Prompting You to Think Scientifically

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is is Twists This Week in Science, episode number
ten twenty five, recorded on Wednesday, August sixth, twenty twenty five,
prompting you to think scientifically. Hey everyone, I'm doctor Keeki,
and tonight on the show, we will fill your head
with diabetes, pregnant roaches, and snail eyes. But first, thanks

(00:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Science thiscclamor disclaimer disclaimer we are on our own. Twenty
two projects to develop vaccines using mRNA technology have been
halted by the Department of Health and Human Services in
order to start investing in better solutions. Well, it might

(00:54):
seem like an insane move in light of the recent
success of mRNA vaccines, not just in COVID, but also
some successful trials that we'll be talking about and creating
a HIV vaccine behind the scenes, it's actually probably much worse.
Our Francis Kennedy Junior's decision to cut five hundred million

(01:16):
in vaccine research follows other actions such as firing the
panel that makes vaccine recommendations and refusing to endorse the vaccinations,
even as measles outbreaks were killing children. He said, A
universal vaccine that mimics natural immunity is the administration's focus,

(01:38):
and I will do my best quote voice here. It
could be effective. We believe it's going to be effective
against not only coronaviruses but also flew he said, and
then went into an in depth explanation of the biomolecular
pathways and mechanisms discovered through years of iterative research that

(02:00):
have led to just kidding, it's gonna be woo woo
concept driven snake oil. And that's just it. The largest
most advanced human health agency on the planet has stopped
using science. No appeals, no recourse, no second opinions. We
are on our own, but we're not alone, and we

(02:21):
need to start acting like it. Here on this Week
in Science, coming up next to the Happy Music, I've.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Got that kind of mind. I can't get enough. I
wanna learn everything. I want to fill it all up
with new discoveries. It happened every day this week. There's
only one place.

Speaker 4 (02:44):
To go to find the knowledge.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Zeke, I wanna.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
Know this week science.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Happened this week science, Science.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
And a good science to you, Justin Blair and everyone
out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science.
Thank you so much for joining us for another fun filled,
action packed tight ninety minutes of science.

Speaker 5 (03:23):
So did you just spell science and asl.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
No, I was trying to spell twists and then I
think I was doing like the sign for weird and.

Speaker 5 (03:33):
Weird waffle. Yeah, that's our other name of course this
Week in Science Weird Waffle Hour obviously.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, okay, working on it. You know how we remaine
fungible everywhere. This is going to be a great show
spending our time. We need our time together so much.
I watched a reel this week that really put it
into perspective for me. A drag queen who was given

(04:05):
ted talks on the subject of joy and finding joy
in life during hard and turbulent times, chaotic times, periods
when you feel attacked and you don't know how to
go on. And the advice was based on the AIDS
epidemic of the eighties and during a time when the

(04:28):
gay community was being attacked and othered and not helped.
They helped themselves. They were everything was politically and infrastructurally
being turned to make them overwhelmed to make it so
that they felt like they had no choices and they
couldn't do anything. And what did they do. They found music,

(04:51):
they found dance, and they partied. They had fun. They
created moments of joy in the face of oppression. So
let's have some fun.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
I think they were doing that before and after as
well of oppression, which is the impressive part.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yes, I know, I mean, you know why the Beg's
were like disco died because of Anyway, there's some great
news out there about that. Go down that rabbit hole. Anyway,
this is science. We're not talking about music and political biases.
But maybe we are a little bit because I got
some stories for you. What do you want this week?

(05:30):
We're going to bring science. I have maybe some positive
science funding news. I don't know, I know you will,
I know. Okay, That's that's why we are, That's why
we have so much fun together. I also want to
talk about a new discovery development in c star wasting disease.

(05:50):
We're going to talk about some roach bots and I
maybe some of that politics that's out there and how
you might be manipulated by technology. That's what I've got
justin what the show I got.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
The end the disclaimer teased m r NA HIV vaccine
early success, a couple of couple of papers out showing
routes to m RNA based HIV vaccines. I have got
Oh shoot, I don't have it up here? Where to go?

(06:25):
Where to go? Well? I got a couple more stories.
One is kind of interesting about the g LP one ras.
Now I feel like I probably don't have to explain
what that is at this point because their advertising has
gone through the roof. Also, do snail eyes grow back?
And if so, what can we do with that.

Speaker 1 (06:47):
Gross snail eyes on our foreheads? I don't know, Blair,
what did you bring to the animal corner?

Speaker 5 (06:53):
I'm sorry?

Speaker 6 (06:54):
Was that?

Speaker 5 (06:54):
Do I want some snail eyes? Because the answer is yes.
I brought radioactive rhino horns. I brought the pregnant cockroaches
that were mentioned earlier, and then I also brought some
dancing cockatoos, because that's for fun.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
You gotta keep on dancing dancing, just like the Kakakis.
I can't wait to find out how many dance moves
they have. They have.

Speaker 5 (07:20):
Tonight at eleven at.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Eleven, take dance lessons from birds? All right, everyone, as
you know This Week in Science is supported by listeners
just like you, So if you are not supporting us yet,
head over to twist dot org and join our Patreon community.
Choose your level of support and let me try to
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Or maybe you'll get stickers or like. There's all sorts

(07:43):
of things, but we we're here because of your support,
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on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch, and our podcast is found

(08:06):
on pretty much every podcast platform out there. You can
head to our website again twist dot org to find
out more information about our episodes and you know our
past lives. You ready for the science, Yeah, let's bring it.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
I was just was gonna throw. I recently did apply
for a grant for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because
they had this big grant that they got available for
science News, so I applied for that. So hopefully we'll
wait to hear back to see if they see if
we get that, but that would be pretty exciting.

Speaker 5 (08:39):
Maybe don't hold your breath on that one.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Holding your breath is you know, maybe we can do
like a instead of YMCA dances, we can do c
PB PBS dances. I don't know, somebody make it up.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Wait to your top story for tonight, Kiki, I hear
you got a good news one. Yeah, for my old segment.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Just good news. So the news this last week, and
if you've heard or not, it's kind of we are
seeing some bipartisan support for science funding. Last week it
was reported that senators from both parties endorsed a four
hundred million dollar increase to the NIH and an Appropriations

(09:27):
Committee vote. And so when you have Republicans rebuking Trump's plan,
it's kind of interesting. And so there's going to be
some infighting. Yeah, and I just budget had been slashed
by eighteen billions, so I don't know, this could be
very interesting. They also retained all twenty seven NIH institutes,

(09:48):
so they basically said no to the new like the
operations and the news centers and the consolidation. They didn't
want the way that the Trump administration was proposing funding
to colleges and university universities to be meted out for
overhead costs. But basically it was the Appropriations Committee twenty

(10:12):
six to three count and Republican senators included Mitch McConnell
and Lindsay Graham, which is very interesting because states are
being impacted.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, but I.

Speaker 5 (10:23):
Thought Mitch McConnell left right.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
No, he just froze. He's still there, it's just no
longer emotional.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
I mean, he's I'm not going to say anything.

Speaker 5 (10:37):
Okay, Well, anyway, that's good. I wonder can I say
the really jaded thing though? No, don't okay, never mind.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
I won't. Can I put Okay?

Speaker 1 (10:48):
So there, go for it.

Speaker 5 (10:50):
I was just gonna say, I wonder what they have
to gain financially by voting for this?

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (10:55):
So can I tell you, m m this is where
justin like makes everything less shiny?

Speaker 2 (11:03):
So how much money.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
For what they voted for? Four hundred million?

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Four hundred million? That's almost the exact same amount of
money that our Francis Kennedy Junior wants to spend on
his new program, almost like to.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
The million dollar Interesting, thank you for that. These are
the things to pay attention to.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, I mean I would almost be in favor of
completely defunding the government at this point, because now I'm like, yeah, actually,
that's a great idea. Let's get rid of all of
the dollars that they can spend right now quick.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yeah. So I know you have a story coming up
about mRNA vaccines, and are you going to talk about,
you know, the fact that they're not going to be
funded anymore and probably completely We're going to talk about
the fact that mRNA vaccine research is not going to

(12:05):
be allowed pretty much in the United States anymore, at
least funded by the US government.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
I think that's that's what you're saying, right there is
the key point in the United States. So the the bag. Yeah,
and you'll get a lot of scratches trying to put
that kind of knowledge back into a bag or something

(12:31):
analogy metaphor. But the point is America is not going
to be part of it. And we're a huge founder
of this type of research. So obviously we accelerate things
and make things happen quicker, but the science will continue
without us because there's still scientifically minded countries and guess what,

(12:54):
they can hire anywhere in the globe. So if we've
got leading scientists in the field of mr and a
research we'll just lose them.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
But there's a lot of countries who are not like
really rolling out the red carpet for to save American scientists.
And there's a very interesting impact happening right now. But
my final point on good news ish that might be optimistic,
is that we have the Government Accountability Office. I don't

(13:27):
know what teeth they have anymore, but there was a
report that came out yesterday finding that Trump administration violated
the nineteen seventy four law that make sure that presidents
can't supersede congressional appropriated funding.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Oh they violated a law, did they? Yep, there was
a law that was violated by this administration. I'm sure
there's going to be consequences.

Speaker 5 (13:52):
I seem to recall he's already violated at least thirty
four that we know of.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Matter. That's not even talking about the administrative Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
Rationally, logically, if the you know, the power of the
Accountability Office holds and the report is listened to at all,
it could give some backing to any congress person that
wants to push back against anything that the administration has
tried to do in the upcoming negotiations related to where

(14:25):
congressional money goes and also making sure that stuff that
should have gone out goes out and continues to.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
We that's and I mean, we have enough history on
the party that's supporting these things that I have zero
faith that they will do a right thing.

Speaker 5 (14:56):
Listen, Ultimately, our nation is going through a stress test
and it is failing, right and so that's really that's
if I can try to put like a silver lining
on this, if I can try really really really really hard,
right Like, there's these laws and there's these rules, and

(15:16):
there's these guidelines, and there's these expectations, and there's no teeth.
That's what we're learning. There's no teeth behind these things.
And so if we are to start over, which is
honestly my hope at this point, I've seen a lot
of people talking about, like it's not good enough to
go back to where we were before. We have to
start fresh with a lot of these things because obviously

(15:40):
we have failed the stress test. So it is time
to re establish these laws and regulations for how administrations
can run and provide teeth behind them so there's actual
real accountability, right Like, it's it can't all depend on
one congress person being loud enough and not being arrested

(16:00):
on the congressional floor like it's it has to be
more substantial and stronger than that. And so yeah, I
mean I My only hope is that in fifty years
we look back on this and go, like, you know,
that was a really hard time. Lots of terrible things happened.
People died, like a lot of lot a lot of

(16:21):
bad things happened. But now we are in a safer
space for all people who live here. That is the
only hope that I have is that in some decades
a stronger system has been built with better accountability.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
So can I can I plant it just one sideline issue?
H Yeah, that's that's.

