Welcome to the weekly podcast broadcast of This Week in Science. So glad to see you all here. I hope you're ready for a tight 90 full of science news and maybe a little after show. Who knows? We'll see. Blair's tired tonight. Justin's sniffly. Things are, you know, far for the course. Everything's great. It's all good. We're all here. We're all ready to do this show. Just remember, this is the live recording, so mistakes will be made because, you know, we like to make mistakes with conviction. But they may get edited out for the podcast. So the video versions are the whole real deal. Shlameel. Yeah, this is where all of the cursing happens. And we try to be, no, we try to be all audience friendly during the show, when recording all the time. We try. We do try so much. So we're ready for the show. We're ready to do this. Everybody likes. Yeah. Get ready. Hit the likes. Hit the little buttons that boost us up in the algorithms. And let's begin. In three, two, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 910 recorded on Wednesday, January 25th, 2023. Who wants to play asteroids? I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with arctic monkeys, screen time and a game of will you or won't you? But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. With all of the things going on in the world today, like those things I stopped paying attention to around mid pandemic and all the news about stuff going on in those places where stuff is happening. I may have stopped watching the news a while ago and no longer have the ability to make current references to things that are going on. But for all I know, the apocalypse of zombies has taken place and we are now broadcasting to a sea of mindless zombies, in which case brains. And if not, well, we might still talk about brains. Because one thing that never stops getting paid attention to around here is science. No matter what else the day brings or doesn't bring, regardless of the weather, whether good or rather bad, inconsequentially dependent on the amount of coffee in your cup, compared to the number of tasks left on your to do list, completely removed from the half remembered images of the dream you had last night that tries you might cannot be formed into a cohesive narrative. Science always finds something new to get excited about and tells a story to go with it. And that's why we're excited to bring you another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin and Blair and everyone, everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again. That's right.  So many things. I brought this week the aforementioned arctic monkeys, arctic primates at that. Primates. Just think about that for a second. Arctic primates. We'll get to that. Fluffy asteroids. Antidepressants versus antibiotics. And something for the end of the show that is most definitely not the Terminator. What do you have, Justin? I've got a lot of questions about that last one. Oh, I've got, just so everybody's ready, I've got the next pandemic. No. I've got how best to relax during that next pandemic. Yes. What wildlife toxinoplasma gondii is killing off now and just more bad news. Revamp. Man, you're not even calling it good news. That's really bad. It's a revamp. It's a, it's a just good news story at the end of, like they did with the onion thing. Yeah. Never mind. He's done. I'm just, I'm just rebranding it. It's just time. Yeah. But we need the good ish news blare. What's in the animal corner? Yes. I have gestures. I have sea spiders. I have some dogs. Lots of good dog stories lately. And then before that, I have a really quick story about screen time. I've got something to add to one of your dog stories from the last dog story you did. Just remind me if I forget. Oh, good. Yeah. I ran on what time it is. I didn't experiment with my own child. So I just, that's all I wanted. Right. Well, as we jump into all this sciencey goodness, I would like to remind you all that you can find this week in science all places podcasts are found. Well, most places that podcasts are found look for this week in science twist. We broadcast our podcast every week live streaming from YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. You can find us as twist science on Twitch, Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram. And if you go to twist.org, you don't have to remember any of those things because that's where all this show notes and other things are. And you can find us there. And it just makes everything very easy. That's the hub. But right now it's time for a new episode of science. Are we ready? Let's do it. All right. Okay. Let's get down to the core of the problem. What problem might that be? The problem with people writing bad science headlines for the news that make people go, oh, my gosh, the core of the earth is stopping and reversing. Oh, no. Oh, no. That means gravity won't work anymore. The core stopped and it switched and we're doomed. I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been these headlines and the stories. There have been some very well written stories about this research that I will say the New York Times and Nature and other places have done a good job writing this work up. But there are a lot of outlets out there that have jumped to the headline of the core stopped reversed direction when we weren't looking and what does this mean? And I just want everyone to know that we don't understand a lot of what's going on at the core of the earth. We really truly this is a place that we have never been that we cannot get to. We've barely scratched the surface of the earth when it comes to digging our little wells that we try to go down to through the crust to the mantle. We're really trying the way that we study the center of the earth is by using earthquakes and other radio signals that bounce around inside the earth, kind of like a bell. So when an earthquake happens, what's happening is you have the crust of the earth. You have maybe you have a subduction plate where part of the crust is going down, being subsumed into the mantle of the earth. And in the process, there's shaking that happens and they can use detectors on the surface of the earth to actually listen. Kind of like sonar to the inside of the planet. It's like the crust is the bell and those sound waves bounce around inside. And similar to sonar, they're able to get an idea of the solid bits, the liquid bits, all the things that are happening in there. So researchers have been doing this for a little while and back in the 60s, they started taking a look at an area of the crust where they could really get an idea of how these earthquakes were ringing the earth. And they decided that in the 1960s, or actually in the 1930s was when they first started looking into this. Way back in the 1930s. The 1960s though, they came up with evidence that there had been a change to the rotation of the core of the earth. Now, you may want to think about what the core of the earth is and what are we looking at. And when we talk, the core of the earth isn't just like it's complex. There's an inner core that's solid and it crystallizes and that as it hits the more liquid outer core and the liquid outer core gets the dynamics of the outer core start changing because of the crystallization that's occurring between the boundary layer of the inner core and the outer core. And so you have all sorts of spins and things that happen in the outer core that then hit the mantle and the mantle's doing its own things spinning around and each of these has magnetic fields that it's created and there's gravity and so there's inertia and there's all sorts of things. And so you have spin. You have the mantle moving, you have the outer liquid core moving on its own and then the inner core moving. And for a period of time, the data seemed to suggest that the inner core was doing something that they call super rotation. And that is that somehow it had started rotating faster than the outer core. And then the new data that they're looking at and that they're reporting right now is that somehow in about the last 10 years or so that super rotation slowed down. The inner core came to be about the same speed as the outer core and then it slowed down a little bit more. And so the inner core is now potentially rotating a little bit less slowly than the outer core. It never stopped moving. It never changed direction. We don't have it going forward and then stopping and reversing itself like a trick yo-yo. It's moving. It's just, this is the thermodynamics, the physics, the very complex nuanced dynamics of the interior of our planet that we're guessing at by ringing the surface of the Earth like a bell. So anyway, I just wanted to talk about that for a second. That is interesting because it is also different than, a little bit different than what I read, which it was the, I guess the researchers who've just put out the paper were saying they think this is a cyclical event that happens every 30 or was it seven? It's a cycle of 70 something years, but that means it's that you would see a direction change every 30 something years, 32 years in it. That changing direction just slowed down. I hear you. I hear you. Although if it's, if you think of a ball spinning, but it's not, that ball is not directionally or axis, the axis of that ball isn't the same as this outer shell, then it could be technically reversing by going slower because it's maybe just a different angle. Anyway, this was also discovered back in the 60s and they thought it had, they thought it was a much quicker cycle because they saw this, this change, this acceleration or deceleration change take place, which happens to be right at the time that this one predicts that would have happened, you know, 70 years ago, right? Yeah. So, so, yeah, there's, there's both, there's both in a lovely way, there's both a contention about in amongst the scientists about what they're actually observing and what those rotations are. And, and, and of course then we have the public media who's, who's taken just the direst version of a headline of a paper and just ran with it without reading. Right. Yeah. You need to go deeper, everyone. The headline is often not going to tell you the whole story, but the very interesting aspect of understanding this is that the inner core spinning and how it affects our magnetic field does affect how we can protect ourselves from cosmic rays, from solar outbursts and also it affects the length of the day because it affects how the entire, how quickly or slowly the entire planet is rotating. So wait, okay, so now the only thing I want to know is we're gonna have more time to get things done or less. Right. So maybe this slowdown is going to be great. Give us a little more time in the day, right? A little longer day. I might start showing it on time, because I'm only, I was born like 15 minutes late and I've, I've caught up most of the way. I've caught up most of the way at this point, but then you got a little bit of help. Maybe that's all I needed. Just a little help. Okay, time to move into, yay. What are you talking about? What, what not pandemic? What are you talking about, Justin? Well, I didn't say not pandemic. I would maybe title the story when next we mink. Denmark was the world leader in mink fur production before the pandemic. Cute little creatures, it turns out, happened to spread COVID amongst themselves very effectively. So they were killed, buried. Some question about whether or not they should have buried them because there's, you know, waterways, water estuaries in there, but still they were banned. 