Hello, everybody. Hello, hello, hello. We are here for our weekly podcast broadcast. Welcome to the latest episode of This Week in Science. If you are joining us live, do know that this is a live show and there may be things that happen during the live show that will be edited for the future podcast and radio show. You are getting the unedited, did-did-did-did wonderful version of the podcast, everyone. And, you know, I'm just going to say that wherever you're watching right now, if you have not hit that subscribe button, do that. What are you doing? Honestly. Give us a like. Where have you been? What's it going to take? What's it going to take before we really get a moving? Are we already, team? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I'm about the water, but otherwise I'm great. Fantastico. Okay, let us, let us begin. I gotta make sure that we can get in to see theirs. The kind of thumbs up I was waiting for from the chat room. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I see you in the chat rooms now. Hello, Gerard, Fada, Blair. I see you in the chat room. Identity four. Crouchy gamer. Eric Knapp. I see you all. Okay, let's start this show. Let's do this. Let's make it run. Let's make it go in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 834, recorded on Wednesday, July 21st, 2021. Fly me to the moon, Mr. Bezos. Hey there. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your head with butterflies, ice, and assimilation. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Space, the final frontier. A place where one day mankind will watch as billionaires build resorts on the moon and overtime regulation free factories on Mars. Space, the undiscovered country from whose born no travelers tax returns are ever seen. And while tax dodging billionaires live out childhood dreams of wearing spacesuits and launching their rockets into suborbital altitudes and then fizzing all over themselves with champagne upon completion, let's not forget that this is a great achievement for the commercialization of space and a rather modest admission that as a nation, America will play no role in it. When NASA landed on the moon, we did so as a nation. And the words Neil Armstrong used dedicated the event to all mankind. Jeff Bezos made no such statement. Well, he did thank Amazon employees for paying for it. I suppose through starvation wages, unsafe working conditions, unrealistic time quotas, lack of job security, lack of health security, and an all-round lack of respect for basic human dignity, never mind the unregulated outsourced manner in which most of the products the company sells are manufactured. Somehow, all those starvation wages equated to job well done. You did it. You put one billionaire space cowboy in the suborbital something. Look around at the growing homelessness problems and fill in the blank city or town. The housing epidemic, the lack of mental health programs, the growing expense of healthcare, the cost of educating the next generation, the stagnant spending on science, research, and the lack of activities to do with global warming, the rest. And tell yourself, hey, at least we're paying for billionaires to take publicity, fuel, joy rides instead of collecting taxes from them. Job well done, everyone. Who needs public funding for society when you have that? The limited public funding of science is, however, the only reason that we can even bring you another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science, brought to you by the funding of science. Yes, that's true. And our Patreon sponsors. But we have a whole episode full of amazing science ahead. And I guess, you know, as everybody's here joining us for this episode, I hope that it will distract us from the fact that the billionaires are escaping to space while the earth floods and burns, you know, little issues like that. On this week's show, I have stories about assimilation, about protein structure, AI, and also about helping your own with empathy and rewards in your brain. What do you have, Justin? I've got a few words about how to fight global warming. A new species of butterfly discovered in San Francisco, why there's no room for new life on the ocean floor, and why 15,000-year-old novel viruses are being thawed from glaciers. That sounds like a good idea. Great idea. Wonderful idea. What could go wrong? So, and the fun, the fun byline on that one is, it's happening anyway. Oh, right. Yes, that whole climate change thing. It's happening because of the warming. And yes, why shouldn't we help? Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have a shark poop. I have pika poop, and I have fish friends. Okay. Fish, fun, fun and poop in the animal corner. Okay, great.  Listen, I have a lane, and I am sticking to it. At least I don't have to shout at you and ask you to stay in your lane, Blair. Everyone who is with us, thank you so much for joining us. If you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us all places, podcasts are found, look for This Week in Science, and you can find us on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. Look for This Week in Science. Our website is twist.org, T-W-I-S-dot-O-R-G. And now it is time for assimilation. The Borg. We're going to talk about the Borg. Resistance I have heard might be feudal. Yeah, well, resistance against me talking about this particular story right now, totally feudal because we're going to talk about it. And when I talk about the Borg, I'm talking about not the Star Trek civilization of robot people, cyborgs that assimilated any living being into their super entity. What I'm talking about are linear elements of DNA found outside of bacteria in mud. That's what I'm talking about. Some Berkeley researchers have found what they call ELEs or EGEs, extracellular genetic elements, these extracellular line elements. And sometimes these extracellular elements are circular in shape. The circular shape preserves the DNA, protects it while it's in the dangerous and inhospitable environment of water or mud or whatever environment it's in. But these elements are made of DNA. They are not inside bacteria per se, but they can be picked up by bacteria and then used and swapped around by bacteria. And this is very often how antibiotic resistance gets swapped around are these extracellular elements. And they're usually very short. However, these particular elements were massive. They're over a third of the size of a piece of a chromosome for archaebacteria. Archebacteria also tend to have pretty large sizes and they're these amazing survivors in the bacterial world, the proto bacteria, bacteria that came before bacteria that are extremophiles. And in this particular situation, the researchers dug a little deeper, did genetic analysis and found a whole bunch of genetic elements within these what they're calling borgs because of the ability of these extracellular elements to pick up DNA from other bacteria and help swap them around. They assimilate genetic elements very well. Yes, they do these borg. They looked deeply into the genes that were contained in them and found genes responsible for the metabolism of methane. And they found that these elements seem to be associated with methane eating archaebacteria. And there are a number of questions still at play here. The researchers, number one, have not been able to culture these archaebacteria or the line elements in the lab so they can't actually confirm that they're really associated with and being used by these archaebacteria. And because that's an issue, that it's kind of a question as to whether they really exist at all. I mean, they found them, they found the genes. It's a lot of gene sequencing, but they haven't been able to like show proof in the lab at this point. And the study is also a preprint, so it hasn't been peer reviewed yet. It's a very, but people are talking about it. So it's a very interesting question. So is it the, is the idea that these are like lies cells from archaebacteria that then other bacteria are like, oh, I know how to use this. As long as they're, as long as they're not using this bit, I can incorporate it. Yeah. So I don't know how they would end up, how these elements are just floating around in the mud, but apparently there's DNA all over the place and it just gets picked up and swapped around by bacteria all the time. Not necessarily from laced bacteria, bacteria that have exploded and spewed their contents all over the place, although that's potentially how you would think that kind of an element would end up in the environment. Yeah. So random genetic elements found in the mud, researchers calling them Borg, they're really long and they have these interesting aspects to them. They did discover that they have these repeating elements at the caps at the ends of their length, which is unusual. It's very similar to stuff like CRISPR, where they have the repeating elements. These, these extracellular elements, the circular ones also very often have a lot of repeats contained in them within them. And they find that as well. But they're wondering if they can get the culturing to work, if they can potentially not in the wild in, like you were mentioning just a moment ago, the melting permafrost that is releasing melt methane, maybe not muck around with genetic elements and bacteria there, but they're going to start looking at rice fields in California to see if they can perhaps add in this extracellular element, these Borg, with these methane eating genes, to see if they can reduce the amount of methane that is produced in agricultural processes. That's a fine person. I might not my number one suspect is that there's a virus at play. If it is doing an insertion spot capping things, tearing up the cell, exploding the cell or having it otherwise be torn to shreds, then that opens up this whole question, like how big and important would then viruses be in doing this process over all of evolution, tearing up one thing in a way that something else could incorporate it. They then become the workers for that. They got to look for the virus. There's going to be a virus in there that's tearing up these archaeobacteria, that's allowing them to remain stable and get incorporated later. And then the thing about agricultural methane, that would be fine too. That would be fine too. Yeah, we need to reduce the amount of methane that we release into the atmosphere. That is a huge thing, especially if the permafrost is melting and speeding up the process of warming in the atmosphere. I don't know about any evidence about viruses. All they have are these long sequences of DNA that are hanging out in the mud, but that apparently exist in tandem with these methane eaters. Yeah. Anyway, Justin, what did you want to talk about next? Oh yeah, let's go to some viruses were found in two nearly 15,000 year old ice samples taken from the Tibetan Plateau. Most of those viruses are unlike any viruses that have been catalogued to date. And because they were frozen, they survived. They're perfectly fine. Yeah, they're perfectly fine. The findings published in the journal Microbiome could help scientists understand how viruses have evolved over centuries and evolved and viruses is tricky because they don't have this sort of reproduction that we normally constitute with something that's alive and they do replicate, but it's still it's different, right? So for the study, scientists created new ultra clean method of analyzing microbes and viruses in ice without contaminating it. These glaciers were formed gradually along with dust and gases. Many, many, many viruses were deposited there. So the Zhiping Zhang, the lead author of the study, they analyze ice cores taken from this ice cap in Tibet. These cores are also at a very high altitude. The summit there is 22,000 feet above sea level. So this is a sort of interesting laboratory for a lot of