems and looking at new CRISPR molecules. We look at how it's editing. So that's where we get a sense of if it's editing well, whether it's look like if we can do substitutions and this paste function that I mentioned. So that's pretty much what we did in that room. And we sequenced on... next 6, I don't know if you're familiar. Okay. Yeah, the Illuminates. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, Illuminate machines, yeah. Talking shop over here. I know Justin's getting into the knitting gritty details. So there was a lot of donated equipment and you took over a space and you started figuring out how to work with clinical samples? I mean, did somebody come in and say, this is how you should do it? Did you get it? We had a pretty interdisciplinary team where we had someone from... it's interesting because Berkeley doesn't really have a med school. So there's not really a hospital. There's just a student health center where they didn't really have a lab. So there wasn't a lot of expertise of what we were going to do and how we were going to set this clinical lab up. So we actually talked a lot with people at UCSF to get some of their insight. But we pretty much did it from scratch where we just found this kit that we could use and convert into our testing kit. And then we went through the FDA regulations and looked at what do we have to do to demonstrate that this is reliable, that what our limit of detection is and whether we can use this to diagnose clinical samples. So we did that for two weeks, yeah. Part of the reason I was interested in the equipment too is because on Nexiga Mycic, you can do hundreds and hundreds of samples run in parallel and still distinguish which one was which one and what one was where at the end of the thing. So I've been hearing about that they're doing pooling, but this is, you don't necessarily even need to pool if you've got them tagged. You can throw all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of samples. It's done overnight, right? And then you can say this one or that one or the other might have had it or is it still pooled to where you know somebody had it? And so this group, we got to go test it and narrow it down. How does that detective work where you're testing? So we're actually not using anything fancy. We're doing a straight QPCR where we have a probe for three different genes that are part of COVID, the N gene, the S gene and ORF 1AB. And for each of these genes, we have a TACMA probe that fluoresces if that gene is detected in a sample. So it's really this technology has existed for decades now. And we chose this because we wanted something fast. We didn't want to develop something over months, which we've seen with some of these new sequencing methods where they're trying to adapt this to COVID testing. And we wanted to minimize the possibility of having false positives and false negatives, which can happen in this huge pooling thing. And some of those tests were like something like 40%. Like when you get into those numbers, we were playing with the statistics a while ago, you have, if you get a positive test, at some point you might be like, now I'm relieved because then chances are I don't have it. Pretty much, yeah. And I think we get this question a lot, like why aren't you pooling? Why aren't you doing 100,000 samples a day? Right now we're doing... Why don't you do more? So we started with 200 samples a day and now we're doing about 1,000. But really, it's really hard to collect 1,000 samples in one day. So I can't imagine collecting 100,000 samples in one day. We just don't have the personnel and we don't have the people. This is all volunteer-based. So we don't have the people to do that many. But we did incorporate two robots to our whole pipeline that allow us to go from 200 to 1,000 a day and we are doubling that to hopefully 2,000 with a second robot that we've added in this process. And yeah, we've been offering free testing for people on campus and the campus community. But we've also made it, as I mentioned, we have this effort to have equity and access. So we've actually offered our free testing to different community collaborators. Oh, there's a video. Two different community collaborators within the Bay Area, where we have, for example, Roots. That's a community center with a really high amount of marginalized vulnerable populations. And I think we've all seen within this pandemic that the most affected populations are marginalized minorities, especially Black and Latinos. And we really want to offer our services to these populations as much as possible. Is there a specific way to make sure that the populations who are getting tested, that those tests make it to you, or are you reaching out to find those specific, like to specific testing locations and saying, here are our kits, use them and send it back to us? Mm-hmm. So when we started, we reached out specifically to Lifelong and City of Berkeley offering our tests and they partnered with us to test homeless people and then essential workers, like firefighters and policemen and other people who are, for example, working on maintaining the electrical grid. And for me, it was very surprising that a lot of these groups do not have access to testing from the government or anyone else. And it's really important when we think about, for example, maintaining the electrical grid, if that falls down, then hospitals can be affected, lives can be affected as well. But then as we've been going on, we've had the clinic now for a few months and then people have started to reach out to us, asking for help as well, because they can't find it anywhere else. Despite what you hear out there, there's still a lack of testing, especially for asymptomatic cases, but overall for people who are uninsured as well. And we are trying to close that gap. I think what we've seen as well is that there is a lot of private testing. Like there's some labs that do private testing, but each test can cost up to $200. And sometimes the turnaround time is up to a week or seven days and I don't know, I think that's crazy. So we're hoping to continue providing tests for free and with our turnaround time that it's between 24 and 48 hours. So we saw that video of your lab and now I just, something I hadn't even really thought about, we saw a lot of PPE on all those people. And I'm just kind of curious how it feels for you working in that lab. Do you feel like you're on the front lines, like someone working in medicine or does it feel pretty separate because you're working with these samples? I think it's important to note that the samples that arrive in our facility are inactive. So we have a solution there that inactivates the virus. However, because everything is volunteer based from the beginning we said we have to do this the safest way possible to ensure that our volunteers are safe and to ensure that anyone who feels like they could be exposed is not. I would say the first time I got into one of those suits, the hazmat suit, I thought it was really cool. If you're like an astronaut and you're like, oh, this is really cool. And then it gets really hot. And then after wearing it for several days, you're like, oh, this is uncomfortable. But for me, this is possibly, and for many scientists who are working there, this is possibly one of the few chances that we have in our life to have such a direct impact in what we're doing. And it's been really, really exciting for me to have this opportunity. And I think for our volunteers, we've had over 800 people sign up to volunteer and it's been really inspiring to see so many people wanting to do this and wanting to help in this time of crisis. That's awesome. Do you have room for more volunteers or are you at physical capacity for people in your space? Like you said that you'd like to be able to test more and you know, so there's money and there's time. And people in time and money, they all kind of go together. What do you need? So we do have, we have a lot of volunteers that continue to sign up. And we've actually, so when we started, we were working with an OP swab. That's the back of the throat used graduate with a swab. And that was what we were doing. And now we've actually developed a saliva test because we recognize, I just got this OP swab a week ago just for a study and it was very uncomfortable. The nasal swab itself is this thing that goes in and folds into it. Blair is familiar. Yeah, I got a COVID test. It was an experience. Yeah. So we recognize that saliva really is the way to go, especially if we want to do surveillance. And as campus is thinking about reopening, surveillance is really important. We want to make sure that students feel safe if they come back. But also researchers and scientists with labs reopening want to feel safe and want to know that they're not positive and not exposed. So we've developed this saliva test, which is pretty cool. You just have to spit in a tube. And then the sample comes to the facility and gets processed in a similar way. But we're looking for more volunteers to help with that effort. There's always money. And if you want to visit our website, IGI, we have a website there about our COVID testing and we're always looking for more donations to allow us to continue providing the services to the community. And we also have some equipment that we're looking for and we have it all up on that website. So please take a look. Oh, yeah, there it is. There are many ways to get involved. Yeah. And right now, most of our efforts have been paid for through donations. And even for a while, people were just donating lunches for us, which was a great incentive for the volunteers to continue coming in. Come in, get a free lunch, do some work. That's great. Yeah. I'm curious. There's someone in the chat room is wondering, since you have switched from the nasal swab and developed the saliva swab, have