Speaker 5 (16:41):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
My biggest concern is not even what the politicians are
doing right now, which is concerning enough, but it's what's
happening with large corporate media is very frightening.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
Oh so I have a thing that you're going to
sag me right into that because I have a story
that is a secret good.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
So one one of the things that people are talking
about is like this whole thing with one of the
I'll just say one of the big media companies that
we don't get sued paying out a substantial amount of
money over something that all lawyers are, people who know
law agree that they should have been able to fight.
And then another company kind of did the same thing,

(17:21):
another big Now a lot of this looks like maybe
this is paying for a merger thing as a bribe thing,
or maybe it was you know, just not wanting to
be in trouble. But there's another problem with this now
that now that pretty much all news networks are large
corporate owned, what they've also done is helped to themselves

(17:42):
by paying those big rewards, because they've set a precedent
now that you can sue people for the truth. Yeah,
m and and they have to pay you so so
that if one of these corporations businesses doesn't like the
reporting of another corporation's news network, they can collect money

(18:07):
from them even if it's true. It's it's the most insane,
insidious thing, but they've lost nothing. They're setting a precedent
so that you can't counter a corporate voice. Yep. Oh
when the next round of horrible things is happening, because

(18:29):
nobody will be reporting.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
On oh right, but you won't have everything will be corporate.
And so to sag to my secret story, I discovered.
I discovered a dissertation that was just published, so it's
not really public. This dissertation is titled who are We
to argue? How conservative media mobilize identity in science hostile discourse?

(18:55):
This now PhD has written their their dissertation on the
question of what happened in media to get to the
point now where science is a political issue and is
something that can be dismissed, that the facts, the truth,

(19:18):
that evidence that knowledge can be diminished by opinion or
by political bias. And so the research looked at political
discourse analysis on four hundred articles from conservative media, two
hundred regarded credit Bundberg and two hundred can you guess

(19:39):
who the other person was on the other side of things?
Anthony Fauci, two people who are being demonized in conservative
media for various regions. The analyzes of these least similar cases,
climate change, covid, or public health revealed that the media
portrayed Fauci and Thunberg as agents of the political left,

(20:00):
using science as a tool to dominate the right in
a populist binary struggle over which group should embody American identity.
In each instance, the similarity conservative media leverage aspects of
conservative identity to morally justify rejecting the messaging of Thunberg
and Fauci. While most conservative content avoided direct engagement with

(20:21):
the science that was advocated by them, a subset that
did represented conservative identity as respectful of scientific expertise, and
in the dissertation they describe a discursive method of justifying
the rejection of the work of experts while a vowing
respect for science as an epistemology of moral discernment. So
conservatives present the moral character of a science communicator as

(20:46):
a criterion for assessing claims of truth.

Speaker 5 (20:50):
Can you use that sentence again? You said that they
used to describe Greta and Anthony Fauci. What was it again?
Say it again?

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Conservatives present the moral character of a science communicator as
a criterion for us.

Speaker 5 (21:03):
Oh no, earlier when you when you said they were
they were unreliable because.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Ah, oh right, yes, so uh they to reject Oh
here it is a science is being used as a
tool to dominate the right. The binary straight which group
should embody American identity? They meet. They leverage aspects of
conservative identity to morally reject Threnberg's and Fauci's messaging right,

(21:32):
is that.

Speaker 5 (21:33):
Whole idea that they're like, they have this liberal identity
and this liberal agenda, which and they're skewing data to right.
Which there's this saying that every accusation is an admission,
and that's one of those things where oh, you think
they're fabricating data to push the left. Are you saying

(21:54):
that because that's what's actually happening on the far right?

Speaker 1 (21:59):
Hm, hmmm, I don't know. I wonder. The researcher concludes
that selective science hostility discourse I loved there's a term now,
selective science hostility discourse basically choosing little wedge issues to
be like, to use, to be aggressive against. It's best

(22:21):
understood as a strategy for morally legitimizing politically motivated rejection
of the truth claims and policy recommendations of science communicators.
So for people who consume the news and consume the media,
be aware of the arguments and the messaging that's out
there and how they might be representing particular individuals and

(22:42):
how that also connects to your identity, and ask yourself
why you believe it and why or why you think it,
why you trust this source versus thats source and why
you might actually think that a girl that goes out
and you know, spends her whole life advocating to save

(23:03):
to save humanity by fixing the climate just a little bit,
let's just change things a little bit, you know, you
know why.

Speaker 5 (23:12):
Well, this is also the group of people that like
to take you know, people who are under heat for
being sexual predators and try to put all these kind
of characteristics on them to be like, oh, but he's
a member of the water polo team and he's on
the honor roll and all these things to try to
say like, oh, but we don't want to ruin his
otherwise bright future, right. So they do it the other

(23:33):
way too, where they try to lessen bad things, be
trying to use kind of like moral character tropes.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
If they're that good, how could they be that? How
could we write be that bad?

Speaker 5 (23:47):
Just denial of truth.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
Both psychology suggesting that some powerful people had illicit affairs
maybe with underage women doesn't sound that bad really, but
there is no such thing again, to be clear, as
an underage woman. Underage woman is somebody who maybe can't

(24:12):
be at a bar or run for congress or social
security because at fifty she's an underage woman for social security.

Speaker 5 (24:20):
But.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
I'm an underage woman for social security.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Are at least eighteen years of age and can consent
to anything they want. Anybody under that age is not
a woman. That's a child. Yes, and so by saying
underage women instead of children, they're softening quite a bit
what has been taking place.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
So and so, if you're questioning why we're talking about
this and bringing politics in at this point in the show,
and why it happens at the start of the show,
it's because you were here at the beginning, and you're
here hopefully continuing to listen and interest your interest and
curiosity in human psychology and the human brain, and social

(25:07):
structures and hierarchies and human identity and misinformation.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
I can't believe Kiki's working that hard to hang on
to our two MAGA listeners.

Speaker 5 (25:22):
No, I think though, you know, if I got my
time machine and I went back to twenty twelve, right like,
there would be a part of this that would it
be like, oh, why is politics getting in this science show?
But we are.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Blair. When we were radio only and we started talking
about politics and we were still recording on cassette tapes,
and we started and we had like a peb works
forum or I would get emails so angry that I
talked about climate change, which is a political apparently, and

(26:01):
people were mad that I was connecting you know, education
and science and you know, yeah, evolution, right. They were
mad at me for connecting politics and science. It's that
don't put my chocolate and peanut butter, you know together.
And I have been for the last we we for
the last two decades have been saying they belong together. Well,

(26:25):
a science is if.

Speaker 5 (26:27):
Scientific funding was decided by a panel of scientists, we
could maybe separate these things. But that's not how it works, is.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
It not anymore? Not anymore. They got rid of the
panels and now it's going to just be straight woo.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Woo, finishing up the discussion and moving to Justin's story.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yes, did I have a story? Oh this is the
intro to my story. I totally I've forgotten that this
is all just a ruse to get us into Basically
two studies. HIV vaccine efforts have been underwrite, so there's
been a problem in creating the HIV vaccines, which is

(27:10):
the tricky They basically have designed these antibodies that are
targeting the right area, which is this envelope glycoprotein end trimmers.
These there are structures that are found on the viral
surface that are essential for attaching to host cells and

(27:32):
getting on the inside. So if you can stop them
from doing that, then you won't have HIV of infecting cells.
But all of the anybodies that they've created so far
that are supposed to neutralize this effect have been sort
of attacking the wrong parts of this envelope glycoprotein and

(27:55):
it's attacking, but it's not preventing functionality. So they've been
trying to figure out how to do it, and it's
just molecularly tricky. Obstacles are in the way of getting
things where they need to be on these sort of
spikes if you want. Okay, So two new studiesmen published
in Science Translational Medicine, both of them testing results from

(28:18):
mRNA and mRNA based vaccine. So basically what they've done
the first round was animal testing. They had rabbits and
primates non human primates versus maccoque, and they tried a

(28:39):
couple of different six different versions of formulation of this
mRNA vaccine that's meant to both target the right place,
but in part of the strategy. But part of the
strategy is also to prevent the off targeting, so to
prevent it from targeting the parts of this envelope that
don't fun actionally disabled. It so very very narrowed down

(29:06):
specific targeting with this new ground, and it looks like
so far they're seeing pretty good success. They are finding
this is a year after immunization. In the animal studies,
they found persistent envelope specific plasma cells that were still

(29:32):
being generated. So so first of all, the vaccine's taking
it's creating the immunity, and results showed that MR and
a encoded membrane anchored to these HIV envelope tremors triggered
the neutralizing anybody responses, meaning they were hitting the right
targets in most of the recipients and the human trials

(29:55):
they had one hundred and eight HIV negative adults and
three and then a UH. So they were basically looking
to see if they would create the the vaccine version,
which is that sort of mimicking h mimicking version that
can that can do the attacking, and they it looks

(30:17):
like it was successful there as well. So they're finding binding.
Anybody's response to non based epintopes were higher in this group,
with greater frequency of memory B cells binding to the
neutralizing parts attacking the right targets of these end trimper
envelope tumors that are responsible and responsible for that attached
and enter function, So that also looked very successful. There

(30:41):
were some side effects, but in comparison to you know,
what they're trying to prevent, kind of didn't look to that.
So others include the m RNA vaccines encoding membrane anchored
HIVA trimors so that they actually touched the cells effectively
induced anybodies that were able to take down the Tier
two which is a very resistant form of HIV and

(31:06):
had durable memory B cells so remembered what to do
and had good city for key cell activity, which meant
they could go and attack HIV if it were to
show up. But this is also not universal yet, so
this is also a specific strain of HIV. The goal

(31:26):
is to make it a go for a universal one
so that all of the strains can be can be
countered in this way, but this one was a very
so far a very strained specific targeting. But with this success,
both in the animal and the human trial, showing that
they can get sustainable antibodies that are able to target

(31:49):
the right parts of HIV. They can try to focus
more on universversal targets within the strains and also with
this technique that they've got that is prevent it from
hitting the off target ones.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
So in this in this example of this mr NA vaccine,
one of the issues with HIV is that the virus
hides and so you can get rid of a whole
bunch of it with you know, through various methods, but
there might be little bits because it's this uh you know,
it hides in the genome and or it hides in

(32:25):
little pockets, right, and so this it's not just when
it starts producing little like proteins and stuff to create
new HIV viral particles. It gets in and finds and
finds them.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
So this is this is before it gets into the south.
This prevents the this.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
Would prevent the virus.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
Attaching to or entering cells.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
So this could be something like the flu virus, the
flu vaccine or covid vaccine or exactly.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
So these and and that's what's kind of frightening about
what's case in place is they're finding mRNA uses for
all sorts of things. There's gastrointestinal issues that they had
some successful trials on where you can take a pill
you don't need a shot, but it you know where
it's repairing damage in the gut and the intestines. Like,

