Free to be Science-y

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Twists This Week in Science, episode number ten thirty three,
recorded on Wednesday, October eighth, twenty twenty five. Free to
be Sien See Yeah, Hey everyone, I'm doctor Keek and
tonight we will fill your head with cheese feet, blind spots,

(00:22):
and yogurt. But first, thanks to our amazing Patreon sponsors
for their generous support of Twists. You can become a
part of the Patreon community at patreon dot com. Slash
This Week in Science declaimer disclaimer disclaimer. When universities bend

(00:43):
the knee, what happens to the idea of being free?
When science funding is based on politics, what happens to
the lot of us Academic rigor goes hand in hand
with freedom to self police is required, But when thought
police regulate previous free men, what will we talk about
on this week in Science? Coming up next. I've got

(01:10):
the kind of mind I can't get enough.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
I want to learn everything.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
I want to fill it all up with new discoveries
that happen every day of this week.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
There's only one place to go to find a knowledge, esik.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
I want to know what's happened, What's happened? What's happened?

Speaker 1 (01:29):
This week in sciences.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
It's happening. It's happened this week in science.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Good science to you, Kiki, and a good science to YouTube.
Blair and everyone out there, welcome to another episode of
This Week in Science. We are here to talk about
all the science that we wanted to bring for the
show this week. And unfortunately we are missing a justin.
But I guess we won't have this just in. Oh,

(02:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
We have to catch us up later. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah, we'll have to figure something out. We will make
it all work. On this week's show. I have a
lot of science news, A lot of things happened. We
got some little awards prizes that were handed out earlier
this week, some new stories about a new old yogurt recipe.

(02:28):
It's a little spicy, a little exciting, little dangerous maybe.
And I also have Alzheimer's.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Oh that's interesting. I also have Alzheimer's. But dolphins with Alzheimer's.
We'll get into it.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yeah, this is Alzheimer's Week a twists yay. In the
animal corner, well, I also have.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
A very fun story about leafcutter ants. And then I
have two different spider stories for the kind of the
quick news segment at the beginning there that I'm very
excited to tell you all about right before you go
to bed in many cases, or while you're eating dinner.
In both cases, not great. I can't wait. I can't
wait to get into it.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
I can't wait either. There's lots of spiders. It's spider
season where I am. They're all around my door, around
my house. My family has finally gotten to the point
where they're like, Mom, peeks, can we really clean up
the spiders a little little? And I said, no, you
have to wait until after Halloween.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah. This is when the spider females get really fat
and pretty and the most terrifying. Also my personal least favorite,
the orb weavers. This is when they're out the females,
just huge, huge females making very thin, very invisible webs
right at face height in front of your door, in

(04:02):
front of doors under awnings. Truly, truly awesome and terrifying, wonderful.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Just no, they don't want to end up in your hair.
If you hit their their strand that does cross your doorway,
They're more likely to drift on the remains of the
web to go back to the support column as opposed
to you.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
They don't want it, Yeah, and a lot of or
weaver species. Also, my favorite thing about them, in an
otherwise less than favorite bag of tricks, is that they
will often remember if you if you disturb a web
very tactfully in a particular place, they will not build
it again in that same place. They know, so if

(04:50):
you get higher, if you get a face full of
spider one time, they will not rebuild in the same
place in most cases.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
For specifically, there are more out there, and there will
be more science of spiders tonight. And if you want
to share the spider science with your friends, let people
know that they can subscribe to This Week in Science
most places where podcasts are found, We're on all the

(05:20):
big ones and a lot of the little ones. Do
wherever you like to find podcasts, look for This Week
in Science. We also stream weekly on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook,
and you can find information about the show at twist
twis dot org Twist dot org. Now it's time for
the Science You ready?

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yes, Yes, it's a wards season. Yay what did everyone wear?

Speaker 1 (05:52):
I wasn't paying attention to that. I'm excited about who
won for what? Oh my gosh, Nobel prizes we're handed
out this week it is the big week for the
you know, it's not the most money's there's other new
prizes and globally and that are more splashy and funded

(06:13):
by tech people and whatever. But this is an old,
solid award. The Nobel Prize is given to three people
in a number of areas of science, physics, chemistry, and
also physiology or medicine. This year the Nobel Prize in

(06:38):
physics went to an area that is a little confusing.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
It's not really something.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
That we can see in the world. It can't really
be described by macro physics or you know, it just
doesn't doesn't quite you know, it doesn't work in the
same way quant physics. Yes, these researchers, John Clark, Michael H. Deverrett,

(07:06):
and John M. Martinez, they all one for the discovery
of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in and
electric circuit. Why what does that mean? And why? This

(07:26):
is like the big question right, it's what does this
do for us? So one of the big questions about
how how energy in a circuit works, and how we
can measure voltage and how we can use the understanding
of quantum dynamics and these quantum weird things like tunneling

(07:47):
to be able to understand things at these these levels
of quantum computing, quantum circuits, at you know, four things
related to photonics. There's all sorts of levels where where
quantum UH physics comes into play. And so in what
they did, what they did know, what they did is

(08:10):
they were able to use make a device that like
can fit in your hand, a small device using material
that is super conductive in nature, which means that it
allows current to flow without UH without resistance. And this
device that they created, they set up so you know

(08:32):
how you like in the in in school in the
old days, they're like, let's make a simple circuit. And
so you start like with a battery and you have
like a lever that like turns it on and off
that like opens and closes the circuit kind of thing
like if you can imagine that kind of a circuit.
But instead of like bigger what they're what they tried
to do with instead of copper wire, using this UH

(08:54):
semiconductive material as the conduit. What it does is in
the UH when these atoms are or when the current
is turned on, it all turns into basically one electron
as opposed to when you think of current, it's like

(09:17):
electron electron electron electron jumping, jumping, jumping, you know, running,
you think of like separate ions running through a current
as separate things. Because of the way that the quantum
physics of this situation works, the ions, when you first
put them in, they become these cooper pairs where the

(09:37):
pairs become one and so two ions act like one.
And then when you like basically go, hey, turn on
the whole thing, like, it's like it all stretches and
it's one ion for the whole thing. So there's no voltage.
So even though you like were like hey, kind of go,
there's no vantage. Yeah. So it's this really weird situation

(09:59):
where it's like you have, I have all sorts of ions,
but suddenly because they're in this like water slide, they're
like water slide, drain and wear a worm. I don't know,
I just made that up. It probably makes zero sense anyway.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
That it's like when you scrunch this the outside of
the disposable straw and then you put a little bit
of water on it, it goes.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Kind of but it's all but it's like it's like extend.
Like you had a small thing.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
So you scrunch it up, you scrunch it out, scratch
it up on the straw, and then you take this
then you go a long time. Yeah, and you let
a little bit go and it goes wa and it
expands out.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
But this is more yeah. And so the the situation.
And you know how that we in the regular macro
regular I know, regular physics, you have like a lever,
i'ming the circuit, so voltage can current can flow opening

(11:04):
the circuit? No flow? Well, they have a different kind
of little lever in there. It was a gap, a
junction called a Johnson gap, and that particular gap created
a barrier to flow. But it was like this weird
it's a weird thing and I don't understand it enough
to explain it. But what it allowed is that they

(11:28):
turned a voltage on and they're like, Okay, we're going
to see if there's a difference in voltage. We're going
to see if current is changing, if there's a difference
in voltage, because right now we have one ion going
all the way around and then kind of stopping at
the end. It's not flowing past this Johnson bridge. But
because of quantum tunneling, which is like nuclear radiation, where like,

(11:53):
eventually these ions are like, I'm going to go through
the barrier and it's probabilistic, right, So there's math involved
related to the probability of the density of a nucleus
and the amount of current, and you know the barrier itself,
how thick it is, how how hard it's going to

(12:14):
be for any kind of nuclear radiation to pass through.
Tunneling is the process of that ion on one side
going groop and getting to the other side, even though
there's a wall in the way. So it doesn't work
in the real world. If you throw a ball at

(12:35):
the wall, the ball will bounce back and hit you
in the head. Maybe in this particular situation, you've got
a whole bunch of pushing on the wall and it's
like wait wait, wait, wait oh, and one makes it through.
And so eventually they were able, over multiple, multiple, multiple trials,
they were repeatedly able to show that there's a consistent

(12:57):
and deterministic kind of It's like the math works out
that you're like, oh, we have this, we have that,
this is how it's gonna work, and the math all
works out in the way that's predictable for the current
to flow. Okay, why is this important Because it's creating miniaturization.