different types of research, but it gives them a timeline of sorts going back, back, back, back, back over many millennia to look at things like climate change, microbes, viruses and gases throughout history that have been trapped in the ice. Yeah, but they found genetic codes for 33 viruses. For those viruses, we have already discovered 28 of them are novel. About half of them seem to have survived from the time that they were frozen, but not just because of the ice, not just because of the ice. This is who's Matthew Sullivan, who's a co-author of the study, a professor of microbiology at Ohio State. These are viruses that would have thrived in extreme environments. These viruses have signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments, just real genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions. So part of what they've also done is they've used a new method that Jiping has developed to decontaminate the cores and be able to even study the viruses that were contained within the ice. They now think they could actually use this technology on Mars, on the moon, and actually even in desert areas where we can get to ice that hasn't really been being disturbed by mankind. As much of it as is existing now, anyway. So one of the things too that they're going to be able to study, this is according to Lonnie Thompson, who's a senior author of the study, as well as so at Ohio State. We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments and what is actually there. The documentation and understanding of that is extremely important. How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we're now in? So some of this will help our predictive ability for what's going on in the future. As scary as it might sound that we have taken 28 novel viruses from an ice core, like we were teasing earlier, this is happening every time the ice melts. And we're melting a lot of it. So we're going to encounter this anyway. Also, when they looked at these viruses, they say they look a little bit more typically like a soil virus, something that there are trillions and trillions of all around us. And most of them are going to be novel because we haven't looked at everything, not necessarily because they're so frighteningly different. But one of the also problems with viruses is they do not have the type of evolution that we associate with life forms. When we look at a virus, we can't easily determine what it's related to, especially with something that's maybe disparate as 15,000 years of virus evolution or viral changes, mutation that has taken place over time. You can't simply look at a bit of that and go, oh, I can tell that it diverged from this virus 2 million years ago, or how things that we can actually do with our life genetic code. We scan the DNA that's there and look for genes that are very similar to what we see in modern viruses, what we see in other bacteria, and we can look at what we know to be certain genes with specific functions. And if that may not tell us lineages where the virus potentially came from, but at least it can tell us what that virus could potentially do. What it's target is, you know, you can sort of see what is what does it eat? And that tells you then a tremendous amount of information about what it's, what it was in the environment and when it was in there, 15,000 years ago, which really isn't that long ago. It's not that long, but in virus lifespan, it's probably that's like so long. Like we're seeing how fast SARS-CoV-2 is mutating, you know, and if a virus has the potential to spread and mutate, it's going to and it can change very rapidly. Yeah, depending on where it is and what it is doing. But yeah, beware of the Tibetan ice. No, it's fine. Yes. Yes. The permafrost is really what we should be more worried about. And I think that's my just my I'm going to keep going back to that for the rest of the show. Nope, the permafrost. Beware of the permafrost. Blair, what do you have? Well, you know who's not hiding in permafrost? I don't think. Who? Sharks. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I hope not. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually have a study about shark intestines. Did you know? We don't actually know that much about. I'm just gonna stop you right there. You said shark intestines and you said, do you know? And I'm going to say no. No, exactly not. No, you're right. And you are not in the minority there.  And that's because they've had to cut open shark specimens to figure out what's going on in 3D inside their bodies. So they either get that or they get flat sketches of sharks digestive systems. So this is the first time that researchers have produced a series of high resolution 3D scans of shark intestines from nearly three dozen shark species, not individuals, but species. This is a pretty widespread study. And they're looking at something that apparently shark biologists did know, which is that sharks have spiral intestines.  There's really no other, it's a corkscrew spiral intestine. And this is a study coming from University of Washington, California State University, and University of California Irvine. Sorry, CSU, Dominguez Hills and University, UC Irvine. And they developed a new method to digitally scan these tissues. So they can look at soft tissues in detail without having to open the shark up. They use a CT scanner, computerized tomography. And they did it just like how certain X-ray images can be taken where you take them from different angles and you kind of stack them up with computer processing to create a three dimensional image. So you're able to do that all from natural here's natural history museum specimens from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. And they found, based on this corkscrew kind of structure inside the intestines, that the spiral shaped organ, it actually slows the movement of food, which makes sense that you could travel straight through, or if you have to go in a spiral, that's going to take longer. So they slow the movement of food, and they direct it towards the gut.  You can only go through. And that relies on gravity. Once you're swallowed by a shark, there's no getting out. I mean, until you get out of, you could get out of here in the stomach, but then yeah, once you get to the intestines, that's it. Why is there a Tesla valve on the image? Great question. So it resembles the one way valve designed by Nikola Tesla over a century ago that allows fluid to flow in one direction without backflow or any moving parts. So why is this important? So on one side, you have learning more about sharks and how they eat. One of the crazy things about the way sharks eat is that they can go weeks, they can go days to weeks, I've heard in cases months, without eating. That means they are able to hold on to food in their system to absorb many more nutrients than we would in our body. This could help explain that. You're increasing surface area, you're slowing it down. It's a one-way travel. So they've slowed the movement of food. But the other piece of this is, because it looks so similar to this valve created by Nikola Tesla, they actually think once they use a 3D printer to create models of these intestines, they can test how it works in sharks, but also work with engineers to use this model, a shark intestine model, as inspiration for industrial applications like wastewater treatment or filtering of microplastics out of the water column. Wow. Thank you, sharks. Yes. Thank you, Nikola Tesla and thank you, sharks. Also, what was Nikola Tesla looking at? That's what I want to know. The intestines of sharks. About shark intestines. Maybe he had a fascination we're not aware of. It was a brilliant invention because he just took the properties of water pressure and created a one-way valve with no moving parts. Yeah, exactly. It's the simplest structurally design to efficiently do that. And so, of course, nature figured it out way before we did. Of course. Exactly. Yeah, that's what I love about it is whether he knew about these kind of structures in nature or not, he stumbled across something that nature figured out millions of years ago. Don't even worry about it. Now I'd like to know if there are other species that have this kind of spiral intestine design if sharks are unique. Good question. And we'll be able to figure that out by using this new CT scan technology or the technology is not that new, but the application. It's pretty new. So anyway. That's really neat. And speaking of cool applications of technology and, I mean, it's not an adaptation, but it's an improvement on artificial intelligence. We've reported previously on the effort by Google's DeepMind Alpha Fold to determine the structure of proteins. And this is something that we've talked about for years on the show, going back to fold it a game that uses human pattern recognition to be able to suss out the patterns and the folds and the twists and the worlds in protein structures. Now, and if you remember, a little over a year ago at the AAAS meeting, we did a live show and we interviewed Dr. Baker from the University of Washington Institute of Protein Design, and we talked with him about his synthetic biology. Well, this new development is out of his lab, the Baker lab at the University of Washington. They have developed based on what was revealed at the meeting that we talked about like six or six or eight months ago, that Google Google Minds Alpha Fold project did like 90% accuracy in determining protein structure. The stuff that was revealed about their methods and how they did it, the Baker lab and their collaborators, they used that information to make an open source artificial intelligence because Google DeepMind's Alpha Fold is not open source. They have made an open source AI for determining protein structure that takes only 10 minutes to determine the structure of a protein running on a gaming computer. Wow. Yes. So they're using, you know, off like off the shelf gaming, it's really good gaming computer processors, but at the same time, this is off the shelf technology and they've created this artificial intelligence using very basic rules that are on par almost as good as in the 80, 85% accuracy range, which is above all of the other artificial intelligences that are out there working on the same problem. So really starting to get at this problem of protein folding and in a really rapid way, single pass, 10 minutes, oh, look, here's your protein. You may have to do confirmations, but this, this, the fact that it's open source will allow real development to take place from here. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Artificial intelligence. Yeah, what do you have? Speed at which this stuff is happening is just exciting. What have I got? Oh, I have an editorial published in Energy and Environmental Materials, Professor Ravi Silva, director of the Advanced Technology Institute of the University of Surrey, it's arguing that there are no coherent excuses left to justify the use of fossil fuels. Such a great way to put it, no coherent excuses, which does leave But, but, but society, but, but, but economy, but, but, but yeah, no excuses plenty of room for incoherent excuses. So he's, you know, in his paper, Professor Silva challenges the scientific community to lead the world away from fossil fuels, which are still 80% of the energy mixed at the time. While the cost of clean energy generation has been plummeting, it's going down, down, down, down, down, the cost of getting that energy is cheaper and cheaper. Silva argues that significant innovations in advanced batteries and energy storage technologies are needed to keep up. They needed, they're needed to meet the international energy agency's goal of a planet being carbon net zero by 2050. For example, as pointed out here, the transportation sector would need to see a 15 fold rise in electric vehicle sales from 10 million in 2020, which is still a really good number, to 145 million in 2030. And that's not an unachievable goal by any means. So it's, it's, but it is dependent on a leap in some battery and energy storage technology, as well as, which isn't pointed out here, the ability to, to charge anywhere, which I was actually just excited. There's this oldie time bank downtown, small town Davis. And I just drove by it for the first time and I don't know how many years. And there are, they've, they've, their parking lot has charging stations in it, which is one of those things that this, this innovation can be done within our existing infrastructure. It's not like we have to build a different kind of gas station next to the old gas station or on top of it or net, you know, we can put the, this is something that's very accessible. This is something we could put in parking spots pretty much anywhere. Uh, let's see. So the quote here, or first he concludes, he concludes that the unprecedented, but much needed goals are the only, are only possible if the scientific community itself ushers in a new way of energy materials that are cheap, easily deployable and have short payback times. This is quotey voice of silver. The pandemic has been a truly horrific experience. However, one of the few positives that I can gather from the past two years is that it has allowed me to take stock and refocus on the incredible challenge of combating climate change. It's increasingly clear that the energy materials community has a crucial role to play in weaning the world off of fossil fuels. The cost of green energy is falling all the time in the UK. Solar and wind generation is competitive with fossil fuels, but we need to look at improvements in thin film technologies, new polymers and other hybrid materials that can boost energy capture capabilities while reducing the cost of production if we are to have a genuine green energy revolution. So calling out his, it sounds like very much peers and the companies that are involved to refocus some of their energies and resources towards the materials that we need to make these next big steps. Yeah, one of the things that we do need to consider for these big steps, there is a lot already available, like he is arguing and like you're saying, but there are big questions about the sourcing, the ethical and sustainable sourcing of materials like lithium for car batteries or how do we do that without destroying the oceans? How do we get this, you know, this material that we so rely on and how do we do that in a way that doesn't put the burden unduly on, you know, on underrepresented groups around the world, you know, you are impoverished groups around the world. Such an important part of this, right? It's like, yeah, it costs money. Even if it's cheaper to have the green thing, if you're replacing a thing you already own with a green version, it costs money to do that. And so unless governments are willing to help with that process, it's going to be really difficult logistically to do this without disenfranchising people in lower incomes. Yeah, I disagree. And this is why. When the first generation of Prius came out, they had actually cost something like $10 million each to produce, if you factor in the R&D and everything else. A few years later, there's like, you know, 30 million of them on the road, and they're the same cost as a regular compact sedan. So that hurdle is sometimes an illusion. Like we're looking at Nikola Tesla's doing these high-end electric cars. That need not be the electric car that every man drives, and it need not come at those price tags. Right. But we've also seen different countries and states put forward assistance. So there are, you know, you can get rebates for buying an electric car or a hybrid car. And there are, there is assistance that has allowed the spread of these vehicles to happen more rapidly. There's also assistance to actually help the companies make the transition from creating gas cars to electric vehicles. It's like, oh, if you're going to sell cars in our state, then you have to have at least one electric vehicle that you sell among all your other cars. So there are regulations that push that development forward. And you know, it's hard to get past that 100 million dollar prototype into mainstream acceptance and distribution. And I mean, ultimately, so I just bought a car three years ago, right? And I was planning on driving that car until it died. The last car I bought, I drove for 15 years, right? But if I am going to hand in my car for an electric vehicle, even if it is reasonably priced, it takes a certain amount of financial privilege to do that before I was planning to do it. And that is the part, I think, that gets missed here is it's very easy to say all new buildings are going to have solar panels. But what about people that are that have owned the same house for however many decades? Right. And so there has to be a conversation, not just about making sure new stuff is better, but about making sure that there is a subsidized practice of trading out for newer stuff. And there are things like washing machines, like you can get, you can get assistance to trade out an old washing machine or an old refrigerator to get a new one that is more energy efficient. But it's not no dollars, which is what it takes to keep the one you have. Yeah. Well, that makes some sense. There's detractors to that as well as the cost of maintaining a vehicle is totally different on an electric car, like you do away with repairs, the most part you do repairs. Right. But it's a big cost all at once. And if you're poor, we can only pay for the small repairs in little bit. But then there's also the resources themselves. And so like pipelines going through indigenous lands, there are going to be those questions about where is the lithium going to be mined for these batteries? How are we going to get it? Are we going to just say, oh, it's on Native American land, so whatever. We have to put forward sustainable and egalitarian practices moving forward if we want to change the way that everything works. And I love that idea. I think that might have to come second, unfortunately. And what we're talking about, to be fair, is we're talking about the burden being the cost of these things, environmentally, what have you, being born by certain different people. It's different underprivileged people than the underprivileged people who are burdened by pollution in inner city and fossil fuel factories. That's still, I mean, it's not like we're adding that. I want to make that clear. We're not adding an environment. We're just shifting the burden. So that's fine. It's like move the deck chairs around. We need to remove burden is what needs to happen. That's what I'm doing. The point is that we're severely and drastically reducing it for all ships. We may be able to find some ships who are more negatively impacted, but I don't think that when we're lowering that burden on all ships together, I don't think we have to make that the thing that stops. We still need to push forward, but we exactly, I think we all agree on that. The editorial, what you're reading, absolutely agree, and we need to make sure that it happens, but there are better ways to do things, and that's only going to happen if people push for it. If you remember the cash for clunkers, that was actually the brainchild of Stephen Chu, who was the head of the Department of Energy at the time. It happened on the back of a stimulus to resuscitate the economy, but the point of it was to take gross polluting vehicles off the road and replace them with cars that did not pollute as much. It's heading in the right direction, and it was. It was something that allowed people to take those old 15-year-old beater cars and get a sizable down payment, maybe $4,500 towards one of those electric cars that makes that ease of transition a little better that you were talking about. You're just bringing up evidence to support Blair there. No, I absolutely am. I'm not disagreeing. I disagreed with her that the burden is the price of vehicles. I think that's nonsense, but I do agree that the government has it. No, no, I'm not trying to be rude. I worked in the car industry for decades, and I watched how rollouts of cars and I watched the auto industry fight the electric car because of the and even hybrids.  And now the price of them is ridiculously the same as any other car because people buy it. And once people start buying something, everything about the infrastructure of the fossil fuel economy is being paid for. You might not see it at the pump exactly. You might not see it at the price of the car, but we're all paying for it tremendously. So that's why I'm saying that I don't like the economy cost argument. It's not economy cost. It's individual cost. And that was my point, is that there needs to be support. It's like telling someone they shouldn't buy fast food because they're going to have to pay for medical bills later. It's very blind to the idea of the individual cost of a person who lives in poverty. And that's all I'm trying to say. But I think what's missing there is what we're talking about is the next time that a person goes to buy a new car or maybe a used car that the vehicles that are there are electric should be no difference. It's not like you're going to tell them you can no longer drive your 15-year-old car and you're done. You have to walk until you can afford a car. It's the next time they're ready to buy a new or used car. The sooner we do it, the more 10-year-old electric cars are going to be available on the secondary market. Anyway, rant. Yeah. And my final story for this opening segment is that we've talked about spider silk on the show many, many times. Researchers have been trying to create synthetic spider silk for years and years and years. Well, researcher publishing in the journal ACS Nano from the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has created bacteria that are engineered to make spider silk that's stronger than silk that some spiders make. Stronger than spider silk, spider silk? Yes. This is synthetic spider silk that is stronger than spider silk. And they were able to, in previous studies, determine some of the compounds that were necessary to the strength, the tensile strength of spider silk and they were able to solve some of the problems of mixing the various materials together that spiders have evolved to do so seamlessly. And in doing this have managed to out spider silk the spiders and they think, the researchers think that they can even do better with a little bit more work that there are, the researcher says that there are many more amino acids to be looked into. There are something and there are many more combinations of chemistry to see. And so they've got their work cut out for them. But what this does suggest is that we are figuring out how to make silk fibers that are stronger than steel yet flexible.  