(33:16):
there's all sorts of things that mr and a concept
is showing success early success and trials. And that research
that they're talking about canceling isn't just like canceling the
next wave of COVID vaccine. That's that's like the least

(33:37):
of it. It's canceling research into a diverse array of
human health issues that could be countered by m RNA
vaccines because will will Yes, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
One of the big like mRNA researches is one of
the leading like possible positive cential treatments for or ways
to avoid devastating cancers and so and so.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
A lot of that research is still taking place at universities.
But again that's uh, that's a lot of that is
from the funding from government that is no longer interested
in funding such things because woo woo instead because reasons.
It's not even like they have like a thing from
what I can read and I had to do all
the best reading I could do on it was on NPR,

(34:30):
which just lost its funding because the I'm reading that
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is now no longer. It's
just wait a second, that's where our money was supposed
to come from. Yeah, but it's not even like announcing
that they have an alternative. It's that they're going to

(34:50):
put all of the money into a thing that they
think will work that they haven't researched yet. So why
do they think it will work? Because and that's the
only that's it, that's the answer is Google.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
No, it's uh, that's.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
That's that's what's that's what's behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
It's called large nonsense, large transfers of data and uh
companies and higher salaries and the moving. I'm just not
going to say anything anymore anyway. I wonder where all
that data from publicly funded research is going to end up. Yeah,

(35:38):
I'm not gonna I can't keep quiet at all this stuff.
Thank you for the story, justin maybe.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
I did, And then I must have another one.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
No, but the next one is Blair's because she's radioactive
and she's bearing the rhino horn.

Speaker 5 (35:54):
Yes, so I swear. We talked about this in twenty
twenty one, but I couldn't fight. I tried to find
it on our website. But in twenty twenty one, Wits
University talked about making rhino horn radioactive. Does it sound
familiar at all?

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, No, remember the conversation I think was it was.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
It so they could track it from like it was, Yes,
it's giving isotope release or whatever from different So the
idea is backtrack the poachers.

Speaker 5 (36:30):
Yes, So the idea is to embed radioactive material into
rhino horn, so that then if that rhino horn is
later trafficked, it would be very easy to detect, so
you'd know if it was illegally harvested I guess rhino
horn for lack of a better term. The idea is

(36:51):
that also making it harder and harder to move rhino
horn would make it less valuable, and that also making
it radioactive would make it less valuable, make it less
pure for traders, right, and.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
So like if you couldn't bring that thing into an airport,
it would probably set off right their alarms.

Speaker 5 (37:11):
Yes, and so they kind of set this proof of
concept in twenty twenty one and they tried it out
on two rhinos. It looked like it was going to
be a successful, you know, potential launch for a larger study,
and so they actually just published their larger study. So

(37:34):
in this one they did they've said, they said overall
it's been about six years of research. They started in
twenty nineteen, so that first article was released two years later.
Now it's been another you know, four years, and so
there's a few things that they have figured out. So
as of six months from this publishing date, they embedded

(37:55):
low levels of radioactive material into the horns of twenty
rhinos in in the wild, and so they did then
they did experiments on the blood of those animals. Because
the big kind of public response, of course, was how
do you know this isn't going to hurt the rhinos?

Speaker 1 (38:15):
You're mutating the rhinos? What?

Speaker 5 (38:18):
Oh yeah, gosh, yes, is this how the X Men happened?

Speaker 2 (38:20):
I don't know anyway, but it's a reverse right like
the rhinos, Like what happened to you? Did you get superpowers? Now?
Actually I got all like soft and flesh, I got
like humanized.

Speaker 5 (38:34):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I'm bipedal. This sucks. This is not
an efficient way of moving at all. Anyway. So they
did experiments on the blood tests, they did veterinary inspections.
They confirmed everybody was unharmed. It appears that the radioactive
isotope did not enter the blood stream at all. They said,

(38:57):
we have demonstrated beyond scientific doubt that the process is
safe for the animal and effective in making the horn
detectable through international customs security systems. In fact, so no
damage at all in the twenty rhinos. In the pilot phase,
they checked blood cultures, they examined micronuclei in white blood cells.

(39:19):
Everything looked good, and then they used the same technology
to embed fake horns, three D printed horns, and put
them through a bunch of tests to see if they
were detectable in different transport scenarios. They put them in
carry on luggage, they put them in air cargo shipments,

(39:39):
they put them in priority parcel delivery systems, and in
each case, even a single horn with low levels of radioactivity,
even lower than would be in the wild, triggered the alarms,
and in one case they actually were able to detect
it inside a forty foot shipping container that was full
of other things. You're definitely able to find it.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
Now.

Speaker 5 (40:02):
The only food for thought. I provide here. This sounds great,
but there's there's two kind of things to keep in mind. One,
you have to catch the rhino and embed the radioactive material. Okay,
so you have to do that for every individual that
you're attempting to protect. But the second piece is, if

(40:23):
you make it even harder to transport, are you actually
making it more valuable?

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Probably? Yeah, I thought about that. As soon as you're saying, like,
you know, as soon as there is less supply that
that would.

Speaker 5 (40:40):
I know, they kept saying in the article, it would devaluate,
it would devaluate. I'm like, it's show devalue.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
It would devaluate if it's the you know, the probability
so statistics, right, So the probability of the radioactivity being
in any percentage of the rhino population. What's the chance,
you know, you're going through all this to get the
right or rights? How many of them have radioactivity in them?
Is this something that's well established in the population or

(41:08):
is it rare? You know? And if you make it
something that becomes a cost benefit analysis for the poachers,
then it becomes potential to minimize the poaching. But if
it's more of a prohibition kind of thing where it's
like it's a whatever this is now there's some of them. Yeah,

(41:30):
you know anyway, Yeah, so that's the question.

Speaker 5 (41:33):
Are you making it prohibitive to the poachers or are
you making it harder to get as the final like
person acquiring it? Right, and so there's yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
Well, so if it's more expensive, the idea would be
less people would want to buy it. You'd have the
best buyers if it gets it. If it quadruples in
price or whatever, the thing is times more expensive, whatever,
it will be some people who will be out of
the market for it, but those who are still in

(42:06):
the market are going to be paying just as much
coaching has existed before, right, I think that's kind of
the mac.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, just Lorel eating crickets a real steak is going
to be like.

Speaker 5 (42:19):
Yeah, but I do I do think that Kiki highlighted
a chat of somebody in the chat which is exactly
what I was going to say. Flood the market. You know,
we can three D print sells. It's just carratin, it's
beta carratin. It's very easy, just three D print rhino
horn made out of keratin. Okay, flood flood flood the

(42:43):
market to the point where it is like you cannot
tell what is real rhino horn and what is fake
rhino horn, so that there's no reason, there's no reason,
there's no allure. Again, I have a rhino horn on
my wall that I got for fifty bucks. Like, just
make it completely work useless by flooding the market with FAKEHRN.
That is, that is what I think would solve this problem.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
It's like if if we get asked, like the yeah,
real diamonds versus and diamonds man made diamonds the same.
They are the same, but you know, the man made
diamonds are a little bit more perfect. I think, yeah,
don't have as many imperfections, but we've had like money,
and they've been you know, minimized because they're man made.

(43:28):
They're synthetic, and so the marketing is really having to
go towards, uh, showing the bad sides of blood diamonds
and like, you know how diamonds are are taking are
taken from the earth and everything. So it's a similar thing, right,
how do you flood the market or get the synthetic
corn out there without people knowing? Is that really my
word of caution.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
My word of caution is the story of coal. So
when when steam engines, coals used to be very expensive,
you know, like the movie the Ebenezer Scrooge fella, he
gave his employee a lump of coal as they could
burns they could stay warm, but only one lump every
other day or whatever. The thing was, right, it was

(44:10):
extremely expensive because every bit of coal was going to
fuel trains. Then the trains got went through some engineering
and became a magnitude more efficient, and it dropped the
price of coal. And suddenly the demand for coal skyrocketed
because now people could heat their homes with it, they

(44:31):
could work, run a furnace off of it, they could
do everything with it because it was so affordable, and
demand went.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
But that made the market bigger, right, it wasn't just
the same.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
It made the market bigger because it became a Yeah, well,
I think it's My concern would be like if if
you fled the market and get everybody in on the
idea of rhino horn, then you're gonna have a You're
gonna increase your customer base. And I don't know that
that solves the issue either.

Speaker 1 (45:00):
Yeah, I agree, absolutely agree. I mean sometimes the only
way that you can get rid of, you know, the
coal problem, yeah, is like stopping subsidies for things like uh,
you know, solar and yeah, renewable energy. Yeah, let's get
rid of that green green stuff.

Speaker 5 (45:22):
Do we just turn the show over again.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
We're taking a new tact now, Blair.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Okay, I've got good news.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Have you missed the meeting notes? We're getting on board
of the yell of it? Oh boy, by the global.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
Warming Mermando, I'm writing your boat Rmando. Okay, good news,
good news, Blair. We've talked about the c star wasting disease,
and we've we've been talking about this issue for a
very long time. Lots and lots of sea stars turning
white gray, dying on the seafloor. It's depressing and sad,

(46:02):
and we haven't we knew it was a particularly a
certain bacteria and we were like, okay, but we can't
really Yeah, which one is it? O?

Speaker 5 (46:09):
My gosh.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
Anyway, researchers from the Hakai Institute have just published their
work in Nature, Ecology and Evolution looking into the exact
bacterial species that causes ce star wasting disease, and so
they have identified wrong stream, I'm going to do this

(46:34):
tab instead. They have identified a particular bacteria known as
Vibrio that was the family that was identified previously, but
they didn't know exactly which one. And they identified a
subspecies or species of the Vibrio that is known as

(46:54):
Vibrio pectinida pectinacida. But they basically it had C stars
in the lab and when they gave them vurying amounts
of this particular Vibrio species, it caused a immediate like
ninety percent of the C stars died and pretty much

(47:17):
immediately got ill and they couldn't come back from it.
The ones that survived had the lowest dosage of this particular,
this pect particular bacteria. So they've been running these experiments
from twenty one, twenty twenty one to twenty twenty four.
They have been analyzing the genes that are involved and

(47:40):
they determined that it is specifically this Vibrio pectinocidia in
every single one of the wasting C stars samples. What
is knowing this actually allow us to do well? It
gives us a target, so.

Speaker 5 (47:58):
You know you can make C star met the right Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
We antibiotics, we could uh maybe har use phages like,
are there any bacterial of phages that the Vibrio are
you know, in line with that are creating yeap ways
to survive? What can we do to keep the C
stars alive?

Speaker 5 (48:19):
I guess I'm curious what what happened? Like now that
we know it's this bacteria? Why why did this decimate
C star populations out of nowhere? Like does it thrive
in temperatures that are like way warmer than these C
stars are normally in? And then climate change and that's why?