(13:19):
So this is a handheld device that they made, right,
So this is reducing the size of quantum circuits and detection.
This was creating an understandable It was validating understanding of
like these really crazy aspects of quantum physics, which when

(13:41):
you get in the quantum scale, it doesn't make sense.
It's not like our world. Yeah, you're holding your face.
Why are you holding your face?

Speaker 2 (13:55):
I think I kind of get it. I kind of
don't like, where is the power coming from if it's
just one election? I don't know. I think the prize
and I did it.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Yeah, so the mechanics of quantum tunneling are not something
I know well. But being able to understand the practicalities
that the theory behind what they thought, they were able
to actually show it working in a practical sense. They
were able to use macroscopic tools to create a measurement

(14:33):
system for this microscopic or quantum level phenomenon. And so
this has lots of it's already you know, this is
not something that was just just done. This is work
that has taken place in previous years. And so what
it's been able to do is that it's been able
to underlie an undergird other types of quantum mechanical experimentation,

(15:01):
development of technologies, understanding further these phenomena that are so
very weird, that don't make sense. It's our world, right.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
I just think about the notebooks and notebooks full of
math that led to them thinking this was possible.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
So many chalkboards, whiteboards, many things.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Yeah, just that we're seeing them say like, I think
this might work, and then they get it to work.
But the amount of work that gets to the I
think this might work is a mountain. It's like the
Iceberg thing, right, that's everything under the water that you're like,
I have no idea, you know.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
And to go from the math and the theory to
an experiment, right, so I know we can test this now.
And so that's what they all did different years. Nineteen
eighty four, nineteen eighty five. It was a series of
experiments that were conducted at UC Berkeley. And this is
the big thing that's happening. The Bears Go Bears at

(16:06):
cal Berkeley have been putting Nobel Prize winner stickers on
their football helmets from the Football Gase is very good.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
So great, I forgive me because I forget we only
do this once a year. Is this a normal timeline
that a nineteen eighty five study is getting their Nobel Prize? Now?

Speaker 4 (16:24):
Yeah, okay, so that's part of the conversation that we
have every year of how it's so white and it's
so male, and it's because there's this huge flag in Okay.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Except for sometimes like you get stuff where it's dawd
NA and Charpentier who you know, and and I'm forgetting
the Harvard the Broad Institute researcher and I'm David, I'm forgetting.
But their research for crisper that was much re all recent, right,

(16:57):
So we also had the mRNA vaccine for that was
much more recent. So there's some things that come super
super fast and then other thing because they're so apparent,
and others that don't. Moving on from physics. Oh, also
one of the now this is for this this next

(17:19):
one the chemists. I do love the chemists. So the
next award is for the Nobel Prize in chemistry. No
did I miss one? Wait no, he's the last one. Haha.
Physiology and medicine that makes sense, Okay. Nobel Prize in Chemistry,
we have Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, Omar Yagi, and these

(17:45):
researchers received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development
of metal organic frameworks. And if you have been listening
to the show watching the show for a long period
of time, you'll know that we have discussed metal organic
frameworks and also other types of organic frameworks as with

(18:06):
respect to how incredible they could be, the potential for
what they could do as tools chemical tools for us.
And one of the phrases that I thought that the
Guardian used, I think it was the Guardian basically said,
you know, oh, researchers won a prize for Hermione's handbag,

(18:28):
which I think is fantastic because these metal organic frameworks,
they set the basis for creating chemical architecture for or
frameworksop boop boop, within which the hollows inside of the
frameworks can trap other atoms, ions, things, and or and

(18:53):
also allow chemistry to take place in a concealed place within.
So they're very, very cool and have so many different
applications from environmental remediation to atmospheric to I don't so much.
I mean, they're even moths metal organic frameworks. I think

(19:15):
Justin had a story last year or the year before
about how they were going to revolutionize biotech, which I
think is also and medicine, which I think is also
very interesting. We're using moths to harvest water from desert air.
They can capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases, or like
I said, make little rooms for chemistry to happen. And

(19:39):
you know, we've spoken with researchers in the past who
have worked on offshoots of these who are potentially creating
other kinds of frameworks that could be used to clean
our water, to get p foss out of the water,
to be able to you know, so many, so many
amazing things could be possible, right, And so this award

(20:02):
this year the researchers Susumu Kitagawa was working on this
area and came up with I think it was a
Sumu who came up with the ideas first. Maybe I'm
getting confused. I'm just very excited about the Physiology and
Medicine award that's next. But anyway, rooms for chemistry inside molecules,

(20:26):
that is the basis of this, and so I actually
think it's a really good award because moths have been
jumping off point and will continue to be for some
very impactful science for a long time to come. And
our one female science winner as in the Physiology and

(20:48):
Medicine category Mary E. Bruncau and Fred Ramsdell and Shimun Sakagucci,
they have won this award this year for their discoveries
concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Now, what does this mean? Peripheral
immune tolerance? It's why doesn't everybody have autoimmune disease? Basically, like,

(21:14):
why doesn't our immune system attack our body all the time.
We've got like these cells roving through the body going
you're an enemy, You're an enemy, You're an enemy. You know,
But what is it about? What are the ones that
are like, oh, you got that wrong, Nope, nope, not
an enemy here, yeah, or the ones who are like

(21:37):
regulating and saying, hey, nope, you're too excited. That is
not an enemy. It come to turn it off. It
turns out that Shimon Sakagucci was working on this area
of T cell research and it was kind of off
in left field, doing some work that not a lot

(21:58):
of people were looking at, but had these questions related
to T cells and had an experiment where he found
a certain type of cell, these regulator T cells or
now as they call them trigs. But he discovered this
type of cell and it was like, this is interesting.

(22:19):
When I, you know, take this out or put it
back in, Oh, suddenly things have changed. And then Mary
Bruncau and from Fred Ramstell, they did some further work
and were able to isolate the genes involved, the cirque
genes that were involved in actually leading to the creation

(22:39):
and which individuals have them more often or don't sell
like autoimmune Uh, people with autoimmune disease tend to not
have a great trag system. And then Shimon Sakagucci did
another study and really nailed nailed it down and was
able to say, hey, these regulatory T cells are the

(23:04):
thing from our thymus and are so important to making
sure that our body doesn't make mistakes and has led
to an incredible field of work determining the development of
treatments for autoimmune diseases, for cancer, for a number of

(23:24):
immune related issues. So, anyway, how has the immune system
kept it in check? It's the trags man, the trags
t RAG.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
And so zombie Tom Hanks and the chat room asks
can I crisper my allergies away?