Except maybe, you know, you'd have to have a better shoulder maybe to be able to swing at the bottom of the swing. Anyway. Yeah. You have to be a lot more ape-like. Yeah. I was picturing a spider silk bridge and how weird it would be to drive on a suspension bridge. You know, it's made out of spider silk. Exactly. Maybe, yeah, suspension bridges not with steel cables, but with spider silk. And my grain is telling lightness. Heck no. But it's stronger than steel. I just want, I just want underwear elastic bands that can last as long as I'm willing to keep underwear. Maybe one day with this technology, you will. Because that's the thing that always goes wrong anyway. I don't know who would have that much gift, but I might be worried about, yeah, I'm okay. We got to talk a little bit more after the show about the underwear issues here. But for those of you out there, thank you for joining us for this episode of This Week in Science. We are back this week. Every week we broadcast weekly on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Pacific Time live on our YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch channels. If you enjoy the show, tell a friend. I'm going to come on back with a very quick COVID update. I've got a few stories to dive into, but they're fairly just not a lot of nuance, just a little bit of information. So I'm going to tell you what you need to know. COVID update, da, da, da. Wait, is that the two songs? It's just, it's gotten shorter and more sad throughout the pandemic. COVID update to like, what's the thing? Is we still talking about this? Let's go. People who are vaccine hesitant sometimes say that they don't want to get the vaccine until it is fully authorized by the FDA. And so the question is, when will the COVID vaccines be approved by the FDA? Well, Pfizer has applied for its mRNA vaccine to be approved, and they are currently getting all the paperwork together to submit to the FDA. It has been stated that with the priority review process, which can take up to 10 months, that they set a determination date and that date could be as late as January 2022. However, there was a report from an individual on CNN recently suggesting that it might be within the next couple of months. So we may see full FDA authorization for Pfizer's vaccine very soon. And then, as for the question about pediatric vaccines, the under-12s, what is going on there? They are currently running trials with reduced doses of vaccine for the shots that the children get. They are collecting data on those. They are in a second round of trials at the moment. And we could see an emergency youth use, not emergency youth, emergency use authorization for kids under 12, at least to about the fifth grade level. From 12, yeah, I think it's from like six to 12. The under-6s may have to wait a little bit longer, but for kids of school age, we could see an authorization as early as September or October. They are rushing, but not rushing. They're doing everything to the letter, trying to get things done as quickly as possible. So we may see a vaccine for school age kids by the early fall, a little late for the beginning of school for some, but at least coming on the sooner side. However, there are also reports that this authorization may not come for all of the under-12s until at least midwinter, so probably December-ish of this year.  We keep not getting to the, like before school, that's your deadline, before school. Well, we want to get the studies done to make sure that they have the dosage right, that things are as safe as can possibly be to reduce the risk because the reason we want our kids to get vaccinated is to protect them, not just for the heck of it. So we need to make sure that everything is done well. And anyway, speaking of for the heck of it, if we've got about 70% of the population in a lot of places around the United States, with at least the first shots of their mRNA vaccines, a study out this last week suggests that the second shot is really the money shot. That's the one that boosts, and it's a booster shot for a reason. It boosts your immune system, improves the T cell response, and really gets your immune system primed to ward off SARS-CoV-2, much more significantly than just the first dose. So if you've only had the first dose, really consider getting that second. It'll help your immune system fight SARS-CoV-2 off. And then the longer that this whole pandemic's going on, and we're living with this virus, the more we learn about the virus and about our immune responses to it. This time last year, we only had about six months of experience with the virus. We didn't know what was going on. Now we've got 18 months of experience. We have people who have had the virus and who have survived and lived for at least 12 months, if not longer, with the virus. So we're getting more and more information. Another study that just came out this week found, it's in Nature Communications, found that people naturally infected with SARS-CoV-2 produce antibodies against the virus for up to nine months following primary infection. And this is really great news. Then they need to go get it again for their booster. They need to go get it again. Well, they also found that some individuals had increases in antibody production, and they think that that's the result of reinfection. So yes, people have gotten reinfected, and that also boosts the immune response. But yes, getting a vaccine is also an easier way to go through the process of gaining immunity without getting COVID, because you never know whether you're going to get stuck with those long-term effects. And then there's questions about kids and whether or not mild and asymptomatic cases actually lead to much immunity. They just released a study suggesting that children who presented with mild or even who were asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 had a really robust antibody response months later, up to four months later, is how long they followed for the study. So even a little infection for kids can help protect them, although not saying you want to have COVID parties. That's a very poor idea. No, no, no, no, no. Again, when the pediatric vaccine comes out. Yeah. All of this is the great news that our immunity seems to last for what we're finding is it seems to last, and that is really great news. The really bad news that I'm going to end the COVID segment on is that we've talked a lot about the adults getting COVID. We worry about the kids getting COVID, but then we don't really talk about the kids that are left behind after their caregivers die from COVID. And a recent study looked at the deaths of caregivers and the numbers of orphans around the world. There is over 1.5 million orphans from COVID. And an estimate at this point is that a child loses a caregiver to COVID once every 12 seconds. So you know what? Get vaccinated for the kids. Yeah, if you won't do it for yourself, do it for your children so they're not alone. Yep. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Just think about that. I think that is, this is one of the, was one of the hardest studies to look at and to read through this week because, yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to leave the kids alone and behind and as orphans. So that was some serious ending of the COVID corner. COVID update. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. We hope that you enjoy the science that we bring you, the good, the bad, the serious, the joyful, the fun, the funny, all of it because we like to talk about it with you. And you are the reason that we're here every week talking about science and trying to bring new discoveries to your ears. If you appreciate This Week in Science, please help us continue to do what we do every week by becoming a Patreon sponsor. Head to twist.org and click on the Patreon link to choose your level of support, $10 and up. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. Thank you for your support. We really can't do this without you. And now we come on back to Blair's Animal Corner with someone I think named Blair. What you got, Blair? I have pikas or pikas depending on what you want to call them. I call them pikas, pikas, pikas. They are, I do believe the inspiration for Pikachu, but they're actually real animals. They're mountain lagomorfs. Whoa, let me try that again. They're mountain lagomorfs. Lagomorfs are rabbits and hares, but they're also, rabbits, hares and pikas. So they, they are a distinct group of mammals. They are not rodents. So people often think rabbits and rodents, but they're not there in this other group called lagomorpha. And so pikas, why am I talking to you about them today? Well, a University of Aberdeen School of Biological Sciences and Chinese Academy of Sciences study have completed a 13-year-long investigation on the survival strategies of the plateau, wow, I'm having a hard time. The plateau pika lives in the King High Tibetan Plateau in China. They are of interest because they can't hibernate, but it gets really cold and all of their food disappears in the winter. How does this animal survive? Well, to figure this out, they went to the King High Tibetan Plateau around 4,000 meters in elevation and they looked at the low temperatures and low oxygen that is present up there or is not present as the case may be to provide to look at how this specific environment still manages to provide for this animal and they still survive. So what they did is they measured daily energy expenditures of two different populations of these guys and found that the energy expenditures are about 30% lower in the winter. So they're spending less energy as they're running around. They also filmed their activities. They implanted them with temperature logging devices and they also looked at what they were eating. So they looked at their stomach contents. They looked essentially in their poop and did some DNA analysis. They found yak DNA in their poop. So obviously, they were eating yaks, right? I mean, that's obviously what, no, no, no. They're still tiny. But that's fine. If there's enough of them hunting as a pack, they can jink down a yak. There's no horde of pikas just pulling up over onto a yak. All that's left is bone. That's just destroyed by cuteness. Oh my goodness. I think it's better. Anyway, that's not what they think, of course. They think that they are eating yak poop. This is especially interesting because in Tibet, yak herders think that pikas are pests because they think they're competing with their yaks for food in the winter when the food is less and dry and hard to find. So this would actually lead us to believe that they're around the yaks not to steal their food, but to eat their poop, which is a really important thing to then communicate to the Tibetan yak farmers because if you explain that to them, maybe they won't be trying to intentionally rid their area of these animals that will be pressured by climate change and they need all the space that they can get. So all that to say, they're eating yak poop. This is how they're avoiding the lack of food and avoiding hibernation. But the other really interesting thing is that the temperature logging devices on these animals also showed that their body temperatures dropped. So hibernation is essentially a drop in body temperature. It's a drop in metabolic rate, which is a drop in body temperature. And so they're sleeping, they're also kind of in a like a hyperthermic coma, essentially. That's kind of what it is, right? Their temperature has dropped so much, their metabolism has slowed, but their body has adapted to allow them to do that without core systems failing. So these guys can't do that. They don't do that. They are able to eat, but they also lower their energy and they lower their temperature. So this is important to know also in relation to climate change. As things get hotter, will that create, will there be more grasses, which will then allow them to be more energetic and not lower their temperature as much? Or will the higher temperatures key their body to not drop? Their energy requirements will not deplete, but the grass will still deplete. This is all that's going on. I want, yeah, I think that's the interesting question is what is it that triggers the change in metabolism? Is it just a change in day length? Is it a change in temperatures generally where there maybe is a threshold temperature that when it hits a certain temperature for enough days that they're like, okay, that's it. My metabolism is going to be down-regulated. Or is it food availability? Is it food availability? Is it the type of food that they're eating? Is there a chemical change in the grass that they eat as the season progresses? There's lots of things that could be going on. But what's interesting is they have identified that lowering temperature, reducing energy output, kind of how much they're doing, and eating yak poop, those three things together increases chance of survival in the winter by 94 to 96% in this population. So yes, so these animals have adapted to a very specific environment on the top of a mountain. So as I often talked about what I used to teach school programs about climate change, mountains are generally cone shaped. And even though this is a plateau, it's like you took a bite out of the end of the ice cream cone. It's nice and flat on top. There's still nowhere further to go. So if they wanted to follow the colder temperatures that they're used to, they're stuck. That's it. They can't go down the mountain and up another mountain. They'd have to go through several biomes to do that. So this is just, they're stuck. That's as far in elevation as they can go. So these are on an island. Yeah, exactly. 