17 million of them were called in Denmark. And, and, and farming mink was banned completely in Denmark. Very aggressive and controversial move by the Danish government. There was a lot of pushback. One hand it eliminated a major industry, put mink farmers, legacy generational mink farmers out of business completely. On the other hand, it prevented the virus from mutating within the mink community to a point where it mutated beyond the capabilities of the vaccine. That's what they were worried about. There was so much transmission back and forth amongst these millions of millions of minks. They were worried a mutation could, could come from that, that was easily transmissible to humans that would make it worse.  Apparently the Danish? I don't, I don't know. You don't see it here. So I think it was an export. I don't know who was wearing it, but I haven't seen it here. Or I just don't hang out in the fancy mink fur around the neck wearing circles. Anyway, move out a lot of pushback, but the Danish government stood its ground until this year, when mink farmers are allowed once again to resume or rebuild, I suppose, their businesses, because all the minks are gone, they need to source minks from probably other countries to restart their farms. So they can restart the whole fur trading, farming scheme again. But hold on, there's a mink farm in Spain that was losing large numbers of minks to COVID just three months ago, which is a problem, or so they thought. Turns out it wasn't COVID after all, but something much worse. Ah, H5N1 bird flu. Oh no. Yeah, the fast mutating, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that is far, far deadlier than COVID, and has not been found transferring around mink populations before. None of the farm workers have been reported to have been infected. Normally, people who get bird flu get it from direct contact with infected birds. I don't know that we have any cases of human-to-human transfer. If so, there's very few. And again, you probably wouldn't know because like, kills half the people who get it. So they looked at the genome of this thing because at first of all, they were surprised, hey, this isn't COVID after all. And then, ah, right. This virus has gained at least one mutation. That helps it spread between mammals. That allowed it to race through the population of about 50,000 minks on this farm in Spain. They've all been called at this point. So H5N1 already admits an ongoing pandemic. It's affecting bird populations around the world. But now the discovery that it conveyed mink farms means that to leap to humans and then human-to-human transfer, which is the super scary version, is much closer than we expected. While most of us were worrying about COVID-19 actually, H5N1 was spreading around the world. It's first infecting migratory birds and now it's been hitting poultry farms on every continent. There's been mass poultry culls because of this. Is that why my eggs are so expensive? Yes. One of the reasons. Yes. Yes. That and the poultry farm people, they want to charge more money. But it's actually been a huge hit to the industry in North America, South America now, Europe. Farmers have been killing off chickens that have been infected. And we haven't been talking about it. So while most of us were worrying about this, COVID, this was taking place. Good news. There is good news. The virus appears to be a lot less deadly strain than it once was when it was killing 50% of the humans that contracted it. That's good news. The bad news is that that good news is actually bad news because it makes it more transmissible. Yeah. It's a better virus. More people one day. Yeah. The reason also that minks are such a terrifying host is because minks, aside now from being able to get avian flu, already can get the human influenza viruses, making them the perfect mixing vessel for mutations that can get around that whole interspecies bird to mammal, to human barrier. This is going already from one mammal to another means it's a lot closer. It could make the jump more easily. Yeah. The last thing here, though, is that because we humans have large dense population centers and rely on large dense livestock populations to boost our food, it should be clear that threats from emerging and reemerging and re-emerging infectious diseases will be dominating our lives for the foreseeable future. The best we can hope to do about it is to have vigilant field science, which is what took place here because they said, why did we get this spike in deaths? It wasn't like the, they were, it was a huge, huge spike either that went from something like a half a percent of them dying to almost two percent of them dying, which is a big percentage difference, but they just noticed that more minks were dying off and so did the, bring in the researchers. Field research caught it. The research caught it, but we wouldn't have to worry about it if we didn't have these big places where we grew all of our food, all of our animals, livestock. Yeah. I mean, I mean, we rely heavily on chickens and if it wasn't for the chickens, I don't know what I would eat. But I don't know. Fully funded research pipelines is the other thing we can do so that we can come up with a way to, once we've, it's gone beyond the minks, we can be ready for it. And then of course, fact-based government policies to meet these challenges. So while the, the government in Denmark took a tremendous amount of heat for taking this very aggressive action, you know, things like this remind us it was very necessary and might, and like you'd point out, might still be. I also want to point out, since you were talking about them bringing minks in from other countries now, because they're re-establishing their, I see. That's just an assumption. I don't have any data on them doing that. Let people know. So they don't panic. That's the only way that they could do that. Most countries have really extensive quarantine checks for animals entering their country. And so the good news here is, if we know now that bird flu is something you need to check for in mistelids and weasels, right? Like minks, then they can check for it in the quarantine process. So this, I just want to, you know, assure everybody that's, most countries have very stringent processes. Like I know if you move to Australia, I think your dog has to be in quarantine for weeks if you have a dog or a cat before they'll let you bring your domestic animal out. Countries are usually different. I mean, island continents, island countries are definitely stricter. But yes, there are lots of restrictions, especially when it's going to be large numbers of animals for something like food production. But Blair, I feel like we need to talk about screen time now. Yes. The thing that all of us are doing right now, staring at a screen, even those of you listening to this podcast later, you might also be staring at a screen while you're doing it. You might be multitasking. We know that screen time for children is a hot topic.  And so this is a study from Osaka University. And it's, it's not really specifically looking, it's kind of looking at screen time. It's also looking at this other element that I think is really interesting, which is why I brought it. So they followed 885 children from 18 months to four years. They looked at the relationship between three key features, the average amount of screen time per day at age two, the amount of outdoor play at age two years, eight months, and neurodevelopmental outcomes. Specifically, they were looking at communication, daily living skills and socialization. And they used a standard size assessment tool called Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale two. And they did all those at age four. So they let these kids age from 18 months or two years old all the way up to four, and then tested them on these outcomes. Obviously, there's a million variables with these children. So this is like anything on humans. Yeah, so hard to parse out exactly what happened here. But with these 885 toddlers, they found that communication and daily living school skills were worse in four year old children who had more screen time, which again, like, what is more? What is this magical threshold of screen time? But those that had outdoor play, they had about a 20% increase in their daily living skills. So it actually made up for some of the deficits of the screen time, if it was the screen time. Okay, right. So then, so then is this solution?  Or you have to go outside later. You get an hour of screen time, you get an hour in the playground, right? And they also found a completely separate metric socialization, which wasn't impacted by screen time was better in four year olds who had more time outside. Makes sense. But so this is just kind of an interesting idea that screens are part of our lives. They don't have to be considered this like vilified thing that you have to keep away from your child necessarily as long as they are doing other things. And that's, you know, I could have guessed that right moderation balance. Yes. So my problem with it has always been the conversation about screen time is what's on the screen? Yeah. I mean, there's there's a huge difference between putting, I think a child in front of Saturday morning cartoons, screen time, or a video game screen time, or something that's just more, for instance, my only one year old, I will allow to have screen time.  So like, is, is that screen time of birds at a feeder a terrible thing versus like Paw Patrol or something, you know, like got to be a difference. So you also have screen time that is interactive on a tablet, maybe you're moving things around. And then you have screen time that is going to sit you in front of the TV or the tablet, right? But so they're also, as you're saying, there's these different categories of screen time. So of course, any study like this is going to be fraught with lots of intricacies that we don't know the specifics to about how they tested it and all this kind of stuff. But I just think it's interesting to recognize that there's a potential here based on the data that you can overcome some of the downsides of screen time by making sure that your child is outside and probably socialized. And a big thing here is, yes, at some point, the screen time is mom or dad needs a little time to themselves here, watch this show. And what it does is it takes the place of human interaction. If you go outside, it's very likely that that child is not just playing by themselves at the age of two years old.  