Speaker 1 (23:42):
Not yet? Not yet, unfortunately. No. Maybe with those trags
and the crisper we can put these.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Pieces together all together.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yeah, yeah, I like it. But anyway, these are the
awards this year, and at first I was thinking, oh, okay,
maybe this year they played it kind of safe. It's
not really any big outstanding science that you'd be like, Yeah,
I knew that's what it was gonna be. But at
the same time, all of the all of the choices

(24:16):
this year are incredibly impactful for providing steps in the
stairs that we progressed along, right. And the final aspect
of this story that I absolutely love is that Fred Ramsdell,
who helped with Treggs worked. You know, he was on

(24:38):
a digital detox in the Western US without his phone
and nobody could get in touch with him to tell
him that he had won the Nobel Prize.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
That's funny. He was just like camping in the middle
of the wilderness.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yep, he's off, He's do it, and like, I love it.
There are articles like scientists living his best life.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
When Nobel Price doesn't.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Know he's won Nobel prize Nobelody. But he came back
and he said that it was a wonderful, wonderful surprise.
He his wife led out a yell, this is a
story from the Guardian. He feared she'd spotted a grizzly bear.

(25:26):
But she's had like two hundred messages on her phone
saying he'd won.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
When was there study from? Do you know where that
was from? I'm wondering how long this has been, like
sitting on the shelf and they just all of a
sudden got this call.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
This is again work. Okay, no, no, that's metal organic frameworks.
Hold on moving backwards, going to get the right paper
out here. So this work was complete? Did saka Gucci was?
His work was nineteen ninety five initially and so and

(26:03):
then Brunco and Ramsdell had their next work in two
thousand and one, and then the final work that was
it was a fox P three gene that was governing
the development of these cells, and that was nailed down
after that in two thousand and three by Socochi.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
So it's been over twenty years. That's kind of what
I was curious about, because it's not like you like
go out of town when they're announcing the Oscar nominations
or something like that. You don't know, You're not going
to schedule your whole life around the Nobel Prize announcements
every year for infinity.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
And if you've done the kind of work that is
people think is impactful, you've probably been nominated a couple times.
Maybe you're like, I'll be nominous, you know. Maybe you
don't even know. Maybe you've been living your best life
all summer.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe we should all digital detalks a bit,
but not right now because you're watching that right now.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, thanks for joining us for this show. So anyway,
there's a lot of treatments that are coming out of
this using these regulatory tree t cells that are undergoing
clinical trials currently, which is pretty cool, all right. And
some other interesting medical kind of physiology news. Not an

(27:27):
actual UH in the clinics in the clinics yet anything
that doctors are going to be using. But there was
UH paper published in the Journal of Translational Medicine this
week by a group of researchers who have validated and
developed a blood based test for basically chronic fatigue syndrome

(27:50):
or for people who are suffering from long covid nome CFS,
myalgic and cephalo myelitis. And this is currently the only
test that is is barking up a tree to be approved,
and this is the first publication that really makes it

(28:12):
look like it's going to be good. It has a
specificity the probability the test will rule out negative cases
of ninety eight percent, which is very high. And it
has a sensitivity which is the likelihood of a test
being positive that if that patient has the condition of
ninety two percent. These are blood samples from still a

(28:33):
limited group of individuals.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Questions question, Yes, so they're humansp.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
No, this is past mice. This is into humans, and
they have blood. They tested it on blood samples from
people with me CFS, people that didn't have it. And
the cool thing about this that I think is neat
is this is looking for epigenetic tell tales. So when
we're talking about genetic stuff, like genetic stuff is you're

(29:02):
born with it, right, you have that mutation. These are
the proteins that are whatever. But epigenetics are those little
tags and instructions that change and influence things during your life.
And so they have found a suite of markers for
these epigenetic things. They're they're using what they call epi

(29:22):
switch epigenetic markers. These are unfixed, they can change during
a person's life, and that's how they were able to
get to such a high level of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.
But this needs more testing, it needs more validation. This
is promising because I think there are a lot of

(29:45):
people in the world who would really like to be
able to say, can you just can you can you
validate this? Like is this just a weird set of symptoms?
Like what can you tell? Can you like at least
categorize this? Can you put me in this box?

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Because especially I can imagine a situation where a person
is going to their doctor over and over and over
and they're being told, Oh, you're probably low iron. Oh
it's because of your hormones. Oh it's because you're not
eating right. Oh, you need to get more sleep, get
a new mattress, just like all these things. Right, that
happens when you go to the doctor and you complain
about an issue that you've been dealing with for a

(30:23):
long time that could be chronic. Right, Being able to say, sure,
I will do those things, but please get me the
test that's going to be able to be something that
that people can use to advocate for themselves, and that'll
be a much steadier rate to you know, treatment than
any of these other kind of band aid suggestions.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Yeah, and I don't. I mean, we were talking about
chronic fatigue syndrome when I was a graduate student back
at UC Davis, like, and it did not have like
people were coming like and people were considered quacks. They
were fringe scientists. There were like, who are you trying
to like call this a song?

Speaker 2 (31:08):
She has the vapors.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Because it is very often women, not always, but but
immune systems for women are different because pregnancy and you know,
being a woman and.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
All that, so hormone changes and all.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
The hormone changes through life, and so there's a there's
a that like it dancing play, but yeah, vapors, you're hysterical.
Whatever it was. For a very very long time, chronic
fatigue fatigue syndrome wasn't even catter And they did change
it finally to me CFS, the myloid and but age

(31:47):
I cannot remember which. I appreciate the acronyms for this.
I'm sorry for those of you who may be struggling
with it. But the me c f S and chronic
me CFS conic fatigue syndrome has come together, and specifically
specifically since COVID and long COVID and so many people

(32:08):
having this syndrome and having to deal for a very
long time with these symptoms, and we now have media,
a media environment where people can talk about it and
make it public, and suddenly people are paying attention. And
I think it's a huge step. And so I'm like,
get this, make this test work, make it go, Blair.

(32:35):
Do you want to tell me about spiders?

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, cheesy spider feet? Yes, Okay, stand by my computer
is making me reload the page and it's glitching and
I don't want to turn into a robot. Okay, here
we go. So cheesy spider feet. Black widows. Would you

(33:01):
guess that female black widows smell like cheese feet?

Speaker 1 (33:05):
Nope, I never smell black widow spiders feet.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
So a bunch of researchers looked at black widows latrodectis hesperus,
and they are unique in many ways, but in this
particular context, they're unique in that they use sent to
lurin males to their webs. What they do after that

(33:30):
we've explored thoroughly on this show. Look it up, there's
some black widow Mating is some of the most wild
things I've ever talked about on this show. But I
won't kind of digress into that for the next ten minutes. Instead,

(33:51):
let's talk about how they smell like cheesy feet. So
the females can lure males into their web via a
chemical pheromone. What they do is they actually apply a
chemical pheromone on their web, and it decomposes slowly over time,

(34:12):
and as it decomposes, the scent becomes stronger and stronger,
and that creates an attractant that can last for weeks.
Which is the main deciding factor in which female they're
going to go to, is like, how smelly is this web?
So a lot of other insects release pheromones from their

(34:34):
body when it is time to mate and when it
is time to breed, but these females they use a
long term cent transmitter, so it lasts for all this time,
so they're not just like, oh, there's a male, let
me attractive over here, right, So they are able to

(34:55):
do it and just kind of like apply the dressing
and relax and then the male will come to them
on direct contact, they trigger a charismatic mating behavior. So
then they can also like when the male gets close enough,
just kind of like what and then like, oh, you
can't help it now, bud. But also the ability for

(35:15):
them to decompose allows them to release this aromatic attractant.
And the scientists have said that the attractant smell reminded
the researchers of cheesy feet. Now, let's take a quick
detour here.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yep, yep, I.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Want a word with these researchers. Out of the entire
world of smells that you could pick from, you're choosing
something called cheesy feet. Now, first of all, what is
cheesy feet? Because I have I have an idea of
what it might be, and it's really really gross to
me and I don't even really want to describe it.

