Sentient Meat Science

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Twists. This Week in Science, episode number ten twenty nine,
recorded on Wednesday, September seventeenth, twenty twenty five, Sentient Meat Science.
You like my sibilants? Hey everyone, I'm doctor Keiki, and
tonight we will fill your head with ghost sharks, alcoholic chimps,

(00:23):
and ant clones. But first, thanks to our amazing Patreon
sponsors for their generous support of Twists. You can become
a part of the Patreon community at patreon dot com.
Slash This Week in Science.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Life is such an everyday thing here on Earth, everywhere
you look, in every drop of water, under every rock
in the air, under the soil, every cranny, every nook.
Life has found a way over billions of years elsewhere
in the universe, and not so much what we know

(01:03):
of life here suggest it should be out there, suggests
that whenever the conditions are right, life must occur, and
not an accident, not a fluke, but a natural progression
of chemistry, an almost inevitable feature of the universe, rather
though not necessarily.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
A permanent one.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
To be a multi cellular, complex, sentient form of life
that is incomprehensibly rare.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
You are very special.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
And while we are here doing this being a live thing,
is this complex sentient creature. We need to take pause
and celebrate our ability to know, because that's the really
special thing about being a sentient life form knowing things.
And that's what we're going to do here on this

(01:59):
Week in Science. Coming up next.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough.
I want to learn everything. I want to fill it
all up with new discoveries. It happened every day of
this week. There's only one place to go to find
a knowledge to seek. I want to know what's happened,
What's happened, that's happened this week in sciences.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
That's happening, that's happened this.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Week in science?

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Science? Do you kicking?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
And Blair and a good science to you too, Justin
Blair and everyone out there, Welcome to another episode of
This Week in Science. We are back again talking about science.
We took a week off. Hopefully we're all a little
bit healthier, more hail ready for this this dynamic, exciting

(03:02):
discussion that lies ahead. They have all sorts of stories.
So much has happened. I have stories about earthquakes, fighting
cancer with microbes, science on mars Ant clones and bad math.
What do you have justin.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
That's a great question.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
I haven't looked yet, but I assume I've got an
ancient hominin type story.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Actually I do.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Oh, Homo, the Letti update, social bees, drunk chimpanzees, and
oh and that's it.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
That's all. No, No, that's not all Blair. What's in
the animal corner?

Speaker 5 (03:44):
Oh, I have Kuala vaccines, I have Mattador bugs, and
I have ghost sharks.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
I don't know Mattador bugs. I am looking forward to
that one. And it's very rare that people see ghost sharks.
It's like like ghosts generally.

Speaker 5 (04:04):
Well, see, a ghost has to die with unfinished business
for you to be able to see a ghost shark,
So it's very rare. They're very good at finishing their business.
And then also it's it's very uncommon for humans to
be where their unfinished business is, where they are tied,
and where they must haunt. So it's you know, there's
probably some more ghost sharks than we're used to see.

(04:27):
Now in reality, that's an actual animal, and we'll talk about.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
I feel like if that scenario for creating a ghost
is correct, that there'd be like a lot of ghost
dogs and squirrels.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
I got it, didn't find my nuts, and.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Like you know, and all the dos, all the dogs
are still waiting for you to come home to ghost Stop.

Speaker 5 (04:50):
Don't give me that.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Waiting.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Well, definitely, I've been watching too much of the old
show Supernatural, so that's where I am these days. So
much fun. But you know what, that's not real science
at all. And we're gonna jump into our show. But
before we do, I want to remind you that subscribing
to Twists on your favorite podcast platform is the best

(05:22):
way to catch our show weekly in your ears. Look
for this Week in Science in your favorite podcast player. Also,
you can find us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. We
are live weekly around eight pm Pacific time on Wednesdays,
and those episodes are up on our channels. Look for
this Week in Science on Twitch. We are at Twist Science.

(05:47):
Are we ready to do this?

Speaker 5 (05:50):
Give me some science stories immediately? I demand it.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Okay, right now, I will jump in with a story
sorry that gets those excited headlines going. Did we just
find life on Mars? No? No we did not. Yeah.
So research out of the SETI Institute was published recently

(06:17):
and researchers from SETI, the Seti Institute's senior research scientist
Jiannis Bishop and users University of Massachusetts engineering professor Mario
Parente took a look at evidence from the Mars orbiters.
So they were looking at orbital hyper spectral images, so

(06:39):
the orbiter looking at these using spectrometer to look at
what's going on in the atmosphere on the ground on
the surface of Mars. And the news came out and
of course it's from SETI and it was like about Mars,
and they found chemical evidence of chemical processes that are

(07:03):
found here on Earth in relation to biological microbes, so
metabolic activity, biological origins. We've been able to do the
experiments here on Earth that say, yeah, these compounds come
from life, from living organisms, but on Mars we can't

(07:24):
do that. We need to do the experiments still. But
what they were able to show in a Nature article,
they were able in this Nature News and Views article
to explore perseverances conformation of minerals being observed from orbit
and also minerals that usually aren't detectable from orbit, and

(07:46):
these on the ground measurements and readings that we've been
able to examine smectite, clays and carbonates using a a
tool called compact Imaging spectrometer for Mars so chemicals molecules

(08:10):
they have come from processes that are chemical in nature.
Whether that chemistry took place in a cell or as
the result of cellular activity is yet to be determined.
So if you've seen headlines and speculation about life on Mars, but.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
No, that's not the big life story that everybody's talking about.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
No, is there another Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
Thought that's what you were talking to talk about. So
they found spotted rocks.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, they're rocks.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
This is this is the what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah, there's these different readings and it's a big finding.
Perseverance on the rim of Jezero Crater has been picking
up rocks and looking at things and they are these
tiny green toned like they're these specs, right, and so
it is chemically reduced Yeah, there's chemically reduced iron in there.

(09:15):
And so they've been looking at the rovers, been looking
at it. They have the Mars orbiter looking at it.
They've been checking this stuff out and so we've got
these interesting olivine pyroxene basalt basaltic rocks and they're checking
all these things out. They found iron sulfite, iron phosphate

(09:38):
nodules in these rocks, and ooh, that's interesting because phosphate
very very active part of biology ATP. Right, that P
is phosphate, And so there are these clays with lots
of stuff that is we can attribute a lot of

(09:59):
it here on Earth to biological activity, but we are
not there and we cannot do the tests there that
we have done here. So we need to bring rocks back.

Speaker 5 (10:13):
This is the scientific equivalent of so you're telling me
there's a chance, right, Like, that's basically what this is.
It's saying like, Okay, we found something that indicates that
it is not impossible.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yay, No, it's not just that though. What it is
is we looked at every way this could have happened
that isn't life, and we've ruled.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
It out, but we canry on earth.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
Definitively say it's like. And part of part of what
it is is that for this transformation chemical transformation to
happen in these little spots that have rings around them
as though they originated in a center point and was
sort of expanding out, would require an intense heat or

(11:03):
possibly an acid to be in contact, and they don't
have any source or way that that could have happened
in the Martian landscape to produce it.

Speaker 5 (11:14):
But what about like millions of years ago?

Speaker 3 (11:17):
So even over millions of years ago, this is for
this to be on that surface, the only way we
see it done on Earth is there are microbes that
have the ability to do that chemical transformation of the iron.
But for it to happen just on its own in

(11:37):
dot form means an incredible amount of heat would have
to be just right there, just right there. He we
do one more right over here, and we'll cluster them up.
I mean, like, yeah, some Martian visitor playing with their
new laser gun.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Taking a couple of test shots on Mars before taking off.
Sure it's another possibility, but.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
Or is really that they This study wasn't trying to
prove life. This study was trying to prove all the
other ways that it could have happened, and they failed
to find one.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
So it's a little bit more.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Than that would mean that there is not one that
we don't know about. And this is not talking about
now life. This is still talking about this is ancient,
This is not now this and it could have been
could have been extinct life which we're still talking about,
could have been, but we don't know, and we will

(12:36):
bring rocks back.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
Okay, But I would say though, I would say there that, uh,
there's a chance. Scenario is more in the on the
side of there's a chance, it's not life is much
more right now, is much more how this is weighed.
And that's why there's all the excitement about it is that.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
It's it's exciting, but we're also wondering whether or not
there could be life in the atmosphere of Venus, right,
and that was a big exciting finding because of certain
compounds in the atmosphere at very at a certain level.
And since then conversations have taken place that people have got,
oh wait, no, there are other possibilities that we had

(13:19):
not considered previously. So there. Yeah, So you're saying there
might be a chance, yes, Blair.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
You're oh, no, there might be there's there might be
a chance that it's not life at this point might
be yeah, no, not life.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
There is no finding of life at this time. To
say that is like what you're saying, justin is not
the that's not scientific method.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
It is it's ruled out the alternate possibilities because it's
disproving things, not proving things.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
And that's how science usually works.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
As you disprove disproving.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
The other possibilities.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
It doesn't mean you ever prove a thing, but you
disprove the other things. And that's what they've done and
that's why it's exciting.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
And you've disproven a whole lot of things. Yeah, we
still have so many questions about things here on our
own planet that we have not you know, figured out
all the answers to just by thinking we had all
of the all of our assumptions correct. But anyway, I'm

(14:30):
just saying you can be excited if you want to
be excited about the possibility of ancient life having been
on Mars. It could have been a possible, but it
also might not have been suggestion might be. We don't
have evidence saying.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
You might be a little bit jaded. Like right away
you brought up past relationships. You're like, at one time
dated Venus and like it just didn't pan out.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Why would Mars be any different?

Speaker 1 (14:59):
One time? One time, this system I got excited about,
like life arsenic life in Mono Lake.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Come on, oh yeah, I remember that, I remember that Yeah,
that was a very exciting story on.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Everybody be excited, but have a little critical thinking going on.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
There is And that's what I wouldn't be. I wouldn't
be getting excited about this one. I would be shooting
it down with every possible way possible that you can.
But this is a bit they've eliminated so many of
the things that would have eliminated it his life. Yeah,
and the heat and acid required to do the transformation

(15:41):
and make it look like what does it look like?