100%. Yeah. So that's little, what happens when that island becomes inhospitable. Indeed. And they adapt quickly enough. Poop eating pikas. Yes. And from pikas to fish, the tops of mountains to the bottom of the ocean. I wanted to talk about fish friends. Hmm. So we often talk about animals and their relationships with one another within their species. They have, they've developed friendships, associations, social structures, whatever fancy term or label you want to put on it. They have relationships. And when we think about long lasting bonds or social familiarity, we talk about chimps. We talk about dolphins. Sometimes we talk about rats, but we definitely talk about animals that we consider kind of like, quote unquote, like higher cognitive function. And so this is going to be one of those stories, like actually all animals do it. So in this one, looking at fish and the importance of friendship to survival, this is a study from Nova Southeastern University's Holmas College of Arts and Sciences. And they wanted to study the presence of friends versus strangers in fish and how that changed their response to predators or a threat. So they, they took a bunch of tropical fish and they wanted to see how they responded to potential predators. So they, they had kind of the, they had strangers in some tanks, and then they had friends in other tanks, fish that were very comfortable and aware of each other. They, they weren't strangers. And they found that the presence of strangers was actually distracting and made them react more slowly than the friendship tank when there was a predator. So the social scene affected their reaction time to potential dangers. Then they think that this comes down to trust. So social animals in the wild, they rely on friends, buddies, comrades to alert them if a predator is lurking. So you can kind of let your guard down a little bit because you know there's other eyes on the field. You would think that would reduce their predator response time. Uh-huh. But no. The issue is that if they are spending every minute looking in every direction looking for a threat, it's harder to catch important information right away. So it, it, it kind of doles their sensitivity to new stimulus, I guess. So the idea is you're chill, you're calm, you know your buddy next to you will notice a predator if they come. So something unfamiliar shows up. They're like, uh-oh, what's that over there?  It's like, what's he doing? What's he doing? What's she doing over there? Are these fresh my friends? Oh, I've been eaten. So the individual or the level of familiarity in a group impacts their ability to respond to threats. So this is the idea of, of, um, the, the transfer of information and if it breaks down, so does the chance of survival for the individual as well as the whole. So that means your readiness to react to a threat depends on who's around you and therefore your entire social structure's ability to survive is dependent on familiarity. So this means there is a evolutionary advantage to developing, yes, developing familiarity, schooling, exactly. Developing familiarity and developing relationships to, uh, delineate between strangers and friends. Oh, he just thinks, if we just think of fish in their big schools is just, oh, they're just fish, right? But they know each other, they recognize each other and it makes a difference to their survival. Absolutely. Think about, think about ants, think about their social spiders out there. Think about, the, I think there's a lot of situations where we could find more and more examples of this where familiarity is important. And I think for people that work with wild animals, this was something that I think I wasn't expecting when I started working with animals is that animals that you'd never think would care about you start to recognize you. And even if they're not affectionate towards you, they definitely recognize familiar from unfamiliar individuals. And that can't be just a crop to their, their, their keeper or somebody taking care of them. That's got to be throughout their entire, their entire kind of species. But also we've talked on the show about different, different species recognizing each other as well. So there's, there's definitely an advantage to knowing your neighbors. Who are the fish in your neighborhood and the zookeepers in your neighborhood and the really nice people who feed you peanuts, right? It's figuring out being an animal in an environment with all the stimuli. Hey, that's us. Who do you know? Who do you not know? Who's dangerous? Who's not dangerous? What are the things that are safe and not safe? Is that a familiar dog you see down the street? Or have you not seen it before? Oh, I know that dog. It's pit bull.  I know. I grew up around, I grew up around people who trained their dogs to fight. So I have a Stockton. What are you going to do? Yeah, exactly. Come on. It's, it sort of is the whole, the whole story there about the watching out for predators. I remember this from, there was a fish tank in high school from the like forestry class, and somebody had put in too many minnows. There was like a trout or something in this giant fish tank. And the teacher warned us not to put too many in because the trout would normalize with them and stop eating them. These little, we put these little feeder fish that you could put in to feed the trout. But if you put too many in, it would no longer be other. It would no longer be food and it would stop eating them. So even a predator can like, can become part of a community of what was the food fish. If it hangs out there long enough and is surrounded by them, they become the familiar. And these are not my fish friends. Also, why would I eat them? That doesn't make sense. They're helping me watch out. That's Gary and Fred and Joanne. I'm not going to eat them. Don't eat my fish friends. Those are my fish friends. Well, this is This Week in Science and I hope that we are your science friends, bringing you science every single week. Justin, what science do you have right now for everyone? Oh, yes. An exceedingly rare butterfly was a species was discovered in San Francisco. It was? Yeah. This is exactly the sort of place you would expect to find a species of butterfly that no one had noticed before. It's a city overfilling to the brim. There's no parking spots left in San Francisco. Don't bother going. Too many cars already. Is it the Mission Blue Butterfly? Because I know that one's only found in San Francisco. It's the Circe's X-E-R-C-E-S. Circe's Blue Butterfly. It was actually last seen flapping its iridescent periwinkle wings in San Francisco in the early 40s. And it's generally accepted that it is extinct. They think it may even be the first American insect species destroyed by urban development. That can't possibly be true, the first one. Maybe it is. But there were some questions about whether or not it was actually a species to begin with or a subpopulation, possibly the butterfly that you're describing. This is in biology letters. Researchers analyzed the DNA of a 93 year old Circe's Blue specimen in a museum collection. And they found its DNA is unique enough to merit being considered a species. And that is the rest of the story. So it was found, but it's dead. Oh yeah. It's been extinct for 50 years. Right. So this is a posthumous species designation. Discovery. Oh yeah. I should have put a comma between discovered and dead. 50 years new species it turned out to be. But yeah. Old dead species that used to be unique and used to be amazing. Congratulations humans. We killed it. Good job. Oh geez. I wonder why nobody talks about like, is that something we could bring back? Could we use DNA to bring back an extinct butterfly to San Francisco? I think we could get people behind that. If you're not behind mammoths or neanderthals, which is probably a little dice here, maybe a butterfly. How about something that's only been gone 50 years? Yeah. See that would be okay. That would be okay. All right. We found one. We found one. All right. So now we need to get some funding and get this butterfly back. The next story is more things change. The more bacteria on the ocean floor don't care. Winter, summer, spring and fall, even on really windy days, the bacteria on the sand on the floor of the ocean is always inhabited by the same bacteria. And it wasn't an intuitive find. One of the things about water is that the makeup of bacteria floating around in water changes seasonally. It is affected if there's 24-hour sun or 24-hour darkness. It's they change if it's getting colder waters versus if it's warmer waters. But the sand on the ocean floor, even though different regions might have their own distinct populations of different regions of ocean floor, might be distinct from each other to some degree. The populations there don't change. Once that is established, it stays the same despite seasonality, light, temperature, any of it. And it's sort of like something we've talked about before about life not showing up on this planet many, many different times. Talking about all the niches being filled. This is literally all the niches and the grain of sand being filled by the same bacteria. And having simply no room for an invader to take up enough territory or real estate to get a foothold in the ocean floor. This is all research out of Marine Microbiology and Bremen Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany. They're describing this in the journal ISME Communications. What they found was for them very unintuitive having studied bacteria in the waters, ocean waters. But yeah, there is absolutely nowhere else. And it's also working as a pretty huge filter. The bacteria that are there are breaking down chemical components that are in the sea water and they're creating a sort of filtration system of different compounds that then goes deep into the sands of the ocean floor and may not ever come back up again. So they fall to the bottom and they never come back. But this is, and it's an area, the area they were studying, that you were showing there, does get that midnight sun, does get that 24-hour-ish, near 24-hour sunlight at some points where the sun is still in the sky, well past midnight, didn't affect the bottom of the sea, didn't care, didn't care. So is it the grain size of the sand? Is it the light availability? They didn't care about the light. They're at the bottom of the sea, it's dark. Well, and I don't know. So that's a great question because I think they're not like this, where they're studying doesn't look like deep ocean. So there's probably got to be sunlight filtering through. But the point is that the niches are so filled, they're so homogenous at this point that there isn't room for a whole lot of infiltration by another species to even get the foothold. And it was, they even went to the point where they're looking at sand that is facing down versus facing up in their analysis. The sand that's facing down is completely covered in every little niche. It's just like, and then the exposed sides, because I guess the play of the water or something, have a much lighter inhabitants. Well, you know, so if the only thing that is available is the thing that's hard to hold onto also, that sort of adds to the inability for other bacteria to then infiltrate. And it sounds like it's just a really healthy, happy environment that's providing everything that the bacteria need that they can remain so stable, despite any seasonality changes and that sort of thing. But it just really reminded me of our conversations about how come evolution hasn't shown up multiple times. When you get down to the point where you have every look on a grain of sand is occupied, there's really nowhere for a next thing to move into. No more angels can dance on the head of this pin. No more. It's done. Exactly, exactly. No more room.   Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, I think that's just a fascinating insight that just at a certain point, the bacteria, the life there is efficient. It's taking all the resources. There's no room. There's just not a place for more inhabitants. And yeah, I wonder if it's the same everywhere or just where they looked. Yeah, that's a great question. So that's, of course, there's always more research that needs to be done. One of the things that they did, as you mentioned, is they did want to look at if there is any sort of seasonality change in enzyme expression. Maybe diet does change. Maybe there are different metabolic activities taking place, still seasonally within that same population. So to that point, they may be more plastic in their ability to change strategies. That could be something that's at play, why they don't have to abandon an area when there is some temperature change and that sort of thing where conditions are different than you would normally expect them to be. So yeah, that's still on the table is like, how are they so good at maintaining a stable population? I assume. I hope we will find these things out in the years to come. As researchers study these questions more and tell us more about our universe, about our planet. I have some science stories for you. You want to talk about Mockingbird Song? Some of you might not consider it song that repeating. When the Mockingbird sits outside your window early in the morning before the sun has even risen copying the sounds of the car alarms. Mockingbirds. Yeah, so that was about to try to.  People like, I don't even know if they have car alarms like that anymore. I don't think I've heard one in front of forever, right? But they used to, yeah, they were so amazing. They were doing, they were doing the sound of the car alarm. Oh, fascinating. Yes, they're fascinating. Blair, I see what you're, I hear what you're doing. Oh God, that was the last one. I hear you, but a group of researchers got together and they used their various strengths to investigate Mockingbird Song and to explore the various structures that Mockingbirds use in their song. And while you may, in your annoyance of the morning Mockingbird, not think of it so much as a song, Mockingbirds are amazing mimics. They are able to mock many species in the animal kingdom. They're mimicking though, does have limitations. According to an article from ours, Technica, the birds can mimic blue jays, but not ravens, tree frogs, but not bullfrogs. And so they have a repertoire of particular species and sounds that they are able to mimic, but not others. So researchers have studied how they sing their songs. And we know that Mockingbirds repeat each syllable three to five times. And these repeats are separated by little breaths. And then they'll have a new syllable that comes in. And they can, 25% of the syllables that they use don't appear very often, but they can have thousands of phrases. Individual birds can put so many things together. So how do they choose all of these different sounds to put together? And the researchers looked at different stylings, what they called morphing modes, and they morphing modes are what they call like a variation on a theme. And they recorded a group of five different Mockingbirds, two in the, three in the spring, and then some, a couple of others from a bird song database. And the researchers, there was a researcher who's good at statistical analysis of animal signals. So that researcher was really good at putting the statistical analysis together. Another researcher is the music philosopher who studies connections between music and nature. And the third, a field biologist who studies the songs of Mockingbirds. And this particular quote from the study, again from the Ars Technica article says, When confronted with complex Mockingbird song, a musician will hear one thing, an ornithologist, another, and a signal analyst, something else. The most complete human knowledge of any natural phenomenon comes from combining distinct human forms of knowing. No one perspective negates the others. They are strongest when applied together. So I love just their philosophy of how they came together to use their strengths to analyze Mockingbird song. So anyway, they looked at all these different spectrograms of the songs and the morphing modes of how the strategies were being employed by the Mockingbirds. And they came up with four different strategies. There's a timber change, which is like the difference between a flute and a piccolo, or a flute and a clarinet, you know, that you might have a B flat instrument, but because it's a different build, a different construction, it has a different timber. There's also pitch change, which is actually changing the pitch, which I guess that would be more appropriately the flute to the piccolo. Stretching the transition, so taking an element of the song and making it longer and longer, or squeezing the transition, like taking an element of the song and smushing it up and making it faster and faster and faster. And they figured out how the birds do all of this, but they say that every transition involves a mixture of more than one of these modes. And they use this for their testable hypothesis. And basically ended up determining that the way that Mockingbirds put their songs together is very similar to how humans put their songs together. The timber morphing mode of the Mockingbirds, everything about the syllable stays the same, except for the timber. And the Mockingbird shifts from the mimicking call of one bird species to another with a different tonal quality without changing the rhythm. So they will go from the song of a non-mimetic blue jay, let me move my pictures back to where I had a non-mimetic bird to a mimic of a blue jay pump handle. But it's the same sound, just a different timber. So they'll switch to something that sounds very similar in how they're singing it. And this is something that is seen very often in tube and throat singing in actuality, where they'll have the similar sound but then different timber. The birds then will also use different pitch changes. So they'll do a long flicker call and then change the pitch to their own call. But it's very similar to the flicker call in the beginning. And we see that happen in music like in Beethoven's Symphony. And then there's also evidence of the lengthening or the slowing down of a transition. We've seen that in Disney in some of their music. And additionally, the clumping up and shortening of phrases is something that has been seen in other music as well. So there are many examples. I think Kendrick Lamar uses a lot of these examples as well. And the paper actually links to Kendrick Lamar as an example of a human musician that mockingbirds sing similarly to. I want to know if our brains are activating in the same place as theirs. I think that's a really interesting question. I have no idea. Yeah, the question of, yeah, if they, as they're making their transitions and as they're making their choices for their song elements, it's like, oh, I'm singing and then I'm going to do and do an element that sounds exactly the same. But is it a different pitch? Or am I going to have something that has the same rhythm, but the timbre is different? Or how am I going to make this musical shift? But along the line of like things that animals do that are interesting and the abilities that animals have is the big question of whether or not the birds are doing it because they think it sounds good, because they have this vast repertoire to choose from. Are they making these choices from some sort of judging of good composition versus bad composition? What sounds good? And I guess there is some evidence that some species of birds do have like a qualitative sense of what their songs sound like musically that they try to, that they try to do. Still doesn't explain the Karla. Aesthetics. Aesthetics, right? Yeah. It doesn't explain the Karla. It doesn't explain the Karla. But yes, I want to know what's going on in their brain versus our brain when that music is being composed and similarly when it's being heard. Because I'm assuming that ears across the animal kingdom have similarities and that therefore what we hear from sounds is similar to other animals, at least to terrestrial animals, I will say. Animals on dry land. So if I make that assumption, would, to your point, the same sounds be considered pleasurable across species and desirable? And then, so yes, this is what I want to know. Like what was the first animal to sing? And evolutionary did they like the way they sound? Yes. Or is this something that happened through convergent evolution that even possibly that humans heard birds and then kind of stole it? Right? These are, yes, I'm very, I'm very curious about all that. We do know that there are brain similarities and we use birdsong as a model, a neurological model for human speech. And there are a lot of neurological studies that look at birdsong, bird brains versus human speech production and human brains. And there are many similarities. And so I think that particular question of what is lighting up and what is getting activated as the choices are being made? And if there's similarity there too, is that, yeah. See, but then what I want to do, then what I want to do is I want to get the artificial bird ear to sort of translate it into what they can hear from another bird song. Because they're going to be getting so much more nuance. It's like how we only just discovered mice can sing. Mice knew it all along. Mice were listening to mouse songs and like having fun. But we only just do you hear what I hear? Like the whole world of recording and then putting into our range, animal noises. We should put out a CD of just animal sounds. Yes. Like I would love to hear that. Well, we should put a CD of animal sounds where each track is followed by us trying to replicate that sound. Really, that's what it should be. That sounds like a lot more fun. That would be fun. Last study of the night, researchers at UC Berkeley looked at empathy in rats. And we know that rats are empathetic to other rats that they know. So like the fish, they have their familiars. They have their in group. They have their out group. And they will save a rat that is one of their in group over one of the out group. So these researchers, they published their study in eLife wanted to know what beyond just that empathetic aspect and the group behavior of that of saving someone you know versus not saving someone you don't know. They wanted to know how the brain of the rats was responding to the situation. And what they found is that there is a brain network involved in this empathetic helping very similar to humans. They used photofiber, photometry, immunohistochemistry, calcium imaging and other used other tools to look at the experience of empathy in response to other rats distress and so the brain of the rats. They discovered that to act on the empathy. So no matter whether it was