You Can't Retract Good Science

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This e Twists. This Week in Science, episode number ten
twenty seven, recorded on Wednesday, August twenty seventh, twenty twenty five.
You can't retract good science. Hey everyone, I'm doctor Keiki
and tonight we will fill your head with ape, doctors, flying.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Bird poo, and.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
The mind's Eye. 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 3 (00:41):
Jaschoollaimor disclaimer disclaimer. Although the sun is shining high above,
there are shadows creeping in. In spite of all that
we have learned from science, literature, history, and art like
there is a madness growing in ignorance and the American heart.

(01:02):
How freedoms are lost is how power is seized, and
it's a long road back from enslavement to freed So
this book that research those ideas. Every band comes with
a hidden cost, because knowledge is a form of freedom,
and a freed mind is never lost. There are brilliant

(01:22):
people in this world, more than ever before, and one
not too distant day they will again be knocking on
American doors. After the failure of the ignorant and the cruel.
When the smart kids have had enough, the sun will
still be shining high above. Meanwhile, down on Earth, it's

(01:43):
This Week in Science coming up next. I've got the
kind of mine. I can't get enough. I want to
learn everything. I want to fill it all up with
new discoveries that happen every time. This week. There's only
one place to go to find a knowledge. I think.

(02:04):
I want to.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Knowledge that's happened.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
What's happened, That's happened this week in science.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
That's happens, Happenings happened in science.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
Good science and.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
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 to talk about
all the science that we decided to bring to this
show to talk about tonight.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
You know what I absolutely love, uh.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
The optimism and the curiosity and the big wonder Ah
my god. There's so much out there that science brings.
And sometimes it is ridiculous and sometimes it is just
downright important. But I love getting to talk about it.

(03:04):
And thank you for being a part of this community
and being here to listen to us talk about science.
And I hope that you take something with you tonight.
I brought stories about disappearing nature words, phantom limbs, brains
and thumbs, chimp doctors, and pig lungs for people.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
What'd you bring?

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Justin?

Speaker 3 (03:29):
I forgot I saw that phantom won story. I'm excited
to hear about this because that's a that's a big one.
That's a really big one.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah, it's very cool.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yeah, Oh where did I bring? I have psychedelic therapy,
don't while getting COVID nineteen vaccine is going to be
possibly more complicated this year. And then I might talk
about the first plagued ever recorded in our history ever ever.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
It's like a famous the black one or.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yeah, it's it's just the plague is what they call it?

Speaker 1 (04:05):
The plague?

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Yeah, but it was the most has another name I'm
gonna avoid using if I can. And and a new
segment is not completely new new segment justin trashes a study.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
We've had fun, you know, critiquing things in the past,
but I like this new title. That's great.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
We could all have is that you just you printed
it out just so you could crumple it up and
throw it into the trash. Is that.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
No, it's worse. It's actually much much worse. It was.
It was I spent three and a half hours trying
to figure out why my brain didn't work and trying
to decipher how the you know, like I kept like,
how am I making so many mistakes? And how am
I reading this wrong? As I go back to like

(04:57):
check you know, the right that I've done on this piece,
I keep finding contradictory things and it turns out the
contradictions are all throughout the paper and wasn't the failings
of my feeble mind. So it made me angry, and
now I'm going to trash the study.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
You know, I love that because I've had the same
feeling about studies where I'm like, wait, am I dumb?
Is this what's wrong with me? And then I go, no, yeah,
I feel.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
It's very relatable. That's like beyond scientific studies. You you
we all go to get those emails from the boss
where you're like, am I dumb? Or does this make
no sense?

Speaker 3 (05:39):
And the thing that actually then I'll get into it.
But the thing that made me maddest of all is
that it's a Science Advances. Uh, It's it's a Nature publication.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
It's a science.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
Its authors that review their work before they submit it.
It's supposed to get pure accepted for publication by somebody
who reads it. It's supposed to get peer reviewed.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
And Science Advances is editorial board is fast tracked. Science
Advances is like the Less. It's not science, it is.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
It's one of those that you should wished totally.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
I think so. But Blair, Yes, what's in the animal corner?