you found that there is any specific fluid from the body or way of collecting that is better for getting the samples that you need? I think what's really important is if you administer a nasal swab or an OP swab or a pharyngeal, you need a health practitioner to do it. A nurse, a doctor, someone who is familiar with it. But if you're doing a saliva. If you want to do blood, you need somebody who can take blood, but anybody can spit in a tube. Exactly. Yeah. You don't really need, if you think about, in the future, we would like people to just be able to do it at home, for example, and then they don't really, I don't think it's safe to send a nasal swab to someone at home and have them try to do it. Stick it in their head, yeah. Stick this in your nose right now. You're going to have a line of people. You're going to have a line of people. I put it in. I can't, now it's gone. I can't get it out. You weren't supposed to use a regular Q-tip. Well, I don't know. I'm not a... I think it's so uncomfortable. People would just go boop and be like, look, no clothing. I'm done. Done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, saliva is just so easy. Yeah. Nice. And then you can do way more samples at a time because you can have 10 people spitting six feet apart from each other spitting at the same time and you collect all of those at the same time instead of having to go one by one doing a nasal swab. That's great. That's great. And it could potentially, I mean, it could potentially be the kind of thing that could be a mail, a mail kit that people, you send to people who are isolated. Exactly, yeah. And then they, at home, they take care of it and mail it back to you. Mm-hmm. Which is perfect because, yeah, that's what most people are now. And so how do you feel? I mean, I don't know if you're at Liberty to really talk about the larger environment of testing and the state of testing. Like you mentioned, we haven't been testing enough. There are countries like South Korea who got on top of it really quickly. They took, they, they have managed their COVID-19 situation very well. And meanwhile, we are completely overrun. It feels as though the time that we were in shelter in place or lockdown orders in various states around the country, that it was squandered and that it wasn't used to build up a higher testing capacity, that it wasn't used to develop the infrastructure to be able to deal with a resurgence of the virus. Do you feel like we're playing catch-up still or do you feel overwhelmed? I think, yeah. I would say there's definitely more testing now than there was at the beginning of the pandemic. That's pretty clear. But I would say it's really inefficiently distributed where some places like Arizona where you have cases spiking up and you see a surge, there's not enough testing there. But then other places where the situation is a little bit more under control, they have too many tests and they don't know what to do. So there's, for me, a lack of federal oversight and organization that would... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop, stop, stop. You might need to get grants one day. You might need to get grants one day. You can stop. Yeah, I'll just continue though. I think the federal leadership on this issue is crap and it's going to be completely fast backwards and it's actually maybe hurt, not helped because it's really, really been awful. That's just, that's my opinion. Yeah. And then I think I would add to that that we really need a symptomatic testing and a lot of coverage only covers people who have symptoms. But if we want to, if we look at places that have done it well and been able to curb the pandemic, they do a lot of symptomatic testing. But when you have to pay $200 for a test, then I mean, so many people will not be able to afford it. So this is another issue of the health system and other things. It is. Universal health care is turning really nice right now. Also, one thing, and then this is again, just me, this is one thing that was in the news recently. I think a child of the president's spouse tested positive for COVID, though they have no symptoms. So it could be a false test. But what it tells you, that news tells you is they're getting tested whether they have symptoms or not in that circle, in that family. While at the same time, it's being said that we don't need it as a society. That's called hypocrisy. I thought we were in a democracy. Oh, do we live in a hypocrisy now? It's really bad hypocrisy. Some people have always lived in a hypocrisy in this country. Yeah, this is true. This is true. There's lots of hypocrisy. But that's an example I would use in the specific case of the COVID approach from the federal government is not living by the advice it's giving the nation. From the perspective of moving into testing, are we at the point where not the antibody tests, but these PCR tests, there were issues with the initial kits that were being released by the CDC.  Are we at the point now where the PCR kits, are these all across, are they pretty much across the board getting good results for the large part? So like if you go in somewhere and go get a test to find out if you have it and you get your results within 24 to 48 hours. Well, that's the key, the time frame. If you send in your test and you're gonna get your results in two weeks, well... Yeah. I would say the technology is there now, and well, it was always there. I mean, I'm surprised about what happened with the CDC, but I would say PCR is not extremely complicated, and most labs that are doing it now are doing it correctly. But I think on that note, and thinking about CRISPR too, there are a lot of labs that are thinking about how we can move beyond PCR and think about other ways that we can detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And there have been now some new methods using CRISPR that do this exactly. There's one method from the Broad Institute called Sherlock where they're using... Yeah, they're using CRISPR-Cas-13 to detect SARS-CoV-2. And then there's another effort from Mammoth Biosciences, a startup that came out of Jennifer Dautner's lab, where they're using Cas-12A for a very similar approach. And then this is supposedly more cost-effective and cheaper and can be done or can be distributed widely if it works really well. And the FDA has already given emergency use authorization for Sherlock at least, not for detector yet. But at the same time, as we're working on this clinic here at the IGI, we're also developing a completely new method where we also want to use Cas-13. But if you look at Sherlock, the first step that they have is one where they have to pre-amplify the genetic material in order to detect it. And the method that we're developing here in the IGI is one where you don't have to do this pre-amplification. So it would be faster. It would be faster. We're aiming for less than an hour. And then you can think about, okay, then maybe you could have this at airports, at gates where people could get tested within an hour before they board and things like that. It would be pretty awesome. I would get to the airport a few hours early if it meant that it was safer. I mean, it's that kind of approach that's going to lead to the ability to go back to business as more normal than we have right now. We need to be able to detect at that kind of a rapid pace. That would be amazing. That would be pretty cool. Yeah, when are we gonna get it? Stay tuned. I think we'll be releasing more information about it soon. That's very exciting. Well, yeah, I hope that it is successful and that it is able to be a rapid, inexpensive, efficient path to... Reliable. Reliable, yes, that's very helpful. Extremely reliable, especially if you're talking about having people who are not trained necessarily to administer the test at an airport or at a shopping mall or all of the business complex. But it's not even the fault of anybody doing the testing. The problem is if 2% of the population has it and you test everybody and you have a 10% false positive even, that's a massive amount of people who are gonna show up with it who don't have it and the very small percentage of that group that'll really have it. If you're just doing it in a hospital where everybody's sick and showing symptoms as a confirmation tool, it's probably extremely efficient. But when you apply it to people who don't have it, that's when that false positive number really starts to mess with your statistics and really makes it hard to judge of the group that you then have who actually has it. If you did the whole population of the United States and had a 1% even, you would have, what is it, 50,000 false positives? My math is bad. I don't know. But the point is, the point is you need to have it as efficient as possible for people to apply it to the general public so that you can catch things early and not just freak people out. Is there anything that we haven't asked you about that you wanted to comment on? I think we've talked about most things. Not sure. By the way, the typical interview, the typical interview lasts a half an hour. Oh, okay.  