(35:56):
But I'm picturing like somebody who needs to wash, right, and.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Like, yeah, it's like the socks or the shoes, but
it's like the smell kind of of like a cheese
rind that's gone too far, maybe the moldy.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah. So but this is what I'm saying, Like they
could call it like, oh, it smells like an aged Kimombert,
or like it smells like rotten eggs, or it's cheesy feet.
This is what you have to.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Does this come from wine tasting? That's my question, Like,
is that.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
There cannot I do not believe there is any way
anywhere in this universe that anyone uses feet as a
descriptor in a wine varietal. That cannot be true.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
You don't know why.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
I mean, I went to school in wine country. I'm
pretty familiar. I don't recall feet being on the menu
when we were talking about like hints of things. Anyway, Okay,
so I take issue with this particular terminology. I really
don't understand why they picked that. This feels like this

(37:10):
is like a deep seated memory in somebody's brain from
like childhood where their brother put socks on that had
cheese in it, and that's what it smelled like, you know,
like it just it feels like there's some backstory I'm
missing here because like cheesy feet. Okay, anyway, so.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
Probably sticks sleepover frank gone wrong.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah, so it sticks. That's what we're gonna say. To humans,
sticks don't like the smell, but to male black widows,
very attractive. Now, the other thing I wanted to mention
here and I'm gonna make some jumps in logic here,
so bear with me. So in in the research, they
found that females adapt the intensity of their scent signals

(37:55):
to the time of year. Now, normally, other insects that
release pheromones would release pheromones at the time of year
where males are trying to find a mate and breed,
but the female black widows are doing this year round.
They're doing it most when it's mating season, but they're

(38:15):
doing it year round. Kiki, do you think of why
that might be? It is not in this article or
in the paper, but I think I know why.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Why they would be looking for the stinky cheese feet.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
No, why they'd want to attract males at times other
than meeting them. That's my assumption.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
It's called nutrients. Yes, yeah, thank you, you're you weren't
thinking in the right time of season.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Yeah, I'll eat that.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
Gets eaten.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, So that's what I'm guessing here. I don't know
that for a fact, but that's the leap I'm going
to make based on what I know. And for the research,
they also were able to kind of figure out how
they made the stinky cheese smell. And then they even
were able to make a synthetic scent that attracts males
as well in the wild. So they're narrowing it down.

(39:19):
They're figuring out what's at play here, and that's of
course important for invertebrate conservation. It's important for understanding mating
strategies and movements of black widows. It's important for understanding
how to manage black widows around humans because they're dangerous, right,
So there's lots of different ways that you can kind

(39:41):
of learn from an animal like a black widow and
their mating habits and use that information to everyone's advantage.
But yeah, stinky cheesy feet webs, let's hope spider man's
webs don't smell like that.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
I never thought about it, right, Suddenly it's like, hmm.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
I'd assume that like spiderwebs don't smell. The idea that
a spiderweb smells is truly wild to me, And now
I will always wonder.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Wafting.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah, like Peter Parker at least makes his webs like
in the lab, and so he can choose to add
a scent compound or not. I don't think there's a
lot of accidental smell. But considering that, like the Toby
Maguire version of Peter Parker creates them naturally, they could
smell They're just coming out of his body. They could

(40:40):
totally smell it. So think about that.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
So black widows can smell. They are attracted to certain smells.
And if you do not want to have male black
widows or female black widows for that matter, around you,
please avoid the cheesy feet odor in your house. So
you might want to talk to your child.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
For your potiatrists. If you're the prior cheese, why blame
your child? It means your feet.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Maybe it's your feet. Oh okay. Speaking of wonderful things
to smell, that leads to things to eat, And I
have a couple of quick stories related to some really
neat work that came out this week related to people
and things we eat. There is a group of people,

(41:39):
the Tracana people of northwest Kenya, and they exist in
an incredibly dry area that does not have a lot
of vegetation, and so they rely predominantly on milk, meat,
and blood from herds of camel and goat for their diet.
Not a lot of veggies in there. Of their diet

(42:00):
consists of animal products. And we know, you know here
in Western world people are like, yeah, eat animal products
is good for you, what a what keto diet, et cetera.
But that causes actual heart problems. You can get gout.
There are issues related to your kidney function and your

(42:21):
metabolism that lead to various serious health issues. If you
if you're doing an eighty percent meat product or animal
product diet, it can lead to some over time serious issues.
So these researchers just published their work and it's really

(42:46):
wonderful because the researchers worked with the community, got their permission,
their consent to work with them and do this, do
this study because in modern in modern day Kenya, people
leave the Tracana area and can head out to cities.

(43:09):
And if this is no whatever, eighty percent animal products whatever,
if that's just a thing, whatever, But if it's going
to cause them health problems because they've adapted over thousands
of years to their environment and this diet, then it
could help their people. So the researchers found that the

(43:31):
majority a majority of pastoralists were found to be chronically
dehydrated but very healthy. They looked at the genes with
other indigenous communities in the region eight million gene variants
or so, and they found differences in DNA differences consistent
DNA differences excuse me in eight areas, and one is

(43:54):
around a gene called STC one, which is related to
how the kidneys retain more water and so STC one.
When the gene gets turned into a protein, it can
lead to proteins that help to conserve water and it
also can lead to potentially protecting the kidneys from the

(44:18):
waste products that come from the high intake of meat.
Gout is not uncommon or actually, no, I take that back.
Gout is not common among the Chircana people. They are
living dehydrated and meat happy and they're fine. And basically
the evolutionary story is that these people have been for

(44:43):
the past five or eight thousand years existing in these
conditions with as much of this meat in their diet,
and that it appears that they have adapted over time.
And so this study and others like it may help
keep the people in there in their in their youth,

(45:04):
those who decide to go live in urban centers from
being sick or when they go to the doctor being
able to say this is wrong with me because this
or maybe being able to have natural diet interference that
they are able to do. But anyway, they're able to

(45:25):
show that this STC one is changed in the tracana
versus other people, and it's pretty cool. I mean, you
and I would have issues, but it's pretty neat.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Yeah, I mean humans or animals and animals in very
specific extreme environments with very different habits and diets than
populations of the same species that live elsewhere adapt to
that diet. So like, but whether it's something that's happened

(46:02):
over many, many generations and is related to gene expression,
or whether it's something that has to do with how
the baby is initially raised from the day that they're born,
or if it has to do with the microbiome that
they're exposed to from mother's milk, from their habitat, from
you know, the birth process, Like those are all things

(46:22):
that go into that in nature, in any animal population.
So that's it makes it. It does kind of it tracks,
but it's when we think about it in human terms,
it sounds wild.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's just hard to believe that
we are isolated enough, yeah, now that we can still
have these kinds of differences. YEA, well we do, and
it's so neat and it's helpful to know about it,
especially as we meld and merge even more.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
I think about like even real quick, like when you
travel to a place and you get sick from the
water and the people who live there aren't getting sick
from that water every day, and you adjust to it
over time. This happened when I moved to Israel, you know,
twelve years ago. I got so ill for like a

(47:18):
whole week, and that was fine for the rest of
the time I lived there. It's just something that you know,
everyone else's biome has adjusted to, and that's a very
like simple adjustment. But it's kind of a similar scale
or reminder that there are variances. Even though we're very

(47:39):
like interconnected and interwoven and there's not a lot of
like super isolated communities, there still are differences enough in
biomes that you can you can kind of see that.
This is really cool to kind of see that.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
And I think, like we go, oh, camels, they can
exist where there's not a lot of water. You know,
We're like, oh, yeah, people, they just have tents and
clothes that help, right, We don't think about the actual
human adaptation, because there is still this Western separation of
us from animals, right, and so animals can be adapted

(48:20):
to dry places, but we have to make our adaptations.
Like that is the status quo way of thinking about humanity, Right,
We create our ability to exist, not oh, we're an
animal and we adapted too. So yeah, I think it's
a very interesting juxtaposition. And then moving on from there,

(48:46):
let's talk about yogurt in Turkey and Bulgaria. So the
researchers publishing in I Science this last week they went
to the home of one of the researchers and investigated
stories from you know, ancestral stories, stories that in past

(49:09):
pass down about recipes for making yogurt using ants.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
What do you mean using ants using as an.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
Ingredient as an ingredient?