in group or out group, the empathy network was stimulated whether the animal they were looking at who was in distress was in group or out group. But in order to save the animal in distress, their reward circuitry needed to be stimulated as well. And they think this is something that happens as well in humans. And the big insight from this is that we need to broaden our sense of who is in our group? Who is someone we know? Who is someone like us? We need to broaden that so that more people or rats are included in not just our experience of empathy but also within our reward circuitry so that we want to help more people. Or the sci-fi version of that would be to give somebody an empathy chip. Sure, you could give somebody an empathy chip but it's not the empathy chip. It's the reward chip because regardless you can look at anybody and you're going to feel empathy but it's whether or not you act on that empathy is the big point. Do you give spare change to the homeless person on the street? Who has changed one? Yes, back when paper coin metal money was a thing. That was the thing you could do. But beyond that it's like how do you decide who to give your charity to? How do you decide who to help when they've fallen down? Who do you decide to help when their house has burned down? Who do you decide to help when an oil pipeline is being proposed? These are the big questions. Who's in our group? Who's not in our group? And it's just really interesting to see that very, very specifically in these rats the reward pathway needed to be stimulated. It needed to be triggered and it only happened with rats that were in group. And so if we can expand our idea of in group. Yeah and and so this is a reward. This connects really well to a study one of my favorite studies we've ever done on the show where they had rats that were related and they had one trapped and then they had to see if they would help the other one out, right? Then they had rats that weren't related and they didn't help.  And that rat was let out because he was raised around them and so he was part of their social group, right? And so this I see this tied into that in that how do you develop empathy for all people and exposure is the answer.  Yeah and it is Robin Williams' birthday today I believe and something he said once upon a time testifying in front of Congress to try and get Congress to solve the homelessness problem said you don't help people by lifting them up. You help them by keeping them from falling down. So if we can accept more people broaden our definition of our neighborhoods and who exists in those neighborhoods, maybe we can keep more people from falling down in the first place. Thanks Robin Williams. Anybody else have more stories? No? All right I think we have come to the end of another episode of This Week in Science. We did it. We brought you the science. It wasn't all the science but it was a bunch of good science. It's a good sample. Smattering. Yeah smattering lots of poop, lots of animals. That's a scattering. We covered the whole ocean floor. We covered the ocean floor. We went from mountaintops to ocean floors. Yes I think we gave it a good tour this week everyone. Thank you for listening. I do hope that you enjoyed the show. Shout outs now to Fada. Thank you for your help on show notes and social media. Gord, thank you for manning the chat room. Our other moderators, thank you so much for all your moderation. Identity 4, thank you for recording the show. Rachel, thank you for your editing and assistance and I would like to thank our generous Patreon sponsors. Thank you too. 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For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. And you can also sign up for our newsletter. You can also contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or me, Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into the depths of the ocean floor amongst many types of bacteria. It'll just get lost down there. Yeah, no room. You'll have to sleep in the sea. If you want to, you can hit us up on the Twitter where we are at Twist Science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jacksonfly, at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If you'd like us to cover a topic or you have a suggestion for an interview, please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more. Great science news. And if you learned anything from the show, remember... It's all in your head. All the warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grass coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all like in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just dead understand. That we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just so everybody listen to everything we say and we can science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. In a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour. This is coming away. You better just listen to what we say. And this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in. My child is talking to somebody. Ghosts. I hope it's his father. And not a ghost. And not a ghost. It's his father. Awesome. That's funny. Like who, who is being talked to right now? Yes, identity four. Shuber, I hope he's not talking to some hacker named Neo. Yeah, no, I mean, he spends a lot of time on the internet these days. And I'm, you know, it's at that age where I'm like really concerned about who he's talking to on the internets. That's fair. You should be concerned, right? Wow. Garab Sharma got a twist doormat. You can wipe your feet on twists now. Like it. Good quality. Awesome. Oh, tell your friends. Great. That's very funny. I didn't think that would happen so fast. And oh, it's like, let's have a doormat. Okay, so good. Oh, noodles got a sticker. Yay. Yes, some rewards. Perks are being sent out from Patreon. Week by week. Yes, Ulysses, if you would like to wipe your feet on twists, you must go to our Zazzle store. Oh, the doormat is bookmarked. That's very funny on my computer. It's bookmarked. Yeah, you want me to show here? Garab got a sticker too. Fantastic. Add to stream. There you go. Bookmarked doormat. Bookmarked. It's actually a cute doormat. Yes, with the tour toys. Let's see. My stores, they changed the interface again. Oh, I messed around with things. I don't know if they changed the interface. I went in the back end and I did some things. I clicked some options to change what was visible because the way it was when I'd go look for it, look at it. I was like, ah, who wants to do this store? Nobody wants this store. So I added some things. I changed things around. Good night, Fada. Shoebrew, goodies are waiting for you. That'll be just so wonderful. Get home and you'll be like, goodies, twist goodies. There we go. Nobody's bought the leggings yet. I just, I'm bad at shopping. I keep looking at everyone. So I'm like, oh, I need to get those leggings and then I forget. I'm bad. I'm really not a good shopper, everyone. I'm lucky that I have any clothes at all. My clothing mostly consists of things people have given to me. My clothing mostly consists of things I buy at Target when I'm buying milk. Exactly. I'm like, this will be fine.  I hope it's giant. Have that coffee. Is this one with beetles on it? Is that giant? I mean you can get it in a different style. Good night, Fada. Thank you. You can get it in, like you can get a stein if you want. A twist stein. The reason I love that it, there's a giant coffee mug. So I got this mug. This is, I don't know if I can show this off. This is a very shiny, multi-colored Dr. Who mug. Oh, it's shiny. The tiniest, it's going to be the smallest coffee mug. It's my hand.  It's bigger than, I can hide it. I can foam with it. Justin, I didn't realize your hands were so big. But this is actually, now that you mentioned it, now I've realized this is actually a superpower. Now I'm like, so I'm just going to drink out of my coffee mug. I have giant hands by the way. That's what it looks like. I have enormous hands. Yeah. Yeah, you know, this is a great idea. Next time I'm going to, I'm out at a pub.  Just so it looks like I have ginormous. I love the mug. It's a great Dr. Who mug. It's got funny colors all. It's really cool. But it's tiny. It's like, it's like a three sipper. I don't know. I'll have to convert to Turkish shots or something. It'll be fine. Yes, little Turkish coffees. That's perfect. Yes. Espresso. It's an espresso mug. Exactly. Or an alcoholic beverage. Smaller. That's the best way to enjoy your Jack and Coke at 10 a.m. Yeah. No one will know. No one will know. No one will know. Only you and the contents of that mug, which will then shortly be the contents of your stomach. Good job. Oh, Moscow Mule. That could work. Mug and stein and rug. I mean, you've got at least some rhyming in there, Ralph. Yes. Yes. Mug and stein and the rug. Yes. Mug, rug. Mug and the rug and the stein. It'll be great. I like the, I do like the, I do like the doormat. That looks pretty awesome. That's fun. I like the shower curtain too. Yeah. That's also very sweet. Actually, all of it looks pretty good. I think I'm going to need to get some of these pillows. Oh, pillows. Those are good as well. We didn't talk about Hubble. Hubble was broken and they fixed it again. Oh yeah. Came back. Yeah, which is very exciting. And they didn't have to like space walk or anything. They just did it from, yeah. I didn't need an update. Well, you know, Windows 10. It just turned it off. Turned it back on again. Clippy was like, it looks like you're trying to prepare a telescope. Can I help? Oh, Clippy. No, you cannot help. No. No, not allowed. Yeah, they smacked it too. They unplugged it, plugged it back in, smacked it a couple of times. Make it work. Yes. Yes. The software equivalent of that. Yes. Oh, someone. Nobody gave us a what has science done for us lately. Schuber wants to know if we have plans for a twist meetup, which we kind of do in that there's an event in October that I'm planning on you both being at that I will definitely be at. You're like, hint, hint. Yes. Percussive maintenance, Gaurav, for sure. Yeah. So yes, twist meetup. In the real world, I think it's still wait and see for me. I'm waiting personally for a lot of public stuff. Hi, Cappy. You're coming through making noise down there. I'm waiting until Kai can get vaccinated. That totally makes sense. Yeah, I have a child who can't be vaccinated yet. And the only thing I can do is minimize my exposure so I don't bring it back to him. And I've got the same conundrum. And it makes it tough to feel that invulnerability. You're supposed to feel by being vaccinated? Well, it's like, yeah, I'm like, oh, if I, you know, and if it were just me, I'd be like, okay, I can maybe get it and I won't get as sick and the chances of, you know, being really sick. Okay, fine. You know, great. But it's not just me. Nope. Yeah. And that's all, but that's, that's true for all of us, everyone, other people. But when it's, it's your child and your home, you very much feel that responsibility. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So I'm still not going and doing indoor restaurants. I'm, you know, I wear my mask to the grocery store, even though here in Oregon, you don't have to anymore. And it's a personal choice. I go to the grocery store and two thirds of the people, no, probably four fifths of the people are now no longer wearing masks at the store. And I feel like the oddball out. But I also feel like I'm doing what I need to do to, you know, limit exposure. So those numbers are reversed in, oh, sorry, those numbers are like reversed in the city of Davis anyway. The city of Davis, most people are still even like walking the streets with masks on. Like there's, there's exceptions everywhere.  