All right, well, the other guests were too. But you have your own podcast. Yeah. How could I forget? My podcast is called Caminos en Ciencia and I started it with my colleague Kevin Alicia Torres. And we really started this around 2017 where the rhetoric around Latin American immigrants was really bad. So we thought, okay, we need to have a way to showcase what Latin Americans are doing here and that a lot of people, for example, are working in science and they are working to better the society here and in other places. But as we continued growing the podcast and the stories that we have there, we realized that there's, well, there's really a lack of diversity in science and there's very few Latinx people in science. And one of the reasons is because there isn't a lot of information out there, a lot of people don't realize within our communities that you can have a career as a scientist because we just don't know that many people who are doing it. Right. So for us, really, it's an effort to we interview people from all different countries in Latin America. We've had, I think, over 10 countries represented now. And we really want people to listen to it and, for example, feel identified, be like, oh, I'm actually from the same town where this person came out of and now she's a scientist, so I can do it, too. As I mentioned for me, it was so important to have a role model that I could look up to and be like, okay, if he can do it, then even if we live in this small country, there's no dreams we can't achieve and we want that to translate to people who are listening to our podcast. So we also do it completely in Spanish. And it's awesome. You can hear two other different Latin American accents in our podcast in every episode. For me, it's been really inspiring to be able to do this as I'm also doing my research, too. And hopefully this can lead to increasing diversity in science, which I think is really, really crucial. And in times like this pandemic, it's really also important to think about if the communities that are being most affected are people from marginalized communities, then really we need people or scientists who represent these communities as well so their voices can be heard. So people are thinking about them and their concerns as well and also explaining the science to them and what's happening. So this is one more reason to increase diversity in science. I think it's great. I think it's absolutely fabulous. When we see people who are like us doing things, we aspire to be able to do those things as well. Exactly. And I'm sure you have fun getting to talk to all the scientists that you interview for the podcast. Yeah, it's been really fun and I actually got to visit, for example, Sandra Kaufman. She's one of the directors in NASA. She's from Costa Rica. And it was awesome. There's just... All the people I've interviewed are so humble and so happy to share their experiences because they realize that this is a really important part of training scientists and allowing people in our communities to rise as well and to follow their steps by sharing their stories and they not only share their successes, they share a lot of their challenges and times where they were discriminated and how they deal with those situations or how they deal with imposter syndrome and a lot of different challenges that... or even like not being able to speak English properly and having people think that they're not smart because they don't understand the questions. There's so many lessons within this podcast that I think have... are so enriching and inspiring and it's been such a great experience. I hope you keep doing it and I think it's not just enriching for you, it's enriching for those who listen to it. Yeah, it's probably having an amazing impact. I hope so. Where can people find you? CaminoAnciencia.org is the website. You can find us, yeah, CaminoAnciencia.org, Facebook, Twitter. They can find us in the podcast app and Spotify. Great, and can people follow you online? Oh, yeah, they can follow me as well on Twitter. It's embriquet- the lower thing. Underscore? Underscore. Embriquet-underscore-linz. So feel free to follow me. Cool, we will have links on our website, twist.org, where you can find those for more information. And follow Enrique. Enrique, thank you so much for joining us on the show tonight. Oop, put away my show notes. Nobody needs to see those. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. Really great to speak with you. I think you're doing great work and I can't wait to find out what's coming out of IGI with the COVID detection and where you end up going with your research. I'm sure it's going to be good. Thank you for donating your time to test people out there. It's such a big thing. And I'm happy that we could kind of spread awareness about that tonight. Yeah, it's been awesome. Thanks for spreading awareness and hopefully, yeah, more people know about it. Yeah. All right, this is This Week in Science. We are going to take a very quick break. So I can tell you, thank you. Thank you for listening to twists. You are the reason we're able to do what we do every week, bringing you up to date and down to earth views on science and technology and all the discoveries that are out there. And with your help, we can do even more.  Head to twist.org right now. Click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support. Be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people. We thank you for your support. We really can't do it without you. Are you going to stick with us, Enrique? Justin has taken a quick break. Are you going to stick with us for the rest of the show or are you going to head out? I think I'm going to head out. I need to have dinner now, but it was a pleasure. Oh, it's a late dinner night. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye. All right. And we're back. This is this weekend's science. It's time for our COVID update. I do feel like sometimes we should have, like, some COVID-19. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It would be, like, something spiky. Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. COVID update. Yes. Or we're like, muah, muah, muah. And a COVID update. That note. We are not going to report numbers tonight because they just keep going up. We opened up too early and now we're paying for it. I do want to mention that there has been a lot of debate related to the relatively low numbers of deaths compared to cases of COVID-19. We're seeing numbers of COVID-19 cases spike, but the numbers of deaths are not increasing at the dramatically similar rate. Now, this can be partially attributed to the use of an average number that's based on all the U.S. states as opposed to looking at individual states as individual states. So those that are decreasing, like in the Northeast, will balance increases that are seen in other states, like in Arizona and Texas and Florida. Additionally, this most recent increase in cases is being seen across the United States rather than in just a small number of densely populated urban areas as it was before. And so this means that the impact on the healthcare infrastructure is spread out as well. So instead of all the cases being in New York City and New Jersey and the New York City and New Jersey hospitals being overloaded, it's all over the place. And so maybe more hospitals can move patients between them and it takes a little bit longer before that capacity is reached. Although we are seeing states, like I said, Texas, Florida and Arizona that have maxed out their ICU capacity and are turning patients away. A study out in JAMA this week on July 1st it also reports that the total number of deaths due to COVID should be at least or about 28% higher. But there were a bunch of unattributed excess deaths over 100,000. So that's one of the things I was going to say is because we're not having widespread testing, people could be dying of heart attack or stroke or anything else and it could actually be a death related to COVID. So that's part of it. But I also think isn't part of it that people now as numbers are starting to increase again we're seeing a much bigger percentage of people getting sick and younger people who might not die from it right away but also might have lasting health effects for the rest of their lives we don't know yet. So I think that's the other side of this too is they might not be dying right this second. They might die in a couple months. They might die in a couple years. They might just live with complications forever. So I feel like that's kind of the other side of this that's sticky and complicated. The numbers are sticky and complicated. It is a difficult thing to calculate because people love their black and white world with absolutes and that's not the way it is. That's not where we live. It's not where we live. We live in a world with a lot of fuzzy edges and a lot of overlap and things are hard to figure out but we're trying, we're really trying and scientists and epidemiologists are doing their darnedest to figure all of this out. A study also discovered this week that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't appear to cross the blood-brain barrier which is great news but it does somehow lead to a number of neurological complications including delirium, brain inflammation, what else do we have? Stroke, nerve damage and it might also be linked to an increase in encephalitis cases. Well, and then also there's the anosmia, which is a... Yeah, the no tasting, no smelling. That's a nerve thing, right? Yeah, anosmia it is. Yeah, so a lot of that they think is related to inflammatory aspects that are accentuated by cytokine storms within the patients and there have been other viruses, flu and the original SARS virus which also have led to encephalitis outbreaks where the disease actually brings on the swelling of the membranes of the brain and so they're looking out for that. So that may be COVID related encephalitis. Apparently there was a mass of it with the 1918 flu pandemic which I wasn't aware of. Yeah, and as we were talking about the asymptomatic... We pause here for a moment as Kiki has to reconnect to the podcast. Oh, that's not actually... Oh, yeah, you're back. Oh, but can we hear her? No, we can't hear her. So I'll jump into a story. This is... This is a... Oh, is that a train? You can hear the train? Wow! So the fun thing about Davis... You're the dog and now we have a train. The town of Davis was built back when it was a super big advantage to have a train come through your town and so the entire town is like close to a train track. There's like a bisecting intersection of trains that