But yeah, being outside and playing is going to be more interactive, potentially at two to four years old than the screen time for the two to four year old. So that's a great point is that was also communication. That's what I was picturing that that two year old being sort of dropped off at the park, set off in the wild. Go play outside, see you at dinner. No, even, even, you know, however long ago, that was not two year old. That was never to stay out till dark kiddo, especially with COVID. When people were, some of them were stuck like completely in their house, like not very much outside time at all, if you didn't have a backyard, that this, this is an important thing to recognize that the walk around the block might be really important to be able to tamper kind of the, the impact of, of being an inside kid in other ways, I guess. Yeah, Gary, I was pointing out in the chat there, where I live playing outside greatly creatures being hit by a car. It also depends on where you're talking about going outside and playing. Oh, now you have kids with greater exposure to pollution, because they're in a highly urbanized area versus kids who live on a farm and are exposed to pesticides. So this specific study looking at like the screen time and communication level ability at a certain age. So that's what they're, yeah. Too general, too vague. I agree, Blair. It's hard to assess from it, but. Yes, but I'd like to talk about where we might like to play, where we are playing as humans, which is the rubble pile in space. Keep sending our little robots into space and going, poke an asteroid, little robots. And for years, you've heard us talk about Hayabusa. And it's a cow. Yes, just Jackson's mission to asteroid Itukawa and years back Hayabusa returned, crash landed, but they got some little dust grains out of it. And what they found has for years been kind of leading up to an understanding of various asteroids that exist in the asteroid belt. Itukawa is 2 million miles from Earth. And it would be very hard to destroy if we wanted to destroy it, because it's made of fluffy little dust grains. Yeah, it's a sand pile. The dart mission would just, this is what we were worried about, right? When we were talking about heading into the dart mission, what if it's another Itukawa and you launch into it, it just goes. And so now the dart mission, yeah, so they did, they have been determining that the asteroid that they, the moonlit of the asteroid that the dart mission hit, it is kind of a fluffy conglomeration, but it was more solid than they think a lot of asteroids in the belt might be. According to the data that has been published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Itukawa has been around for about four billion years. Four billion years as an asteroid. Now, if you imagine, that's as old as like the planet, and I guess it's getting there. Yeah, it's very old. And if you think about how old it would be and how many interactions an asteroid may have had crashing into another asteroid, little moonlets crashing into other moonlets and the creation of something like asteroid Itukawa, what it suggests is that we maybe need to worry a little bit more about how we're going to potentially get rid of or deflect the less rocky and more wobbly asteroids that are out in the asteroid belt. Being as old as it is, it's survived for a really, really long time and that suggests it's very shock absorbent, that it would not get pushed around very easily, that a dart-like mission wouldn't necessarily set it off course very much. So it's a big question as to what we will be able to do in the future, but this study definitely suggests that as their headline of their research study is written to say, rebel pile asteroids are forever. Yeah, well, it's also it doesn't that doesn't that mean, I guess, that we aren't talking about a primordial solar system with a bunch of big objects that have been smashing together to make these small objects, but that this is the coalition of space dust into small pebbles and then asteroids, that it's itself the meaning that yeah, that there not only could be a lot more of these. Oh yeah, it means there could be a lot more of these because if this is just if this is, if they're not smashed up from big things, but this is just how all the little bits get to be asteroids.  Right. And then some of them turn into big ones.  But all the big ones are already busted up into little ones and now you got to dodge everything. Oh gosh. So we need a new dart design. We need one that's like a trampoline on the end. It's like shock observant and wide. Push. It's like a space bulldozer or a space blower. That's it. You just got to reduce the mass a little bit. I'm afraid we wouldn't like the answer, but does that mean that if something like it's a cow came into the atmosphere of earth that it would be easier to burn up because of all the little parts? Possibly. Yeah. Or does it mean that it would be just like having a lot more asteroid strikes? I'm afraid of the answer. It depends on how it has formed, right? It depends on how many solid bits there are, how big those solid bits are, how much of it is really fluffy rubble and how much of it is a solid core. Yeah. But with a nearly four billion year old asteroid, the suggestion is that it's pretty fluffy and can withstand lots of impacts. And so that's why it's still around. I wonder now too, like the craters, not maybe from the moon, but craters that you see on some planets, if any of them are they still caused by a big fluffy thing coming down altogether in a clump? Like I could be probably a bigger rocky thing. I don't are you stressed out? What are we going to do to deal with our stress levels? Oh, this is a segue. Yeah. So in an ongoing, albeit stochastically appearing segment of the show, did we really need to study for that? The answer, of course, is almost always yes. Let's see this time. A team of researchers at the University of Vienna has found that listening to music when stressed can boost your mood and help you relax. And experiments conducted on volunteers under stress and volunteers, by the way, should go without saying. I hope it appears in the write up of the study on Medical Express six times that they're volunteers, but isn't actually used once in the paper. Because unless you're trying to differentiate a study from studies done on unwilling human test subjects, you can probably leave out the volunteers and just say participants or subjects. We've been doing this show for quite a number of years, covered over 10,000 studies. I can't think of a single study conducted that we've reported on conducted on unsuspecting or unwilling subjects. Right? Well, I don't know. This one had an app on your phone, so people had to download an app willingly, or they were forced to by a random operating system update. Now, to be fair, it has happened in the past. MKUltra, that was an experiment by the CIA to make torturing information out of people more effective. You're stressing me out.  That project ran from 1950 to 1973. The scheme study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male, as the study was called, was conducted on 400 unsuspecting African American sharecroppers who were never told by their doctors that they had been diagnosed with syphilis. In order to prevent them from getting treatment, that study ran from 1932 to 1972. Despite being easily treatable with penicillin, many of the non-volunteer subjects died from syphilis. 40 of their wives contracted it, passed it on to 19 of their children. Study only came to light well after the funding it ended and was leaked to the press in 1972. Because of this and other horrific human rights abuses, Congress in 1974 passed the National Research Act, which requires informed consent and has guardrails built in to prevent experiments that can cause harm to human well-being. Since then, it should be a given any experiment, at least in the United States, is done on volunteers.  I'm joking up on this story here a little bit. And so to return to the actual story. In a second, because Kiki pointed out something. A lot of American drug companies have run into ethical issues of informed consent elsewhere, most notably Africa, where in the 1990s, multiple drug trials and vaccine studies were conducted that could not have been legally done so in the United States after that active Congress created that informed consent rule. Pfizer, for all the good it's done lately, has given experimental meningitis drugs to hundreds of Nigerian children back in 1996 without so much as getting their parents' consent, which even if they had, they would still have been experimenting on children. Human children, mind you. But not too big a deal if the drug works. All ethics aside, if it works, it works. And Pfizer is a hero for taking the risk, albeit with the lives of somebody else's children, to cure them of meningitis. Only it didn't work. And 11 children died, dozens of others were left blind, deaf and brain damaged. Pfizer ultimately paid millions of dollars to the families after a lawsuit that went on for many years, but has always maintained that the children they non-consensually experimented on were already sick. So that was their sorry, not sorry excuse for violating human rights of children. Yay. Anywho, we were talking about something else. What were we talking about? This stress, the stressed out study. Yes, researchers were stressed out listening to music when stress can help you relax. And that happy music was the most effective. Participants recorded their mood and music listening habits five times a day for a week. Researchers carried out the study during the early days of the pandemic, which is when people were told to stay in their homes and businesses were all closed, creating what they call a global stress environment. Researchers conclude that because music is highly popular across cultures and age groups and readily available at almost no cost, music listening can be considered a low threshold intervention to improve health and well-being during times of crisis. Our findings can further promote the development of individualized and tailored interventions that deliver music to foster resilience in daily life during psychologically demanding periods. So when the bird flu comes, make sure you've got the right playlist. So is now the time that we're going to start getting the influx of stories where researchers wanted to do research, but they were stuck in their house and they had to figure out how to do research well stuck at their house. I do believe so because I feel like that's exactly what this is like. What can I study? Oh, it's also the volunteers. What can I do while I'm stuck at home? Yes. And again, and again, you don't have to call them volunteers. Participants. Participants. They participated. Yes. There's no version. It's mentioned six times that they're volunteers. They almost think wise that there's a version of the study where people unwillingly were forced to listen to happy music. We were forced to stay inside in a stressful environment. And I listened to much music. Was that a voluntary then? I mean, I guess it was in the end. Was it wasn't? Some people didn't. And there were no repercussions. Yeah. Moving to the last story of this first part of the show, we could all just huddle together in the Arctic. We could go to the Arctic and be okay maybe with climate change. Maybe it's going to temper it up there. Climate change is going to make it warm up there again. And it's going to be great. Oh, did I say again? Yes. 52 million years ago, the Arctic was a very nice, balmy place. Swampy even. And there's been much work done looking at these ancient ecosystems up in the Arctic. Now, the research that was just published this week in plus one has taken into account fossils that have been discovered up in the Arctic Circle in the very far north part of the Arctic Circle in a place called Ellesmere Island. Ellesmere Island is basically, you know, it's in the dark half the year. It's in the light half the year. So if you are living in a place whether or not it was 52 million years ago and it was warm and balmy and there was lots of vegetation and good things going on, things to eat, you still had to live in the dark for half of the year. That's funny to think about. It's being permadark and it being balmy. The part of the, yes. I'm feeling the temperature drop during that period. Probably not. Probably got colder. But any animal that had to live there had to have adaptations to be able to survive. And the researchers were able to look at these early Eocene fossil sites in Ellesmere Island. Lots of fossils that have been found there over decades and they've taken a look at the jaws of these animals and determined that they fit within two species of primates. And so 52 million years ago there were primates hanging out, hanging out in the Arctic when it was balmy, but then also hanging out in the dark. The researchers say they had to have fairly strong jaws probably because they ate nuts of some kind that may have been stored over the light season to be eaten while it was dark. So the jaws have really told the story of these animals that are primates in the Arctic. Very exciting. These animals may have been groundhog-sized. So a good-sized primate, like mid-sized, not the large, large ones, but like us. But groundhogs can be a fairly nice size. Yeah. Yeah. So this is really wild because the new world