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Yeah, I brought things. I have a story about jumping spiders.
Can never turn them down. I have the aforementioned bird
poop gotta bring a poop story. And then I have
cane toads, which we have talked about just so many
times on the show.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
And are they still there?

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Cane toes nudes.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yes, they still haven't gotten rid of to fix that
one problem.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
Since they were introduced.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah, almost one hundred years ago. We're gonna talk about it.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
All right, everyone, We have so many great stories for
you tonight, and if you haven't by now, please subscribe
to This Week in Science on whatever streaming platform YouTube, Twitch,
Facebook that you find us on. We are live every
Wednesday evening ish about eight pm Pacific time ish and

(07:26):
we also have a podcast. This episode is being edited
by our wonderful editor Rachel, who will put it into
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to listen to things that are edited, so subscribe and
share with your friends. And if you want to know more,
head to Twist dot org and share with your friends.

(07:46):
Now it's time for the science. Share with your friends. Okay,
have you heard of the Atlas or three?

Speaker 3 (07:57):
I comment.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
Since July?

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Ish?

Speaker 3 (08:05):
I know I have hearing. I've been I've been like
in a space news deprived zonel.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
Okay, long not even lately, lately, longly shortly. Well, I'm
here to tell you about a comet that's not really
a comet because we've been looking at it. Hubble looked
at it, we set jywist on it. But oh what
a newer observatory telescope for infrared stuff, a spear X

(08:34):
who isn't supposed to be looking at our own solar system,
but galaxies that are far far away. That kind of
scooped Jay whist on the looking at this comet, and
it's really been realized it's not really a comet. It's
an interstellar interloper.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Interloper.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
So in early July, we had this incredible thing in
the sky that everybody's been like, what is it, where's
it coming from? What's going on? And so you know,
do you remember in came through and everybody.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Was a cigar shaped one, right that looked like a spaceship.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Kind of yeah, and it was like spaces look like No, well, uh.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
I'm sure there are some that look.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
It was, you know, because you know, space has so
much friction.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Anyway, there's a there's a weird thing which is u
When you have a point at the end, it creates
higher heat. You can actually blunt that heat. That's why
the have you ever noticed the little the space capsule
when it comes down?

Speaker 2 (09:53):
No, that's true.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
Side, I know, because then the around it and then
parachute dissipates all about and.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
Yeah, like concentrating anyway.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
So this is very actually apropos to the conversation about
the Atlas not comet. Researchers have taken a good look
at the the trajectory of this object and have determined
that by looking at it, what they're able to say
is that they couldn't really like didn't have like the

(10:26):
normal comet tail, and they couldn't see a nucleus or
like a good coma. So they were like, what is
this fuffy ball of stuff flying through the Solar system?
And so they're looking at it closer and closer. They
were able to determine that it does not have a

(10:46):
trajectory through the Solar system, which is like any other
object in the Solar system. At first they thought it
might be a Kepler Keppelarrian object, that it might be
coming from the the Kepler disc. But what they have
been able to German as all, no, no, it's coming
in at a really weird off angle, and the speed

(11:09):
and everything it's doing is just not normal for something
that would be coming from the Kepler belt or from
within the Solar system. And so they have de germined
that it is from elsewhere, and they think it is
from a very active area within the Milky Way of

(11:31):
star birth generation, a lot of stuff going on. It's
not a spaceship. There probably are no aliens. But it's
very interesting because this is the third such object that
we have identified within our solar system, and looking at
the spectroscopy of the elements that seem to be outgassing

(11:56):
from it, normally you'd think as it's getting avomits. They
have the tail of water ice. That water ice is sublimating,
it's or heating up, and it is coming evaporating coming
off the as it heats up and gets closer to
the Sun, as it makes the orbit around the Sun,
that it heats up and the tail of water ice
comes off. And so usually they're very low in carbon dioxide.