Speaker 2 (49:23):
Nope, let's tell you know, I am pro eating arthropod's Okay,
I understand, I understand, But you know all.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
The times that we're like, oh, how did people figure
out how to make yogurt? How did people figure out cheese?
How did people figure out all this stuff? Right, here's
this method where the ants with their formic acid and
they have a bacteria on them as well, which also
helps to culture the milk from the goats and the

(49:54):
sheet that they're using. And then the people actually take
they take four ants from this particular kind of ant
and they put them in the milk and they cover
the milk with like a cheese cloth, and then put
the milk with a cheese cloth with the dead ants
into the ant pile. Because the ant pile actually creates heat,

(50:15):
and so the ant pile helps to culture and heat
and culture without eating fire the creation of the yogurt.
And so in a short period of time. This is
a method of making yogurt using ants.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
So not only are you using dead ants to seed
the yogurt, but you're using the ant colony to heat it.
That's kind of nasty. It's kind of mean, not nasty
like gross, like nasty like rude. I killed some of
you and now I'm going to use your body heat

(50:55):
to make food.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Out to make the food. Yeah, it's amazing. So anyway,
when I said format as that is not the one
that's right. They it's the lactic acid and bacteria create
acetic acid. Let's see, So the live ants that they
were using in Turkey and Bulgaria, Like there are different

(51:20):
species of ants that could be there, that are around it, it
doesn't really matter. But they were looking at these traditional
practices and taking these historic practices that have been passed
down in the Turkish mountain villages and other places in
Bulgaria and looking at how these yogurt making practices came

(51:41):
to be. So they used redwood ants in this particular study.
And they say that these countries are connected by cultural
threads preceding the establishment of national boundaries, contributing to general
continuity between their culinary practices. So this is ethno graphic
evidence of ant yogurt across regions. And when did people

(52:08):
in my milk make yogurt? Yum?

Speaker 2 (52:14):
Sure, I'm gonna say in the course of this story,
I think you can. I'll try some ant yogurt. Why not?

Speaker 1 (52:23):
I mean, seriously, it is it's wild. So there is.
They They got a you know, not popular, but a
James Beard Award winning kitchen to be involved in the
research and they were helping with the methodologies of of

(52:47):
what they of what they were doing in these experiments.
This they're like two star it was a two star
Michelin restaurant. I'll have to see if I can find
the name of it again. But this group anyway, they
came together using science, culinary science, social science, you know,

(53:09):
looking at ethnographic and anthropological aspects of this to figure
out what was going on. They did determine that it's
the ants and the bacteria. So the ant and its
microbes that contribute to the ascidification of the yogurt, and
if they got rid of the bacteria or whatever, it

(53:31):
didn't work the same way. For mica, ants have the
formic acid, So this is what was there, and this
can be up to ten percent of the ants body
weight and so and so it can change the texture
in the way that.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
It's more like a Greek style yogurt or something.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
Yeah, okay, so formic acid might be doing different work.
But the whole situation. They also said that don't do
this at home. This has not been okayed as much
as they've tried to okay it in Europe because the

(54:15):
ants that are used very often contain a parasite which
can cause health problems in people. There are ways to
smush the parasite out of the ant and filter the
parasite out. If you are still wanting to use the
ant and its bacteria and not the parasite to make
your yogurt. Thank you frum by b alchemist in Copenhagen.

(54:39):
That is exactly it. Thank you, yes, alchemist in Copenhagen.
And I honestly, when is justin going to go back there,
because we should all go and go have dinner there
and talk to them about ant yogurt because that they
have it.

Speaker 2 (54:54):
Letter E here that does not look like anything I
want to consume. That looks really gross.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
Letter e yes. So on the screen is an image
of ants in milk covering a A. B is covering
the cloth covered vessel with dead ants with the ant
colony materials. C is I think straining out the yogurt

(55:22):
the next day? D is like, I don't know, some
kind of a picture of an ant that doesn't make sense,
and I could probably tell you what the cap should say,
all right, uh D Culinary applications created by the research
and development team of alchemists using RUFA ants. D Oh.

(55:47):
Here it is ant yogurt ice cream sandwich. The top
view shows the twill cookies that sandwiches the ice cream
contained below E is ant mas capone like cheese and
so that's not yogurt. They've let it go to a
more cheese like state, and f is a milk wash cocktail.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
Nope, no, see, I wasn't okay with it. I was
okay with it. I'm not okay with it again.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
I think this is so great, but okay, it doesn't
mean that we need to use ants to make our yogurt.
But what I find fascinating is that this as long
as we have potentially had agriculture, or had had goats, sheep, cows,
animals that have milk with them, at some point we

(56:46):
figured out how to make that milk more conservable, right,
and yogurt is one of those forms as well. It's
not just for drinking. How do you eat it in
different forms? How fascinating that maybe this ant process is
something that someone noticed and played with ants in my milk. Oh,

(57:12):
we'll see what happens. You know, I think, you know,
the human curiosity and the way that we develop things
that now we take for granted. Yeah, where did they
come from? We didn't always have just you know, our
yeast cultures for the sour dough. We didn't always have
you know, the bacteria that we're exactly right for whatever fermentation.

(57:35):
We didn't have the bacteria for your yogurt. You know,
I think the process of all this and having this
come from you know, his stories, from you know, cultural stories,
I think is fascinating. Yeah, apparently it tastes good. Tastes yogurty. Okay,

(58:00):
noted ants in my yogurt. I won't complain again. If
there's ants in my yogurt, I might be happy. What
do you want to talk about? Do you want to
talk about your intersex spider?

Speaker 2 (58:14):
I could or we could just move into the animal corner.
I don't know. What do you want to do?

Speaker 1 (58:19):
Yeah, let's do that. Oh and as a sideline, I'm
just gonna say, hey, we're connected by more than the Internet.
What you and me. I'm in Oregon, you're in California,
in the Bay Area. I'm worried about the Cascadia fault.
You're like, Oh, San Andreas, that's a thing. Apparently a
new Oregon study came out and said they might talk

(58:42):
to each other, and so it might like they're little
ruptures and disagreements. They're not just alone that and when
one goes the other might too.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
So hey, okay, bolts be chatting. I got it.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, pay attention everybody. Okay, new study of Oregon State
University could be a bigger catastrophic thing.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
We're all just floating around on fluid like if one
thing moves, something else has.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
To move, and we have to live in the pretty places.
Let's live at the pretty places where there's food and
it's dynamic. Oh yeah, that's where there's volcanoes and earthquakes.
Oh no. Hey everyone, if you're enjoying the show, please
head over to twist dot org, click on the Patreon

(59:33):
link and help support the show. I'd love to be
able to say your name at the end. All people
who support at ten dollars or more a month, I'm
gonna try and pronounce your name at the end of
the show. I would love to include your name among them.
It would be amazing to add more people to that list,
because I don't have enough of a tongue twister as

(59:55):
it is. I appreciate everyone no matter what who helps
us out, but it's to try and read your names
and give people some credit. So if you can head
over there to try and support us using Patreon, that
would be fantastic. Also, if you need a T shirt
or a sweatshirt or whatever. Head over to twist dot org,
click on that zazzlelink and buy one of the awesome

(01:00:18):
bits and bobs that we've got there. That'll help out too,
all Righty, tell people to subscribe to Twists. We can't
do this without you. Thank you for joining us. We
can't do it without you. And now it is time
for that part of the show that we love to go.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
What is it called.