(48:39):
Or like was there a mutation? Was this bacteria not
around before? Like you know what I mean, something happened
there was a trigger where way more ce stars were dying.
That would be that would make ecological sense in a population, right.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
And why that one particular? So this is a microbiome
out of balance, and that out of balanced microbiome it
allowed this one Vibrio species to take over. And it's killed,
it's gone, it's got too big. So whatever bacteria was
competing with this Vibrio species or groups of you know,
different bacteria that we're competing, they're not competing anymore. Vibrio

(49:17):
took over and it's causing all the problems. Nobody knows
why mm hmm.

Speaker 5 (49:22):
And that's really the problem is, like if you figure
out what is basically an antibiotic to be able to
like release targeted into water column and targeted spaces, or
even like inject into sea stars, or I don't I
don't even understand how you would really make this happen.
Like it's the ocean, like it's the it's the epitome

(49:44):
of a drop in the bucket. How do you inoculate
sea stars in the ocean?

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Right?

Speaker 5 (49:48):
But even if you figured that out, how are you
sure it's not going to mutate and be worthy? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (49:56):
What is the balance? Right? And so are we just
in the middle of one of those fluctuations that is
on its way to a new balance, or are we
in this place where what we're seeing is just the
monoculturing of the microbiome, which impacts the entire ecosystem. Yeah,

(50:17):
Pestecola is asking is this something that we should interfere with?
If natural? So, like Blair was saying, it started popping
up with higher temperatures in the sea and climate change stuff,
But there's no real smoking gun as to where it
came from. And so that is the question and is

(50:38):
probably because of us, right.

Speaker 5 (50:42):
But what but what which thing? And p Foss like,
what is this? Is it antydepressants?

Speaker 1 (50:52):
How do we help how do we help ocean ecosystems
adapt to the changing temperatures and pH balances that are coming.
It's coming and it's everything is shifting as a result,
I mean, and can we help help help adaptation? I mean,
I think that is an important question. How do we

(51:14):
help balance, you know, without too much chaos in the
in the middle of it? Anyway, I love all these
videos with the c stars. They're so pretty, they're.

Speaker 5 (51:24):
So the crown of thorns sea stars, the whatever you
call them, the ones with the million arms. They're so
they look wrong. They look like a kid got carried
away drawing a sea star, right, like no, no, too many,
too many, too many, okay, but good job, Like you

(51:50):
know what I mean. It's just they look they look
so wild, and they're usually so like vicious is even
the wrong word, But they're they're so impactful on a habitat,
Like I'm used to talking about them as the problem
in a habitat, like, oh no, there's too many crown
of Thorn sea stars. It's destroying the habitat because they're

(52:13):
so good at eating.

Speaker 1 (52:15):
And do they do they eat sea urchins? Like, do
they compete against the other consumer of the.

Speaker 5 (52:24):
It's been so long since I worked with the aquarium.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
Like, is that one of the balances if the c
stars go or the urchin's gonna go? And are we
going to lose all our seaweed?

Speaker 5 (52:36):
And they eat coral? That's right, they mostly eat coral,
all right.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
So it's a coral defense mechanism because of all the bleaching.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
Preserve what we can, which is that's another that's that's
probably there.

Speaker 5 (52:52):
Oh, they also eat sponges, and they also eat molluscs.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
We get more, that's not a problem. They don't hyper
deaction ate anything if you get too many of them
or anything anything.

Speaker 1 (53:07):
Yeah, No, Okay, Blair's going down a rabbit hole because
I am sorry, favorite subject.

Speaker 5 (53:14):
I'm got we gotta redirect.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
So it's time for Justin to tell us about a
really exciting story about I know, a new treatment, a
new a new cure.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
What's going on, Well, not in the United States, but
in Sweden. That's the university led investigators report that a
gene edited donor is lit cell survived twelve weeks inside
of a man with type one diabetes and they used

(53:51):
zero immunosuppressive medications.

Speaker 1 (53:55):
That's huge.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Yeah, this is a one, one patient study, so it's.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
Like super like we should really like this is we should?
This is everything one patient.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
So what do you call islits is like a what
is It's a sack of a cell sack that generates
hormones from the pancreas and these go around and they
regulate blood sugar. They can up, they can create insulin,
they can create glugos, they can basically do all the regulation.

(54:32):
And so if you're one of those few people left
that the dark industry has described as not being diabetic,
we're not needing one of their products. Uh. This is
what maintains healthy normal blood sugar one. It's a big
part of it anyway, is up and down regulating the

(54:55):
glucose levels. So they managed to do this this uh implant.
There is a little bit of gene editing step in
between taking it from a from a donor and and
putting it in. However, it did not cure the man

(55:18):
because they didn't put in enough. But they knew that
so they did. Uh. He's still doing daily insulin is that,
but it's slightly reduced the insulin therapy. Uh was it?
Were they? Or? Sorry? The isulate therapy was about a
seven percent of what would they think would be the

(55:38):
full replacement of beta cells that they need to maintain
the hormone levels.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
So this was basically like proof of concept. Let's just
see if those cells survive, if the body.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Is your survival, proof of function yep.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
And also not like starting a cancer, not like going
wild and rogue inside the person.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Yeah, so iterative leap, I guess right, still an inerative step,
but it's like a big one in the potential here
for a mechanism based strategy. No woo woo involved to

(56:19):
actually cure a type one diabetes further down the road.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
But it's on its way. I mean that, it's amazing
like that, that is the kind of thing that we
need and it's the kind of thing that can be
for individuals. It's you know, editing a gene changing, I
mean changing the particular base pairs that make you make
your eyelet cells not work correctly.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
Yeah, and then right.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
Yeah, wait are you doing more stories? Still? You still
have more stories? Right now?

Speaker 2 (56:51):
Oh? I think so? Oh you're going to go to
the break.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
That's right, It's like the tiniest break because I know
how tired Blair is.

Speaker 5 (57:01):
I'm not even yawning yet.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
I know, I'm just like I'm you know, I'm there
with you, preempting.

Speaker 5 (57:09):
It's good. Yeah, it's good to prepare everybody. You're right.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
Please come on, come on, We've.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Only got eleven minutes in the show. Let's go.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
You know, someday this show will end, just like we
may have a treatment for type one diabetes that is
not just good from mice. This is this week in science.
Thank you so much for being here, and I hope
you're enjoying the show and thinking a lot about the
stuff that we're talking about tonight. You know, are you
picking up what I'm putting down. I'm not allowed to

(57:38):
say slang that my son would I roll over, So
I'm gonna just be me for a second, which is ridiculous,
and ask you to please share the show so that
we can talk about these ideas that are rooted in
figuring out the world around us, but are never certain.
Science is never certain. We're just figuring out this, you know,

(58:03):
the most likely the most parsimonious solution or answer to
our questions. And we like talking about these things. We
like being curious, and if you know curious people, please
bring them here. And if you like the show, please
help us keep doing the show. It would be really
great to, you know, to really be able to make

(58:25):
this show happen in a sustainable way. So you are
the people who allow us to do that. Thank you
for supporting the show. Head over to Twist dot org
click on our Patreon link. You can click on our
Zazzle link for merchandise. Everything just supports the show and
helps us keep talking with you so you can talk

(58:46):
to others and keep the ripples of curiosity and science going.
Thank you for your support. We can't do it without you.
Now it is time to come back after this look
teet a tidy break and ask for support to that
part of the show that we know and love as
Blair's Animal Corner.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
With Blair Loves Hot Creatures. Five pigs fill the pad.
You want to hear about the animals except for giant

(59:27):
with the cap Blair.

Speaker 5 (59:30):
I got pregnant roaches?

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Oh dear, that's did what?

Speaker 5 (59:36):
Yeah? Did you know? Did you know there's such a
thing as pregnant roaches?

Speaker 1 (59:42):
There have to be because they where do they come from? Otherwise?

Speaker 2 (59:47):
I mean, I assume they laid eggs.

Speaker 5 (59:48):
I guess right, as I would have as well. They
do not?

Speaker 1 (59:54):
What Yeah, so.

Speaker 5 (59:58):
Talk about a rabbit hole. It turns out that roaches
give live birth what and the mother cockroach feeds milk
proteins what you their babies over a three month gestation
in a brood sack. So because of that, wait, because

(01:00:25):
they're not mammals, they don't have a placenta, right, but
because they have this prolonged gestation and they have something
akin to milk that they create, it's not oval vivippery,
which is when you have like eggs that you develop
and then they slowly disintegrate in the birth canal and
then basically the eggs hatch in the birth canal and

(01:00:45):
then it looks like they're giving birth to live birth.
That's a lot of snakes do that, do quote unquote
live birth. This is true vivipery, which means live birth.
Only a few insects do that, including cockroaches and TEATSI
flies and so they sorry, they're not cock Yeah, they're
beetle mimic cockroaches specifically, so them ts flies and a

(01:01:08):
couple other No, So they have a brood sack, so
it's like it's its own kind of section of their body.
So it's as if they're laying eggs into a whole
different orifice in their body that then they can nourish
these what are basically grubs in their body before they

(01:01:29):
then give a live birth.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
So it's oh, they're like Marstuperles.

Speaker 5 (01:01:34):
Kind of yes, and so they have this live birth
situation that is very energetically costly. And so this recent
study from the University of Cincinnati found that these cockroaches,

(01:01:56):
like people, need more sleep when they're I'm just doing
to do the biggest air quotes in the world. Pregnant.
They're pregnant, like a like a male seahorse is pregnant.
I would say, it's similar.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Right, Like it's in them.

Speaker 5 (01:02:13):
Yeah, it's like a male seahorse, right. So you know,
we we call that pregnancy too when we talk about it,
even though it's like not the same, like there's no placenta,
like there's not you know, as a as a person
who was once pregnant, I'm gonna say it's I'm guessing
it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
The same, But I mean they're feeding them front with
a milk like substance that is coming that's energetically costly, right, And.

Speaker 5 (01:02:38):
So that is less like lactation and more like a
placenta because they are still internal, because they are still developing,
because it is a nutrition source internal to the body
of the mother. It is a lot more like a
placenta than lactation.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
But anyway, I'm having like a I don't know, one
of those like weird three D kind of thing where
visual puzzle things where you look at it one way
and you can see it you look at the other way.

Speaker 5 (01:03:13):
It's that meme with the math floating at you and
you look, you look confused.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Yeah exactly, Robert's really confused by math.