But grocery stores and stuff, it's four fifths that are still wearing the masks. So yeah. So California relaxed everything June 15. And already all Bay Area counties are back to requiring masks indoors. Yeah, I think Los Angeles County did that as well. Yeah, they did. Yep. So if it's any indication, I think that's a good choice. They're not making that decision for the heck of it. They're doing it because they have to, which means they shouldn't have removed the requirement to begin with. In the first place. Or yeah. Getting, getting rid of the statewide mandate is maybe that's fine. And then local municipalities can manage themselves. I mean, that's partially what the CDC has done. They're like, not everybody needs to wear a mask. So you don't have to wear a mask indoors anymore. But what they're, what they also the, that's the simplification of the CDC language. And what the CDC really wants is for localities to keep in touch, keep track of what their case rate is, what their fatality rate is, know what that is and manage it with local regulations. But so, so, uh, Kudos to the University of California system, which made it mandatory. If you're attending, if you're working on the campuses, you see campuses throughout California, you have to be vaccinated. Well colleges are petri dishes all unto themselves. They are, they are, but it took, but that took a decision, you know, by something that is, it's University of California, it gets some state funding. It's largely a private institution, like in every way that it operates, every way that it operates. But they made that decision for their model to say, if you want to be part of our system in any way, it's mandatory. There are a lot of universities that are doing that. I think the majority of universities are requiring vaccination for students to return, for instructors to return. I did find out though that there was one researcher, I think, I'm not, I'm not an Oregon University and I don't know which one. And they're going to have to, they're being told that they have to come back and teach in person, instruct in person. And apparently, they are not allowed to ask people to wear masks. So there's a people, it's just people have to have to choose on their own. And the researcher that I was responding to was worried because she has a young unvaccinated child at home.  And she's very concerned about bringing stuff home to her child. It's interesting. I think that it's like it could be a common courtesy. You could be like, hey, so this is my situation. And for you to be in my class, I would really want you to wear a mask. Okay, because I don't want to take anything home. Just first day of class, just put it out there. But she is not, I guess, for the university not legally allowed to do that. It's tough because in terms of her safety, that would protect her, which is very important that like each person makes their own decision for them. But I think the problem that I keep having about this is that the reason we're still having this conversation and the reason that we're having to backpedal already is that viruses don't respect borders. And this is my big problem is that as California lifted their mandates and as other states did the same, that was a green light for people to travel. It's summer, we've all been cooped up at home, right?  Right, so this is this is actually the argument that the governor of New York had used against opening up because your city had low numbers, against the sort of municipality thing that we're starting to do in California, which is that, okay, so yours is the one town that has restaurants open. Where is everybody going to go from everywhere else in New York? They're going to get in their cars and they're going to drive to that town. And see now that town has got people from all over New York. There not what you can't you can't do. I mean, this but again, two months if if anyone had listened to the sound of my voice screaming a year and a half ago ish. I've heard it. I've heard I've listened two months. I stayed home. Lockdown. No, I know. And actually communities that did this, except there was always like, yeah, except for these workers, those workers, the other workers, all of these people and everybody working at a gas station, everyone working with Super Mario, everyone. Okay, well, so we didn't really do it. I mean, individually, yes, I did it too, you did it. But as a society, because we failed to do that, here we are over a year later talking about a mutant version now that's going to make us continue to go through these hoops. So it's a lack of I want to say the only way that I can say it without being worse is that it's a lack it shows a lack of intelligence. I really feel like it just as a species, a lack of a lack of self preserver preservative intelligence to act with information that you have. Well, I think it's it's it's not necessarily that it's more being easily misled and our need for tribal acceptance and to be part of a group makes the bandwagon effect so strong that we're willing to accept the cognitive dissonance that arrives that we have to, you know, that we have to manage to allow two things to be true in our head at the same time.  And it's, you know, it's not a lack of intelligence, it's just emotional need. Our it's our primate brain needing connection and needing belonging. And I it's unfortunate that it's leading us down this path. Yeah, I also think it's just us as a society failing the marshmallow test. I think all the time like you can't do anything fun for two months. But then after that you can do whatever you want. But I want to do the fun thing now. Yeah, too many people keep keep eating the COVID marshmallow. I love it. It's the COVID marshmallow, the climate marshmallow, like, yes, we're bad at this. Yes. Come on. Well, I think that's part of our next leveling up as a species. It's not just Oh, our ability to, you know, have these technological advancements. It's as a species being able to take the long term view and know that, you know, this thing that we're planning now is going to not benefit us but benefit generations down the line, you know, have a generational sense of humanity as opposed to this hubristic hedonistic drive.  It's never going to be over. We're going to be living with this forever. Yeah, I read today that it's estimated at the current rate of vaccination for the world that it'll be 2025 before everyone on the planet or who can be is vaccinated. Yeah. And by then there'll be another thing. So. Yeah, they don't pop out that often or that fast. I mean, yes, if we don't eradicate it for four more years, I mean, as more and more people are vaccinated, the variants are going to have less and less of a chance to propagate. And so things will, you know, it's we are going to get back. It's a long tail. It's definitely a long tail experience. And this virus is never going away. Yeah, it's with us now. It's endemic. And so now it's just vaccines and adding it to the list of vaccinations and things that we're ready for that could possibly happen. And it'll, yeah, it'll be a new normal. It's like, oh, look. Oh, not just flu season, but COVID. Yeah, we got to keep that in our minds. Oh, go to Disneyland, make sure you got your measles shot and your COVID shot. Well, and then will they actually ask people to show proof of COVID vaccination before they can go to school? You know, I hope they do at some point. I mean, I think it, you know, if that's what's going to happen, it's going to turn into a vaccine like so many others that go in our vaccination record. And people are all upset about these vaccine passports. And it's like, dude, we already have vaccination records that we have to show for like, come on, everybody. I literally have never had a job that didn't require a tetanus vaccine. I had a job in a hospital for a while on a research ward. And because I was working with patients, patient subjects, I had to get a hepatitis vaccine. I had to get one of the hepatitis vaccines. Yeah, that's what I had to do. It was like, you want this job, you got to get that. I was like, okay, you can get certain vaccinations to go to certain countries. But that's just to protect you. Yeah, well. Is it a rub? Is it or is it to protect all of us from when you come back? Yeah. Yeah. That's it as well. Yeah. Great point. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. I can't believe, I can and cannot believe that we're on our way back up. You know what gets me so upset is like, so Canada, we're always like, oh, Canada's above us. Canada was like, slow on their vaccine rollout. And now they're past us. They vaccinated more people than the United States have. We have extras. We're just sitting on doses. I know there was this whole thing for a while is like, why aren't we sending doses to Canada? Why aren't we doing this? Our people don't want them. Well, actually, those are now being sold. Yes, they are finally throughout, throughout, they're not being given to the third world yet, but they are. There are, because a lot of Europe bought into AstraZeneca. And the also, then we're looking at the Johnson and Johnson, and then shelved both of those for fear of that rare blood clotting effect. Also, Johnson turns out apparently not very effective against the Delta. Right. So the Pfizer and Moderna are now, they weren't supposed to be available for sale there for a while, because we needed them so bad here. But since we're not using them, they're just selling them tomorrow. Yeah. So they, but the COVAX program is the program that it has been developed to allow the redistribution of vaccines throughout the world. Gord got a started with the AZ and then got a second Moderna. You mix and match. Wow. That's awesome. I like mixing and match, mixing and matching my socks and my COVID vaccines. That's one thing I told myself very young in life. I will never take the time out of my life required to have matching socks. I just won't. That is, that is something. I draw the line here, right here. I'm not going to sort socks. I'm going to grab two socks out of the drawer. I'm going to put them on my feet. I don't care if they have anything in common. Nobody will see them. I go back and forth. So I, it depends on how I'm feeling. I think sometimes I just take the socks out of the laundry and I just put them in the drawer and I don't even care which are matching and I'm just, I just put them in the drawer.  I, yeah, I'm all over the place. So as I say this, as I say this. Oh, but they are kind of color, color coded. I'm wearing what looks like, it looks to be matching socks, but this is from two pairs of Rick and Morty socks and they're both Ricks. I don't know if I can get, I don't know if I can. It's not Rick and Morty. It's Rick and Rick. That just shouldn't happen. Oh, no. We're doomed. And Rick. It's two Ricks. Rick and Rick. Where's Morty? He got left behind. Rick was just like, you know what, I'm done with this, this, this Morty sidekick is I need a proper sidekick. I need another Rick. So there's now two Ricks running around. But the solution is really buying all the same socks. So it doesn't matter. You just have all the same, all the socks are the same. Yes, we need critical thinking. But this is about as matched up as I get. Actually, this is probably over matching. It's two Ricks socks. That's very matched. That's actually a very weird day you've caught me on because usually they'll be totally different color socks. Maybe one's themed with something and the other one just isn't. No way to tell. There's strange banging noises from upstairs. I am gonna need to go because I need to put my child to bed. Okay, Blair. He's awake doing something. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night. Good night, everyone. I hope you enjoy your socks this week or don't, if it's too hot for socks wherever you are. We will see you again next week. Thank you for joining us once again. Sleep well. Have a great day.  May you live in science and curiosity.