Speaker 2 (15:43):
It looks like a ringworm, mean rot, That's basically what
it looks like. It looks like the.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
Form, uh visual form that you would expect from a
sort of bacterial colony of some sort of fungal colony
or whatever. Mars calls that Martian life colony. So just
the eye test. But then the chemical transformations are something
that microbial life on Earth uh utilizes to grab energy

(16:16):
by uh that shift. It's it's how life works on
Earth and.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
Is a solar system, and yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Shouldn't be different. It should follow the same rules everywhere
in the in the universe.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Really, but we.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Don't know all of the environmental factors involved. We can
guess at a lot of things, but we don't know
because we weren't there.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
But it will need it would be it would need
an unknown at this point to uh to take it
off the table, and there is that.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Unknown for all that now we were pretty good at knowing.
It would have to be a big.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
Unknown scenario that pulls this off of the its life shelf.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Okay, Hi Blair, you like this debate?

Speaker 5 (17:12):
I mean, I just I have two conflicting kind of
philosophies on this. The first is, obviously there's life elsewhere.
We're not that special, right, we have extremophiles on this planet.
Why can't life live in other extreme areas? So of
course there's life. But on the other side of it,

(17:34):
I also have this, you know, whole philosophy of we
know what life looks like here, what the what the
chemical processes look like here, what the artifacts of life
are here? We don't know that all life throughout the
universe requires metabolic processes like the ones that we have here.

(17:56):
We don't know that the same chemical processes equal the
same kind of artifacts that we have here. And so
I think that's that's the part where these sorts of
of releases lose me, is there's there's a lot of
assumptions being made that all of these different kind of
elements of science work under the same laws that we

(18:17):
are assuming are universal. And that's there's assumptions going on,
and I think that is.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
But to assume that life would be, like say, carbon based,
is also partly because it's like so abundant, right We're
when we're looking at no in throughout the universe, No,
I thought.

Speaker 5 (18:38):
You carbon based life is abundant here?

Speaker 3 (18:40):
Yes, okay, I mean the building blocks for that we
use for life are aren't like hard to find ones.
We went with the base most basic toolkit to get started.
And so I think that's where a lot of the
assumption comes from, is what would be the easiest path
is also kind of the one.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
That we took.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
We didn't we didn't take the hardest route to becoming life.
We took kind of the low hanging fruit at every opportunity,
and so and so I think that's that's part of
why that that assumption, Like I used to have that
same like why does it need to be a carbon
based life form? I watched an episode of Star Trek
once in the day. There was a talking silicon rockry

(19:20):
My goodness. But but really, when it comes down to
the building blocks and where you got to work with
and how we did it was was was with the
most basic, most abundant things that we could you know,
that were that were present. And so it makes sense
to assume that that's going to be the most most

(19:41):
replicated scenario, at least everywhere in the universe.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
The researchers write in the summary of their paper, in summary,
our analysis leads us to conclude that the bright angel
formation contains textures, chemical and mineral characteristics, and organic sick
that weren't consideration as quote potential biosignatures. That is, quote

(20:07):
a feature that is consistent with biological processes, and that,
when encountered, challenges the researcher to attribute it either to
inanimate or to biological processes, compelling them to gather more
data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or
absence of life. And then they say, we need to

(20:29):
get rocks and bring them here, Bring tests here, bring
the rocks.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
That is what you would call a professional credible scientists
basically saying.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
We've our life.

Speaker 6 (20:42):
Oh God.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
But they don't do like, uh like wow them out
emojis in their professional papers.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
We need more evidence, bring the rocks.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
Of course, more scientist is like, you know me, see
anything else, I'm calling it. Scientists are going to do that,
and we're supposed to get the ro We need the
rocks back. So, speaking of coman Aletti, if you don't recall,
this is a South African cave where a Facebook ad

(21:15):
rabbed a bunch of asked for brave, short, skinny archaeologists
to go dedicate time splunking in South Africa. A trove
of bones was discovered in a very hard to find,
hard to reach chamber of the Rising Star Cave, and

(21:41):
they came out with a very kind of controversial I
guess paper. You know, first of all, the finding itself
is just sort of astronomically controversial because they've discovered a
new species.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
They identified and named a new species, and.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
This has happened before with a bone, fingerbone, or jaw,
partial skull, that sort of thing. They have thousands of bones,
complete skeletons, the whole anatomical structure of this, with no
inferred missing bones anywhere. This is not how, this is

(22:18):
not how this field normally has to approach something. They
find a partial piece and then all of the research
community analyzes this one bone or partial bone feature and
tries to extrapulate. So they got a little controversial because
they made some uh, I guess the opposite of what

(22:42):
you were just reading about.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Maybe potential we got to watch out for. It could
be a bunch of things. They're like, oh, homon, lad
you buried. It's dead.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
And we have proof because we found a cave full
of their bones that are buried.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
But there were like a bunch of assumptions from that
one as well, and it was a bunch of st Well.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
That paper was a lot of conclusionary, Like if you
read the paper, it is exciting, but there was a
lot of we conclude this, we conclude this, we conclude this.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
It wasn't what I would.

Speaker 3 (23:11):
Call the most professionally written paper, but it was also
a paper that was announcing a discovery that had all
of its work ahead of it.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
So instead of waiting ten years.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
To publish a paper about their find, which is often
what happens in these fields, they said, we're going to
publish everything we found, make a bunch of conclusionary statements
figured out later.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
Cool, well, part you just come along for the ride, everybody, Oh,
and they did it.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
You know, they made brought some money into the through
a Netflix special and did public talks and sold some books.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yeah, you know, and people complained about that. But a
couple of.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
Things going on questionable, well questionable if it was in
the United States. Lieburger is running archaeology in South Africa,
which doesn't have the most resources being thrown at science.
Not that America can talk anymore, but.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
But you know a couple of things.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
First, you wanted to make sure that all of the
local researchers from the university and from the region were
involved and had stakeholder roles throughout all of this. Also,
by bringing money in they can to his organization, they
can keep doing more research internally. So instead of just

(24:41):
we're going to send these bones to the US and
the UK or whatever and have you guys analyze him
and write your papers on him. He was being selfish
in a way, but also like supporting scientists and supporting
the research anyway. Now this time, yeah, they've got oh

(25:01):
I remember like six different nations of researchers, twenty something
thirty something researchers or all authors on this new paper
where they've gone and done a much more thorough deep
dive and the conclusion, the main conclusion about the burial,
which is what this paper is focused.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
On, stands they have ruled out water flow.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
There does not seem to have been water flowing at
any point throughout this cave, so it hasn't been like
the bones were somehow deposited there and then just covered
up by water carrying bones or water carrying dirt and
sediment over them. Part of that is because a lot
of the bones are fully articulated, so you have like

(25:47):
the whole arm with the wrist right there. So these
these were bodies that were placed there. There's no signs
of animal activity or anything like this. They haven't been disturbed.
And then some of the bones everything will be articulated,
and then there's a bunch of missing stuff with another

(26:07):
burial in that place that's been disturbed, which indicates that
it was not only used as burial, but that there
were there were multiple burials, so maybe even generational. It
could have been there for you know, they could have
been using this for hundreds of not thousands of years,
doing burials in the same cave where they would go

(26:28):
in and dig out and move some of the old
bones aside as they placed the new lands Homono Letti itself,
if we're unfamiliar, kind of an interesting mix. It's almost
the opposite of what you would expect. It's got it's
about five feet tall, has hands and feet and kind

(26:49):
of lower legs that are very much like a modern human,
but its hips are more like an asteropithecal Like it goes,
it skips home, erected, it goes back to a more apish.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Hip structure, shoulder structure.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
So it's one of these weird things where if you've
taken any single if they had found just the hip,
if they found just the hands, you would have ended
up extrapolating a very different species based on just a
few subtle clues, right that you would you would you
would expect, Yeah, but no, because they've got complete skeletons,

(27:31):
they can they can completely define Homono Letty.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
And so much too. It's just a massive database, like
the find is just there's lots of bones.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
And then part of this paper two is introducing the
fact that they've opened up a couple more chambers within
this cave system that also have burial bones. There's some
allusion to a stone feature that looks like it was
intentional placed, but they say there will be more analysis
on that in the future. And this and there was

(28:08):
a time frame that I don't think was in the
original that I think they've narrowed down for when And
I think, now there's a minimum age on this of
around two hundred and forty thousand years.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
So let's see, let me see if I've got that right.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
Yeah, yeah, so over, So it's over now they know
it's over two hundred and forty possibly three hundred thousand years.
So this would have been meant that somewhere in Africa,
very early human Homo sapiens current modern humans are running
around already doing their thing, would have been one of

(28:50):
I think eight hominins human hominin type things wandering around.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, maybe nine.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
Because there's like I knew, you know, there's other Like
we keep finding other ones that are like, well, there's
like the that skull uh in Greece. It's like, well,
they didn't quite fit anywhere. It's a lot of doesn't
quite fit anyway. It looks like there was a lot
of a lot of humans that almost all went extinct.

(29:21):
And the thing about this one is too that I
find interesting is like if if it's if they've been
using a spot for burial over and over and over
for generations.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
Where were they They weren't living in this cave.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
There's no signs of them doing There's like no food,
bones and none of that stuff.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
They weren't living in the cave. They were depositing the
dead here. Where were they living? What were they doing
somewhere on the surface.

Speaker 5 (29:42):
So I'm not saying I have any hypotheses based on this,
but I just kind of want to mention that elephant graveyards.
Do you guys know what to think about that? It's
the talks about it. Yeah, it's talked about in in
like story and in myths and stuff, where you know,

(30:02):
elephants go there and they mourn they're dead and all
this kind of stuff. But really the situation is that
elephants have a finite number of teeth. They grind them
down throughout their lives, and when they get old, pretty
much the only thing they can eat is squishy swamp food,
and so old elephants go and they eat the squishy
swamp food and they eventually die, and so they all

(30:25):
die in the same place. So I'm just throwing out there.
Like I said, I don't have a hypothesis. I don't
have like maybe it's this, but it could be that
they are putting dead individuals into this space, or it
could be that infirm individuals are going into this space
and then die.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
Some of them are are and some of them are adolescent,
some of them are teenagers.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
There's a range.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
And that's why they say it looks like a graveyard,
because in a graveyard you tend to see like a battlefield,
you should see all kind of adults. But this one
is this is the range of ages.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
And so that's that's part of the sense.