converge and so wherever you live in the city of Davis you can hear that train whistle as it blares through town if you will. I'm just saying. That's how it's said. So Kiki, asymptomatic... Yes, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals might be responsible for a majority of all infections suggesting that even if all symptomatic individuals are isolated widespread outbreaks could still happen so in this new study the authors write our results indicate that symptom-based isolation must be supplemented by rapid contact tracing and testing that identifies asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases in order to safely lift current restrictions and minimize the risk of resurgence. More and more... I was just going to say more and more details keep coming through that the testing and tracing is something that we really need to work on here in the United States. We need the testing and the tracing but we also then need people to stay put maintain your pods if you're going to see other people only see those people less than 12 for three weeks only go to the grocery store as often as you need to go. People are starting to... wear the mask. We've transitioned from... still wash your hands, that's fine but that's apparently not the main mode of transmission. It is airborne. So wear the mask, that's the best line of defense that there is, the hand sanitizer you can still keep using it. That's not the thing that they're focused on. All of the things, social distance, wash your hands, wear a mask especially when indoors. But social distancing itself is less efficient than close distancing with a mask. The social distancing itself is... the numbers of how far you really need to be apart are much greater than the six feet. Social distancing is... is better than not social distancing. Yes, but it's not going to be protective. I have to do all the things together so the thing that we need to message is that it's not an either or it is all the things. Everything you do, everything you add to your repertoire in a particular moment for a particular situation that you can is going to reduce risk of transmission or... But the number one thing is wear a mask. If you're going to be lazy on any of them the mask is not the one. The mask is the mandatory now. The mask is the absolute first and best part of the defense. Yes, everything. But all the things together. All the things, but absolutely the mask. Absolutely the mask. If you're going to go outside in a snowstorm your big puffy jacket is pretty darn important. That is the most important thing. But you can't just have a scarf. You can't just have a hat. You can't just wear gloves. You need all of those things. Big puffy jacket, nothing else. No, you need it all. I need it all. Hey, if you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science. Want to help twist? Leave a positive review for us on your favorite podcast platform. That would be awesome. Do that today. Easy help. Justin! Do you have a story for us? Between 2001 and 2011 astronomers can several looks at something called luminous blue variable. Which it turns out luminous blue variable is a type of star. This one in particular is about 75 million light years away in the constellation of Aquarius in the Kinman dwarf galaxy. It's too far away for us to see individual stars. But they can detect the signatures of some of these stars. The luminous blue variable wasn't too difficult to detect as by many observatories that looked at it between 2001 and 2011 because it is 2.5 million times brighter than the sun. 2.5 million times brighter than the sun. This is a monster that's out there. Makes it pretty pretty bright. Even in something that far away. In 2019, the European Southern Observatory which has a very large telescope that they call the very large telescope decided to train their powerful lenses on the luminous blue variable and discovered that it was gone. Poof! Not there. Not a zilch. No giant 2.5 million times brighter than the sun star where it had been seen a decade previously. It went home. Shelter in place. It actually listened. Yeah. That's why you can't see it. Scientists think that this could indicate that the star became less bright and maybe got obscured by dust or something.  That seems really fast. Yeah. And it definitely didn't produce a supernova. There's no trace. It's gone without it. 2.5 million times brighter than the sun and now it's gone without a trace. Quoty voice. Let's see. This is Andrew Allen of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland who is a PhD student. If true this would be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner collapsing into a black hole. We were surprised to find out that the star had disappeared. It would have been highly unusual for such a massive star to disappear without producing a bright supernova explosion. They published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this week. The group first turned the espresso instrument towards the star in August 2019 using the very large telescopes four eight meter telescopes simultaneously. But they were unable to find the signs that were previously pointed to the presence of this this monster star. A few months later they tried another instrument. Again, no trace of the star. We may have detected one of the most massive stars of the local universe going gently into the night. Says team member Jose Groh also at Trinity College I love that massive star going gently into the night. Anyway, they plan to begin operations in 2025 to take another look. The European Southern Observatory is building an extremely large telescope that they are calling the extremely large telescope which they hope will actually be able to solve the cosmic mystery of what happened to the luminous blue variable. What happened? Although there is this class of star is sort of known to have towards the end of its life they become a bit erratic and can eject or a lot of light and mass and material in these big bursts. So that's also what we may have seen is what is normally not that big of a star but is putting out its energy all at once and we don't know. It's just a fun mystery to find something that massive and bright in the universe and then it's just gone. Ten years and it's just gone. Link. We did see it. So the one idea is that when we did find it it was in that kind of like blow it all out. Yeah, it might have been in sort of a peak ejection phase. It's also a stage of a star that's very old and is near near death. What's amazing is that within this two decades of observations saw it didn't. You think of things in terms of just how long stuff takes to come and go on the planet Earth. Obviously things probably billions of years old to begin with but to catch it within two decades of there it is now it's gone that's pretty that timing is pretty insane. So the question is what was the end? What end befell this giant star? Did it just dissipate? Did it black hole? They don't know. So they think that maybe now that it wouldn't just dissipate. I mean would there be a core left to it? Something that's dark? It's not a black hole but just not putting off light anymore? That is yes and that's one of the ideas is that this may have been, we caught it in the highest point of it putting out a mass of energy but it's not a supernova now it's sub-supernova expulsion of energy and now it's dim and gas cloud or an edge of the galaxy something has gotten something's blocking it but they don't know and again two and a half million times as bright as the sun and now it's not there now that they're not finding a trace of it from a very large telescope which is a superior observation instrument than the ones that initially could see it which is also pretty amazing. The big questions here you know it's like okay these stars we wouldn't normally expect them to go black hole without first going supernova and then compacting on themselves right so supernova and then turn it into a black hole normally at the size and brightness that they are they should have that supernova and this one didn't so that's the question that's the key term it's like what do we not understand about this star and again this kind of plays into what we were talking about a little earlier about sometimes we have assumptions we have mathematical models that in physics that explain these things very well but they're also still sort of we still have the model based on the universe as we understand it there could be things that we just got wrong and if it's doomed or correct and it could just be that like there's stars out there that are big enough and they just go you know what I'm done I'm gonna retire I'm gonna black hole and that's how they do it it's just that quick so fireworks there's no celebration at the end of being a star where they put the fireworks out there into the universe just quietly go gently into that dark night it was aliens it was aliens great I mean definitely that right let's go with that one you know actually that's a terrible suggestion I mean I mean what if they're like harvesting energy from the sun and they just you know sucked it all out at time you know who knows here's the thing I always have the problem about when we talk about and it was an incredibly incredibly advanced society like that is harvesting energies of dying stars what's your problem with it I'm sorry what do you do at that point I mean clearly that's how they power your planet and their spaceships so why there's a certain point where like oh we can harvest stars now what are you gonna do with that I don't know go home watching Netflix what's the purpose of society at the point where they're harvesting stars we'll have to ask them you kind of got to the point of the game where it's just not fun to play anymore what's the point of the game right now the struggle isn't it that thing that you don't the unknown the still