primates, the monkeys that are split off 30, maybe 40-ish, more likely 30-something million years ago, like all of the South American monkeys that are thought to somehow have made that crossing over the Atlantic, only appeared there 32-ish, 40-ish million years ago. Yeah. What are these things doing? Where do they come from? How are they connected to the wrong continent and how are they this is big mystery story. Well, they could have made the crossing multiple times, right? So the crossing could have happened. They could have settled in the Arctic, froze to death when things got cold, and then there were no primates, and then they made the crossing again. Yeah. So these two species- Oh, this could be the crossing. I want to know who got the species. So these primates, researchers apparently are kind of debating whether to lump them or split them with true primates. There is a question as to whether or not they're kind of their own group or whether, you know, how closely they are related to true primates. But they're just close relatives-ish, but they think it's a very odd find. Ignatius McKennae and Ignatius Dawsonae and these now extinct genuses of small mammals. Yeah, used to be widespread across North America. Gone. And they probably were in North America before 52 million years ago and traveled north as the weather changed, taking advantage. I mean, if you think about primates, they're adaptable. A lot of them are generalists when it comes to their food, right? They're, yeah, they're very adaptable. They're very mobile. They're very good at living in lots of different environments. So I like this idea. I think it's really interesting. I think it's very fun. Yeah. Oh yeah. David Hunt in the chat room. Origin of the Yeti, maybe? From groundhog-sized, extinct, maybe primates. Yes. Oh my goodness. Maybe we will be making our way as primates up to the Arctic Circle, still adapting along the way, hoping that we will survive. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Science Filled Fun. We're talking about all sorts of stories here tonight. If you are enjoying the show, please head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link. Patreon is how we support the show through listener support. It's people like you who really allow this show, this show, this short, no, this is long, this show to thrive. So head over to twist.org, click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support, $10 and more per month, not even week, per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. All right, time to come back now for that very exciting, full of energy time of the show we call Blair's Animal Corner. Oh my gosh, I have so much animal news for you this week. I gotta go through it real fast. So first, we have sea spiders. What? Yes, this is a study from Humboldt University in Berlin and they wanted to see what sea spiders could regrow if you chop stuff off. Thank you, sea spider volunteers. It is well documented that many different types of anthropods such as centipedes, spiders and other insects can regrow limbs after a loss. And so what they wanted to see is if sea spiders could do more than limbs. They amputated different hind limbs and also posterior parts aside from limbs of 23 immature and adult sea spiders and they monitored their results. In the juvenile specimens, they experienced a complete or a near complete regeneration of missing body parts, including the hind gut, anus, musculature and parts of reproductive organs. 90% of the youth, the youthful sea spiders survived long term and no actually of all of the sea spiders, 90% of them survived. 16 of the young ones went onto a molt and recovered parts of their body. Regrowth of the posterior was observed in 14 of the young spiders. None of the adult specimens molted or regenerated, but they still survived. A lot of them still survived from this process, which is really interesting. So we know that sea spiders have this capability. They can regrow things besides limbs. It's pretty cool, but only when they're young. So that means the next step is to figure out the mechanism on a cellular level and molecular level. What is triggering this regeneration? And why does it happen in juveniles and not in adults? Probably something with stem cells? Probably. Figure it out though. And the hope is that of course this could help lead to medical treatments of limb loss or finger loss of humans, but that would be pretty far down the line. Yeah, turning us into spiders. Yes. Yeah, that's good. I know. Not just spiders, but sea spiders. We're way closer related to axolotls and I feel like we've been working on them for a really long time. So I think it's just, yeah. Use the whole thing. Sea spider. Give me that. Sea spider cure. Give me the, all of it. Mix it all in there. Let's see what happens. You know it's going to be the epigenome and stem cells. So which stem cells are turned on, which are turned off, how are like the genes that are turned on and off, then it's going to get much more intricate into the weeds of the details. And may I have a bucket of sea spider stem cells, please? Yes, maybe. Yes. Moving on. I wanted to tell you about a study on chimpanzee and bonobo gestures. So we use our hands to gesture quite a bit. We're a gesturing species and gestures were discovered in great apes long time ago. They were considered the first evidence of international communication outside of human language because they could communicate with each other, even if they weren't from the same group or even the same area geographically, they could understand each other's gestures. More than 80 signals have been identified. So this kind of library of gestures in great apes exists. This is shared across species, including chimps and orangutans can communicate with each other with gestures. So like it's pretty universal amongst great apes. So then the question is how far back does this go? Is this a library of gestures that is shared with us? Is this a library of gestures that is shared with the arctic primates that Kiki was talking about earlier? Like how long ago have these gestures existed? And so as far as we know, these specific ape gestures, these 80 that have been identified, are not seen in human communication. So either they all got them and it's universal and it's like a convergent thing, or we lost it. So this study wanted to see what human capabilities of understanding chimp and bonobo gestures were. So researchers tested the understanding of the 10 most common gestures used by chimpanzees and bonobos. And this is through an online game. And because it was an online game and it was free, over 5,500 participants participated. They did it. They were like, I want to play this game. And I will tell you, you can also play this game. I played it. It is still available. The research is not ongoing. Now it's just kind of for fun, but it does exist. And you can click the link. It'll be in our show notes. And they were asked to view 20 short videos of ape gestures and select the meaning of the gesture from four possible answers. He's popping it up right now. They found that participants performed slightly better than chance, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures over 50% of the time. Which if you have four options every time, that's quite a bit better than chance. If you don't mind me pausing just for a second. Kiki had to click on a consent form to be part of an experiment where you watch videos of ape gestures. That's how much you don't have to point out that there were volunteers involved is that just to watch this video, she had to consent to it. Yes. And so people did better than chance, which makes you think that there is perhaps some communication that is preserved into our understanding what's going on. They even in some cases provided contextual information about what the apes in the video were doing. That didn't really improve their success rate. It improved it a teeny tiny bit. So really just the gestures were enough for them. And I'm really interested to see how Kiki does on this because I'm clicking and doing a lot of watching and clicking. Remember, people did well. They did, they got more than half of them right. I got six out of 14. She's close to half. It's close, but it's not quite. And then I was like, man, I'm I just really bad at this. I had Brian do it. He also got six out of 14. So I don't know if the people doing this study, like we're a bunch of primatologists signing online and doing this study and just so good at it because they had expertise or am I outlier? I would have given you an edge, having been a zookeeper. I don't know. I did not do as well as the close, I guess.  So yeah, the reason I'm asking is like, if it happened to be in Italian, right? Yes, I was wondering that too. If there was lots of this, right, which I remember descended of some, there's a lot of the hand gesture. Maybe it's maybe hand gestures translate in some cultures better than others. I don't know. Kiki, did your test freeze? Oh, Kiki froze completely. That's all right. I will keep going. So while we don't currently use the gestures that were tested in this test, it's possible that we retain an understanding of an ancestral communication system. This is if there is an evolutionary basis and this is something that is carried on through generations, just kind of inherent in the genes is baked in there, the gestural communication. Then this is something that might be why we understood it. It could also be that, you know, we as humans are very attuned to other animals and we're interested in them. And so people who are drawn to a study looking at ape gestures might also be people who spend a lot of time watching David Attenborough and might have an edge in that way, right? So we as a species do spend a lot of time looking at animals and interpreting what animals are doing. Anyone who has a pet at home probably has their own internal dialogue of what their pet is doing and thinking at all times. So I think it's not too difficult to try to put yourself in the shoes of a chipper or bonobo and try to interpret what they're doing. And the thing is interesting about what you just came into is we've talked quite a bit in the past about how some people, like, I picture images. I don't really see words. I think it's why I'm bad at spelling. Kiki, who disappeared for the moment, sees words, has a hard time holding images in mind. And it kind of makes me think, is there a third category that we've missed of people who are thinking about the world and gestures? Yes, they're just playing charades constantly. And so to them, this is finally, finally, these apes are talking my language, I get what they're what they're trying to say. So the next step for this study would be to try to figure out whether our ability to understand specific great ape gestures is inherited. If it is an evolutionary edge, or whether humans and great apes share an ability to interpret meaningful signals, because of their general intelligence, which is more what I was getting at, just that, like, you can use empathy to kind of put yourself in a chimps position and say, if I was doing that with my hands, this is what I would be trying to say, right? Or is it just because we look similar? So it's easier for us to put ourselves in the shoes of a chipper bonobo. And then kind of the other piece there is that we do have similar social goals. We are similarly social animals. And therefore, we can kind of approximate how a dynamic might look just because of that. And so, yes, Kiki, did you finish the quiz? I almost finished the quiz. Yes, dang, well, we'll have to figure out how well you did another time. Yeah, I'm almost there. I'm almost there. Okay. So, yeah, so... Oh, eight out of 14. Eight? Oh, you did way better than me. Okay. Eight out of 14. So that's better than 50 percent. So you are within... And I think a few of them, if I hadn't been rushing through and had been watching a little more carefully, I may have done a little better. But yeah. Because the clips are extremely short and subtle. So you really have to think... Yeah, I probably went through it kind of fast, too. So it's not how I would have imagined this point, depending on... So far, we have...  