Speaker 5 (31:09):
Yeah, I don't know. I was just like, man, was
there like a mushroom in here or something that they
were like going in there and looking for you know, just.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, this is the earliest. This is the earliest.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Now, I think burial much earlier than current modern humans.
But Neanderthals. There were debates for a long time about
whether burials that we were seeing with Neanderthals were intentional
or not, And it turns out we found.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Now more and more examples that yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:39):
Neanderthals did occasionally bury their dead and and I think
it was Lee Burger at some point is the one
that was putting this forward. But it's not necessarily a
supernatural connection. It's not necessarily even a sentimental.

Speaker 5 (31:57):
Completely connected hygienic.

Speaker 3 (31:59):
Yeah, it could be a combination of hygienic, you don't
want to attract predators and maybe maybe the if you
the first time that you see a dear loved one
who was you know, left out on the open tundra
there or what do you call it in the planes
there they got the savannah, they got torn to pieces

(32:25):
by a pack of hyenas wandering off with their head
and their arm and their leg and whatever.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
It was so traumatic that whatever hamins were like, you know,
from now on.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
Let's do a cupboard thing where they we don't have
to see that again, you know.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, And if you think about you know, this is
earlier than Homo sapien or our earliest you know, are
the human burial. But we keep finding pieces of evidence
pushing everything back related to our social activity. We know
that there is concern about predators. We know there's in

(33:05):
social groups. There is evidence for actions by social animals
by the upset by like psychological you know, upset mental
strain in other primates that don't have language, that don't
have the problem solving that to the level that we do.

(33:27):
So if they are thought to have had, you know,
a growing brain case and something that is very on
the way to being totally human or comparable, why not.

Speaker 3 (33:40):
Yeah, And then there was the one last thing. The
brain is kind of on the small side, the brain case,
but the internal foldings of those small brain cases.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Look very much like a current modern human.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
And that's one of the other like really cool things.
They have so many like amazingly intact portions of the
fossil that they can see the internal imprint in the skull,
and they can see that the brain folding looked very
much like a current modern human, even though it was
a much smaller brain. It was tidy kind of like
a like even like the homon a leg or not.

(34:20):
The Homo florensis is like they're like three feet tall,
like I almost can't even picture, you know, skinny three
foot tall with the tiny, even smaller brain. But they
had evidence of tools and you know, spears and things.
So these a lot of our preconceptions of what we
would expect have been overturned in the last twenty years.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
When it comes to what what evolutionary points in.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
Human development would be required for us to do this,
that or the other.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
So yeah, well let's move on from human evolution and
development to koala chlamydia.

Speaker 5 (35:03):
Hmm, yeah, koala chlamydia is ready to be treated in
the bush, isn't that where it's yeah, yeah, it's uh.
The first vaccine for koala chlamydia is ready to go.

(35:26):
This is developed by the University of sun of the
Sunshine Coast and the approval by Australia's Veterinary Medicine Regulator
IS is the next step in this fight against what
in many cases is the greatest thread threat to koalas.
This has been over a ten year project developing the

(35:49):
vaccine to protect koalas, and in many cases chlamydia can
and of course in UTIs, but also in in for utility,
huge impact to the species blindness and it actually can
kill koalas. And so this is now looking at a

(36:09):
single dose vaccine with no need for a booster. So
you could grab a koala, give them a quick stick,
maybe give them a notch in an ear or something
like that, so you'd know that they've gotten their vaccine
and they are done for their life. That's it. And
so you could potentially target areas where you know infection

(36:31):
rates are high. You could target individuals that you know
are approaching breeding age because it is a sexually transmitted disease,
and so there are ways that you could kind of
strategically plan on how to administer these. Obviously, administering individuals
with vaccines in a wild population is not ideal, like

(36:55):
you want to figure out an easier way to do this,
but Koalas, their populations are just plummeting and have been
for the entire time that I've been on this show.
So it's been you know, almost two decades that these
these guys have been really struggling, and so this ten
year study is really showing some great promise to save

(37:22):
the species. Honestly, in some particular colonies, infection rates are
as high as seventy percent. In a lot of cases,
these vaccines have been really really effective. They first they
started on captive animals and in animals that were from
the wild that were being rehabilitated, and now they are

(37:44):
looking at deploying this in the wild. And so in
their study they found that it reduced the likelihood of
qualas developing symptoms of chlamydia during breeding age and decreased mortality.
This is crazy in the wild by at least sixty
five percent. WHOA yeah, yeah, exactly wow. And so they

(38:08):
have had hundreds of test subjects. It looks ready to go.
I think the thing that is important to mention is,
as is the case with a lot of human STIs
the main plan of attack is antibiotics, and particularly with koalas,
antibiotics are a huge issue because, as I am sure

(38:34):
we've talked about many times because I find it so fascinating,
they have a very particular microbiome to be able to
eat eucalyptus. If we tried to survive off of eucalyptus,
we could not. We would die. And it's because they
have a very particular microbiome that allows them to a
not be poisoned by it, but also b actually extract

(38:56):
nutrients from this plant. And so if you give them
a systemic dose of antibiotics, it wipes out the microbiome
in their stomach and in some cases the individuals can
fully starve and die after having their antibiotics. So you've
cured them of the chlamydia, and now they die because

(39:16):
they can't eat eucalyptus anymore, so a vaccine. A vaccine
is a much better choice in this case. But also
because as an STI has a very particular way of spreading.
So if you can apply a vaccine prior to them

(39:38):
reaching breeding age, then that means you're not going to
have the same spread each time they copulate throughout their life,
right if they're infected, So that's reducing the opportunity to
become a vector of this STI. So this, this is
huge And of course Terry Irwin from the Australia Zoo

(40:02):
Wildlife Hospital, yes Steve's wife, she is part of the
effort to get the word out, to fundraise for this
and to actually develop an implementation plan in the wild.
And so I am very excited to see what comes
of all of this. But I love I love the
idea that we might actually be able to see some

(40:24):
some positive movement on the Koala chlamydia front, because as
silly as it is to talk about koala sexually transmitted diseases,
in this case it really was a threat to their species.

Speaker 1 (40:39):
I wonder, I mean, we've we've got the uh, what's
the the animal in New Zealand that has the facial tumors.

Speaker 5 (40:49):
That oh, the Tasmanian tigers.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
The Tasmanian the Tasmanian.

Speaker 5 (40:54):
Sorry, devil, not the Tasanian tiger. That's that's extinct.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
Sorry, So there that also is like a hepatitis or
like a transmitted by contact.

Speaker 5 (41:07):
It's transmitted via bite.

Speaker 7 (41:08):
But yes, absolutely, and so that finding these endangered or
threatened animals, that there is something where we could possibly
relatively easily, now that we found this, be able to
treat and combat things that kill them and reduce the
populations even more and make them healthier and happier.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
I think it's great.

Speaker 5 (41:31):
Yeah, And I don't know what the treatment options are,
but you know, when you're trying to vaccinate wild animals,
if it's a single dose with no booster, you could
you could potentially administer things via dart too, Like that
would be super cool. I don't know how you would
mark them as having received it. That's kind of where
you run into trouble. But no, right, I know, right,

(41:58):
it also gives them a little tattoo the same time.
I don't know, but yeah, it's very whatever. Yeah, that
that's I mean, this is this is really a situation
where the issue was identified quickly. I would say, like
all of a sudden, it was a big deal. Oh
my god, all the Callas are getting lamydia. And there

(42:20):
was a lot of fundraising. Yep, there was a lot
of awareness, and there was a lot of research that
started this research. This particular piece of research was ten
years of research that continued, continued to be funded, it
continued to be supported, and in the end it resulted
in a real solution. And so I think, you know,

(42:40):
we don't often get to have that part of the conversation.
We get to talk about issues, we get to talk
about ideas, we get to talk about trials. We don't
get to talk about, hey, we might have actually found
a solution to this problem, and we might have had
enough study done that we can actually implement the solution now.
And so I do think that's really exciting, and so
I wanted to bring every buy a little bit of

(43:01):
good news on that front.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
Thank you for the good news. We all need good news.

Speaker 5 (43:07):
So at least in Australia, Koalas can get their vaccines.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
Thanks for that. Jab. Anyway, moving on, let's talk about
some new directions we're looking at for treating cancer. So
Researchers have been looking at the microbes in the gut
for a long time and they have identified microbes that
hang out with tumors in the colon. So when you

(43:34):
have colon cancer, tumors in the colon often have certain
types of bacteria that tend to hang out with those
tumors as well. Some of them slow down tumor growth
and others speed it up right, So it's always a
question of what bacteria are there, what are they creating chemically, like,
how are they signaling and communicating with the tumors to

(43:57):
be able to get what they need, Because it's really
all about the microbes. What they have discovered with this
this study that was just published in I think Cell
Systems or what is it, Yes, Cell Systems, it's a
Cell Cell Press journal article. This particular study, they were

(44:21):
able to look do a high through put four way
screen to be able to discover a particular compound that E.
Coli associated within C. Elegance. This is not human state,
but they did this massive C. Elegance through put four
way screen. They determined that there is a molecule that

(44:45):
is released by the E. Coli that slows down the
tumor growth and in slowing down the tumor growth. They
were like, hey, this is really interesting, and so then
they were like what does it do and what is
it like? And they determined that this molecule also works
along with a common chemotherapy drug that is called five FU.