unveiling all this knowledge about the universe once you get to the point where you can just harvest a star it will you're really running out of things I read once that the purpose of life is to learn how to give cats really good headscritches did a cat tell you that I think that sounds like a maybe it was whispered into my ear during a dream yeah yeah alright I have a I have a story that doesn't have to do with cats but it has to do with birds because I like birds now hummingbirds we like hummingbirds put out your little sugar water feeders and they bye and we've talked before in the show about studies of hummingbird memory in which it's been shown that hummingbirds remember where they have withdrawn nectar from flowers in their environment males specifically of the rufous hummingbird species will defend a territory so if you put out a feeder and the male rufous hummingbird decides that he's going to be eating from that feeder he is going to defend that feeder from other males he's going to get vicious but among the between the feeder and the other flowers in his territory he will remember every single flower and how which ones where in the garden he's visited to be able to come back to them later the next day or to be able to once they've refreshed and it's a really fascinating question of what they're actually remembering when they're remembering this location and so a new paper in the Royal Society proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences out of Susan Healy's lab looked at whether or not hummingbirds have a number sense and so what they did is they took this rufous hummingbird and it's ability to remember locations and they trained the hummingbird up on various arrays of fake flowers and these little flowers they look like little bells they're like little cups with a flower they look like flowers it's really great and they arrayed them F1 being location 1 closest to the feeder that they trained the bird on initially and then moving out 10 spaces so F1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 and then they would move the food around sometimes the food would be in flower 1 sometimes the food would be in flower 7 sometimes it would be in flower 8 and as they moved it around they started testing how well the birds remembered the numerical the numerical aspect of the question and what they found is that the birds were absolutely capable of it's not as though they were tapping out you know like whatever the horse was that could tap out the number that it that was a trick it was a trick but it's not like the birds were like whistling back a certain number of times no we don't know if the birds are counting most likely the birds are not counting but in terms of the location with respect to other previous locations the birds were able to remember and so what they're saying is that this species of bird has what's called a numerical ordinality they're not counting Kiki they're doing algebra if I may I feel like most animals if not all I'm going to make a sweeping declaration here whatever all animals there you go sweep it I'm going to do it and far and near and more and less and probably a little bit more than that so one of the fun things about it is humans named quantities things so we believe that we because we have the number sense we know about it and so nothing else does because they didn't name it it's the language of naming things has got that we also think that it makes this unique but the ability to conceive of the concepts behind those namings of things isn't necessarily something unique to humans you're giving words to this is more than this and this is more than this you can categorize really well and use it to great extent but it doesn't mean the concepts are lost on animals it's natural to nature nature is using the concepts that humans use all the time plants use it more sunlight is over there yeah and so the birds were definitely able to remember the this ordinality and the ordinality of a number is defined as the understanding that the third item in a set comes after the second and that both come after the first as opposed to cardinality which allows discrimination between the quantities one two and three so in this instant it's what's interesting is that they're showing that the birds don't just have a location based memory but that they also have this ability to determine the order of items in a set yeah pattern recognition look all animals hunt through pattern recognition all animals have strategies of evading being eaten or strategies of getting prey through pattern recognition this is again it's nature that humans are naming and claiming we've invented nature by naming thing that we noticed in nature already it's yeah I think the question here is super interesting though because we can't talk to birds and we have these understandings of how we can figure things out and how we imagine things and so the researchers were really trying to answer the question of whether or not the birds as they're going through a trap line or a sequence of flowers in the garden and they're going I visited this one and this one are they going to them and memorizing it as a sequence or is it possible that they use the ordinal information to create a trap line that assigns each artificial flower a numerical value and then they visit them in that numerical order and this this study shows that it's more likely that they're using numeracy than memory it's not just a memorized pattern it's an understanding of the relationship in space I feel like that's such a specific claim I'd want to see another study that's designed completely different that measures the same thing to kind of prove that that's going on because I also know as you were talking about the very beginning of the study that hummingbirds are pretty good at like mapping out their surroundings totally so how do you parse that out from just knowing where things are supposed to be yeah well I mean it would be like in in town you can use landmarks to get around and remember where those landmarks are but you can also know that the post office is three blocks past the grocery store and that is going to be different that's counting that's numeracy that's knowing that if you travel in a certain direction for a certain amount of time that you're going to that there's a relationship between this place you just visited in this next place and I know I wonder if this is though we've seen amazing numerical ability in honeybees so I wonder if this is a property that isn't just something that like a hummingbird can do but that insects could be capable of as well yeah so I'm simultaneously skeptical of the experimental method a little bit and also assuming that it's true yes exactly so that's the weird situation that I'm in right now I love it alright should we move into the animal corner oh sure yeah let's see if I can actually get into my computer how's our Justin can sing it oh okay what you got there I have a story about Sicilians do you know what Sicilians are oh yes like my whole family everybody in my family is from Sicilia absolutely sorry is that a ghost it was a ghost in the machine so Sicilians they're not just from Sicily they're also a really weird kind of amphibian so when we think about amphibians we think about frogs, toads, nutes, and salamanders but there's a fifth kind of amphibian yes the Sicilian it is sort of the sea and it is it looks like a giant worm there's really no other way to describe it looks like a giant well kind of like you can see worm snake I guess if you're trying to be really specific but it's actually an amphibian some of them live under water some of them are more rigid most of them are more rigid and they live underground in burrows and they can burrow with their head and their tail so these guys wild but just an amphibian not particularly unusual otherwise if we're talking about evolution Utah State University has now found the first known evidence of oral venom glands in amphibians in these Sicilians this is new information so amphibians we know that a lot of them have poison and as we know poison is ingested venom is injected so poison is something that like on a cane toad where they secrete from their parotid glands they they secrete some poison some neurotoxin so that if I'm a crow and I go to eat a cane toad on how big of a toad it is and how big of a crow it is I could just get a really bad tummy ache throw up I could be paralyzed or I could even die based on that poison but so it's a defensive strategy and we know a lot of amphibians have poison but now we know that Sicilians might be able to inflict injury via a bite so they discovered oral glands in a family of Sicilians and they found these fluid filled glands in the upper and lower jaw with long ducks that open at the base of each of their spoon shaped teeth so think about that too spoon shaped teeth pretty wild animals so they wanted to see what is this stuff now keep in mind they have poison they also are covered in mucus so Sicilians have a lot of other liquids that they secret so they wanted to see if this has any relation Mediterranean climate it's always warm you just have to sweat constantly yes yes so they wanted to make sure that this had any they wanted to see if it had any relationship to venom that we currently know in the animal kingdom perhaps reptiles the next kind of clade of animals that came about after amphibians so they looked at embryos and they looked at embryonic analysis because if you look at how an animal develops you can see if they come from similar places in the fetus so they looked at the embryonic analysis and they found that the glands these dental glands originated from a different tissue than slime and poison so not related to either of those things the poison skin glands come from the epidermis but these oral glands came from dental tissue and that is in fact where the developmental