Speaker 1 (01:00:44):
Player's Animal Corner.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Creature Buy pid mell a pid don if you want
to hear about.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Animals except for giant What you got, Blair?

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
I have intersex spiders? What does it mean? Yes? So
when I'm doing my research for stories, I see titles
like that, headlines like that, and I go like, okay,
so you found a hermaphrodite animal. Sure, there's lots of those.
There's also like sequential hermaphrodites. There's I could do a

(01:01:35):
whole show just about that and how normal it is
and how we like stigmatize it as humans, but it
is super duper normal to find intersex animals and so
like whatever. But I clicked on it. I was like,
let's just see what this is about. I learned about
a brand new type of intersex animals today, and I'm
gonna talk to you about it because I didn't know
it existed. You might, Kiki, because you worked with birds

(01:01:58):
and it happens a lot with birds. But it is
called a gynandro morph.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
Yeah, I do know that one.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Yeah, I thought you might because it does happen in
birds a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Okay, so let me explain. So this all happened because
in western Thailand, scientists discovered a new spider. The spider
was then presented to researchers. They were studied extensively. Many
specimens were collected and after analyzing the specimens under a

(01:02:34):
stereo microscope and comparing them to similar species just based
on morphology, they have not done genetic research yet, but
just based on morphology, they think they're part of the
genus DaMarcus, a group of my Gallo morph which is
a wishbone spider found in South and Southeast Asia, and

(01:02:54):
so they're known for making wishbone shaped burrows that they
make in the in the in the ground where they
wait for prey. And so they found that they have
big differences between male and female spiders. The males are
aboutero point six inches in length. The females are out
one inch. The males are gray, and they're covered in

(01:03:15):
a white substance that is yet to be identified. So
you can think about that however you want, leave it
to your imagination. Yeah, and then the females are brighter
orange and they have a white layer of an unknown substance.
So what's crazy is they found amongst this collection a gynandromorph.

(01:03:36):
A gynandrowarf is an organism that is half male half female,
as opposed to a hermaphrodite, where they have both types
of sex organs. Gynandromorphs have bi They do not have
bilateral symmetry, so hermaphrodite still have bilateral symmetry. They look
like just anybody else, but they either present usually as

(01:03:59):
female or male, or a little bit of both. But
it's like a mixture, and they are bilaterally symmetric. Gynandromorphs
one half of their body is male and one half
of their body is female, straight down the middle. And
so this happens in birds a lot, this happens in
crustaceans a fair amount. But I had no idea about this.
And what's very funny is they actually named this new

(01:04:21):
spider the species in a zuma, which is a character
from one piece which I do not consume. I'm not
super familiar, but apparently it's a character that can change
between male and female, and so because of that, they
gave this spider this name. But I just wanted to

(01:04:42):
kind of bring that up as a little sprinkle because
a lot of people don't know about this very cool
kind of sexual dimorphism or sorry, not sexual dimorsisms, inner sexuality,
something totally strange and unusual.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
How does it end up hemispheric Like organisms like insects, arachnids, humans,
we are bilaterally symmetric, right, and so there is there's
the process of being like this one this gene, we're
gonna mark that one, that one not. And so there's

(01:05:20):
a lot of picking and choosing and marking which which
of the the fathers of the mother's genes get included
on whatever side. But this is like, hey, you're half this,
half that. There you go. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Yeah, So they have some ideas. It's uncertain exactly how
it happens. There's certain kind of theories in the scientific
community that it might come from a loss of sexual chromosomes,
so it might be an animal that is otherwise genetically female.

(01:05:53):
It's a female zygote, but there could be like a
nematode infection or some sort of microbial infection that causes
a degradation of the chromosomes to make their body not
develop correctly. But I don't know. It's very very It's

(01:06:16):
unlike anything I've ever seen. And you can actually you
can google this. You can you can look at gynandromorphism,
and particularly in birds. It's wild because you can see
a bird that looks like a hen on one half
and a rooster on the other hand on the other,
or like a cardinal that's red on one side and
brown on the other. It happens in butterflies a lot.

(01:06:36):
And so yeah, why.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
Why say that it's a parasite or something else that,
Like why not just one of those odd probabilistic things
that happens, right, Like why not just be like it is?
It is, that's how it that's how they got marked.

(01:07:00):
But yeah, I find it very interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
Yeah, yeah, So there you go. That's your that's your
word of the week. Gynandromorphism. Next, I wanted to talk
to you about leaf cutter ants and here's okay, So
here's another. This is like the theme tonight is that headlines.
Let's talk about headlines. Here's the headline that I read.
I almost passed it by because I was like, duh.

(01:07:25):
Leaf cutter ants have blind spots, just like truck drivers
when they're carrying leaves. Duh, they're carrying a big leaf.
Now I read the story. This is a little more complicated,
so let me get into it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
So the ants their eyes the way they're located.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
And yes, so obviously they can't see around the leaf. Right.
So leaf cutter ants they carry a load several times
their body weight. And what this research from this Sonyan
Tropical Research Institute and Panama was looking at is the
quote unquote truck driver effect, which is when leaf cutter

(01:08:08):
ants carry an oversized load, which in some cases can
be eight times their body weight, they walk more slowly
the ants behind them because they walk in a line.
They're social, right, that makes them walk slower. And so
this is just like if you're stuck behind a big
rig on a one lane road. This is called the
truck driver effect, and it can reduce the walking speed

(01:08:30):
of following ants by up to half, by up to
fifty percent. The reason behind this phenomenon is a mystery.
Is it really just because they're they're walking slow because
it's heavy, or is there something else going on? And
so they recorded the ants with and without the leaves
to see how they use the antennae. So this is
the it's not their eyes, it's their antennae. The antenna

(01:08:51):
are in charge of touching, smelling, and tasting, and ants
use chemical pathways to know where they're going. So they
were measuring the ants and the leaves they were carrying
and monitoring their antennae movement. And so then based on
their observations, they offered artificial leaves to the ants, which
were tiny pieces of paper dipped in orange juice that

(01:09:13):
made the paper attractive to ants. And then once they
collected the leaf, they cut it with scissors while the
ant was still walking. So they chopped part of it
off while they were carrying hey to reduce the load
in about half. And then they watched the use of
their antennae before and after they cut it in half,

(01:09:34):
so that what they found was that leaves did fewer
antenna taps per step than ants without leaves, and that
when they were cut in half, the ants increased their
antenna taps. So basically they were because they were carrying
something really heavy or awkward or whatever it is about it,
they weren't checking where they were going as often. So

(01:09:57):
this is the quote unquote blind that we're talking about here.
It's not a literal blind spot. They can still see
with their eyes, but their vision is very poor. They
use their antenna to feel their way through chemical signals,
and their ability to sense those chemical signals was reduced
based on their payload. And so this means that carrying

(01:10:21):
larger loads leads to difficulty with dealing with trail obstacles,
surface irregularities, and it slows the whole colony down behind them.
And this is actually exacerbated in larger ants, just like
in a big back truck versus a car. So aside

(01:10:42):
from this just being interesting, it also does explain some
phenomena that has been observed with leaf cutter ants in
the past, namely that they will sometimes carry a smaller
load than they are capable. So people who observe these
ants have noticed like, oh, there's a bigger leaf over there.