So those gestures, if they're immediately translating into a word, might be... Like now I want to break down who's getting up the above 50 and who's getting the just below 50 to see if they have also some differentiation in how they can... How they picture in their own mind a thought, how they hold it. And that's gonna be a much more interesting study. We got to get some humans involved. Yeah. So volunteers though. Volunteers only. Yeah. Is this part of a shared evolutionary language that we carry in our genes? Or is this something that we can just kind of guess at based on our similarities physically, mentally, socially? So I don't know. It's surprising to me that again, I would want to make sure that the people taking the test were an average subset of humans and weren't like a bunch of researchers. Right. Yeah. That's the thing I really want to make sure. Are these really like a proper cross-section of humanity? Or are these extremely skewed results? I don't know. And then real quick, let me just close out the animal corner with a bit of comfort as a dog owner that I received this week from the news. And it is that your dog can tell if you're trying to help them and you physically are unable to. Let me explain just with the experiment design. So I think it's pretty cool. They built a small cage with plastic mesh on three sides and a clear plastic panel with holes drilled in the fourth. The cage was in an otherwise empty room. Dogs were introduced into the cage. The researcher picked up a treat. They could pass the treat through the drilled holes, but they didn't. In one case, they pretended to and then kind of like took it away or like, palmed it.  They would drop the treat and they go, oh no.  And so when out of the 48 dogs tested, when the treat was held back intentionally, the dogs backed up, sat down, laid down, kind of closed off to the experiment. When the treat was withheld accidentally, when they dropped the treat, the dogs continued to make eye contact. They wagged their tails and they maintained proximity to the researchers like, it's okay. You got it, bud. I'm ready when you got it. No, you can't do it. I'm your cheering section. Yes. So the idea here is that dogs were clearly able to understand the intent behind offering of the treat, even if they were not able to offer it. And I love that because when I drop a treat, spill Sadie's food accidentally, don't let her through a door, anything like, I feel so bad, but it sounds like she might actually, no, I don't mean it, which is great. Oh, that's sweet. They might be so tuned in to the humans around them that they're able to determine, is it on purpose? Yeah, I love it. It is great. And I have to say, I probably am a little bit jealous of these researchers who get to work with dogs. I know. Oh, shucks. I gotta go to work and play with dogs all day. Oh, darn. Thank you for a great animal corner. Everyone, this is This Week in Science. We hope that you are enjoying the show and that you will share it widely to all your networks. Make sure and hit those like buttons, the notifications, the bells, the whistles, all the things that help other people find This Week in Science too. All right. Coming on back, it's time for some stories from Justin. What you got? Oh, okay. This is a study led by Washington State University researchers at the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. They found that toxoplasmic gondii, the parasite that infects most species of warm blooded animals, causes the disease of toxoplasmosis and has been talked about enough on this show that I probably don't need to do a refresher of all of the evils. Yeah. Is now causing a pregnancy loss in wild bighorn sheep. Researchers have documented five cases of bighorn sheep in a study published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases, but additional studies are needed to actually determine how widespread this is. Well, you're not supposed to change kitty litter if you're pregnant because of that exactly as a human. Yeah. Well, it causes blindness and can be associated with pregnancy loss as well. So this was sort of found by accident, I guess. It's not quite actually. This is great another great example of field science at work. So normal sheep, like the farming sheep, sheep on farms and whatever, they get toxoplasmic gondii, but they can also get like a whole bunch of other diseases that the wild bighorn can get. So they test the wild bighorn to see if any of the diseases that are domestic sheep are crossing over into the wild population. And they happen to detect five cases of really bad toxoplasmic gondii infection in eight of these sheep that had been deceased or these wild sheep. Anyway, this is here we go. This is from Ellis Fisk, who's the lead author's study. We have seen toxoplasmic gondii, toxoplasmic as a cause of fetal and neonatal loss, pretty commonly in domestic sheep. Unfortunately, it does appear to be causing abortions in some level of death in young bighorn lambs. It can spread by several methods. As we know, all of those methods involve direct or indirect contact with cat feces. I don't even think you can get six degrees of separation between toxo and cat feces. You're going to be, you're going to be talking in this case about wild cats. Maybe. Probably. Maybe because actually in wildlife, because we, people have had so many cats and let so many cats go feral and because cats are a much greater domestic house cats are such a massive population in North America, the territory overlaps with bighorn wild sheep as much as if not more than it does with the wild, what you would call like bobcats or mountain lions and that sort of thing. But it could be from those. It absolutely could be. Yeah. So yeah. So they were testing just to see if the diseases that normally get domestic sheep had crossed over. They found this. So it's not a huge, you know, they're saying it's not really that big. They have a sample size of eight with five that are diseased, which doesn't sound like a big sample size, but they have a sample size of eight, which is a very hard sample size to get from wild bighorn sheep to begin with. And five of them were riddled with t gondii. So seems pretty significant. Anyway, just another thing to look out for. Yeah, what I think is significant, too, is the, you know, coming into the realization that the t gondii is having a physiological impact and, you know, affecting the ability of these bighorn sheep to be able to bring a pregnancy to viability. Yeah. And then there's also the outlier that what are the effects on the ones that aren't surviving? Right. Because they're going on to start nations. No. No, well, the ones that joke about the effects in people. But yeah, what are what are they doing to the those? Well, they could be they could have a immune issues as well. Because apparently the t gondii infection is hitting all sorts of organs and parts of the brain and creating lesions. I mean, even the ones that survive may be less able to survive longer term as they mature. So just another reason why we either need to figure out a way to stop the spread of t gondii or get rid of all cats. We can do one or the other. I don't care which one as long as it gets done. I like the second. I mean, the first one. Oh, you like to get rid of all cats? I meant the first one. No, I mean, let's figure out how to how to work with the t gondii. I think that's we've already figured that out, which is there's no will to do it. Nobody. Okay, so. Okay, my final segment tonight. Just more bad news. Oh no, the once positively spun science news segment previously titled just good news, but widely considered misleading at times downright deceitful and so has been rebranded in order to maintain the musky effervescence of science communicator crudulity. Just more bad news. Sea level rise addition. Turns out a lot of assessments on flooding as a result of sea level rise due to global warming was based on faulty data. That could be a good thing. It could be a bad thing, depending on which way the new data has pushed the needle, right? It could mean oh, it's not going to be such a big deal. Or it could mean it's going to be much worse. Could be a could be just a little worse. You don't know until we read the story. Radar based land elevation models that have been used so far have suggested that land at risk for permanent flooding will be relatively limited initially. So part of that depends on which end of the IPCC range of reported predictions. We're assuming you're going to happen. For the low end, sea level rise of three meters would take place by the year 2300. So more than a century and a half away, right? A couple of centuries away. Whereas the high end is about seven meters, which is, whoa, that's really bad. But by the end of this century, by the end of this century, it's predicted to be only between a half meter to somewhere under two meters of sea rise by the end of this century. So neither of those scenarios, either by changing our ways and reversing climate change or by building dams and pumping infrastructure, we have time. Massive flooding isn't expected to have a major impact in that first two meters, but which sounds like it might be good news, right? I don't want to point out a silver lining, but at least that means that there is time to do something about it. But presumably there's more bad news coming because, oh, radar, it turns out has a slight problem. It bounces off of anything it hits, including ground cover, plants, trees, and grasses. After applying new satellite LiDAR elevation data, LiDAR, which sees through vegetation, therefore more accurately records actual land elevations around the world, researchers have found that the previous radar generated elevation of coastal data was much too generous. Fresh analysis with the new data finds bigger increases in flooding will occur in the first two meters of sea level rise. In fact, that will cover more than twice as much land as the older elevation models had predicted. The underestimates of land level elevations in coastal communities now have less time to prepare for sea level rise than previously expected, and with the biggest impacts of rising seas occurring much earlier than previously thought after those first few meters of sea level rise, the rate at which land areas fall below new sea levels decreases significantly, though. So that part is good news, but will only come after a tremendous amount of bad news has been realized. A lot of bad news much sooner than various areas around the world have been considering or expecting. It's interesting. It all depends on how you look at it. And if you look at it right, it's kind of an interesting, I mean, I find this is very interesting because LiDAR is relatively new technology. It's the one that we all have really heard about in terms of exploring ancient South American civilizations in the Amazon where this technology is able to discover new tools in Egypt. Yes, being able to see below all of the vegetation and to see all of these structures that we would have to see on foot through a dense jungle before. Now it's all been revealed to us. And yeah, it turns out it also changes coastal elevation means across the globe, which means that, yeah, it's going to be a lot more flooding. Get on it, people. So funny, like coyote brush and some trees really messed us up. And you think about it, that could actually, if you're trying to do a sea level inundation analysis and you're just using like a global information system