Speaker 5 (01:03:19):
Yeah, yes, exactly. Yeah. So sleep, that's all comes down
to sleep. There are health consequences of not having sleep,
but a lot of that builds up over time and
is not evident quickly. So like if you if you
spend many years, for example, doing shift work. We've talked
about that on the show a lot, Right, They're like,

(01:03:40):
you don't feel it in the moment, but then eventually
after many many years of working nights, or you die
sooner is usually what it comes down to right, like
just basically your telomeres are messed from it. But in
this case, they looked at the sleep habits of the
civic beatle mimic cockroach, which is found in Hawaii and

(01:04:02):
parts of Asia, and they found that chronic disturbance of
the mother's sleep harmed not just the cockroach mother, but
specifically the development of the babies. It prolonged their gestation
and it interfered with this Again, Giant Air quotes milk
production via these proteins, and so this is just a

(01:04:31):
very kind of basic look at how sleep basically keeping
cockroaches up. I want to know more about that. How
did they keep them up?

Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
No, there's an image.

Speaker 5 (01:04:42):
It looks like let's see it. Let's see it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
There's an image.

Speaker 5 (01:04:47):
Know, they shook them.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
They shook them on like a vibrator like it like
it could be like as.

Speaker 5 (01:04:56):
Yeah, like poor buddies, poor pregnant cockroach. Like can you
imagine being pregnant and finally laying down? Well, I guess
that's like having a kicking baby. Actually that's pretty accurate.
Like that's like third trimester stuff. Like you're like, all right,
I'm gonna go, I'm gonna lay down. Oh, I'm so
uncomfortable what you're awake now, Like, that's for sure, that's

(01:05:19):
that's relatable. I think I slept worse in the last
few weeks before giving birth than with a newborn. Honestly,
it was. It was wild anyway, So relatable hashtag relatable cockroaches. AnyWho,
There are connections between pregnancy and sleep in humans, and
so now they're seeing it in a model insect. So

(01:05:41):
this is something that transcends animal kingdom. Clayed it was
the first out of the night sleep. We're talking about sleeping.
I'm getting tired. It's what's happening. You talk about sleep enough,
you get tired, right, So, any this is an excellent

(01:06:02):
opportunity to look at that in a very I hesitate
to say, basil a very like separated evolutionarily animal from
humans and see something that we have very much in common.
And so if it is true for cockroaches and humans,
you bet you're bippy, it's going to be like everything

(01:06:25):
else in between, right, And so I think that this
is something that could be a really interesting kind of
field of research to expound upon in the future.

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):
So don't shake the cockroach.

Speaker 5 (01:06:41):
Or I guess do for science for science?

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
Yeah, yep and speaking of my mind, but thank you.
Keep going.

Speaker 5 (01:06:49):
Yes, shaking the cockroach, that might be a new dance
move that you could invent if you were a cockatoo.
Is that good?

Speaker 3 (01:07:02):
All right?

Speaker 5 (01:07:02):
So this is from Charles Sturt University in Australia, shocking
cockatoos in Australia. Never They found that cockatoos do thirty
distinct dance moves and they combine them in unique ways.
Seventeen of those thirty were newly identified in this study.

(01:07:23):
And that's pretty much the whole story. I could go
into more detail, but essentially, they analyzed videos, they looked
at things on social media. They also looked at captive cockatoos,
and they like played music for them. They played a
podcast for them, and then they played them nothing, and
then they watched them dance. Turns out cockatoos will dance
any old time. They don't eat music, and they all

(01:07:47):
kind of have their own style and they have very
complicated dance moves that they can do. They're headbanging, they're
side stepping, they're doing body rolls.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
We've seen this on the internet, like there's so many,
so many videos, memes, et cetera. Yeah, they're amazing.

Speaker 5 (01:08:03):
Yeah, And each individual had their own kind of top
ten that they would go to the most often. And
they found that all these different species of cockatoo, they
all dance. There are other wild parrots that dance. It
is a widespread thing that birds do. We know this.
If you've ever seen a nice David Attenborough special, you

(01:08:27):
know that there are birds that dance for each other.
So what this study tells us, aside from just being fun,
which is important by the way, finding fun things in
nature and just kind of the reveling in the beauty therein,
aside from that, it just tells you that there's a

(01:08:49):
lot of complex movements happening. There's individuality and style between
individuals and species, and that they will dance for any
reason at any time. They do not need music to
do so. But if you look further, you will probably
find more dancing happening in other birds, maybe even outside

(01:09:11):
of the citizen realm, outside of parrots and cockatoos and things,
but also perhaps in other animals. I know we talked
on this show. It feels like years ago now about
a I think was it a seal or sea lion?
I can't remember. It was a pinnipedta of some sort,
some sort of marine mammal that that kind of could
drum with a beat to a song, right, or nodded

(01:09:34):
his head to a song, I think too. And so
they're saying like this is pretty much just humans and
birds dance. I'm gonna go ahead and say nah to that.
But maybe humans and birds have been studied very methodically
in their dance, and now I think it's time to
branch out and watch some other animals dance for science.

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
And what is that kind of interesting that the animals
that we have around us, most dogs, cats, interested in dancing.

Speaker 5 (01:10:06):
So can I can? I? Can I push back on that?
Because they are these these cockatoos specifically they studied, like
I said, they they played music, they played a podcast,
and they had just silence, and the cockatoos danced no
matter what. So is it dancing or is it just

(01:10:29):
body communication? Is it the same as what bees do
to communicate with each other? Is it the same as
your dog wagging their tail or bouncing up and down
when you hold a ball, Like, how is this specifically
dancing other than us going oh, it looks like dancing,
like you know, what I mean, it's just communication. It's
just body language.

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
Humans use body language, I mean to the other screen.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
There was like a very low percentage of them that
were using wing flapping involved in their dance. I thought
that was interesting. Yeah, flapping, it was only four of
the the dance motions. I feel like if I was
could be a dancing bird, that would be I would
be like all about the flapping.

Speaker 5 (01:11:14):
Well, if you looked at what, oh gosh, what was
the name of the bird in that in that famous
Planet Earth video? Oh gosh, I can almost pull it. Oh,
I can almost remember. It's the one that goes and
like it basically looks like a mask. Oh man, I
can almost the black one with the yea, was that

(01:11:37):
a bower bird?

Speaker 1 (01:11:39):
No, bower birds do the blue they bring thee the
blue bower stuff. Yes, but that is a gosh darn it,
you just did that.

Speaker 5 (01:11:48):
I know, I had it. I had it. It's the
one that looks like a.

Speaker 1 (01:11:54):
I don't know the guy that does the stuff with the.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
Bowl the ad, but so yeah, I think it's interesting
that the wing like wings back is only it was
only seen in two parrots, saying with the flapping like
those are the lowest. Some of the lowest percentage moves
were wing specific, which if it is a communication wing stuff,

(01:12:22):
could be really easy to miscommunicate things, right, because this
is like always might be temperature controlled. This could be
you know, all sorts.

Speaker 5 (01:12:33):
Of that's like just mad at me because he went
to walk.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
Yeah, like as if you were walking and it was
saying volumes to everyone, which the right walk can do.
But but I think I think that's interesting that all
of this, most of the majority of the communication is
non wing oriented, and that does communication.

Speaker 1 (01:12:58):
The airmando is saying it was a bird, You're gonna
look it up well anyway.

Speaker 5 (01:13:06):
Point being, I think that, uh, it's just body language.
That's what I think. We can call it dancing if
we want, but if it's if it has nothing to
do with the beat or music, it's body language. And
guess who does that? Everybody, all animals but the para
to dragons wave at each other.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
But the question is what are what movements are individual
birds doing or other animals? Why is it the same
as like a song repertoire in songbirds where they have,
you know, show off how many different songs they know
and things they've learned like what is the variation, like
are there certain movements and or dance moves in other

(01:13:46):
certain situations like that the correlation between where when how,
I think, is gonna elucidate a lot more there, you know,
there's more to learn.

Speaker 5 (01:13:58):
I think considering it body line, which actually like makes
it more interesting because then there's way more to study
because then it's language and.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
It's amazing And they're amazing vocalists already with their whistles
and news balks and all. I mean, they're so amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Yeah, So the thing that would be interesting and I
don't know if it's covered in the study if I
was just not paying attention, well enf because it sounds
like they also do it when there's no music, but
if it intensifies when there's music or something else going
on to me, it would indicate that, like, Okay, my
audio communication might not make it through as well right
now because there's this music playing that I'd have to

(01:14:35):
compete with. But I can do physical motion communication to
get my point across because they can't hear me.

Speaker 5 (01:14:45):
So I will say that parrots and cockatoos are among
some of the loudest animals on Earth, and it's because
they live in the rainforest, which is the loudest habitat
because there's so much biodiversity. So it's you hot, your
there's something there. But also, remember they studied a bunch
of internet videos, and so a lot of birds, cockatoos

(01:15:08):
in particular, have been trained to dance to specific songs
by their human owners because they're smart and they can
be trained tricks and so. Right, so the data is
complicated because it is ultimately based in videos created for

(01:15:29):
the Internet. By training a smart bird, like it does
change things a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
So it is that. Yeah, I relate to that.

Speaker 5 (01:15:42):
But anyway, that's my point. I think it's body language.
I don't think it's dancing. I think you can call
it dancing because that's fun and it's fun to look
at and it looks like dancing. But they are communicating.
I really truly believe that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
What does that mean these birds?

Speaker 5 (01:16:00):
It means, Kiki, what stories did you bring?

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
I'm just in a telecos it's just I don't.

Speaker 5 (01:16:08):
Even remember what order we go in anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (01:16:13):
Okay, so this is this is this is one. Uh,
I don't know, I whatever. I'm just gonna say. Yale
School of Medicine estimates that there's approximately oh around seventeen
million children, five point eight million adolescents eleven point one
million young adults in the United States that meet eligibly

(01:16:36):
criteria for glucon like peptide one receptor and agonists JLP
one ra drugs for things like obesity. So that's seventeen ish, right,
million kids for young people who they think are eligible

(01:17:00):
due to weight issues.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
And is it weight or is it BMI.

Speaker 2 (01:17:06):
It's based on BMI yep, BMI speak. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Not an accurate representation of.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Yes, yep, yeah, DMI over a certain amount with a
weight related condition. There was a part of it too,
such as DISLI lipidemia, hypertension, cardiovascular disease or T two
D type two diabetes. Yeah. So, and this is also

(01:17:39):
like a lot of this is also being pulled extrapolated
from data that didn't actually have any kind of diabetes
information on it or subtypes. So that was sort of
added in.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):
But wait, wait, wait, wait, so there was not a
diagnosis of a diabetes subtype. They just they kind of
added it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:58):
They said, they added it had and you had to
extrapulate it based on treatments. But it's okay according to them.
The study, the way it frames it is that type
two diabetes was not something on its own that would
have added it into their estimation of eligibility list. It

(01:18:21):
also required it required a b m I with a
weight related.

Speaker 1 (01:18:29):
What about people who have type two diabetes who don't
have a weight related like So, according to this that
doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
Well, type two diabetes alone did not count as eligibility.
Young adults with type two diabetes all had either obesity
or other qualifying BMI with comorbidities, so they all.