origin for venom glands and reptiles starts so it's related which is very cool and these oral glands also activate when they bite down on prey which for Sicilians it's worms, termites, frogs, maybe a lizard it's nothing too intense yeah, pasta, of course pizza, okay not only is the value being racist that's racist okay, okay, okay yes, so the team doesn't yet know the biochemical composition of the fluid in the oral glands and this is where it gets kind of questionable because as a reader knowing what I know about animals getting to this point in the story I'm thinking yeah, it could be venom glands extra special digestive enzymes right? a little bit of pre-catalytic effect on the food so this is where a million questions come from so of course next in the study they want to look at if these secretions are toxic and if they have any similarities to the toxins in venomous reptiles but if not if these things are not toxic and if they are in fact some sort of kind of saliva aid or something else even, I don't know if they're not toxic then what the heck is it used for and then even more importantly is there a common ancestor that had something that gave us these amphibians with whatever oral glands they have and venomous reptiles my money honestly is on the fact that it's probably a toxin and that there was a common ancestor the ancient amphibians before reptiles split off that had some some venom or capability of growing venom glands I think you hit on something just absolutely amazing here though the precursor to all of it could be a predigestion that has never occurred to me but that is incredibly an incredible advantage to tackling any sort of a new food source you spit your digestive juices out there externally let it get broken down to me yeah well and I think also I'm trying to remember my vertebrate evolutionary morphology class from my undergrad but I do believe the digestive system of an amphibian is quite different from our own and so yeah it's possible that it might aid them to kind of digest this stuff a little bit potentially I don't know but so anyway they might be venomous but they have some sort of weird glands in their mouth so one if you didn't know what Sicilians were before today please go google them and just marvel because they're wild and then they are not honestly they are if you have not seen one before for the podcast listeners I'm just saying they do not look like your vision of an amphibian no they look actually quite ruggedly handsome they do not look like amphibians they look like a giant worm snake yep I'm having my own side conversation to this whole story anyway so that was the number one check out Sicilians they're cool they are the most awesome they might be venomous they have some sort of crazy oral glands we have tempers it's fine we know my last story is also about an amphibian I didn't even realize until now it's about an amphibian and someone named Alan so Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology looked at Alan or artificial light at night oh get out of here I can't handle it just shut up guys so artificial light at night or Alan oh my god Alan what you doing shut yourself down Alan we know that it can impact behavior all sorts of behavior foraging migration patterns mortality rates physical structure of animals ability to communicate any number of things no artificial light at night or Alan can be a problem but this new study is specifically looking at Alan's impact on invasive species nocturnal insects like moths flies and beetles of course are attracted to artificial light as we know and these invertebrates are food sources for nocturnal predators like bats, birds and cane toads our buddy the cane toad is back so cane toads they are going after nocturnal insects now remember they were introduced to Australia to eat locusts which are a way to turn the day good job guys so they're like at night and they eat nocturnal insects so that didn't work out and there was no natural predators so the cane toads are all over Australia it's a big fat mess it's a penal colony good choices say that to the cuacas okay it's not their penal colony but anyway they are all over and so it would be helpful to know how artificial ethnic impact cane toads and what's interesting is so they set up six outdoor enclosures they had an artificial light attached and it was in different rural areas they placed cane toads that they had locally captured into enclosures just before sunset and then they had the toads feast overnight on nocturnal insects then they euthanized and dissected them to measure the contents of their bellies don't feel too bad they're an invasive animal that need to be eradicated so sorry guys occasionally they even put out bounties I think there's no you can get paid for a satchel of cane toads anyway the researchers varied the amount of light they controlled for rainfall wind speed and temperature and they all looked at how that impacted food so they they found that with lights on the percentage of flying insects that the toads caught increased significantly but this is what I think is so wild about this story they did not eat as many flying bugs when the moon was bright the same reduction in bug consumption also happened when they were closer to urban areas that already had ample ambient light yes in cases the extra light diluted the impact of the lamps that the researchers had set up so that so the moon like it makes sense because the moon is like far away you're not going to get a concentration of insects around the moon right but if you have if you have a streetlight or how does it actually even know how the toad is getting up ground lights what is it some garden ground lights like how is the toad getting benefit you get a concentration there are going to be also garden lights there are probably porch lights there's going to be so many lights street lights so having a light up above a toad will increase just the general amount of bugs in that area they will also make the bugs more visible and therefore easier to catch yes two points well made yes so anyway this means that obviously they need better careful management of artificial light in rural areas especially in areas where they're invasive animals like this running amok and that research on artificial light needs to consider the lunar cycle which when I heard it whoa and then went oh duh it's one of those things that until you think about it you don't consider it and then once you hear it you can't unhear it like of course we need to think about the moon when we're talking about light at night come on guys but yeah it's definitely it's pretty interesting so one of the things they suggested was reducing light in rural areas during darker lunar phases so the lights are more effective when it's darker out because it's more of a differential so turn your lights down or use them less if it's dark out yeah it's more dark I still remember this the first night I spent in this farmhouse and I went to the kitchen flicked on the light it was going to make myself a late night sandwich and I looked up and the window that was above the sink looking out was an entomologist's dream it was every insect with that it lived within miles of this little farmhouse it was way out in the middle of nowhere was there on the window like covered like needed lines the whole thing because I was the only light source for miles in any direction yeah bugs nocturnal I don't understand why nocturnal insects are so attracted to light but yeah I'm also I mean the moon being involved totally understanding that lunar cycle having a role totally understanding that but the idea of reducing artificial light use during dark lunar phases I mean I get it but the reason we have artificial light is for the dark lunar phases you need less artificial light when the moon is full when there's a lot of lunar light why the public kind of education effort is because it's counterintuitive if you think about it because we want to be able to see stuff but if you think about when you're in bed you don't need a porch light on when you go to bed or when you go inside turn your porch light off especially if it's a darker phase in the lunar cycle you know who benefits from Alan who bats so this was it's been a few years ago but there was on the very edge of town I was living in an apartment that had external walkways that had these big dome lights that would stay on all night and they weren't super bright they were actually kind of dim enough to just they were high up but they illuminated pathways through this apartment complex but at night because we were sort of on the edge of the town next to the farmland insects would just be like going like this giant ball of insects would be circling these globes and the bats would come in and just be swooping through and you'd hear them chirping and yeah they absolutely were drawn to it and fed very well those things so turn on the bat signal I mean Alan I don't know why that bothers me so much just because it's such like a blase name let's talk about artificial light at night oh I know Alan it reduces the importance of the subject yeah I guess that's true the sound of it speaking of important subjects we can science questions we have a question for the end of the show from Ashlyn Entrobus she has a question for this new segment it's been reported that COVID-19 has a higher mortality rate in men this seems to be a fairly common occurrence where illnesses and medications affect one sex more than the other while I'm sure the mechanism differs based on what we are talking about has there ever been any research on why these differences exist the answer is yes there has been research into why the differences exist we don't know a lot yet there is a difference for COVID-19 in the prevalence of the ACE2 receptor which seems to be the receptor that SARS-CoV-2 binds to that men have more of it in