that's like, okay, well, this says it's going to be up here and the water's here and it just moved to here, no problem. But if the up here, the high end is that sagebrush, is there is some grasses along the coast, is it is a tree for goodness sakes? Then, yeah, you've really, you've really overestimated. I'm going to take the good news side of this, which is that this is giving us more information to make better plans and to do more with the time that we have before things really, really happen. So we have, there's a positive spin to the just bad, more bad news segment. That's very sure. Give you a little positive spin. Yeah, okay, I'm going to jump into some stories. You know, we take antidepressants to try and be less depressed, right? Antidepressants. And they work to a certain degree. Well, it turns out, according to a new study out of a group in Australia, the Australian Center for Water and Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, researchers are determining, and they've been working on this for a few years, that lots of drugs influence the way that bacteria interact within your body, the way that various metabolites are formed, how drugs are having all sorts of side effects on our microbiome that we'd never even expected. Well, it turns out that exposure of E. coli to antidepressants increases the microbes mutation rate and also the subsequent selection of various resistance genes. So the researchers did their experiment in not really real world situation because here's this group, they're looking at wastewater. And so they're checking out what's happening in the wastewater that's coming through the waste treatment plants. And so they're seeing all this stuff. But the real place that these interactions are probably taking place and having the big impacts is inside our bodies. And so these researchers did their experiment in a very oxygenated environment. And they also used very large quantities of fluoxetine and other antidepressants to determine the effects on E. coli and other bacteria. But what they determined, we need to do more studies to find out what's happening inside the body. Studies have shown that sertraline, which is a commonly used antidepressant, actually increases the amount of horizontal gene transfer between bacteria. So your antidepressant, if you're on sertraline, it could actually be leading the bacteria to trade genes back and forth and to mutate more quickly. However, again, the study was done in oxygenated situations. And that is not the case in your colon, your large intestine in the parts of your body where these bacteria may be really interacting with these compounds. And so the question is what's happening inside your body are the same effects in place or not? I don't know. Anyway. So does that mean that E. coli and maybe some other bacteria and pathogens or even maybe not pathogens suffer from depression? And that once they get the whole of the antidepressants like, hey, you know what? I wasn't planning on doing a whole lot of no reducing growing and gene transfer today, but I feel like I got a little pep in my step. No, so what's happening? Small or harmful to my no, no, no, what's happening really? Is it the the antidepressants that are involved? They are generating reactive, reactive oxygen species. And so these activate the microbial defense systems to get rid of toxins. And so the microbes start pumping up their their pump systems that get rid of toxins. And so in this, they eliminate a lot of molecules, including antibiotics. And so the bacteria start to use the antidepressants really the antidepressants make those reactive oxygen species. The those make the bacteria start shunting out all sorts of toxins and other things. And so a lot of this also is just increasing the metabolism of the bacteria. And so leading to more growth mutation. And when you have growth and mutation, the potential for increase in horizontal gene transfer and also the transfer of genes for bacterial resistance between harmless between harmful to harmless bacteria. So Kiki, you said that we don't know if this actually happens at the human body yet, right? If it does, if it does, what can be done?  Right.   And it's also going to have an impact. Yes, it will have an impact on the whatever you do. Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't hear this story. Don't worry about it. Just don't worry about it. Yeah. So did you try the happy music? It's time for the happy music. You can always use the happy music. And I guess that, you know, they can they can figure out the antibacterials that the antibiotics that are most effective when paired with with antidepressants. Right. So this is basically just opening the door to then look at pairings at drug pairings. And when you have specific bacterial infections, kind of knowing is half the battle. That's exactly it. Yeah. So understanding this, now they're going to be looking at mouse models of the gut and the microbiome to look at this more closely. And they really think that we should be trying to figure out not just for antidepressants, but other non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals across the board. How do they interact? Not just with other medications that you're taking, but also with the microbiome that is that is active in your body as well. Yeah. Interesting. Yes. Now you might be thinking, oh, maybe I'm taking my antidepressants and sometimes antidepressants don't really work and they leave you feeling a little bit emotionally blank. Like you can't get happy. You're not sad anymore, not as depressed anymore, but you're not feeling emotions. And a lot of people report what they call emotional blunting when they take SSRIs specifically. And so this study out of the University of Cambridge looked, they looked at the interaction of SSRIs on people's cognitive performance. 66 volunteers, participants were in the experiment, 32 of them were given acetalopram and the other 34 were given a placebo. And these were taken for at least 21 days. The participants completed a comprehensive set of self-report questionnaires and then they were tested on their cognitive functions, learning, inhibition, reinforcement behavior, and decision making. They found no differences in attention or in memory, but they did find a reduced reinforcement sensitivity in two particular tasks for the acetalopram group. And so reinforcement learning is how we get rewards within our brain that keep us going to go back to things within our environments. And the researchers used what they called a probabilistic reversal test and they showed people to stimuli A and B. If A was chosen four out of five times, you get a reward. And if you choose B, you only get a reward one time out of five. So the volunteers would have to learn this rule on their own and by just doing the thing and go, oh, I get a reward more often when I do this, I get a reward less often when I do this. And people who are learning reinforcement appropriately that are responding to it in the way that the average person does respond to it, they would at some point learn the rule and figure out when they get more rewards and pick the thing that would give them more rewards. They found that people taking acetalopram were less likely to use the positive and negative feedback to learn anything. So it affected the sensitivity for rewards and also the ability to respond to that. And so this is very interesting in that this blunting of the SSRI in some aspects is, you know, making you able not depressed anymore, but in the serotonin and the way it's involved in the neuro signaling, it isn't allowing the part of the brain that's involved in the reward pathway to respond appropriately to those reinforcement situations. And so a person is not going to get excited about things. You're going to feel emotionally blank or blunted because your brain is not having a response. You are not responding to what would normally be a reward. That's exciting. I want to go do that. You have an antidepressant that in some ways works but is missing something. So does that mean that you could add, is that what they would potentially do is pair this medication with something else, like a micro dose of ecstasy or something like, you know, something that really highlights the reward center of the brain? Right. And so, you know, people choose different antidepressants, different SSRIs for different reasons. Some of them are more activating. Some of them are a little bit more sedating. Some of them lead to this emotional blunting. Others don't. You know, so everybody's going to have to go through a process of figuring out what works best for them specifically. But it's interesting to start to understand what is potentially happening in somebody who is emotionally blunted. And so now the next step is to go in and understand what part of the brain is being affected, what neurons or receptors are being impacted to lead to this blunting because if it is a very specific cognitive difference in this reinforcement learning, and that's just the only difference they found in these cognitive tests, that can be nailed down to probably a very specific part of the brain and particular receptors and particular actions. Well, it is a whole different disorder as well that someone could have. Aside, you know, if you have depression, you take antidepressants and then this happens. But are there people out there who are not depressed but have a messed up reward center? Yes, absolutely. Oh, of course. But then the question is, how can you exploit that? I was thinking how can you fix it, but that's fine. No, no, no. Fixing it for somebody who's otherwise perfectly healthy and has no problems. Yes. Is it possible that this could be a good drug addiction introduction for me? Somebody who is a compulsive gambler, maybe? Somebody who is addicted to this, that or the other drug or whatever the thing is. If this blunts that reward system, you know, if smoking that cigarette or pulling that lever and seeing things go ding, ding, ding, ding, or whatever the thing that somebody might be addicted to isn't offering a reward anymore, does that make it easier to step back from that otherwise addictive behavior? So like I would first look for, yeah, is this or does it ruin the negative learning of these things so that you just, yeah, I feel horrible when I do this. Normally I have guilt or I'm like, oh, I worry because I lost all my money gambling and now I don't care. Like you can go the other way too. I don't know. But it would be sort of interesting to see if there's, if it could be used for more specific off-label, because they're always pharmaceutical companies are always probably, they probably are way ahead of me on the finding an off-label use for the drug. Are you kidding, Justin? You know all the, we tried this one for eczema. We tried this, we tried this one for compulsive results. We already did that. Yeah, well now that we're all appropriately depressed or not depressed or emotionally blunted or not, wherever we are, I did want to close the show on something that is very much not the Terminator. And the way you say that makes me, I don't trust how you say it. It's very much not the Terminator. We're talking T1, T2, T1,000. What are we talking about? This work is out of China and the researchers have embedded gallium, which is a very soft metal with magnetic particles. And in what they have... It's like a little lego, man. Yes. And so In a cage. What are they doing in China? They're putting legos in prison? Little lego dying in prison. But they're trying, based on the C-Cucumber, actually this research is inspired by the C-Cucumber, not the Terminator, and its ability to become soft or rigid and return to a particular shape. So the researchers took gallium, which can liquefy and become a solid through a transition from a solid to a liquid state when it's