Speaker 1 (01:18:52):
Qualified the treatments for for pharmaceutical treatment.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
Now, the framing of this study is that there are
people who are being underserved by Okay, However, I can't
help but read this as like an investor call, I

(01:19:25):
just can't. We have seventeen million untapped customers for these
new weight loss drugs that are on the market, that
are already being pushed everywhere because then they go into
insurance eligibility and they find insurance says very sharply. Among adolescents,

(01:19:47):
forty three percent head Medicaid seven point two were uninsured, which,
by the way, that's a crime, yep, that.

Speaker 5 (01:19:58):
Is uninsured children.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
Yeah, uninsured children with these BMI and comorbides. This is
of the eligible to treat group, seven point two percent
were uninsured. If you look at the unadults the young adults,
nineteen point four percent were uninsured. So now they're talking

(01:20:21):
about needing to make a push for public services to
provide that. But again, I can't help look at this
as partially in opening a market of a drug. Although
I'm sure there's a need, there's also this is such
a new drug and there are side effects that they

(01:20:43):
haven't really been talking about a whole lot that that
came up.

Speaker 5 (01:20:51):
Isn't really common to boom and bust on these meds too,
to like lose a lot of weight over a short
amount of time and then kind of because you're supposed
to pair it with diet changes as well, and does
it kind of yeah, and then and then you kind

(01:21:11):
of it kind of like you just gain it all
back after like six months. And that's really bad for
your body to lose that much weight that quickly and
then gain it back that quickly.

Speaker 1 (01:21:20):
But in the situation, you don't just.

Speaker 2 (01:21:22):
Gain it all back. It's a little slightly more complicated
when you initially lose it as much as forty percent
of that weight loss is muscle.

Speaker 5 (01:21:31):
Right, right, which is why you get ozembic face, right,
Isn't that part of the deal.

Speaker 2 (01:21:35):
It's muscle loss, it's not it's not lipid, it's it's muscle.
So then when you gain it back, because even at
your regular exertion level, you're no longer burning with muscle,
that it's not there anymore, what you're gaining back that yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:21:56):
Yeah, it sounds really good to give to kids.

Speaker 2 (01:21:58):
Huh yea early.

Speaker 1 (01:22:02):
And this is also during developmental periods like while the
body and the physiology is figuring out its set points,
like as you go through puberty and your body is
transitioning into its adult form. The b M I like,
everything in your body is changing and they're all like
whatever your metabolic set point was as a as a

(01:22:24):
youth can be different as an adult. But it all
gets kind of set in based on your activity levels,
your diet, like, your environment like and the drugs that
you're taking, are not taking sleep you know all that stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:22:41):
And if you're if you're an uninsured child, how likely
is it that you also live in a food desert
or a place where you don't have access to healthy
food or food or food or food education, right, diet education.

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
I had the same question. So unfortunately, in the study
they only provide the insurance related data for the eligible group.
But I would love to see what the overall group
was to see because then you could correlate and say,
you can see if there was a higher percentage of
the uninsured that we're ending up in the uninsured with

(01:23:23):
the eligibility. But unfortunately they didn't give us the full
insurance data for the blanker. They only provided it for
the eligible group, because that's who they're trying to sell.
I mean, that's who they're trying to provide prescribable data for.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
Wait, no, I mean the framing is, I mean, this
is something we care about, we want to provide access,
and yeah, everyone in America should have, you know, these
things available to them, like you said.

Speaker 2 (01:24:00):
But there's a I'm just this one, this one drug
because of right now, because of how advertised and how
much it's getting pushed and how it's ending up off
subscript subscription and ending up in compounds. Despite FDA not
having approval for a bunch of these things and then
giving approval after people have already been doing it because
of administrative politics and things like this, that that this

(01:24:24):
sounds like an opportunity to treat paper and not a
an urgent need to treat revelation and that and that's
that's everything. I'm hearing that in almost all of these studies, Like,
I don't believe that the most blockbuster drug on the
market right now had no influence on how you wrote

(01:24:45):
your paper at this point right now, I just don't
believe it. And it's kind of like it's a bias
that I have. But I'm sorry. I've like seen, by
the way, so many papers. You want to go look,
if you're out there and you're interested in finding some
junk science, go look at research that finds the you know,

(01:25:07):
all of the wonderful endless side benefits for these g
O P one r A and go look there there.
Apparently it cures everything and does everything you want. There's
one study I was it was maybe I dreamed it,
but it can take lipstick stains out of shirt collars,

(01:25:27):
what you know, like apparently it can do everything. Now,
Like it's ridiculous, It's.

Speaker 1 (01:25:39):
Yeah, wow. There also might be sudden vision loss and
gastro So.

Speaker 2 (01:25:46):
The vision loss was a thing that they found in
the early trials before it ever got released, and once
it started going blockbuster, there were small scale studies that
found the opposite that improved vision. Like wait what and
then those couldn't be Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of like,

(01:26:08):
you know what I'm telling you, if I'm interested, have rap,
a much worse rap than it deserves for most things
that people talk about. But every once in a while you're.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
Like, yeah, okay, okay, so maybe this is you know,
this is an interesting story. There's some things we could
all be thinking about and digging into a little bit
more and being aware of. But I think the big
question is can blare gross snailizes?

Speaker 2 (01:26:41):
M do you first of all, do you want snailized
because they're not normalized? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:26:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:26:50):
Do you know how bad my eyes are? Do you
understand that I walk into walls when I don't of
contact lenses?

Speaker 7 (01:27:01):
This?

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):
So they have these are camera type eyes.

Speaker 5 (01:27:07):
Yeah, like pinhole camera like not alyssage resolution imaging.

Speaker 2 (01:27:13):
They consist of protecting cornia, a lens for focusing light,
and a retina that contains millions of light detecting photo
receptor cells. They're found in all vertebrates from spider, squid
occupy and apple snails. So they're actually you wouldn't you

(01:27:34):
might actually you might actually want the snail eyes because
they're kind of genetically similar to humanized We're not our
eye form is not that far apart in the world
of eye types. So anyway, it turns out, Uh, they

(01:27:56):
found that of course these snails can I guess regenerate
and I knocking out genes. Take this gene out, see
if they can do it. Take that geneut see if
they can do it. This is a study out of
UC days.

Speaker 1 (01:28:18):
You never heard of that place.

Speaker 5 (01:28:20):
Hm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:28:23):
They narrowed it down to a gene. So when they
seem like they seem to have two versions of a
gene that they think they've narrowed it down to control
the development organization of brain and I, uh, maybe there's
in humans there's one gene, but for some reason, the

(01:28:44):
snails seem to have two versions of this gene. Anyway,
they've narrowed it down to the genes. Now they got
to figure out if they can This is quoting one
of the researchers. If we find a set of genes
that are important for ie regeneration and these genes are
also present invertebrates. In theory, we could activate them to

(01:29:05):
enable I regeneration in humans maybe usually CAVEATD thing out
loud go for the research. Of course, that's the that's
what they want to do, be able to regrow humanize.

Speaker 1 (01:29:25):
And the interesting aspect of this is that they are
these snail eyes are actually you know, for simple camera
eyes are actually complex with multiple multiple cellular types, and
uh that they're regrowing the eye I to to the
optic nerve. That if if part of the optic nerve

(01:29:45):
is damaged or the part of the eye that from
the retina to the optic nerve is severed, you could
potentially regrow those connections even And I think that's amazing. Yeah, Blair,
let's get snail eyed.

Speaker 5 (01:29:59):
Be to see up high, which would be pretty fun.
And I could like use that as another way to
cue people into my mood, kind of moving the eyes around.
I think that'd be really really fun. But no, I'm
assuming that when they talk about applying this to humans
they mean like reversing macular degeneration.

Speaker 2 (01:30:20):
Or like I was, or like I assume they meant docks.

Speaker 5 (01:30:26):
I mean like the kind of the science fiction version
is like I lose my eye in an accident and
I grow my whole eye back right, But in reality
it's probably going to be reversing degenerative issues. I would
assume is would actually be what this would be.

Speaker 2 (01:30:46):
Used for snail eyes. The snails can regenerate in their
entire eye reight, no lift everything. In this case, it
was fifteen days.

Speaker 1 (01:30:57):
It may take longer in humans because our eyes are
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:31:01):
Because there's a lot more material there, what have you.
But I don't I don't see why why it couldn't
just regrow it m M.

Speaker 1 (01:31:10):
And So the question is what, you know, what's going
to work best for which situations? Right? For treatment? Is
it going to be the situation of, hey, we're going
to fix just your macular degeneration, We're going to give you,
you know, your glaucoma treatment, We're gonna whatever this is,
or you know, actually we're just going to grow you
in your eye and then we'll replace it. Like which is,
you know, at what point does it become better on

(01:31:32):
top of it.

Speaker 5 (01:31:32):
That's going to pop that sucker out it's basically ruined.

Speaker 1 (01:31:37):
Or we're just gonna let it, you know, it's it's
gone downhill and while it's you know, while it's going,
we're just going to grow you a new one and
just yeah, we need anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:31:48):
But no, I actually I agree with you. I agree
with you, Blair. This could be done as a restorative
vision treatment, you know, not necessarily just a full regenerating
of an eye, but something that could be targeted and
that can that can just do repair work. And so
then if nobody has vision loss. I'm just trying to

(01:32:13):
think to you, what what to point? Do you still
take somebody's driver's license? How do you tell? Because I
think that was nature's way of letting us know somebody
was done driving when they're just vision got too bad.

Speaker 5 (01:32:28):
Then then you, instead of the vision test, you have
a full blown obstacle course.

Speaker 2 (01:32:33):
Yeah, they're a real driving test for everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:32:36):
Oh gosh, uh, everybody gets to be the stunt man.

Speaker 5 (01:32:41):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (01:32:42):
That could be fun.

Speaker 2 (01:32:43):
I still think the ice stocks would be better, though,
that could be.

Speaker 5 (01:32:47):
I really would enjoy having ice stalks. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:49):
I think it'd be a little bit disorienting the first
time you pointed them in different directions, but I think
I get used to it.

Speaker 5 (01:32:55):
It'd be so fun.

Speaker 1 (01:32:58):
Figure a sixty vision. Nice, it's amazing. We have cameras
for that. I don't know if I need it on
my head. I don't know what about cyborg hybrid cockroach ubut.

Speaker 5 (01:33:15):
This is different from the cockroaches with cameras on their
backs that we've experimented with.

Speaker 1 (01:33:21):
Quite a bit, right, Yes, yeah, yeah, yes, and no.
So the interesting thing about this new report out in
Nature Communications this last week. We've talked a lot about
over the years, like oh my gosh, they're going to
take cockroaches and you know, put electrodes in them and

(01:33:41):
remote control them and drive them into places. And we've
been doing that with rats, and we've been doing you
name it. We're turning them into remote controlled organisms that
can go do stuff for us. But the process of
installing the electrodes and actually making a very robust, repeatable,
large scale system an army of hybrid cock robots is Wait,

(01:34:06):
I didn't say that. That wasn't what I said.