(45:12):
And I think that they acronymed it as FU. I
know there is scientific naming, but I think that FU
is just that saying that to cancer. That is my guess. Anyway,
the researchers were able to through the throughput, be able
to determine that this together, these two molecules, the one

(45:34):
created by the bacteria and the one and the drug
that is already in use, they work together synergistically to
actually make anti cancer better. So together they get rid
of cancer than either one alone. And so they then
were like, hey, I wonder if we can take this

(45:56):
natural E Coli produced comp found and make it synthetically.
So they were able to make it synthetically and they
found that their synthetic version actually worked better than the E.
Coli version, and so that testing it in all sorts
of systems, they were able to show that this compound

(46:17):
made by E. Coli and this chemotherapy drug drug five
fu together are able to reduce cancer tumor growth better
than either one alone. So maybe we will be getting
more of our drugs to fight cancer and other diseases

(46:40):
from our microbes. We just have to look what they're at,
what they're doing.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
Yeah, I mean our old approach was just a pretty
bart back. We will kill all of the weak cells,
we will cut out the affected areas, and then we'll
wait for a few centuries until something else comes along.

Speaker 5 (47:11):
It was like quite literally the nuclear option, right, So
we were using before. It's I mean, when isn't excellent
medical treatments just waiting for us in nature? Here we
go put.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
Them together, find it in nature now sometimes we just
come across things on our oh in nature usually Yeah. Anyway,
there's potential to develop new drugs from natural microbial products.
What you got justin?

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (47:44):
Has anybody ever noticed that bees are social creatures?

Speaker 1 (47:51):
Yes?

Speaker 5 (47:51):
What?

Speaker 1 (47:53):
Maybe?

Speaker 3 (47:53):
Well it turns out these are social creatures and apparently
I no longer have nice story. Hang on one second, Well,
I have technical I have it.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
I know, how do you have it? Because I have
to reopen.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
It, click the links and you put it in the rundown.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
Put it in the rundown, but then I closed it somewhere. Okay.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
Uh So this is basically a genetic analysis of bees,
and they found that a lot of the genes and
bees associated with their social the social individual variation, and
sociability seem like similar genes that we would find in humans.

(48:41):
Fansypcom sequencing real over nine hundred genes that were more
highly expressed in the brain. They're more frequently a be
interacted with the nest mates. Whole gam sequencing of this
is a three hundred and fifty seven bees revealed eighteen
genetic variants associated with the tendency do.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
You share nutritious liquid with test mates?

Speaker 3 (49:05):
Yeah, and they share similar sequence to genes that have
previously been linked to autism in humans. With some of
the variants that they found. Are bees just autistic? Is
that what this is?

Speaker 1 (49:20):
I don't think so. I think these genes are They're
probably involved in this social behavior, and there may be
more expression of them in or different expression of them
in individuals who are artistic, or maybe it's how they're
expressed in the human brain.

Speaker 3 (49:35):
So what is really wild to me about this is
if there's a genetic underpinning for sociability that bees have
and humans have, and they have some sort of structural
overlap where they seem to be similar genes doing similar things.

(49:56):
Part of it is like, well, you're these are in
instruction proteins maybe that are being sent out and the
basic machinery of brains is not that far removed. Maybe
it's something like that, but it could also mean you
could also maybe extrapolate that there's a shared origin of sociability.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
That you would have to go all the way back
to the common human and be ancestor.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Kind of way back there, like yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 (50:30):
So I need to see prairie dog brains and their
genes and what's happening with them.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
I need to see like, yeah, is it convergent evolution
or is.

Speaker 5 (50:42):
This yeah, naked mole rats, what's going on with them?

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Right?

Speaker 5 (50:47):
So pick kind of these like social networking animals, ants,
what are ants doing? And see where the commonalities are
because otherwise is this just convergence.

Speaker 3 (51:01):
Well, it's been six hundred million years or so ish
since we were related to bees, like since since we
were we're our bee and human ancestor were the same thing,
and you know, then you're talking about possibly the basic
infrastructure of all social insects, social mammals, social everything on

(51:28):
land having having the same the same sort of set
of instructions about working together. Now, that doesn't seem like
it would be too far fast. My gosh, microbes seem
to have levels of interaction. But this is this is
at the brain level, right, This is something that has

(51:52):
been preserved and is part of what brains as the
controller of the individual life form is working with a
set of instructions that go beyond the individual. Right.

Speaker 5 (52:06):
Well, and these calling what these have a brain is
kind of tough to It's like a ball of.

Speaker 8 (52:11):
Nerves quite it's gangrain is like very generous, so much
with it, right, Yeah, oh absolutely, I'm not saying that
it's like, not as an insult.

Speaker 5 (52:24):
I'm just saying structurally, it doesn't really look like a brain.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
Yeah, But it's this is chemical, right, This is these
are the molecules that or the genes that are in
there that set up the molecules, the proteins, the enzymes,
et cetera, to trigger stuff to make stuff happen. And
we have seen that there is a lot of a

(52:50):
lot of conservation between different different species over hundreds of
thousands of years that that there are basic needs for
connecting with other individuals for survival for and with bees especially,
this is involved in how they find food. Right, So
there's going to be if there were basic coding, if

(53:15):
there was basic coding for chemicals that were involved in
some kind of a pathway that led to positive reinforcement
for connect like sharing information in some way. I don't
I'm not saying I know how that would work necessarily,
but yeah, but I I it makes sense that there

(53:36):
would be conservation of certain instructions. But that's the question.
Is it conservation?

Speaker 5 (53:46):
Right?

Speaker 3 (53:46):
Because convergently, you can you can sort of picture those
those triggers, those mechanisms when you create a protein, when
you have a gene that's creating a protein that's going
off and eliciting work that if it affects things in
the right way, then maybe that is a convergent thing.

(54:07):
Maybe that gene just pops up a lot of places
and because it's successful or or it's shared, or life
is always been social, and actually the real anomaly is
the unsocial creatures. The unsocial forms of life are really
the ones we got to start looking at, going like, well,
why isn't that life form like other life forms of

(54:28):
its kind.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
Why is it, Well, it's an antisocial life form.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Everything about life is seeking, is gathering information from the
environment and then preservation of the organism. And so what
are the things that need to happen to preserve the
organism and to send out the genes again right to transfer,

(54:54):
to reproduce, and so all those things are the basics,
and that is going to be we found. It's if
you're alone, you're probably going to die because you're not
going to reproduce. So you have to at the basic
level begin well, you're going to die eventually, unless you're
like a sea urchin or something like that, but you're.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
Or clam, what is it?

Speaker 3 (55:17):
The oldest life form is that like five hundred year
old clam they found in like Norway or something.

Speaker 5 (55:23):
Well, and jellyfisher im mortal depending on how you know
you look at.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
How you look at it. But if the goal is reproduction,
survival and reproduction, you're eventually going to have to figure
out a way to be with others like you. And
you're either going to be with them because you all
spawned in the same place and didn't then go other places,
or you're going to have to find them or you've

(55:48):
all comment together in a way to live together communally, socially. Right,
So there's like these different solutions to the problem. But yeah,
I don't know. So the solutions there's base code and
those codes. There may just be a limited set of
instructions that have evolved and adapted and mutated, you know,

(56:10):
to get where we are today. But isn't is it
conserved or convergent? That's what I want to know. We
don't know the answer, isn't there is it?

Speaker 2 (56:21):
Oh? And can we create a drug that makes people more.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
Social because we have a loneliness?

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (56:28):
Isn't that just alcohol?

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Oh? No? Oh no, no, Hey, just a quick question
because we're in the Pacific. I'm in the Pacific Northwest.
You're a little bit further south of me right now,
my friends, But do you like earthquakes?

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Like love them?

Speaker 5 (56:51):
Ed?

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Do you ever think about earthquakes and how much energy
an earthquake actually has and how much energy is going
to the shaking of the earth versus other things?

Speaker 5 (57:04):
Interesting? I mean I assume quite a bit though it
is just all on like gelatinous soup.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
So right, the surface is like where there shaking the
ground shakes, right, What is the thing?

Speaker 3 (57:19):
If the planet was an egg, an eggshell, a plant,
the planet Earth is mantle compared to an egg shell,
the eggshell would be like four or five times thicker
than the Earth's crust is actually.

Speaker 2 (57:33):
On the planet.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
Like that's how what a narrow band of crustiness that
we are living upon.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
But that crustiness we have plates of crust, you know,
so separate pieces of crust that have been put on
top of the pie egg like this, they come together
and the motion into like Blair is doing, smushing.

Speaker 5 (57:54):
Up, they go across slide, yes.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Slip faults. There's subduction transverse fault?

Speaker 5 (58:04):
Is this one?

Speaker 1 (58:04):
I think exactly? So, MIT researchers have been creating lab
quakes because you can't really go and measure all the
factors related to energy in an earthquake as it's happening
in the crust of the Earth. That'd be hard. So
they took a bunch of granite and they powdered it
up and they stuck it into a pressure thing where

(58:29):
plates would like smush these little powdered granite bits together
really like like a I guess, like two plates coming
together to see what would happen, and they had piezoelectric
detectors to get motion. They had magnetic particles in the
mix as well, so that they could use magnetic changes,

(58:53):
polarity changes, and shifts in the magnetism to infer heat
and energy transfer in different ways. And the researchers eventually
have determined by creating earthquakes in the lab that what
goes to the shaking is really not much of the

(59:13):
energy at all, maybe about ten percent or so you
can get about I don't know, maybe twenty percent maybe
thirty percent max. To the shaking. The rest of it
goes to the slipping and the movement, and then the
heat and the majority of the energy in an earthquake

(59:34):
actually leads to heating the area around the epicenter of
the quake. And when they were doing these experiments in
the laboratory, apparently they were able to create slippage and
movement within their lab quake that heated up so much
that it was hot enough to melt material and create glass.