(12:19):
Is carbon monoxide, yeah, whatever, but water for comets from
the Kepler Belt are usually very high. Was high in water,
which was very interesting, but it did seem to be
getting rid of a lot of that water as it

(12:41):
went toward the Sun and headed off on its interstellar journey.
Then there was a second object that came through, and
the second object is actually more similar to what we're
seeing now with the Atlas. And the second object was
low in carbon monoxide and kind of high in carbon
dioxide coming off of it. And so there's a difference

(13:03):
in the kind of the temperature of activation of carbon
monoxide and carbon dioxide versus water. Water usually goes away
first if it's an old thing, as it goes around,
like the heat gets rid of the water. Carbon monoxide
is usually the secondary thing that goes away, and carbon
dioxide tends to stick around a little bit, and so

(13:29):
we have it's like the Three Bears story actually with
these three objects that have come through our solar system
so far, and we've also looked at them with the Hubble,
JWIST and now the sphere X, which are getting really
good views of what's happening with these objects. So oh

(13:49):
Muma was about one hundred meters across, eccentricity of one
point one point nine, entrance speed of twenty six kilometers
per second. Borisov was the second, just under one kilometer
in size, eccentricity of three point three six, entrance speed
of thirty two kilometers per second. Three I at lists
ten to thirty kilometers. Lots of uncertainties because, like I said,

(14:12):
we haven't been able to get a really good view
of it because it's not super defined. It has an
eccentricity of six point two and an entrance speed of
fifty eight kilometers per second. With respect to the solar system,
they think it came from the thick disc of the
Milky Way. There is a really wonderful article on the
Big Think by one of our favorite guests on the

(14:34):
show on podcaster.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
A.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
What's Ethan Siegel. That's what his name is. Oh starts
with a bang. Anyway, this latest at list has come through.
It is according to sphere X and Jwisk got a
much better look at it. But the data suggests that

(14:59):
it is is. It is releasing a lot of carbon dioxide,
and so carbon dioxide requires temperatures of about one hundred
kelvin to sublimate, and this is about the distance from
Saturn from the Sun to Saturn, where about one hundred
calvin are and so water ice needs hundreds of calvin

(15:23):
and carbon monoxide and nitrogen go off earlier. Anyway, carbon
Comet Hartley, the second one came through. It didn't have
carbon monoxide. It's spent a lot of time close to
the Sun and it has uh it has emitted pretty
much all of its carbon monoxide and water and pretty
much all that's left is carbon dioxide. And this suggests

(15:44):
that also Atlas it's like hardly too. It's fragmenting a bit,
it's probably gonna get rid of a bit of water,
but basically it's like it's it's it's it's old, but
it's not as old as things that have just been

(16:05):
sitting in the Kepler Belt.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Oh it's not that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah, okay, yeah, And so they say that as or
Ethan says, is it's going to leave our our solar system,
it's probably not going to change its compositions significantly. And uh,
it's it's not aliens and it's comet like it is.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
It is. It's an alien because it's not native to it.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
It's not a spaceship.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
It's an interstellar interloper.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
It is.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
So I am curious about that. It's not as old thing.
I kind of assumed that anything that made a journey
from another stellar system had to be older, probably than
stuff that was floating around in our Solar system. I
would have assumed that, and I thought that's why it
would have had those other gases going, you know, versus

(17:09):
the ones that are going to come in from couple
are still going to have water. But then also that
maybe just never got heated up before.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
But it's been in space, it has maybe hasn't been
it's been in you know, outside this it's been an
interstellar space, it hasn't been near a lot of stars necessarily.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
It still seems like to make the journey, my gosh.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
And of course, over time there's going to be sublimation
and gases are gonna, you know, probabilistically take their exit.
But at the same time, these interstellar visitors, how many
stars have they been passed? Where have they lost all
their gases? And so what we're seeing is this what

(17:53):
what what Ethan says? Here, we've got looked very old,
like it was in the final stages before evaporating depletely
Borisov looked young, like a fresh Kuiper Belt like object
just approaching a star's system's interiors for the first time.
And Atlas kind of looks like it's in between. So
it's not super super old. It's older than Kuiper Belt stuff,

(18:15):
but it's not Kuiper Belt young. It doesn't have it's
it's it's been traveling for a very long time, maybe
even billions of years. Light the light water ices have
taken off, and now you've just got a lot of
CO two.