(01:11:03):
Why didn't you get that you could handle this smaller
leaf or you could handle the bigger leaf it's not
too big for you, but you picked the smaller leaf instead,
And this might be why is that they're choosing to
pick a smaller leaf so that they can see where
they're going, better move faster and not slow their buddies
down behind them.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
Are you sing the audio from the video? No good,
Sorry about that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
Yeah, look at those little guys. Just Russian, Russian, Russian.

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
But I remember watching leafcutter ants at California Academy of
Sciences and they are just they're going down their path
and they've just chumped the leafs and they are just
doing their business and they don't care about anything there.
And so this explains that a lot like we're just
like comparing a heavy thing following my path out of

(01:11:56):
my way.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
Yeah, we had when I worked at the Zoo, the
leaf cutter and exhibit. There was one exhibit where the
leap where the ants lived, and then they would drop
all of the leaves and things in a different exhibit,
and there was a tube that connected the two, so
they had to travel to the second exhibit to pick
up the leaves and then travel back. So you could
get really up close to this tube to see the

(01:12:18):
leaf cutter ants up close while they were moving with
the leaves. It was very neat.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
That's so cool. Yeah, that's super cool. Yeah. I think
leaf cutter ants and these you know, we see these
animals doing these things that are very stereotyped and just predictable.
But then to find out that, you know, what they're
doing is actually something that is you know, it is
really beyond what they should be doing. Yeah, over taxing them.

(01:12:47):
So it's like, hey, everybody, you know, in your workday,
when you're being overtaxed, think of yourself as a leaf
cutter ant. Realize you have blind spots.

Speaker 2 (01:12:57):
Yeah, yes, absolutely, yes. And speaking of I don't know,
I don't have a good transition for this. Well, marine
mammals get beached sometimes, huh, and we don't know why.
It is kind of a phenomenon in the you know,

(01:13:20):
biology community, like there's just there's lots of theories about
why it might be happening. But now there's a new
theory about why it happens in dolphins. Scientists in many
different states, all the way from Florida to Wyoming have
work together to come up with an unusual hypothesis, which
is that some just as some adult humans with dementia

(01:13:42):
are found wandering far from their homes. Dolphins might become
disoriented because they are suffering from a form of Alzheimer's,
and that is why they become beached. So this is
I could get very far in the weeds on this,
but the long and short of it is they looked

(01:14:03):
at the bacteria, the cyanobacterial toxins in the water column
where beachings are more likely to happen. They found that
those toxins are associated with misfolded tau proteins. That's the
business of Alzheimer's, and also amyloid plaques, also the business

(01:14:24):
of Alzheimer's. And then they looked at kind of the neuropathology,
the disorientation, the kind of the different, you know, behavioral
cues they were seeing, and it followed kind of similar
expectations for Alzheimer's. They looked at this toxical closer. They

(01:14:48):
looked at this particular toxin called beta and methyl animal
no no, no, I mean BMA, yeah, which and there, and
also they're isomers, and they found that they were very

(01:15:08):
toxic specifically to neurons, and that when neurons are exposed
to that, it triggered Alzheimer's like neuropathology and cognitive loss
in animals. And so also these toxins can be biomagnified.
And what do dolphins eat? Fish? And so if if there's
the cyanobacteria and the toxins in the water column and

(01:15:30):
fish you're eating them, then the dolphins are eating those fish.
It comes extremely bioaccumulated in the dolphins, and so it
would make sense that the amount of toxins that they
have would just be off the charts. They looked at
twenty common bottlenose dolphins stranded in the Indian River Lagoon
in eastern Florida, and they found BMA and its isomers,

(01:15:52):
and they found that dolphins stranded during the cyanobacterial bloom
had two thousand, nine hundred times the concentration of one
of the isomers than those from non bloom seasons. So
this is definitely bioaccumulating. It's happening in stranded individuals. And
they also found brain neuropathology similar to Alzheimer's in those

(01:16:17):
dolphin brains. So this looks highly probable. So now of
course I want to know let's go back, let's look
at all of these stranding events and beaching events where
like animals were doing it at just crazy frequencies. Was

(01:16:38):
there an algal bloom at the same time, Do we
have that enough data looking back where this has happened
over and.

Speaker 1 (01:16:45):
Over the thing that so making it related to algal blooms.
I guess that would increase the toxicity and all this stuff,
but that it would be chronic and exposure and Alzheimer's
and beaching like it's just one time and done. Or

(01:17:06):
is this because they've been through a number of blooms
and it's just okay, this is the one that put
them over the edge.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
Right exactly. Yeah, Which, speaking of that, this is this
is where it goes a little far afield. There's a
lot of like hypothesizing happening here. But dolphins are considered
environmental sentinels or indicator species because of this biomagnification issue
and so specifically for toxic exposure and marine environments. When

(01:17:33):
dolphins start dying, you go like, oh, what's happening here?
And so they are actually concerns that are growing about
human health issues related to cyanobacterial blooms. And in twenty
twenty four, Miami Dade County had the highest prevalence of
Alzheimer's disease in the United States.

Speaker 1 (01:17:52):
It's just there are people retiring there.

Speaker 2 (01:17:55):
It could be it could be reporting, It could be
that people have better acts to the healthcare that diagnoses that.
It could be that the particular doctors in Miami Dade
County are more likely to provide in Alzheimer's diagnosis instead
of other things. Like there's lots and lots and lots
and lots of variable So this is where it gets

(01:18:16):
a little less sciency and a little more like I wonder,
but it is interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
You start going in on the variables and you can
figure it out eventually.

Speaker 2 (01:18:25):
Yeah, it is interesting because this is one of the
areas that the cyanobacterial bloom was really wreaking havoc. And
so it's possible if these people were going swimming in
the ocean Florida's beautiful beaches, they were not paying attention
to algal blooms repeatedly over a long time, that they

(01:18:47):
could be getting exposed to these things at a similar
not a similar level to dolphins, but still at a
higher level than our bodies are used to, right, And
so I think that this is not Oh my god,
don't go the water in Florida, You're gonna get Alzheimer's.
That's not the point of this story, not the story.
But I think there's a few points. One, we found

(01:19:08):
similar similar kind of tropes to Alzheimer's in animals, which
means we can follow research pathways with animals who exhibit
Alzheimer's symptoms and neuropathology. Okay, so that's really important. We
found a potential pathway to getting Alzheimer's, it is not

(01:19:29):
the only one. Even if this is a cause of Alzheimer's,
that does not mean it is the cause of Alzheimer's.
Alzheimer's is kind of like a difficult egg to crack.
I think medically we're having a lot of trouble kind
of narrowing it down. But if it is a pathway,
that is still beneficial to know about. And then also

(01:19:51):
the piece about beachings and strandings, which I think is
you know, a whole separate piece of these will happen.
These events will happen, and it will be like what
is going on happening at all these animals. So it's
not that we have potential treatments for Alzheimer's and dolphins.
But if you can kind of identify that there's an
algal bloom happening. You can I don't know, maybe if

(01:20:13):
you have an endangered pod, you could try to move them,
you try to control the bacteria. You could try to
recognize if an animal gets beached and this is what's
going on with them, maybe they need to be put
in captivity instead of tried to be released into the wild,
because it's going to keep happening, right, So there's lots

(01:20:33):
of things that you can do with this information once
you have it. So I think it's a pretty cool
study with a lot of potential for more.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
I think it's fascinating and it ties into several of
my studies. I have a couple adult czebers actually. But
what I find very interesting is the connection to it's
not necessarily algal blooms toxins, right, So something in the

(01:21:03):
environment that has has led to a build up or
changed the way that the blood brain barrier can deal
with toxins so that there's stuff mucking up in the brain,
and then the brain doesn't work right anymore. You forget things,
it doesn't the neurons don't work. There's a study this

(01:21:23):
last week about looking at Parkinson's disease and particular proteins
that are involved that they were they researchers actually caught
these proteins like on and I'm not gonna say on camera,
but they caught them in the process of like puncturing
holes in neurons, and every time they punched a hole,

(01:21:44):
it was like neurons are like spurt, I'm losing myself.
But then the membrane would zeal up. But then you know,
if there's more and more of those proteins, they damage
the neurons so much that eventually it just dies. And
so if you have a situation that leads to a
toxic a toxic build up right where the body itself

(01:22:04):
cannot manage the level of toxins anymore, you know, suddenly
the things are going to go downhill. The body is
not going to be able to regulate that homeostasis to
a point where it can get get rid of the
toxins at the rate that's fast enough are required. But
all right, so doo, do you want to say more

(01:22:24):
about your about these dolphins?