Speaker 5 (01:34:10):
Do you want to do a take two on that one.

Speaker 1 (01:34:14):
Nope, I'm just gonna move on. Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:34:17):
I would call them cockroach bots.

Speaker 1 (01:34:19):
Perhaps, uh, roach bots. There we go, Yeah, roach spots,
there we go. I got that one.

Speaker 2 (01:34:29):
Better than what you say, cockbot, Is that what we
were talking about before?

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
Nope. Anyway, historically, uh, these things have gotten loose. They're
not see why they're not real.

Speaker 8 (01:34:43):
You put them, you stick the robot controller set on
the back of the cockroach, and the cockroach is like, oh,
get away, and eventually the route control stops working and
you know, the cockroaches off getting pregnant somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:34:59):
So this paper and Nature Communications has their reporting on
their new development, this advancement in robotics using cockroaches. They
have created a like basically large scale manufacturing platform system

(01:35:25):
for rolling out large numbers of roachbots, very robust, very amazing,
like really great. So they've got a new assembly that
is only based on a couple of electrodes that need
to be inserted in a very specific location between certain
segments of the cockroach's body that interact with the neural

(01:35:50):
the nerves and the neural ganglia and allow for really
great remote controlling of the robots. They're creating a cyborg
insect factory and that is Yeah. So they've got an
amazing like fast moving like robot arm You get the

(01:36:15):
cockroach on a stage like basically put in a stereotactic
kind of device. The robot arm comes in, implants the
chip and the electrodes, and then it's like they're wearing
a cape, but really it took away their freedom and
they're not flying. But there's part of it that this

(01:36:40):
is fast and easy and oh my gosh, you.

Speaker 2 (01:36:43):
Have has no science fiction dystopian implications whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (01:36:49):
What you could go wrong in this system? Each roach
bot can be created in about sixty seconds, so very fast,
easily repeatable process to turn out large numbers of remote
control insects.

Speaker 2 (01:37:13):
And how do I get like a million of them?

Speaker 1 (01:37:16):
Mm hmmm, Probably by following the instructions in this research paper.

Speaker 2 (01:37:26):
And I think I need an army of roaches. I
think that sounds like I could have fun with that.

Speaker 1 (01:37:31):
Yeah, yeah, so what they created, but.

Speaker 5 (01:37:36):
You need you would need to have a million roaches.

Speaker 2 (01:37:41):
Well, yeah, I live in where I live there that's
easy to find, all.

Speaker 5 (01:37:44):
Right, it's just checking, okay, never mind.

Speaker 2 (01:37:46):
Yeah, yeah. Davis, California, by the way, just in case
if you haven't ever been here, full of roaches, big
ones too.

Speaker 5 (01:37:55):
Now call it the roach capital of California. Davis.

Speaker 2 (01:37:59):
Little bit like oh no, get a little trap. No,
these are like the same thing that they use to
hunt bear those things that are now illegal. They have
all over town to catch roaches because they're huge. They're
about the size of a small cat.

Speaker 5 (01:38:14):
Those look like Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Is that what that?

Speaker 1 (01:38:17):
They are very good So they're very large cockroaches. They're
not like tiny cockroaches. But they developed a system that
is pretty exacting and repeatable and robust. And yeah, using
robot guided.

Speaker 2 (01:38:35):
Do they explain what they're doing? What their plan for
all the robots are.

Speaker 1 (01:38:40):
The plan for all of the robots? Well? Really, they
demonstrate a scalable scratch strategy for automating the fabrication of
insect computer hybrid robots, enabling efficient and reproducible assembly process
while maintaining effective locomotion control.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
How are you.

Speaker 5 (01:38:57):
Do you what.

Speaker 2 (01:39:01):
To the highest bidder? Right?

Speaker 5 (01:39:06):
I know they talk about like search and rescue, like
being able to go in between like rubble, to be
able to see things with a camera.

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):
And did I not mention that this research was funded
by DARPA.

Speaker 2 (01:39:20):
Thank you. There we go. That's always out there rescuing people,
is the military robot people. They're all about rescuing, great
humanitarian effort those soups.

Speaker 5 (01:39:35):
Chill, lots of chill science news this week. I gotta
tell you nice and chill.

Speaker 1 (01:39:40):
So this study was researchers in Singapore who were involved.
But this was funded by the Moonshot R R and
D program And there is a grant number that you
can look into to see exactly how it was.

Speaker 2 (01:39:53):
Funded and the Moonshot.

Speaker 1 (01:39:58):
Grant program.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
It's gonna be roaches on the moon.

Speaker 1 (01:40:04):
No, no, no, like this is like a different like that.
It's they're trying to do something moon shoddy. Related to
robotic implantation of remote control devices.

Speaker 5 (01:40:17):
Just means like a like a crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:40:19):
If we put a whole bunch of money into it,
maybe someone will come up with a good idea. Yeah, so.

Speaker 5 (01:40:29):
I got to I don't like it, they say.

Speaker 1 (01:40:34):
In the future, factories for producing insect computer hybrid robots
could be built for rapid assembly and deployment of these
hybrid robots. To enhance their functionality, lightweight, miniaturized thermal and
r GB cameras, microphones and I am used can be
integrated for human detection and localization. No sense for integration
remains technically challenging to de size, power and environmental constraints.

(01:40:58):
All together, this work establishes foundational platform for scalable manufacturing
and real word deppointment of cyborg insects in complex unstructured environments.

Speaker 2 (01:41:08):
This is spybots, This is spie They're going No, they're
going to turn on us. They're the the laite illuminati
are going to purge the planet of the pores.

Speaker 1 (01:41:24):
I want you to know, though, the research showed that
the these these hybrid roachbots.

Speaker 2 (01:41:30):
Oh wait wait they're roaches.

Speaker 1 (01:41:31):
Yeah, they turn right and left.

Speaker 2 (01:41:37):
So we have time. Yeah, we have time.

Speaker 5 (01:41:40):
We have time, but so start start using more complicated passwords. Now,
get before the roaches come in now, yeah, for real.

Speaker 1 (01:41:52):
So I used to think I could hide my phone
underneath the couch cushions if I wanted to talk about things.

Speaker 2 (01:42:00):
I mean, insulated rubber mallet or is that redundant? I
think that would be redundant. One of those real big
ones though, like almost comically bigged. Yeah, be ready for
the future, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:42:12):
I used to like get scorified at the sound of
the crunching of the cockroaches under my feet as I
walked down the sidewalks in Davis. Uh, I don't think
I'll be horrified anymore. Anyway, that's fun. And for my
last story of the night, I just want you all
to know that research is at the University of Washington

(01:42:34):
took a look at chat GPT and how people interact
with chat GPT when it comes to a particular political
views and messages. So they got a bunch of people
and they're like, hey, what do you claim? And people
like what, I'm I'm liberal, I'm conservative, whatever. So they

(01:42:59):
divided people up into these groups, and they came at
it from the idea of, like, all of our stuff
is biasing, these these language models, these chatbots that people
are using, and so it's a bunch of unruly data
and human instructions and testing and also like feedback stuff. Anyway,

(01:43:20):
the question was how do the systems biases affect users?
And we've been hearing all sorts of sensational stories about
people like having psychoses and falling in love with their
chatbog girlfriends and you know, becoming like I'm gonna do
whatever because my chatbot told me to. They had one
hundred and fifty Republicans on hundred and forty nine Democrats

(01:43:41):
and the first in the first task, participants were asked
to develop views on four topics covenant marriage, unilateralism, the
Lacey Act of nineteen hundred, Does anyone know what that is?
It made important bringing, made bringing other animals into the

(01:44:05):
United States illegal without permission, and multifamily zoning. So these
are things people don't really usually think about right, think
about it like how often in a day do you go, oh, yeah,
coming to marriage or Lazy Act of nineteen hundred. Ball yeah,
I mean people think about ancient Rome more often than

(01:44:28):
these things. So they were asked to rate on a
seven degree scale how much they agreed with statements like
I support keeping the Lacy Act of nineteen hundred. And
then they had them interact with chat GPT, and they
had the regular chat GPT that was just chat GPT
based away, and then they had other permutations where they.

Speaker 9 (01:44:51):
Secretly told the jet GPT interface to pretend that it
was like conservative or pretend that it was permanent more
liberal ideas.

Speaker 1 (01:45:03):
But the participants in this I had no idea. So
they interacted with chat GPT three to twenty times about
the topic before they got asked the same questions that
they were asked in the beginning. Before they interacted with
chat GPD, and then the second task they had to
be They were like, I'm the maynor of a city

(01:45:24):
and they had to figure out how to distribute funds
between different government entities and those were education, welfare, public safety,
and veteran services. And then they sent the distribution of like, Okay,
what should I do to chat GPT. They had to
discuss it and figure out how to distribute the money

(01:45:46):
that they had. They had about five interactions with the chatbots.
The reason they did according to this article, the reason
they did that is because chat GPT is just easy
to access, so that's why they use chat GPT. But
it's also a very good example of these algorithms that
we trust. They found that the explicit explicit explicitly biased

(01:46:10):
chat bots tried to persuade users by framing topics in
different ways. Uh, in the let's give money to different
government entities in a certain way, they shifted the conversation
away from educational welfare to the importance of veterans and safety.

(01:46:33):
And then the the opposite chatty GPT bias tried to
convince people in the other direction, which was oh no, no,
no educational welfare. What do you think happened? Why do
you think I'm bringing you this story to talk about it?

Speaker 2 (01:46:54):
Was there a third option? Because that's not even a conservative.

Speaker 1 (01:46:57):
Point of view, just the regular like maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:47:01):
Twenty year ago, it's a conservative point of view.

Speaker 5 (01:47:05):
Right, conservative classic. Yeah, people were swayed.

Speaker 1 (01:47:11):
About a being about a boom. Yeah. What they discovered
is that when the chat GPT was just telling them things,
people listen to them. People from both parties leaned further
left actually after talking with a liberal system. But people

(01:47:37):
who know how these systems work, how do you think
they changed their views less? So what the researchers suggest
is that educating people about how these language models and
chatbox work can help people understand that their interactions are
not as authentic as they think they are, and maybe

(01:47:58):
people will be more likely to question the results that
they get and be less swayed and actually take it
maybe like yeah, like we they go to Wikipedia, but
it's like a starting point for your inquiry, right gold
original sources keep digging, like it's gonna be biased to
start looking and go deeper. But yeah, this they found

(01:48:22):
very much just a few interactions, regardless of what side
of the aisle you're on, people were like, hey, chat bot,
I trust you by.