(01:00:01):
So the stuff that they saw under the microscope was
very indicative of the kind of rocks that we find
in areas where earthquakes have taken place. Once we go
and look, and so the fracturing of the rock, the
way that the crystals and shards are formed and cracked,
and what happens to the rocks. Anyway, they're now creating

(01:00:23):
lab quakes, and it's not you're all, regular earthquake, but
the way that they're doing it, they're hoping that they
can understand what's happening in earthquakes a lot more to
be able to figure out if one area has had
an earthquake before, what does that mean for future earthquakes
depending on how the area heated up, how the earth

(01:00:43):
in the crust may have changed as a result of
that heating, and how it may have impacted a phase
change or some aspect of the rocks. Anyway they want
to extrapolate. But right now they're doing lab quakes, lub quakes.
I took myself away. Why'd I do that? I don't know. Hey, everybody,

(01:01:07):
this is this Week in Science, and we are just
here for a moment to say thank you so much
for listening to the show, for being here, and for
appreciating the science that we bring to you during the show.
We love talking about science and we love talking about
it with you. Thank you for supporting the show and

(01:01:27):
being part of what we do every week. Our science
is supported by listeners like you, So if you are
hoping to help the show, please head over to twist
dot org, join our Patreon community as a supporter, and
if that is not something that you can do, please
share the show with someone you know. Thank you for
your support. We really can't do it without you. Alrighty

(01:01:52):
coming home back for that amazing part of the show
that everyone looks forward to week in and week out.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Is it the end already? Geez?

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
Yes, No, it is Blair's animal corner.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
Oh yeah, with Blair, she loves hot creatures.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
Five pedal pad.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
You want to hear about the animals.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Except for giant pad.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
Sir, you got Blair.

Speaker 5 (01:02:40):
I want to tell you about ghost sharks story time. Yes,
they are a deep sea fish. They're in a group
known as chimeras, and they're related to sharks and rays.
They're cardilaginous fish and they have they have a weird
rod that juts out of their foreheads, the males do,

(01:03:04):
and they have what appear to be teeth on top
of them. So just picture, if you will, a weird
deep sea shark looking fish with a rod sticking out
of their forehead that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
Has teeth on the end, so a little bit odd.

Speaker 5 (01:03:26):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's not unexpected in deep
sea fish to find just very very strange looking things. This,
this forehead rod is called a tenaculum, which is also
I was looking it up, that's also the name of
a medical instrument. And so the word tenaculum means is

(01:03:48):
from Latin tenaire to hold. Tenaculum in medical in the
medical field, is a holding instrument. It's so it's it's
it's it's basically just like it's not quite forceps, but
they look kind of like forces a surgical clamp with
hooks at the end. So you can understand why this

(01:04:10):
looks like the way this is called a tenaculum. But anyway,
this all comes from the question why the heck do
they have teeth on there? Are they actually teeth? Like
in terms of development of this animal from the fetal stage, like,
what's happening here genetically? What's happening? How do you have

(01:04:31):
teeth on there? Now? The first thing that I thought
of was, well, sharks are covered in dermal denticles, which
means skin teeth, and so is this just more of that,
because that seems like a very easy jump. Sharks have
skin teeth. This thing has teeeth on the end of
a bony petrusion on their forehead, sure, right, and so

(01:04:53):
that would be kind of like the path of least
resistance for understanding what's happening here. But the University of
Florida researchers looked at this thing. They included some scientists
from the University of Washington University of Chicago. They studied
fossils and living specimens. They looked at a three hundred

(01:05:16):
and fifty fifteen million year old fossil that had a
tenaculum attached to their upper jaw bearing teeth, and this
was similar to those in their mouths, so it was
on their forehead, it was near their jaw. This appendage
is most likely used to hold the female in place
well mating, which males can do this with just their

(01:05:37):
mouths in other sharp in shark species, but in this
case it's like it's like a hook for keeping the
females they're dream mating. But so then they also collected
current specimens from Puget Sound. They looked at this thing
on their forehead, and so then they also looked at
genetics and they found that the teeth do look like

(01:06:01):
rows of shark teeth. They they don't look as much
like the skin teeth. They were able to make teeth
that were similar to the teeth from the mouth. So
when they looked at kind of like the development, it
looked the same as mouth teeth development. And that uh.

(01:06:22):
They looked at sea tee scans of the fossils and
the modern individuals, they really just looked like teeth teeth,
not skin teeth, teeth teeth. And then they looked at
genetics and they found that the tenaculum teeth were using
the same genes from true teeth. They had nothing to

(01:06:42):
do with the genetics related to dermal denticles. So these
are just teeth and so this is this is yeah,
and so this is an example of what they call
evolutionary tinkering or bricklage, which is like a just just like.

Speaker 1 (01:07:02):
Isn't that an artistic technique?

Speaker 5 (01:07:04):
Yes, it's just like it's just evolution being like what
about this? And so this is the super weird application
of genes that are used for something else Entirely. There's
like what if I put teeth here that worked for
this group of deep sea individuals, and so they kept them.
And so there you go. There's ghost sharks with a

(01:07:26):
tenaculum with teeth coming out of their forehead.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
Yeah, tried it out. Seem to work, kind of liked it.
I survived.

Speaker 5 (01:07:36):
That's cute.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:07:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
And then moving on, how does it or does it
just like stab it's it's.

Speaker 5 (01:07:46):
I assume it's a flick situation. Yeah, it's like a
stabby flicky of just like whoo gotcha. Yeah, yeah, they
don't have it doesn't move, it's just it's a unicorn horn.
It's just sticking out of the ahead.

Speaker 2 (01:08:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:08:02):
Yeah, but yeah, I didn't realize I had kind of
a theme to my animal corner today. I have I
have strange evolutionary adaptations and why the heck does this
animal have that? So this, Yes, I love the ghost
fish and their and their teeth coming out of their forehead.
I want to talk about the Mattador bug bit elippies.

(01:08:27):
They're from Panama. They have red flags on their hind
legs and they perform an intricate leg waving display. And
so if you're gonna guess why why might this animal
have these red flags on their legs and wave them
around in a special fashion.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
Over here.

Speaker 1 (01:08:46):
Hey, yes, over here, Hey, just over here, Come eat me?

Speaker 5 (01:08:52):
Is it come eat me? Or is it? What do
you think it is?

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
Ladies, My guesses are going to be living somewhere where
visibility is not great, and so they're going to be like, hey, hey,
I'm over here.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
Hey where are you?

Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
Oh I'm over here, because they probably don't know how
to talk.

Speaker 5 (01:09:11):
So the assumption would be nine times out of ten,
if you see a colorful display that is partnered with
some sort of like dance or action, that is going
to be to get the attention of females. So that
is the expectation here, and that would be the kind
of open and close shutcase normally of just like that's

(01:09:33):
what this is. But hey, why am I bringing you
this story?

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
It's not that no, actually, yeah, so we just showed
a little clip of this thing, ye talking and it
wasn't what I was picturing. What that looks like is
almost like berries or something so.

Speaker 5 (01:09:55):
Interesting. So it's the jury is still out on exactly
what's happening here. But let me tell you what researchers
have figured out. So first of all, first kind of uh,
falsification of this idea that that it has to do
with a sexual display. Both males and females have them,

(01:10:15):
not totally unheard of, when you know, it's just kind
of like a sexy sun hypothesis where it just so
happens the genetics shakeout where the females have it too.
That's possible, right, But that's kind of your first clue that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
You have.

Speaker 5 (01:10:33):
Something else going on here, both males and females have
I want.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
To rephrase because now we've played another clip and I
got a better look at it. Yes, in that clip,
and it looks now it looks like a reddened leaf,
like a leaf that's like lost its screen, like a
decaying leaf.

Speaker 5 (01:10:48):
Mm hmm. Yeah. But it's it's a it's a it's
a vibrant color. It's a weird shape to have in
their legs. It's it's very unusual. And so if it's
not for sexual display, why would they have it. And
what Kiki's showing us right now is a video of
this matador bug waving his legs in a very particular

(01:11:10):
way at a praying mantis. And as we know, mantises
are famous for eating everybody. Yeah, and so the flags
appear to have something to do with deterring predators, which
let's have a reminder of a couple things. So the

(01:11:32):
first reaction to that is like, well, why would you
want to call attention to yourself in front of predators?
In most cases in the animal kingdom and in real life,
you know, if you see a threat, you don't want
to be seen, so you'd want to kind of blend
into the background. But as we know, there are brightly

(01:11:53):
colored animals that display warning color for predators. They can
say don't eat me, I'm poisonous, or they can look
like the eyes of an owl, I'm bigger than you are.
Actually stay away from me. Right, So there's all sorts
of reasons. There's mimicry, there's there's all sorts of like

(01:12:17):
warning patterns they can have. So there's all different signals
that animals can provide to predators that just says like
I'm not worth it, leave me alone. And so researchers
looked at these mad at our bugs and their reaction
to praying mantises, predators and katie DIDs harmless just conspecifics

(01:12:40):
just like, hey, we're on the same leaf, so right,
And so they looked at three thousand leg waves. On average,
bugs increased their waving behavior sevenfold in the presence of mantids.
Barely ever responded to katie DIDs, and mantids never attacked
bugs while they were waving. So this is a signal

(01:13:01):
that mantids are receiving and going, gotcha have a good day.
It's an anti predator behavior. But the question is why
so yeah, exactly, so, these flagwaving insects they eat passion
flower vines, they carry toxins. They could be advertising that

(01:13:24):
they are poisonous. Like I mentioned before, we don't know
that for sure. We don't know if the passion flower
vines are specifically poisonous to mantids. We don't know kind
of what the indication would be that where they'd have
to wave their legs instead of just looking a particular color, right, Like,
what's the addition here beyond just looking like they're poisonous.

Speaker 3 (01:13:47):
So then the guess that if I can, if I
can jump in y would be it's doing something particular
to the manta's vision that just being a stationary color
alone wouldn't have achieved.

Speaker 5 (01:14:00):
Great. So the second hypothesis they have is that it
actually is confusing their vision somehow, So it has nothing
to do with the toxicity. But the fact that they
have these flags on their legs, they are a bright
color and they are waving them could in fact be
kind of giving them the disease and going, I gotta go.

(01:14:23):
So that is another option. Is it intimidating them? Are
they mimicking a predator? Is there an exaggerated motion that's
making them look bigger than they are, making them look
like something else entirely, there's lots of opportunities here that
you know, they could be taking advantage of for whatever reason.

(01:14:44):
Some of these bugs had fat legs that were bright
colored in some mutations and it worked. And so like
what it's the it's the combination of the shape, the color,
and the dance that I think is really interesting because
it is a complicated display that usually we only ever

(01:15:05):
see in sexual selection. We don't see this kind of
like performative display with anti predator action as often, I
would say.