the lungs in the respiratory paths and so that could be one reason another is that testosterone may be implicated not just in the infection itself but on their body's response to the infection can I suggest one yes men in their 40s tend to be arrogant and feel indestructible there's that too and Macho and I'm not going to say that no this is a thing so one of the places you can run that psychological experiment is you can go to a place like a Home Depot during the height of the COVID scare see how many men in their 40s are just wandering around with their face mask hanging down like they don't got to care in the world men are especially in their 40s they've survived enough we think we think we know it all and we are indestructible because of the life that we've survived so far and no tiny virus is going to take us down we're too old and Macho for that it's really the older men get the worse we are about really being concerned about anything it's just I think people like Bolsonaro are the leader of Brazil Bolsonaro is an example perfect example I know we talked about maybe it was an after show about who was more or less likely to wear a mask and I know that Conservatives are less likely but no specifically older men are less likely to wear a mask but also I mean that that infects infection rates which is not what this person was asking about mortality rates but I do think someone being less likely to seek medical aid right away does have an impact on mortality rates and that could definitely have something to do with it if people are not going to the hospital soon enough yeah that's absolutely a fantastic point the conservative point that I was making that conservatives tend not to wear a mask it's interesting because people have associated this with Trump but it's actually associated with anything that you legislate conservatives are less likely to wear seat belts they're more likely to smoke cigarettes they're less likely to reduce sodium like whatever the thing that attempts to get legislated into law conservatives have this weird pushback desire where they're going to they're more likely to text while driving it's a weird thing they're more likely to push back against all these things except abortion but going back to which it turns out which it turns out I will just point out they have they walk to walk and talk to talk but there has not been a conservative man in the country the United States that has had an abortion I will just point that out that they are they are that's exactly why that's exactly why not one of them has done that procedure going back to the idea of hormones though testosterone has an immunosuppressive effect and estrogen has an immuno-enhancing effect save the baby yes and so it is it's they've actually started some tests in which they are using estrogen patches to put them on men who have COVID-19 or other diseases that they're not fighting off very well to help get the estrogen into their system to help enhance their immune system and their immune response so that is another aspect of this story that I find very interesting and there's been a question that there's no set answer on this or not but with the long haulers for COVID-19 women who are long haulers seem to experience resurgence of of symptoms around their period when their estrogen drops interesting are you talking about women truck drivers what long haulers so long haulers that is the term yeah sorry long haulers like I'm like 10 forward years Georgia overdrive no long haulers long haulers is the term that's being used to describe the group of people who experience COVID-19 symptoms for a really long time so people who have had symptoms I have not heard this for like months now yeah they're calling them long haulers yeah I read a thread a Twitter thread from a woman who was experiencing she started experiencing symptoms in March and she's still feeling them my son's piano teacher is the same she has she's been having symptoms since yeah she got it in the end of March she had a test yeah she's had it she's positive she had pneumonia well she's not getting repeated tests no she's not so I don't know she got COVID yes she got COVID so then this is secondary infections that have not been able to get kicked out maybe maybe not pneumonia and lung issues these things can absolutely persist for a very long time okay but also what happens to your lungs from COVID is physical no that's what I'm saying but we don't know so I'm not saying yes or no I'm just saying we don't know if it is related to the virus similar to HIV hiding away in the body and making resurgence and sticking around that story you had a while ago it gets into the cells it's an RNA virus sunny day at the beach this is a whole area of study that we really do there's a lot we don't know and so yeah when you get it you're not getting tested after week after week especially here in Oregon they just aren't giving tests like that and they're expensive people don't know we don't have the data on it but yeah to answer the question there are the original question of whether or not mechanisms and differing on why there is a difference between men and women on COVID-19 potentially if you have a question for us about some scientific issue send us your question we will answer it we'll do our best to have answers we might not have all the right answers but we will have answers you can write in with your questions send me an email kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or leave us a message on our facebook page anyone have any final comments wear your gosh darn masks yes and if you already are thank you for wearing your masks also if you're wearing cloth masks wash them every day yes wash your masks that's the other thing I'm seeing is people wearing the exact same mask every day good either do you wear the same t-shirt every day do you wear the same underwear every day wait what we're not supposed to okay we have made it to the end of the show thank you for listening I do hope that you enjoyed it thanks also to our guest tonight Dr. Enrique Linshow for joining us this evening remember that you can find out more about him and his podcast at Communion Ciencia we will have the links at our website twist.org shoutouts to Fada for his help with social media and with show notes to Gord for Manning the chat room and for Identity 4 for recording the show I hope you got all of it tonight it was certainly a long one I'd also like to thank our Patreon sponsors and the boroughs welcome fund for their generous support thank you too Eric Combs flying out Guillaume John Lee Benrothig Ali Coffin, Maddie Pair Rainer, Sara Forfar, Donald Mundes Rodney Lewis, Stephen Albarone John Ratnaswamy, Dave Freidl Darryl Meishak, Stu Pollock Andrew Swanson, Corinne Benson Sky Luke, Paul Ronevich, Ben Bignell Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack, Sarah Chavez Paul, Jason Olds, Brian Carrington 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I'll be right back Thanks everybody Thanks everybody for watching the show it was a long one tonight, but it was a good one How are we still awake? I know your bedtime is 9 15. I know why are you still awake? It's bright Every Wednesday doesn't she know the routine yet? Hmm. Sometimes Brian puts her to bed anyway All right, it's just me everyone just gets to look at me feeling tired I'm back. It's not just you good. I've finally perfected sourdough. Well, I don't know perfected, but I've gotten red out of it It took four month nations, but I got somewhere with my I have the sourdough starter I raised You raised it from a very baby So what is it? Yeah, but what it when you call it before it's a start Paste I think Wasn't that originally what like the first glue was with just flour and water paste. It's just paste Sour dough. Yeah, it's yeah, I'm pretty happy with I finally figured it out.  I've been to so many stores and I still can't buy yeast So I'm like, I have to figure it out. Can I mail you yeast? Yes through the mail I don't know if that's allowed, but I would like to know I can't make it Paula or bagels right now Can I send yeast in the US postal system? I mean I just do I have a massive bag of yeast that that Marshall got it like a Was it at a smart and final Have you been to smart and final? Mm-hmm. I have not been to a smart and final. There's not one near me, but There's one not near me, but still accessible Try died that's Marshall. They have it's serious. It's like this bag. It's like pounds I tried to By the 25 pound bag of flour at Costco and he was like you No, he like he hubered me for a second. He was like come on flowers. So messy Where are you gonna put that? We don't have enough Where it what you want to put it in the closet and get flour all over our clothes like what where is this giant bag of flour? We live in a one bedroom apartment. I was like And I walked real sad away When are we going to save the world from jeopardy? Oh, I don't know. Sorry about that Let's see Garblex Hala Someone wanted a a hair a horse fact. I had a horse story this year this year today Didn't get to the show hmm People looking at what were they see they were looking They were looking at the DNA from the bones of 268 ancient horses and The bones were from about 40,000 BCE to 700 CE from all over Eurasia and What they found is that when people got involved That about 5,500 years ago. That was about when we started Domesticating horses that there was no pro no preference for one horse sex over the other there were equal numbers of Horse bones found in these human settlements about 5,500 years ago But then during the Bronze Age 3,900 years ago suddenly all of the bones were not all but the dominant number of bones became male and They think that it that it Parallels the shift in human culture Massage me got it. Yes Exactly it parallels a new quote-unquote vision of gender in humans. Oh Boy Right, this is where it comes in handy that we try to keep an explicit rating off of this podcast Exactly, I would say things say things say words Oh boy, howdy. Yes, but I know it and also am I angry? Yes, okay, so with this anger the Japanese now have a new phrase that we need to learn it's called screaming inside your heart But that's just me always So they haven't because of COVID there they've passed a law that you're no longer allowed to scream on roller coasters Oh, yes, I did hear about that, but they're telling people to scream inside their hearts. Yes. Oh boy So that is what I do whenever I come across stories like this.  