cold or hot. So if there's current or heat applied to it, they embedded a whole bunch of magnetic particles in this gallium. And then they tested it. They're like, oh, how strong can it be? Oh, it can hold up to 30 times its mass in a weight. It also is flexible, so it can be smashed and then return to a particular shape that you want it to return to. With the magnetic particles in the gallium, it is able to be controlled by magnetic fields. And in this particular video that is moving very, very, very slowly for some reason, the researchers were able to apply a magnetic field to a little lego-shaped robot. They're calling it a robot. I don't think it's a robot yet because it's not doing a job at this point in time. It's just a magnet. It's moldable gallium, right? So it's not the Terminator, but they put it in a little cage, this little gallium magnetic robot, like it's in jail. And then they used a magnetic field to get it to liquefy. And then they were trying to get it out of the cage using a magnetic field. So the liquid pours out of the jail cage, and then they reform it into a robot. It is very definitely not the Terminator. But maybe someday it will be. Oh, they even chose, but they even chose the one with like the grimace face on the, oh, there it goes. Oh, we're watching the video now. It's just, yeah. It's very slow. I don't know why this video is so slow. It's going to bake the show. It's just T1000 right out of the cage. Just turned into a liquid pool of shiny metal looking. Yeah, is it going to reform into a Legoman afterwards? So that's the trick of the camera for this video. At the end of the video, it does reform into a little Legoman, but it is not, yeah, but I think a magnetic field. I think they take it and reform it into a little Lego dude because they can. But it's an interesting use of materials to potentially solve problems. And if we can have state changing robots at some point in the future, we could potentially use these robots, as they say in their work, to enable us to potentially take things out of human bodies. So if you swallow something or you have something stuck in you that may be in your stomach, then the robot can be put into you. It can form around the solid thing and then it can be taken out at some point. They also think it might be a potential drug delivery system. And they are looking at this in terms of a biomedical context as opposed to Terminator taking over the whole world. But this paper was published in Matter, Magnetoactive Liquid Solid Phase Transitional Matter. It's not the Terminator. Okay. Now that we're at the towards the end of the video, I feel a lot better about it. It didn't reform into the Legoman on the outside. It's a lot less scary. Looks like a lot of himself behind too. Yeah, it's like if the T1000 like got all Terminator got all liquidity in that one part, but then just never came back from it. Then you're kind of like, well, okay, I guess that was it. End of the movie. And he never blinked. So they just melted. All right. Melted gallium. Yeah. With the magnetic field. Yeah. And called it a robot. All right. Well, somebody's threshold or saying it's got a little more over there. But the does look cool. The advance of being able to embed magnetic particles into the gallium could be useful for as they say all sorts of applications. And that's what they are hoping for in the future, not the Terminator. Yes. I don't know. This video, it's supposed to be like 50 seconds and it is taken 50 minutes already. Everyone can go to the show notes and watch it later. Watch it go blurb, blurb, blurb, and it will be in there in the show. I certainly will see these transitions. Yes. The paper is open source in cell. And so you'll be able to see all sorts of interesting demonstrations or ideas they have for potentially using it to extract objects from people's bodies for using it to move various loads different places to be able to transport substances. They have all sorts of ideas. Maybe even run it through a maze. It could be amazing. It could be. But I think we've made it to the end of the show without the Terminator stopping us. This time. This time, yes. Will he be back? Probably not. I won't be back. Well, I would love to say thank you to everyone for joining us for this episode. And thank you for everyone who has helped us get here to present this episode to you with you. Thank you, Fada, for all your help doing social media and show notes. Gord, Arun, Laura, others, thank you so much for helping in the chat rooms. Identity four, thank you as always for recording the show. And Rachel, thank you for your editing help. Really appreciate all of that. 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Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, please head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time, or Thursday, 5 a.m. Central European Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels, as well as twist.org slash live, the hub of the whole thing. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Perhaps while you melt your Lego mini figures with magnets? I don't know. Just search for this week in Science Over Podcast or Found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes, links to the stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org, and you can also sign up for our newsletter. You can also contact us directly, email Kiki at Kirsten at thisweekinScience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com, or me, Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. 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So everybody listen to what I say. I use the science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got... You may just yet understand. This is the after show. There's a little stuffed animal instead of a Justin.   Kiki, did you know that the doomsday clock was moved to 90 seconds to midnight today? I did. Yes, I did. What does that even mean, honestly? It doesn't mean anything. I mean, that's the thing is it's performative, but at the same time, it's to bring attention to all of the issues across our planet. It is based in science, kind of, but it's more... The problem is it's an asymptote. Y'all remember what that is from math class? It's gonna take a long time to get to midnight, right? Well, you never get to midnight because you just... You keep getting closer and closer and closer, but you just never actually go to midnight. Nobody's ever gonna be like, we've arrived. It's doomsday. It's just gonna keep being like, now it's 45 seconds to midnight. Now it's 40 seconds to midnight. Now it's one second to midnight. Now it's half a second to midnight. You're never gonna get to zero. So it just feels very arbitrary to me. I don't know. Yeah, is there... There was a band called 90 seconds to midnight, right? Wasn't there? Or something? A band or a song? There was something. Wasn't there? I have this thing, this tickle in my brain that talks to me about 90 seconds.  Popculture-y. Or maybe it just would make a good band name. You have the power. You could do it. There was something, but maybe all of the news has taken over. I don't know. Discord, do you know? I do have a big old orange drink.  Makes it taste orange-y. It's not tang. It is not tang. Justin's back. So this... Yes. I lost my involuntary subject, but you were talking about how... Did you let him play outside by himself? I said, I said him outside, he'll be fine. Told him to come back for dinner. Last week you had a story about how people could track, children could track where dogs were looking. Yeah. So I ran the experiment on a one-year-old with a stuffy. And I had the stuffy go, like, looking and then looking at the object and doing this, getting excited. Yeah. And he knew, oh, it wants that and would grab objects for it. That's awesome. Yeah. Very cool. I kept finding new things for him. Oh, the dog would be interested in this over here. Oh, man. When Sadie... This is like beyond human stuff. He would be like, oh, I got to give him this now. He totally, it totally worked. When... No, go ahead. No, yeah. So it's whatever... It works with stuffies as well as dogs. So it works with dogs and stuffies as well as I would say. So when Sadie was a puppy... There's other stuffies that he can't tell what they're looking at. When Sadie was a puppy. So the dog recognizing a stuffy, we got this like brontosaurus plush that was really cute and it was like corduroy. I loved it. But we made the mistake of like playing with her when she was a puppy, having the brontosaurus walk and like move its head around and stuff. No, she hated it. She started barking at it. She like was terrified. She ran away and it was like she recognized that was a thing that was moving and looking places. Oh my God. Okay. I may have ruined this toy for her forever. Oops. She got it over eventually. But I do think it's funny that she kind of recognized when we were puppeting it that it like, yeah, was looking places and moving a certain way. Sadie didn't like it. No. My cats don't like when I wear cat or bunny costumes. Oh yeah. Like that's our thing, mom. Mom, we're the, we're the ones. That just begs the whole question. How often? Oh, all the time. No, not very often because the cats don't like it. Okay. Wow. Excalibur's engineering.  Fascinating. It must look like a very much like a husky. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So there's like, there's other stuffies. I don't have one handy that have like, ones that's like dinosaur dragging like a thing with the eyes kind of on the sides. But because it's not doing like a, it can't do like this directional thing. Binacular vision. That binocular vision really cues in my one year old to where it's looking. And then also the little like emotional plea. You're just going back a little bit. Like it also seems to increase the urgency. Whoa, I better really grab that quick. I don't know. That's like, what is it? The meme that's Oscar? No. Oh, did we just lose Kiki? No, no, no. She's stuck in a thigh. She's trying to remember. Okay. She's just gonna be thinking for a little while. All right. Got it. About what it's hard to remember sometimes. Oh, and then, yeah, that's that one thing. But remember before the internet, when you had a question or couldn't remember the name of a thing, and then for weeks, for weeks, you'd be thinking about this thing. You'd be like, oh my goodness. And then, and then it's come to you. Oh, it was the wonderful Mr. Ed. That was the talking horse. Okay. That's why I have Wilbur a week to remember that. And I don't know why, what the context was. Was Wilbur the man or the horse? Wait a second. Yeah. Now I gotta go. I wish I had an internet. Somebody better invent that so we can figure out. I'll go to the library. I'll look it up in an encyclopedia. Oh my goodness. What does Kiki say? How come the encyclopedia doesn't have anything about pop culture in it? This whole thing is useless. There's not a single reference to a television show that was made before the 1930s. She says that she's not back in a couple of minutes. We can call it. All right then. Well, why don't we just go ahead and call it? Well, we can say goodnight to her anyway. We can wait a minute. We can wait one minute. All right. All right. What's new with you, Justin? Absolutely nothing. Like I literally, when I'm talking about, I haven't, oh, except I've been having to learn the Danish language lately. They should do away with it. They should do away with it? Yeah, this should start over. Because the language was obviously put together by people who were illiterate in the language that, in the alphabet that they were adopting. It was made in isolation by a disparate group of people stuck in this island who had somehow collected the letters that make up Germanic language, but without any of the phonetics. And so proceeded to make a language with exceptions to every rule. They have three or four extra vowels that have rules about how they pronounce. There's like five ways to pronounce the letter G, depending on what context it's in. And for every rule that I think I've finally discovered that would assist in knowing how to use the Danish language properly, it turns out that there are several exceptions to every single rule that are oftentimes based on things that you can't suss from any of the context or the information. It's a language that you have to memorize. Right. Not just the phonetics, but the grammar and the word usage. We thought English was bad, huh? Yeah. It's not. It's not. Like, I compare to that. When you compare your Romance languages, I would say English is bad. So, so the thing is, it's when you grew up speaking, Kiki is one part, but they learn by rote, I believe, their language and the use of the language because you know, like hooked on phonics, learning a phonetics system to sound out the word would never work. But it doesn't work in English a lot of the time.  