Speaker 3 (01:15:16):
And and and to that evolutionary point, that's it might
have been how it started, right, It may have been
a mat display, but it turned out like its most
effective use was preventing predation.

Speaker 5 (01:15:31):
Right right, And so when females occasionally had them, then
they survived, and so they carried on the genes of
females having them, And so yes, you could totally see
how that would kind of snowball over time, that it
was like a happy accident that they did it for
sexual selection and then it ended up being helpful in
preventing predation. Yes, there's lots of pathways. We have a

(01:15:53):
long evolutionary runway. Yeah, so you know, it's been.

Speaker 3 (01:15:57):
A long time everything about man perception, right do they
do they do they have like a persistent or slow
processing speed?

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
I guess on visions vision.

Speaker 3 (01:16:11):
Yeah, so that so that this waving that we can
see clearly is like moving a thing becomes a single
large blurred object perhaps right like like now we need
to see things from the eyes of the mantis to
see how it is affecting their decision making.

Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
Yep.

Speaker 5 (01:16:30):
Yeah, these are all great questions and I can't wait
to find out more.

Speaker 2 (01:16:35):
Oh wait, I thought you had the answer. We were
just I was just throwing trying to throw as many.

Speaker 3 (01:16:40):
Speculations out there ahead of getting the actual answer.

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):
But I have to wait.

Speaker 5 (01:16:46):
Oh no, they've got to.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
I'm just thinking they have to have great vision. I
think praying mantises are known for having really good vision
because they're predators and they're very often not striking out
at stationary pray. They are stalking prey. They are going
after prey that's moving.

Speaker 4 (01:17:05):
So I.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
Know, I think they like their eyes are really special
in the insect world.

Speaker 5 (01:17:12):
And I feel like it says they have three D vision,
a wide field of view, an excellent depth perception for
catching prey. Yeah, you're dead on.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
So they're going to be not it's not gonna be blurry.
They're going to be perceiving the movement. But what is
it stimulating or not stimulating?

Speaker 3 (01:17:33):
Is it?

Speaker 5 (01:17:34):
Yeah? In a study that I am assuming I covered
on the show. If I did not, it is a
it is it is. It should be illegal. They made
tiny three D glasses for praying mantises back in twenty
eighteen to check their depth perception. This does sound vaguely familiar.

Speaker 3 (01:17:52):
Huh.

Speaker 5 (01:17:52):
I feel like I must have reported on this, right,
I must have. I think that's amazing. That's amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
Okay, so they have a three D vision, but maybe
it's maybe it's not like what we would consider the
three dvision because in that in that image that you showed.
It wasn't just waving, but it was sort of moving
things mirror and further away. Each leg was sort of
moving the these flags closer and then further away, closer,

(01:18:24):
and then further away. So maybe it was disrupting the
processing of the death perception.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
Yeah, apparently according to previous research, praying mantises have terrible
red and uh yellow vision.

Speaker 5 (01:18:44):
Those are the colors, right, Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:18:47):
Interesting, so they have great that's interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:18:50):
Bring that up in the article. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
No, we'll get to the bottom of this before the
end of the show.

Speaker 5 (01:18:58):
Six hours later. Huh, we'll figure it out, the three
of us. Where's our grant.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
Anyway, mantis's great vision, except not in color. So what
are these yellow and red waving matadors doing?

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
I love it?

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
Justin What do you have?

Speaker 4 (01:19:17):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
I don't know. Do I still have more stories? Ah?

Speaker 5 (01:19:21):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:19:22):
This is out of the University of California, Berkeley. First
ever measurements of ethanol content and fruits available to chimpanzees
and their native African habitat shows that animals could be
easily consuming the equivalent of more than two alcoholic drinks
a day. According to the researchers the University of California, Berkeley.

(01:19:48):
It's not clear, according to this pressure release, whether they
are actually seeking out fruit with high ethanol levels, because
these are also typically riper fruit that also have more
sugars to ferment in them. So it may be a
sweetness that's the lore, but the availability of ethanol the

(01:20:09):
fermentation process happening within these fruits naturally that the normally
eating suggests that alcohol is a regular part of chimp diet.

Speaker 1 (01:20:21):
A regular part, oh regular part.

Speaker 5 (01:20:25):
So well, it's got your carbs, it's got your sugars,
it's everything you need, right and the buzz and just
eat a few bugs for protein. You've got a balanced meal.

Speaker 1 (01:20:37):
Do chimpanzees have the same ability to break down alcohol though?
And the metabolic byproducts of alcohol.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
That's the question, says, If chimps are eating five of
their body weight a day in ripe fruit, even in
low concentration field, high daily total, a substantial dosage of
alcohol would be would be expected. So based on average consumption,

(01:21:08):
they did the some maths, Yeah, it would be the
equivalent of a human having about two alcohol beverages a day.

Speaker 5 (01:21:22):
So do they build up like a tolerance like humans do. Right,
So like there's some people who two beers are nothing, right,
like they could they could walk a high wire after that,
they'd be fine. So it's just if they're doing this
every day, then over time, is it affecting them less

(01:21:46):
and less right?

Speaker 2 (01:21:49):
Possibly? Yea?

Speaker 3 (01:21:50):
Or are they sleeping They sleep a little bit later
some mornings than others, depending.

Speaker 5 (01:21:55):
On how So how's their liver.

Speaker 3 (01:21:59):
Average? You're talking about an average, they could go they
could very easily. Then, if you're talking about the averages
to alcoholic drinks today, you could have instances where they
found a tree where a bunch of the fruit was fermented,
and maybe they got up to like five six drinks
that day. And then then you have to start looking

(01:22:21):
at how much of chimp society is based around.

Speaker 2 (01:22:26):
Alcoholic binge eating.

Speaker 5 (01:22:28):
Yeah, like it's our drinks more right, Yeah? More violent
than other primates or are they just hungover, oh my god,
lashing out?

Speaker 1 (01:22:44):
More likely to be mean.

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):
Or friendly?

Speaker 3 (01:22:50):
There?

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
Maybe they you know, maybe they're friendlier. I don't know
where you're gonna figure out what kind of a drunk.

Speaker 3 (01:22:56):
Each chimp individually probably gets a little accent, okay, bit differently,
So I have a.

Speaker 5 (01:23:01):
Question I'm guessing you don't have an answer to, but
I just want to.

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
Throw I'll have an answer, I won't admit it.

Speaker 5 (01:23:07):
Right, So, these fermented fruits, the chims have evolved alongside
these fruits in these natural spaces for a very, very
very long time. So I'm wondering, like, when did humans
invent alcohol? Right, like pretty early in our timeline, But

(01:23:29):
our timeline is much shorter than chimp timelines, right.

Speaker 1 (01:23:32):
So Like, I'm sure though that we were making use
of fermented fruits equally, but it's the you know, the
manufacturer or the making of alcohol, right, That's that's the difference.

Speaker 5 (01:23:46):
Fair point. So yes, I guess we're not that different.
But I was just kind of wondering because if they
have been living alongside these fermented fruits for you know,
well very very long time, then how much is it
actually affecting them?

Speaker 2 (01:24:05):
That's a very good question. So this is.

Speaker 3 (01:24:09):
The title of a book. The lead research to Dudley
wrote a book in twenty fourteen, The Drunk Monkey or
the Drunken Monkey?

Speaker 2 (01:24:17):
Why are we drinking? Not even monkeys? This is what No,
he's studying this in Yes and Apes.

Speaker 3 (01:24:25):
But the Drunken Monkey hypothesis was the idea that Chimpson
Atland primates have been doing this for a very long time,
and likely early human ancestors did, and that alcohol consumption
in humans has an evolutionary basis, not just.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
A modern modern add on that we've always been drinkers.

Speaker 1 (01:24:53):
And was this study funded by the alcohol industry?

Speaker 2 (01:25:00):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:25:01):
Out to your local bar, I think it's I would
like to know if the chimpanzees are honest with how
many drinks per day with their doctors when they.

Speaker 5 (01:25:16):
Go in No way, I mean I don't have a
fruit or two. You know, it's just at the end
of the week, ton wined, you know, just like normal stuff,
you know, just like anybody, just to take the edge off.

Speaker 1 (01:25:33):
All right, to take the edge off. I want to
talk really quickly about the first insects known to clone
another species.

Speaker 5 (01:25:50):
You're talking about plants, animals.

Speaker 2 (01:25:53):
Well, insects, insects.

Speaker 5 (01:25:55):
No, but the insects are cloning plants.

Speaker 1 (01:25:59):
No, another species of ant.

Speaker 8 (01:26:03):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:26:05):
Yeah, what a weird, wild story and it's just fascinating.
Published earlier this month in Nature, researchers were looking at
a species of ant called mesor ibericus and in the
messer Ibericus species you have. This is the Iberian harvester ant.

(01:26:30):
All the colonies, the workers are hybrids, and the queens
then have to mate with males, and these hybrids are sterile.
The queens need to mate with males from a distant
related species Messor structor in order to keep the colony functioning.
So all the males, all the hybrid there's like none

(01:26:53):
in her own colony that are going to work, and
so she has to go to this other colony to
get the males. Now, the interesting thing about the way
their mating works is that there are not messer structures nearby.
These are like there's someplace else. And so they were like,

(01:27:14):
what is happening. I'm looking at these ant colonies. I'm
looking at the individuals and the colonies. All we see
are Ibericus and these hybrids, and there's obviously something happening
here and they're continuing on even though the female, the queen,
doesn't she shouldn't be able to mate, right, So then

(01:27:37):
they started doing genetic testing of the colonies to determine
what was going on in there, and they found that
the queen, it only mates once in its life, stores
the sperm from the meeting as a very special organ
to do that. And those sperm are used to make

(01:27:57):
three different kinds of ant eggs. You got other queens, workers,
hybrids or males. When they were looking at all of
the genetics for all of the samples one hundred and
thirty two males from the Iberian harvester ant colonies, they

(01:28:19):
found that there were different types of males. Half of
them ish were covered in hair, others were hairless. When
they looked at the nuclear genomes, all the hairy ones
or Ibericus, the ones without hair were structor. The queen

(01:28:40):
had never been to find a structor ant anywhere nearby,
and so the queen is laying eggs or males of
two different species. And so they looked and they're like,
are there any structor queens hiding in here where the
males struck coming from?