So I learned some things Um, so like I had no idea how Many types of horses there are there are so many They had a parade of horses So they like had all these different horses from all around the world and something that I thought was really cool Was that they all had different ears? And I had the muscles that controlled the movement of those ears. Yes And so some of them like I think it was Arabian horses Because they could get called by a human like across a Huge spans of land. They were really good. They could rotate their ears like 300 degrees or something like that like farther than other horses They could rotate their ears way farther, but then of course also like depending if you were in a hot or a cold climate In a hotter climate that yours were bigger like for a rabbit for a evaporative cooling and in a cooler climate They were smaller but there was a lot and then one of them had like Pointy and then like curled tipped ears and I I think that might have just been aesthetic But it was it was wild. It was totally specific to that individual But the other thing that I learned about horses that I think is very interesting particularly about horse racing I was just talking to someone about this the other day is that Winning races doesn't really make you money. Like it makes you a teeny tiny tiny little bit of money way less than it costs to keep a horse what makes money when you have these thoroughbred horses that run in races is if They after they win races or do well Then that proves that they have like good genes and then the stud fee is what actually makes money But what if it's a female horse that wins? Does the female horse get a stud fee? They only mails That's a really good question. Maybe they only race males The studs is there a different female league for horse racing? I don't know anything about horse racing But that's interesting. Yeah Just you have to show that your horse is fast and good genetic stock So that others will want to Stud them. Oh, so there are female racing horses Seriously, I don't think Sicilians should be a thing They're so cool.  They don't really have eyes and then that mouth Okay, so hold on I should have figured this is like such a common sense thing. It's late So you don't get a stud fee for a female horse because you get to keep the horse that they make So like that's the whole point, right? Is that you have the female horses to like Give birth to the foal that is then your horse So the stud so you don't get anything from that so really the money Only comes from having male horses So you have to have female horses to give birth to male horses so that then you can collect a stud fee, right? So once they make their money for breeding.  He said he'd be back and then he doesn't leave a message that said like usually he leaves a little note That says hi, I gotta go.  He's he this is what he does. This is what he's doing now He's ghosting us Not fair. I get it. I work long days always You do you get up early?  He did you didn't ghost us. I was just talking smack. I did last week No, I know and I did it was totally unintentional, but you had to understand that that was at the end of four 13-hour shifts So you talk about tired. I am now I think yeah, hang on. Hang on. Let me finish looking doubles No, I'm working graves. I now go to work at 6 30 In the evening and get off at 7 30 in the morning I am now like I'm living on the other side of the plant. Yeah. Yeah, you sure are Which is why this is like one of the most refreshed shows I've had you just got up Because I woke up before the show like this is like I actually woke up a little early today But this is like this was like a midday show. It was almost like a morning show, right? For the first like I have been seriously dragging my Backside into the show having done a 13-hour shift and then a couple hours later doing this So this is this is a this is actually the new dynamic going forward What do I do? Guarv is asking uh firm is asking in the uh No, I don't do that. No, I don't do that anymore. No, I do like like this I do this. I'm doing uh Um, you're riding a motorcycle No, he's turning the the stereo clamps. Clamps lots of clamps lots of clamps the clamps um, uh I'm currently yeah, I'm currently have the clamps uh So, um, I am working uh and pharmaceutical manufacturing Uh and interestingly, uh, it's uh, it's a biopharma. Yeah, so it uses the uh, Chinese hamster ovaries is sort of the basis For for the drugs that we manufacture um And yeah, it's uh, it's interesting too because we I've talked in the past in the show Uh about the fact that I have uh A a disease Which is um, what's it's cll?  And I'm manufacturing a drug which I don't need because my case is like Stupid mild.  Like My doctor says I'm gonna get hit by a bus before Like this will kill me Uh, but I'm manufacturing a drug right now that I would be the drug that they might prescribe to me Wow, if it gets accelerated. So it's kind of like a very It's a very sort of Yeah Um, but the hours suck I am not I am not nocturnal as much as like I've had those nights where I feel like I could stay up all night I didn't Now I have to it's really different I know what wild is uh, you know, brian works 11 to 7 30 every night and um Uh, he switches back to diurnal on the weekend. He's like working half shifts Sure, except, you know, he's In a face shield and a full like hazmat suit like we saw so am I So that's exactly what I when he was talking about having to put on The thing over the with the heat that goes Totally got it. Totally got it. Yeah. Well try doing CPR for 45 minutes while you're wearing that Although Yeah, yeah The uh, the thing is like the story about the the moths being attracted like I totally get it now Because like some point around like 3 4 a.m I would just gravitate to a light source for like heat or just Yeah, yeah Yeah, but I think that's really a lot of people who work nights. They just are nocturnal after that They have a lot of trouble switching back and forth. Yeah But uh, yeah brian just it's not healthy to sleep and Wakes up and he's nocturnal again or diurnal again. I'm like how Yeah, I mean if you can be fine with it, that's great, but I mean a lot of people it's just been It's been suggested so many times that it's not healthy to switch. Oh, yeah, I tell him all the time. I'm like, you're tealum ears You have to stop At some point you gotta switch to day shift I yeah, I don't really know. I just started this So I actually don't know how it's going to affect Uh, I do know that what's odd about this so far um Is that I have Uh fatigue On the shift because again, I'm just started this transition to doing these graveyard shifts Uh, I had this massive fatigue and then after Uh, I guess What would it be after hour? Nine or ten like the last few hours into the early one When you should be the tiredest is when I am the most articulate and most functional Well, it's because you're like coming into the normal time to be awake I'm it's I've become overtired and delirious and apparently Delirious is where I'm actually the most functional. Yeah, it's a human being Yeah, it's yeah It's wild Working night shift, uh, shortens your lifespan by five to ten years says here we go in the channel Uh, yeah, but he gets a 10 bump in pay. So hey, there's that Yeah, I know Brian gets like an extra buck an hour. He's like, okay Yeah Teenager is it so this is kind of somebody's saying uh teenager Uh, beth Bennett uh in the chat room is saying the nocturnal the crash is interesting because my teenager Is fully nocturnal now. Can you explain a bit why it's hard to switch back? You all have me worried. Um Just like jet lag it takes time It yeah, so that's a perfect example This is exactly how I've described what the feeling was initially going to this graveyard shift It feels like having jet lag like there's a reduction a little bit in energy and cognitive ability And that that I've experienced as jet lag before But there is a point to it about the same though is I as a youth this would have been the perfect job because I didn't want to see the sun. I don't know what it would this maybe Did a story about this that that teenagers need to sleep Long like for longer but also later So they they naturally are supposed to be waking up around 10 a.m. Yeah, which means they should be up a little bit later Yeah Uh lightning rots is trying going to the Arctic. So I did that Uh, I went to the Arctic when it was 24 hours sun And what was what I what I recall being really interesting is my transition period to getting sort of used to that I slept Extremely long hours. I had my first I spent six weeks in greenland Under the 24 hour sun And I think the first four or five days I was there I slept 12 hour days And and I don't think it had anything to do with sunlight You might have been not sleeping as well because of the sunlight. So you needed more sunlight I don't think it had anything to do with the sun. I think it was the oxygen content Uh with the purity of the air was so different Uh, you would think if there if it's it's not oxygen content There's no trees. So maybe it's a lack of oxygen I yeah, I I still don't know but my first like four or five days there. I slept like 12 hour days And then uh once I I sort of adjusted It became sort of t