And that's why your generation made Grammarly. From being watched to know if I can say, yeah, I can say it. But that's not even a great example. It has the weird vowels and a couple of things in there. But what is it? Why is he having you say that? It's a classic thing that Dean's always like, oh, can you say this? And they say it with an Irish accent apparently. But like the middle word is just, it's, middle word is with, M-E-D is with. But it's not med, it's mil, but the l that we hear as an L is actually a T-H that you don't fully pronounce. But sounds like an L to the English speaker. This is so hard. No, I'm kidding. And then the last word that looks like some sort of like floaty, float, float, something like that. Flood, float. It's flueve. It's phonetically completely separate. Like if you took Scandinavian language, if I was studying Norwegian, I could sound out the words, the way that they're written with the alphabet that we all agreed on has certain sounds that go with certain letters. In the Danish language they say like, I don't know, we won't. We're going to come up with our own system for how to pronounce letters separate from the rest of the world. And we're going to apply it sometimes and not others and then have four different versions of that depending on the context. We're going to do it our way, our way. Agnap says English-speaking countries are the only ones that have spelling bees. I guess if you have a calligraphy language, it would be kind of hard to have a, you'd have to have a drawing bee. What was it last, last month, so Atlantic, two months ago, there was a whole article about the demise of cursive and how people growing up, kids growing up now, haven't learned to read cursive. And so even if some people are spelling with cursive, people can't read it, so it's like a foreign language. It is a problem because at some point, multiple generations will have to work together. Yes. What is this from your great grandmother? I can't read grandma's recipe. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be archival, it's going to be archival things. And I guess the archive, that'll have to be for future archivists or... I think it's fine. I think cursive is fine. Research will have to learn it, but other than that, the good riddance. I understand most people probably take notes on laptops in college now, which I was still of the generation where maybe there was one laptop in my college classrooms and everybody else was handwriting notes, right? Right. But like, cursive's faster. Yeah, I guess.  Nobody's cursive looks perfect unless that is somehow related to your actual job. But like... Right. How do you come with a signature without knowing how cursive works? Like it's just... Skibble, skibble. Yeah. It's wild. I just, I don't understand, out of all the things to do away with, why are we doing away with that? That seems like a weird one. Well, I kind of understand not doing the, not forcing people like we used to do over and over again. All the letters had to be at that particular angle and everything had to be perfect and you did it over and over again on that lined paper. And I remember struggling with it quite a bit. And there are developmental aspects of some kids, boys more often than girls, but some kids have issues with holding a pen and having control, that fine motor control of their hand that's necessary for writing. And so even learning to print or just to get that understanding of how to use a pen or a pencil is, that in itself can be a task because there are a lot of aspects to development that we're like, here, you need to be able to do cursive by second grade. And the kids are like, I'm still trying to just use the pencil. We're doing it too early. I think that's for sure true. You could move cursive to sixth grade, honestly, that would be fine. But I think that as we spend more and more time on computers, people are spending less and less time handwriting things, but you still have to be able to write legibly to get by in society. Oh, I think less and less so. Because everything is autocorrectable or grammar checkable or spell checkable. But no, I'm saying you need to physically be able to write a note that someone else can read. Still, I don't know, doctors have been leading the way in this. As you mentioned signatures, I recently changed my signature. I went to the last time I was at DMV. Actually, I tried to change my birthday. Because normally, I get to the DMV and, oh, it's busy. I'm there for like hours and hours and hours and hours. This time, my license has expired. And I was there like right before Christmas, the little Davis DMV. And all the students were out of town. And people are going away for the holidays. DMV was still open in these days right before. And so it was like empty. It was no waiting. So I got in there initially just to refresh the driver's license.   I was like, okay, so I can change my height. I can add an inch, take off an inch, add a foot. Nobody's checking. Eye color up to me. Hair color, say whatever I want. Nope. But they won't let me change. I ate change of address. Not a problem, sir. Here's the form. Just fill it out. I can change everything about my identity on the driver's license, but they won't let me change my birthday. Nope. I didn't even change my name if I want to. But it is always linked to your birthday.  Yeah, Blair. It took me about a year to change my name everywhere. And actually, I'm not done. I gave up on some things. I was just like, I'll do it with this later. I did change my signature from the cursive that has been my signature for all these years. I changed it to the one I've been using to pay for things, because everything is like, here's signed here on a digital thing. Now it's just a little heart. Just make it a little heart. So if anybody wants to impersonate my signature, I just make a little heart on the screen. That's it. And now it's on my driver's license. So let me change anything except my birthday. That's funny. I had to practice a new signature before I went, because I didn't want it to be the first time I ever did it, was on the pad at the DMV. Like, oh no. So I had to figure out how to do it. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So it took me a second to figure it out. Fun fact is nobody's ever checking anyway. No. I've signed so many of those digital receipt things with the most ridiculous emojis or whatever. Just because at some point early on, at least when these things happen, I was like curious, can it turn me down? It's so if you want to refute a charge, they can look at it and do something about it. But otherwise, yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah. They just have to capture something, I guess. It's like your consent. I consent to this money being transferred. I consent. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But if I've consented as Donald Duck and it still lets it happen, what is the point? You still acknowledged it, yes. I was at a job where I didn't have my own company credit card, but my boss's boss had a credit card, and I could take that credit card to the store and purchase things. And when I did it, I would sign my name. Yeah. My name was not his name. No. But I would write my name down, and that's when I found out it was so they could say, yeah, so they could say, who made this fraudulent charge at Safeway for cheese and crackers for children? They did. That was me. Oh, it was Blair. Okay, it's fine. It's not fraudulent. It's only fraudulent if you sign their signature. Right? Yeah. If you're saying that you are that person, then it's fraudulent. But if you sign your name, it's fine. Yep. Oh, gosh, I shouldn't have told everybody what my signature is because now I can be fraudulated. Fraudulated? I mean, it doesn't matter if you're fraudulated, you can still just say you are and they'll believe it. Yeah, no, that's the other side of this coin. It's like the credit card companies. Nothing matters. Actually, don't do anything about credit fraud. They just give you your money back. Yeah. They happen so often. They're calculus is that anything that slows, because they just get a percentage of the money that's being spent no matter what, that's their angle of it. Anything that slows down those transactions costs them money. So let it go through. We don't care. Just let it go through first and then we'll worry about it later. It's fractions of pennies on the dollar. Yeah. To them. It's nothing. Practice self-fraudulation. I don't even want to... Oh, careful. Not fraudulism. No, no, no. That's a whole different thing. That's an uncontrollable urge to rub yourself up against others. What? Yeah, it's a very specific thing. No, thank you. Kiki is now googling it. Fraudulism. Fraudulism has nothing to do with scamming. It's not even showing up. Is it fraudulism? Fraudulist. Freud. Not Freud. Fraudulism. No, fraudulent. No, that's just where you got to get the DS, MN, SO, SMO, whatever the thing is. Futilism. No, it's not. That's a form of government that some people are hoping that returns to the United States, but that's not it. Justin, I don't believe you. I can't find anything on this. I'm not finding it either. What's wrong with your internet? Should the internet be telling us these... It's a disorder or it's a... What is it? Yeah, yeah. Fraudulism. Frauturism. F-R-O-T-T-E-U-R-I-S-M. Fraudery. Is the act of touching or rubbing oneself against another person? That's what I said. Fraudulism. No, it's not supposed to go out. You said fraudulism. Yeah. Thanks NCBI. Oh, yeah, now you're right. That's gross. New words. Hey, you listeners and viewers, don't google it. Things not... Hey, here's something else not to google. The end of the show. Oh, yeah. Don't google the end of the show. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of hand writing for everyone. No, for this week in science. Yes, we hope that you come back again next week for our lessons in cursive and calligraphy next Wednesday. The science of... I don't know. Okay, we'll see you again next week, everybody. Stay well. What is it? Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay curious. We hope you have a great week. Bye.


God's speaking to you right now.  He's guiding you and He's instructing you every moment. Jesus said, my sheep hear my voice. So if you belong to Him, you hear Him. Hearing God isn't a skill to be acquired. It's a spiritual sense you were born with the moment you were born again. To hear God clearly, be silent and be still. Silence is the putting away of outer distraction like your phone, entertainment and social media but stillness is the quieting of the soul. The soul is quieted through worship, the word and prayer. Be still, be silent, remove distraction and the voice of God, which is always speaking to you will be loud and clear.