Speaker 5 (01:29:01):
No, no, no, they're not.

Speaker 1 (01:29:04):
So they found that mitochondrial DNA being passed down from
the queen. So they found that the mitochondrial DNA in
the structure males from this mating male the queen whitneys
from their mother, so structor of female. They found that
maternal micochondria mitochondria in the mother of the Ibericus males.

(01:29:33):
So they're like, what is happening here? They looked at
all the queens, they looked at the eggs, they looked
at all the stuff. Nine percent of the Ibericus queen
eggs contained structure males. Wow, cloning.

Speaker 4 (01:29:52):
So the.

Speaker 1 (01:29:54):
Ibericus queen is has this sperm and they've they've got
the structure males like in the colony. But the harvester
queen ants are cloning the structure males. They do not
pass down their nuclear DNA.

Speaker 5 (01:30:17):
Wow. What on Earth? Yea?

Speaker 1 (01:30:22):
So this is like what is a species?

Speaker 5 (01:30:27):
And how she like, how is she making an egg?

Speaker 1 (01:30:31):
Like? I mean, I think you know this is is
it an this whole concept of the passing on of
genes and the creating of new organisms and the way
we imagine everything coming together. But there's nuclear DNA, there's
mitochondrial DNA, and it is these things are being passed
down separately. And the uh, the fact that they're cloning

(01:30:56):
structure males. These queens are mating with one of the
structor male clones in the colony. When they're in that
phase for mating, storing that structor male nuclear material and
mitochondrial DNA that's a structure male, not inserting her own

(01:31:16):
Iberian nuclear DNA and making more structure clones.

Speaker 5 (01:31:23):
Okay, so so hold hold on. So so I'm a
I'm I'm a female aunt. I make an egg, I
take a male sperm, I take half in half through myosis,
right like I make two haploids or whatever, and then
I smooh them together, and I have an I have

(01:31:44):
an egg with a with a diploid set of cells,
set or set of genes that develops into a genetic mix. Right.
If I am cloning myself, if I'm like a whiptail lizard, right,
then I am taking one of my eggs and just

(01:32:06):
like you're, I'm just splitting it in two basically with
full sets of genes, and I am making a whole
new one of those, right, so I will have it
might not have the exact same genetic makeup that I have,
because it might double some things that I only have
one of, right or whatever, But so so, but but

(01:32:27):
I can do that with my stuff and make an
egg with a with a with a gammy in it.
What I'm not understanding is how I, as a female,
make an egg with a gammy in it with only
the DNA from a sperm. Yep, I don't understand how
that works.

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
Is it a special process, Yes, it's a she's.

Speaker 3 (01:32:52):
A surrogate mother for or the genomic makeup that is
all found within the sperm.

Speaker 5 (01:33:00):
Yes, but how.

Speaker 2 (01:33:05):
Clever. It's amazing, it's super super clever.

Speaker 5 (01:33:10):
I'm gonna make an egg and stick a sperm minute
and shake it up, like I don't understand.

Speaker 6 (01:33:15):
Kick out my own kick out my own nucleon right right,
Like That's what I'm wondering, is like, if it's like,
if it's like when it when it teams take, when
it becomes time for combination, does the female genetic code
get ejected?

Speaker 7 (01:33:30):
Like?

Speaker 5 (01:33:30):
How what's happened?

Speaker 3 (01:33:32):
How?

Speaker 5 (01:33:34):
So?

Speaker 3 (01:33:35):
The answer probably is in the structor colony, I would
imagine that there's something strange about its reproduction. Maybe that
when there was this two different strategies that maybe somehow
and then when they did it at some point must
have gotten together, it had this anomalous effect.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
I mean, and it's maintained. Then they're like, and Okay,
if you go and parasitize a structer colony and are
able to do that, that's great. But if not, I've
got my own clones around, and so I'm always taken
care of make more clones.

Speaker 5 (01:34:16):
Right, because that's the thing is that it's not it's
not inbreeding per se, no, because the genetics are completely
unique from the queen. But so it will kind of
it will create an over representation in the colony as

(01:34:39):
a whole. If you use the same genetic male over
and over and over and over again to create your
your babies, right, so there will be kind of a
a replication of potential combinations, I guess, right, if you
do that, everybody's a sibling if you have if you

(01:34:59):
ca but she only needs to do it once.

Speaker 1 (01:35:02):
Right, How often do they parasitize the structor colonies if
they're not close by? Happened?

Speaker 3 (01:35:08):
Does the structor colony an escaped clone colony?

Speaker 1 (01:35:14):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:35:14):
That like that like went off and starts so they've
they were only clones and now they've gone off and
started there out like like escaped one day.

Speaker 5 (01:35:26):
Like there was a girl somehow that might have been that,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:35:30):
Could have been any species that they crushed with.

Speaker 3 (01:35:33):
But because all of the males have this, it just
genetically overtook and that became defined as structure.

Speaker 2 (01:35:38):
Right, Uh, that's wild.

Speaker 5 (01:35:42):
Ye Oh, I can't wait to find out more.

Speaker 2 (01:35:46):
Yeah, wait, we don't have the answer again.

Speaker 1 (01:35:51):
Yeah, but they are. You know, this is a really
weird situation. Yeah, life does. This is such a strange situation.
Clonality but not within the same. It's mixing species as
we define species and as we like, as we like

(01:36:11):
to categorize and split things up. This they're they're not
the same, and this is such an interesting situation. Anyway,
that's fun right, not so straightforward.

Speaker 5 (01:36:21):
Thanks for bringing that, Kiki, what a cool story.

Speaker 1 (01:36:24):
Reproduction is so wild in nature.

Speaker 5 (01:36:28):
I know it's all the people who want to make
it so simple. Man meets woman, they have a baby,
that's it. Nope, there is more scenarios than we even know.
We know, Nature's complicated.

Speaker 1 (01:36:46):
Scenarios you have never thought of before. Like the I
love the Live Science article on this because the interview
with the researcher is actually he's like, we wereking about this.
We're like, haha, wouldn't it be funny? But they didn't
think it was true. And then they're like, how do

(01:37:07):
we Oh, we need to test this. Oh my gosh,
this might be true.

Speaker 3 (01:37:12):
I bet I bet you anything that's a very thorough
paper because it is one of those things like we
can't just.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
You can't publish until we're for sure, for sure, for sure,
for sure, for sure, sure, for sure for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:37:27):
Yeah, but as always, more study is necessary, and I'm
going to take us out after that story with you know,
a quick quick dip into scientific fraud. Back in two
thousand and three, one of the main scientific.

Speaker 5 (01:37:50):
What is it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:50):
It's a metrics for science leader, the database that Clarivate, Inc.
Which is responsible for basically giving journals impact factors, and
it's one of the groups that looks at how much
have you published, how many authors are publishing, what's getting cited,
and ah, you're fancy, You're not fancy. They decide who's

(01:38:10):
in and who's out of the science club and how
many points you get. So Claivate is not the only,
but it's a very it's it's prominent, it's got like
ten thousand employees. It's like making lots of money handover foot,
which again that's also an issue. They're very not transparent
about their methods. But somewhere back aways, they took math,

(01:38:35):
the entire field of math, out of their metrics. They
stopped giving metrics, any impact factors. They stopped doing the
metrics for it. They had calculated their database. They did
some work and there's a couple of papers in the
archive archive dot org right now, pre prints that go

(01:38:58):
into a lot of detail on this. But claravate In
calculated from their database that in the year twenty nineteen,
according to their database, the university with the most world
class researchers in mathematics is a Taiwanese university where math

(01:39:19):
is not a subject. It's not a subject at the university,
and it has the most world class researchers in math.
So anyway, Hey, there's a problem in publishing and how
we count what is good science and what's not good science.
And the bottom line is that these papers in archive

(01:39:40):
dot org are basically reporting on the huge problem with
parasitic journals, with fake publications, with people publishing work that
is subpar and never ever read aside from maybe a
cursory peer review. That there is a lot of issue

(01:40:03):
with the way that publishing is happening right now. And
it's one of the things that they do do is
is they've published actually practical advice how to fight fraudulent
publishing in the mathematical sciences, so they're focused on the

(01:40:24):
mathematical sciences. But honestly, this is not just for math.
Math is one of the smaller disciplines. It has a
small number of researchers globally, it has a small number
of publications, and so because of the small number, changes
in statistics, like you can balloon your impact factor based

(01:40:45):
on the way that things are measured very easily, things
can be put out of proportion really fast and really easily.
So anyway, it's a I'm gonna got a share list tab,
but they go through a whole bunch of recommendations for
policy makers. Why should you care what can be done?

(01:41:07):
For institutions? Why should you care what can be done?
A lot of this comes down to, Hey, if we
keep allowing fraudulent public publication and this misrepresentation of what
researchers are actually publishing, it's not going to be good
for the science that's being done. It's not going to

(01:41:29):
be good for the science that's being funded and that funding,
it's not going to be good for the public. It's
not going to be good for your institution because eventually
that falsehood is going to come crumbling down and Additionally,
for individuals, your integrity is at risk. Everything has an issue,

(01:41:49):
but they have. What can we done for individuals read
the actual publications when writing evaluations, avoid publishing and predatory journals.
Help educate younger researchers. Help identify good journals in your field.
Maybe that'll help with how the impact factors are done.

(01:42:11):
Cite articles that are relevant for your work. If a
respected colleague is associated with a predatory journal, talk to
them about it. Maybe say, hey, stop doing stuff with
that predatory journal. Colleague, check the quality of journals before
joining their editorial board. Choose the journals you publish in wisely,

(01:42:37):
I mean, is any of this so far not common sense?
But anyway, well, so, don't be a fraud, don't be abroad.
But it's also beware, watch out for phishing emails, watch
out for the misuse of names of things. Yeah but
hey wait, go ahead, sorry now some of it is like.