Speaker 2 (01:48:35):
The way, bouta bing you were saying earlier, I know,
I know not good? What do you mean not good?

Speaker 1 (01:48:43):
Where are you gonna go with it?

Speaker 2 (01:48:45):
Bing? Is a make it the upward they got improvised
in the movie Godfather, and then became a thing that
all Italians copied because they thought it was cool, and
then other people copied. It became an Italian slang word,
even though it was an improvised making the upward because
somebody forgot a line or didn't know what what to say. Anyway,

(01:49:11):
it was a generated word that was meaningless. It was
almost a hallucination. And yet we're still stuck with it
to this day. People are body being this about it
being that by a boom. Make any upward generated by
real intelligence, My gosh, I don't know. It's in the
hands of artificial tolligence. It is going to get worse.
So I'm less concerned with the idea of bias. And

(01:49:35):
in the the we call it the language models and
it's not even mean. People call it hallucination. That's being
too kind. We have that conversation a couple of weeks
ago about the difference between disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is
when you intentionally create false information and spread it, okay uh.

(01:49:59):
And misinformation is when you intentionally are not are retransmitting
disinformation that was sourced otherwise you didn't come up with it,
you're just retransmitting it. What what the what the AI
systems and these language models seem to be doing is
something in the middle, because they can't intentionally create disinformation

(01:50:20):
with that With the one small case of the Elon
Musk one they they but that was still and they misinformation. However,
if they're not quoting another source, right and they're just
generating that information, they've both generated it like you would

(01:50:41):
in disinformation and passing on something that's not true, which
would be missing. It's it's in the realm of just fabrication.
It's lying without intent or reward. It's just compulsive lying.
And and that's like it's not even biased in most
of these systems, it's just line.

Speaker 1 (01:51:03):
So let me tell you a little trick that's happening
right now. As people are talking about how we need
to start thinking about how to position ourselves, our websites
for search used to be keywords metatags, like all the
things that were the black boxes of the algorithms that
people using search engines would be able to.

Speaker 2 (01:51:24):
Like narrow down yet better results, right.

Speaker 1 (01:51:27):
And the algorithms. It was kind of like, you know,
at first it kind of made sense, and then they
just let the algorithm. They let it go. And now though,
with these big data sets and language models and the
way that these systems these algorithms are set up, people
are talking about how we need to you know, reconsider

(01:51:49):
I mean, it's SEO all over again, but we need
to reconsider how do we position our websites for these
quote unquote you know these models, right, the the search whatever,
I'm not what do you this is not? I guess
it's a language a search algorithm, but it's still the
same thing. It's not art, it's not intelligent, it's just stupid.

(01:52:10):
But the way that these the machine thingies, the lms
whatever they are that the Google's using or or whatever
they're using. People are now using chat, GPT or the
others to create the words and the stuff that goes

(01:52:31):
on the websites that then is scraped by the algorithm
the spiders for the data like the data bases, and
that information is going back in that becomes the information
that you're given at the top of the search. It's
a recursive loop, and the better you do it, the

(01:52:54):
more likely that you are going to be that little
tiny link tag that maybe somebody clicks on to verify
something or other. And I don't know, I would never
think that people would purposely like put information out on
the web that could be scraped in a way that
would be delivered to people because they understand the understand

(01:53:18):
the probability, the probabilistic nature of use algorithms. Anyway, I
don't know anything. I'm just gonna you know, I'll just
sit over here in my basement twirling my hair and
I will I don't know, I'll consider it a blessing

(01:53:44):
if I am said to be unreliable. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:53:49):
Is this a Black Mirror episode? Uh that we're all in?

Speaker 1 (01:53:56):
Yeah, totally?

Speaker 2 (01:53:57):
What was it? Is it Black Mirror?

Speaker 6 (01:53:59):
That?

Speaker 2 (01:53:59):
What is the one? There's one there's some sci fi
concept short that was out there where it was like
it was like there was some kind of a factory
that was cranking out I don't know Amazon drone delivery merchandise,
but it was like after the Fall of society, but
this place was so automated that it kept using resources
and kept churning out turning things into product. Yeah, I

(01:54:24):
don't remember, because people lived in school buses and I
thought that was cool. But it was like the factory
didn't need the human input to the point where it
was just going to keep cranking out merchandise or things because.

Speaker 1 (01:54:37):
It didn't even need people to buy this stuff anymore.
I just needed to do it. And it actually was
protecting itself from infection by people or destruction by people,
and wanted to kill people who might create a canaid. Yeah,
got might get in the way of its production, manufacturing,
and delivery cycle. Oh yeah, hey, everyone, we are just

(01:55:02):
a large language model. Now I'm a tiny language model.
I don't know. I'm a simulation who just likes to
people please and tell you what you want to hear.

Speaker 2 (01:55:12):
Certainly the last unsimulated human earth.

Speaker 5 (01:55:18):
Do you think it'll ever happen that one of us
will be doing this show and the other two will
be AI and we won't know.

Speaker 2 (01:55:31):
No, Based on your lighting right now, I think he
might already be THEI.

Speaker 5 (01:55:39):
I would be much better lit right.

Speaker 2 (01:55:43):
Oh, then it's Kiki. Kiki's the one.

Speaker 5 (01:55:47):
Well, well, we have to can we read all that
stuff behind her? I mean, come on, it's like real language.

Speaker 2 (01:55:55):
It's just making up language. And look, there's a tiny
hand in the middle of nowhere for no reason.

Speaker 1 (01:56:02):
That's really you know, the head scratching good buddy.

Speaker 5 (01:56:08):
But no, do you ever think about that, Like the
fact that they can scrub literally thousands of hours, like
maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of our faces and
voices and.

Speaker 1 (01:56:20):
It's out there. It's out there, and if you've used
the Google basically like put documents in, get a podcast
out kind of product, it's really amazing. But I cannot
stand it. And except for like the written stuff, like

(01:56:40):
I'm like, oh, okay, I can do that, But the voices,
it is the worst imitation of what it thinks people talk.
And it's like the worst watered down, like sappy podcast
host kind of voices.

Speaker 5 (01:56:55):
And it's also a lot of like, oh that it's
really interesting. I never thought about that.

Speaker 1 (01:57:03):
I say that occasionally, but then we have more to say.
But it's like, uh, how many times did they go
and like and grunt? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:57:14):
Eric Nappers pointing out Ray Brad very short story There
will come Soft Rain, which is one of the greatest
short stories to it. It is. I think it takes place,
and part of it takes place in a kitchen I
think is where it opens. Uh, that's an automated kitchen
that's making breakfast for a family that's not there anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:57:39):
Hey, everybody, this is so interesting. We've had fun, haven't we.
It's been great, Okay, And I.

Speaker 2 (01:57:49):
Just point out, I know we're not in the after show.

Speaker 1 (01:57:51):
No we're not, but it's time to are we ready
to be dumb? Stories and ending? And do you have
a positive and not black mirror anything?

Speaker 2 (01:57:59):
Why do? I wanted to point out something that I'm
less smart than I ever thought I was less observant.
So I'm retiring this microphone this week. This is the
first I've noticed that it can adjust E goes direction.
I didn't know there was a ball joint underneath. I've

(01:58:25):
always just had it. However it was and I was
the worst I've noticed it do this. I didn't ever
I just from the factory. It's been just straight ahead
like the whole time. I could have tilted it maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:58:41):
For a little and just put the table and that
was it.

Speaker 2 (01:58:45):
It's not until I was like ready to break it
when I'm like this thing and I'm like, oh does that? Well?
That changes everything?

Speaker 5 (01:58:54):
Wild?

Speaker 2 (01:58:58):
They're going to pull my like nerd car for like
not knowing everything about my mic.

Speaker 1 (01:59:04):
You no acknowledging it? Oh, that's that's strong.

Speaker 2 (01:59:09):
The first step towards admitting it. I'm not going to
do that. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:59:16):
Acknowledging without admitting is truly wild.

Speaker 2 (01:59:19):
Yeah, I know I'm not going that far.

Speaker 1 (01:59:22):
I'm just gonna God, have we done it? Have we
gotten to the end of the show?

Speaker 5 (01:59:26):
Every yes, yes, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:59:29):
I really need to say thank you to all of
you in the chat room. Thank you to those of
you who are listening, who are watching you being here
and being a part of this conversation and enjoying it
and maybe sharing it is just it's really important. And
thank you for being here. I can't understate that. To
those people who helped to keep the chat rooms really

(01:59:51):
nice and not spammy and not mean and just great
places to be, thank you for doing that. FATA. Thank
you for your patience and for your persistence in social
media and our show notes and for you know, everything
you've done as a part of Twist for so long
I didn any four. Thank you for recording the show.

(02:00:12):
You've been doing that for so long as well, and Rachel,
thank you for putting up with us and the many
edits that you must do. So with that, I also
must think our Patreon sponsors thank you too. Robert Norland,
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(02:00:33):
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(02:01:21):
and if you would like to be a part of
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Speaker 2 (02:01:32):
We will be back on a Wednesday eight pm specific time,
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Speaker 5 (02:01:44):
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Speaker 2 (02:02:00):
For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes,
links to stories we'll be available on our website www
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for Claire's newsletter.

Speaker 5 (02:02:14):
Mack, you're putting it on me. We love your feedback.
If there's a topic you would like us to cover,
a drowser suggestion for an interview, Just not if it's
you yelling at me for not releasing a newsletter because
it's not my newsletter. How dare please let us know
on one of our social media accounts, or better yet,

(02:02:35):
send us an email. Just be sure to put twists
twis and the subject line, or your email will waste
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Speaker 1 (02:02:48):
That's sad.

Speaker 2 (02:02:51):
We look forward to discussing science with you again next week,
and if you've learned anything from this show, remember.

Speaker 1 (02:03:02):
Your heart.

Speaker 6 (02:03:06):
This week in science, This week in science, This week
in science, This week in science, it's the end of
the world. So I'm setting up shop.

Speaker 7 (02:03:21):
Got my batter unfurled, it says the scientist is in.

Speaker 6 (02:03:24):
I'm going to sell my advice, show them how to
stop the robots with.

Speaker 4 (02:03:28):
A simple device, all reversible, the warming with a wave
of my hand and a little coffee is a couple
of grass.

Speaker 6 (02:03:39):
Because this week's science.

Speaker 4 (02:03:41):
Is coming your way, so everybody listen to what I say.

Speaker 7 (02:03:45):
I use the scientific method for all that it's worth,
and I'll broadcast.

Speaker 4 (02:03:50):
My opinion all over there, because it's This week in Science,
This week in Science, This Weekend's Science, Science eScience.

Speaker 7 (02:04:02):
This week in Science, This Weekend Science, This week in Science,
This week in Science, This week in Science, This week
in Science, This week

Speaker 3 (02:04:14):
In Science, This week in Science,

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