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
No, give me the human Alzheimer's stuff. Let's go.

Speaker 1 (01:22:33):
Okay, So you in this you were talking about Alzheimer's.
University of New Mexico Health and Sciences Center researchers just
published a study in the American Journal of Pathology related
to the blood vessels in the brain and dementia. Vascular

(01:22:54):
dementia is a wide is a cause of dementia, and
it's a problem really related to the small blood vessels
in the brain and how they get blood to different
parts of the brain. I was looking at this particular
study related to the to the dolphins, and I was like, huh,
how fascinating. You know, maybe there's something happening to the

(01:23:16):
blood muscles or you know, so where would the toxins
be working and how would they be actually creating this.
But the researchers for this particular study, they found for
humans and vascular pathologies, they hadn't ever really comprehensively comprehensively
defined the pathologies they were looking at that lead to

(01:23:39):
vascular dementia. And they found that nanoplastics actually are very
involved as a new player in brain pathology, not just dementia,
but Alzheimer's disease as well. She found that there were
a lot more plastics. She says, quote, what I'm finding

(01:24:01):
is there's a lot more plastics in demented people than
in normal subjects. It seems to correlate with the degree
and type of dementia. The quantity of plastics was associated
with higher levels of inflammation and the brains that she
looked at and they this is the really first time
that anybody has that a comprehensive look at neuropathology of

(01:24:24):
the vasculature in dementia's and Alzheimer's and the the bottom
line is that the small blood vessels seems seem to
have been punctured in there in the damage that is coming.
So blood vessels have been impacted so much by nanoplastics

(01:24:46):
that they have created inflammation so great that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:50):
Just piercing by microplastics.

Speaker 1 (01:24:54):
Yeah, and our brains. And if you imagine a dolphin
or somebody who swims their whole life or whatever, the
water is full of microplastics and ganoplastics. Dolphins are they're breathing,
swallowing everything, right, So the nanoplastics, I'm thinking, in addition
to the algal bloom story, that maybe there's more there,

(01:25:17):
just if there is a general increase in this that's
not related to the chronic aspect of the algal blooms,
but I think these are bigger stories. And then and
then the other story that I found is that researchers
and this isn't mice, but this is the good news

(01:25:37):
and hopefully something that can be very useful. Researchers that
they Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia IBEC and West China Hospital,
Sichuan University, working with other partners in the UK, have
developed a nanoparticle therapeutic for Alzheimer's that targets the blood

(01:26:01):
brain barrier. So one of the things that has been
found and as you were talking about within, yeah, it
sounds like one of the things that has been found
is that the brain and Alzheimer's disease with those amyloid
beta sheets and all the tangles that come together, those

(01:26:26):
amyloid tangles, that they occur at this interface of the
blood brain barrier where blood vessels have a mechanism that's
usually guarded by a particular molecule that LRP one that
grabs onto amyloid beta, binds to it takes it across

(01:26:48):
the barrier and back to the bloodstream so that it
can go away. When amyloid beta is building up. It's
potential that the lurp one isn't working well. And so
what they did is they created a mimic for the
ligandser one and they injected it into the mice. And
all the mice that they they had that were a

(01:27:13):
model of Alzheimer's disease, they have a genetic predisposition to
have the build up of amyloid beta. When they injected
these nanoparticles into the blood of the mice, the mice
got better, and they did three injections. Over time, the

(01:27:35):
mice started acting like not Alzheimer's mice. They started acting
like wild type mice, which it's not. I mean, that's
for their age, right, So it took it all back
to the point. But anyway, it's this isn't mice and
it's you know, nanoparticles. But they did find that the

(01:27:58):
nanoparticles are in the mice, they work well, and then
they don't cause problems in the mice. Afterwards, we'll see
if they can get this through the various trials that
need to take place to see if they'll work for
other animals and then humans. But it is a proof

(01:28:21):
of concept for a new idea which is not targeting
those amyloid betas or the tau tangles or these parts
that are kind of mucking it up to begin with,
but targeting the mechanisms that help to clear the pathways.
And so who knows, maybe we'll see more of these
nanoparticles in the future.

Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
And it doesn't have to be or it can be.

Speaker 1 (01:28:44):
And exactly, I mean, you've got some treatments ish right,
that helps slow down Alzheimer's a little, but like let's
get another, let's get another. Yeah, and let's help people
because people are just getting older in the West. That's it.
We're all gonna we're like swimming in plastic. So we're

(01:29:04):
all gonna have be demented, which would be really fun.
Possibly maybe that would be excited. Oh got it. Anyway,
last bit of happy, happy joy Joy news. Researchers at
the Allen Institute have developed what I am liking to
call chat gp mouse brain In their story and headline,

(01:29:28):
they decided to call it a chat GPT like AI
model for neuroscience to build up a detailed mouse brain map.
What they did is they used ah what is what
is called a transfer model, a transformer model similar to
the learning model that's used for CHATCHFT, which uses context

(01:29:52):
and so by throwing a whole bunch of brain cell
data and into the mix. Context was taken into a
out and researchers can basically say I want to know
about this and what it's attached to and whatever, and
it'll show you, Oh, it's NIPA campus or whatever and everything.
So far seems to match fairly well with historical expert

(01:30:13):
based brain nuclei that have been determined. But now it's
got more detail and so it's kind of it's a
very exciting way to use spatial transcryptomics to be able
to discover more about the brain. Only in mice, it's great.
Maybe someday and people brains are a lot bigger, but

(01:30:36):
in mice it's great. Congratulations all the people working with
the Allen Institute. Yeah, it's huge. This is published in
Nature Communications. It's thirteen hundred regions and subregions. This is
UCSF also involved in this. Yes, it's it's very specific.

(01:30:57):
It's awesome. But that's all I have to talk about.
So I've got some good news. You don't have any
more scary spider nightmare juice. Do you know?

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
That's all I have?

Speaker 1 (01:31:07):
Okay, okay, then.

Speaker 2 (01:31:10):
Which is good because I think I'm about to be summoned,
so we should.

Speaker 1 (01:31:15):
Yeah, it's time for us to make this, to make
this move on the summoning of the child has begun. Yes,
we all have places to go, but what a wonderful,
wonderful opportunity to spend a couple hours enjoying science. Thank
you so much, Blair, Thank you my pleasure. Thank you

(01:31:38):
everyone in the chat rooms. Thank you for being here
and chatting. I know I didn't pop up your comments
this evening too much on the screen, but I saw them.
I'll see you. Thank you for being here and commenting
and being a part of the conversation and helping us
get through this show. I hope you enjoyed it. Fata,
thank you so much for helping with show notes and

(01:32:01):
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know how much it takes Identity for Thank you for
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And Rachel. Thank you for editing. There are a few
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(01:32:21):
not too many. It's a all good but We really
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