Speaker 3 (01:42:56):
A little bit unfair though this all beware and get
careful where you published and this sort of thing, like, uh,
the the last few years of doing science writing, of
getting getting studies from what is supposed to be the

(01:43:20):
prominent sources journals and finding.

Speaker 2 (01:43:25):
Just ridiculous stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:43:27):
I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:43:31):
What I do love though. Here one of their strategic
recommendations changing the way that publication happens and how you
how you get into publishing government supporting efforts for greater transparency,
culture change in academia. My favorite though, advocate and fund

(01:43:53):
serious science journalism. Yeah, that's my favorite. So I think
they've come up with good recommendations. This is something that
you know is a challenge, and there are resources out there,
and I you know, I can't wait. This is going
to be published eventually this October, but for now here

(01:44:17):
it sits Hey, science, you gotta mind yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:44:23):
We all have to step There were two studies that
I was considering for Justin Trash's a paper for this week.
One was just an error, but I think it looks
like it's just an error. It's another one of those.
It crosses zero and shows a highly significant p value

(01:44:47):
and it can't be right. But if it's a negative
value instead of a positive value, it's exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:44:53):
Where it's supposed to be.

Speaker 3 (01:44:55):
And so it could just be that somebody doing the
data left off the negative sign at the beginning of
one number, but it was but it was repeated multiple
places in the paper, and that one's like probably not
a big deal. Another one started by the fact that
it was showed it stated no conflict of interest, and

(01:45:19):
it was a it was a yoga method thing. But
the organization that did this, that was involved in the study,
two of the authors are specifically due studies for this
one institute that also its founder is the one that
created that yoga method. So it's a whole circle of like,

(01:45:39):
obviously this is an in house study finding a positive result.
Plus it was an EEG, but they couldn't use some
of the channels of the EEGs because they were getting
too much noise they like because they left them out,
And so you have an EEG that's missing parts of
the brain. And the way EEG's work is sort of

(01:46:02):
like how it's a lot of bleed over and to
have the whole topography of the thing is working together.
So if you've taken out certain things, you could have
very different results. There's all sorts of things, but but
and in some of those is some of it is
like that was sloppy methods. That's hiding the fact that
it's an in house. The other one looks like an
air and there's the ones that you know, we talked

(01:46:23):
about a couple of weeks ago where it looked like
they added an completely uh new thing to the to
a study that obviously hadn't been there when the study
was initially written, but they added something to make it
have impact. And we're too sloppy to fix all the documentation.
These documents are not a lot of pages. I don't understand.

Speaker 1 (01:46:48):
Yeah, it's also care reviewers are. There's there's a lot
of junk being reviewed being submitted not so can I
just tell you it's I doesn't know, That's what I
was gonna say. Peer reviewers, I eat, scientists are. They're
overburdened there. They don't have enough time, they don't have
enough attention, and there's too much coming through. So we're

(01:47:11):
and we're seeing, you know, not a lot of benefit
to scientists to do the reviewing. So it's yeah, it's
a systemic issue. We're trying to continue to report from
sources that are peer reviewing, and and we will tell
you if it is preprint, if we're reporting on that,

(01:47:32):
and we are going to try and give you the
caveats as far as we know them. But we are
trying to do our best to bring the best science
research we can unless we're going to tear it apart
for you.

Speaker 2 (01:47:47):
I think.

Speaker 3 (01:47:47):
I think one of the just one of the the
impression I've gotten is that nobody's reading these studies when
before they get published. I don't believe that the peer
reviewers are really going through them. I know the editors
of a lot of these publications aren't going through them.
The delay in finding a bad paper might be a

(01:48:11):
few years from now when somebody looks up a paper
that seems to be related to the research that they're
doing and then after looking through it realizes, oh, this
is garbage. But at that point, the impact or whatever
benefits you get from publishing to get your new job
or whoever like did that, they've already gotten away with that.
If you retract it, it's not affecting. So there's like

(01:48:34):
very little downside to doing the fake publications.

Speaker 2 (01:48:39):
And that's part of the problem right now.

Speaker 1 (01:48:41):
It's mostly upside for the wrong people. So yeah, anyway,
our system so many things, but people are working to
fix them. People are caring about this. That's why this
paper is being published, why they've put it in archive
as a two page's actually as a preprint. But right now,

(01:49:05):
I think we've come to the end of our show. Yeah,
I think have we done it?

Speaker 4 (01:49:11):
Do it? Yeah? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:49:16):
Hopefully no one will have to retract this show later.

Speaker 3 (01:49:19):
No never.

Speaker 1 (01:49:21):
Thank you all for joining us for another episode of
This Week in Science. We're so glad that you have
been with us for this, for this tight ninety right anyway,
Thank you for being here everyone in the chatroom. Thank
you for chatting, for enjoying, for being part of the conversation,
for people listening or watching watching ng Yes after the fact,

(01:49:43):
thank you for being part of this experience and sharing
your time with us. Fada. Thank you for your help
with social media and show notes. Gord Our and Laura
others who helped to keep the chat rooms good places
to be. I appreciate your help and thank you for
being here. Everybody here tries to keep our chat rooms nice. Rachel,

(01:50:04):
thank you for record not recording let's see identity for
Thank you for recording the show, and Rachel, thank you
for editing the show. And of course I can't miss
an episode without thanking our Patreon sponsors. Yeah, thank you too.
Aaron Anathema, Adam Mischkon, Alan Buola, Ali Coffin, Andrew Swanson,

(01:50:25):
Arthur Kepler, Aready, I'm Bob Calder, Bob Coles, Brendan Finish,
Brian Carrington, Chris Wozniak, Christopher Drier, Christopher Rappin', Craig Landon,
Craig Potts, Wait Yes, Craig Landon, Craig Potts, Dana Lewis,
Darryl Meishak, Dave Wilkinson, davidy young Blood, Don Mundess, Donathan
styles A, Don Stylo, e oh Eden Mundell, Eric Knapp,
Flying Out, Fretus one, O four G Burton, Lottimore, George Chorus,

(01:50:47):
Greg Briggs, Howard Tan Jack, Jason Olds, John Outwood, John McKee,
John Rattnaswami, Johnny Gridley, Ken Hayes, Kent Northcote, Kevin Paratchan,
Kevin Reardon, Kurt Larson, Lawn Makes, Lauren Gifford, Mary Gertz,
Marjorie Marquessenflow Noodles, Patrick Pecker, Paul Paldy, Disney Paultronovich, Philip Shane,
Pierre Vellazar p Ig, Richard, Richard Badge, Robert Norland, Robert
w Farley, Rodney Lewis, Rudy Garcia, Remi, Daz Shaun Clarence Lamb,

(01:51:10):
Shoe Brew, Steven Elbern, Steve Lesman, Akezima, Sue Duster, Teresa Smith,
Tony Steele, and vagar Chef's Dad. Thank you Paul for
helping out on Patreon. Thank you for being part of
that Patreon community and supporting Twists. If you would like
to help support Twists as a listener as a supporter

(01:51:31):
on Patreon, head over to twist dot org and click
on that Patreon link. On Friday, Special episode September nineteenth,
at twelve fifteen pm Pacific time, we have an extra
extra episode for you all. We're going to be speaking
with doctors Michael Mann and Peter Hotz about their new book,

(01:51:52):
Science under Siege. Peter Hotez has been prominent in the
in the vaccine world. He's a public health professional and
has been working He worked on one of the COVID
vaccines that has helped so many around the world. Michael
Mann has been essential in a lot of our understanding

(01:52:14):
and communicating about climate change. Michael Mann is the hockey
stick scientist. So they've written a book together about their
experiences and what is happening to science in the world.
And I hope that you will join us this Friday
twelve fifteen pm Pacific time, but otherwise.

Speaker 3 (01:52:37):
We'll be back again next Wednesday, eight pm Pacific time,
broadcasting live from our Twitter, YouTube and Facebook channels.

Speaker 5 (01:52:46):
Want to listen to us as a podcast, maybe while
you're searching for life at the back of your fridge.
Just search for this week and Science Over podcasts are found.
If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe
as well.

Speaker 2 (01:53:00):
More more information on anything you've heard today.

Speaker 3 (01:53:03):
Show notes links to stories are available on our website
wwwwwwww dot twist dot org, and you can also sign
up for Blairs.

Speaker 2 (01:53:12):
Newsletter When did this become? One finds a fun animal.

Speaker 1 (01:53:17):
Fact that was recent you were gone a great well.

Speaker 5 (01:53:24):
I'll continue to deliver it and the cadence it was
delivered previously. We love your feedback. If there is a
topic you would like to cover or address, or a
suggestion for an interview, please let us know in one
of our social media accounts, or, better yet, send us
an email. Just be sure to put twists twis in
the sic line, or your email will be published in

(01:53:47):
a bogus journal that no one will ever read.

Speaker 3 (01:53:53):
We will be enjoyed a discussing science here here today
on this Weekend Science, and if you learned anything from
the show, remember your hub.

Speaker 9 (01:54:06):
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. Got my banner
refurl it says the scientist is in. I'm going to
sell my advice. Tell them how to stop and robots

(01:54:28):
with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with
a wave of my hand.

Speaker 2 (01:54:34):
And oh it'll cost you. Here's a couple of.

Speaker 4 (01:54:36):
Grass because this week's science.

Speaker 9 (01:54:41):
Is coming your way. So everybody listens to what I say.
I use the scientific method for all that it's worth,
and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the.

Speaker 3 (01:54:55):
Go.

Speaker 9 (01:54:55):
It's this week in Science, This week in Science, This
week and Science escren Science, This week in Science, This
weekend Science.

Speaker 1 (01:55:06):
This week in Science, This

Speaker 9 (01:55:08):
Week in Science, This week in Science, This week in Science,
This week in Science, This week in Science,

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

The Joe Rogan Experience

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Sentient Meat Science

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}On Purpose with Jay Shetty

The Joe Rogan Experience

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

Sentient Meat Science

On Purpose with Jay Shetty