Speaker 3 (18:30):
Now that you're talking about, like, you know, a multi
billion year old journey could totally be made. That's really not.
That's especially the speeds these things can be.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Moving, right, and so you know the speeds that I
mentioned of their entry, it's relative to the orbital speed
the rotational speed of the Solar system. So Atlas it
was really fast compared to other ones, and it's it's different,
but we might see more of a tail as it
gets nearer to the Sun. But oh hey, what it's

(19:06):
probably we won't probably get to see it because of
where it'll be because it'll be like exactly on the
opposite side of the Sun from us, and so we'll
lose a view of it. But anyway, can't win everything. Yeah,
who knows how many stars it's been by and lost mass. Yeah,
we don't know a lot of these these images as well.

(19:27):
It's infrared, so it's colder on the outside, hotter or right,
hotter on the inside, colder on the inside, hotter on
the outside. Anyway, fun stuff. Oh hey, and SpaceX had
a kind of successful starship launched yesterday sub orbital. They

(19:48):
didn't actually get out of orbit. Starship launched. It did
not explode anywhere. It landed on the Indian Ocean and
fell over and then blew up.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Oh no, it was supposed to. It was supposed to. Okay,
you're supposed to. Okay.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
It was supposed to land near a booie to show
that it had a homing ability to land within a
target range. And then it was supposed to blow up well,
and it hit the water and there wasn't anything for it.
There wasn't a landing pad and it just kind of went.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
That still sounds bad.

Speaker 3 (20:23):
There's somebody who's like, hey, did we this is why
they need Blair on every and every team. Did we
put down the big floaty cushions at the landing site? Yeah,
I'm sure there. Oh uh oh, nobody noticed because there

(20:47):
was no blare.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, we have to. We have to remember though this
Starships super Heavy, it's the biggest rocket ever launched.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
It's had a lot of issues.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
It so far though it it's matching Falcon Heavy's.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
Launch launch number.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
But it blew up a lot of times. And I'm
not really sure because people aren't really talking about it
as to whether or not, how like how big a
payload it was carrying. It did have some dummy Starlink
satellites that it was releasing to show that it could
be a great launch vehicle for Starlink. If it's never

(21:30):
able to leave Earth's gravity well and take us to Mars,
I'm not I think I've stopped being happy, like cheerleader
for a lot of these things. Now I want it
to work.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
So there's another problem here, which is it's I just
kind of googled SpaceX launch to see what came up,
and it's and it's all successful flight, nails test, flight,
successful launch, nail's critical tenth test, successful test of launch.

(22:08):
Like it's just like sure, fine, it was, but like, also.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
They didn't they didn't do like it's this is a
rocket that's supposed to take people to Mars or the movie, and.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
The richest person on the planet is behind this, and
so like the news coverage is it colored by that?
I don't know, but that's just you know, that's interesting
that that's the narrative.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Well so just just in general, like the science news
space beat has always been positive, right, whether it was
the government or it's now this. I don't I dought
that has anything to do with that, but I do
kind of wish we were talking about, you know, instead

(22:57):
of the richest person on the planet trying to launch rockets,
we were talking about the smartest person. We have the
smartest person who's in charge of launching rockets. That would
seem like that would be the the the better preamble
through who is in charge than the But you know

(23:20):
that's not the planet we live on.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, and we do know that they.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Go ahead.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
I was just gonna say that, we do know that
they were having issues with the angle of the rocket
as it went through the atmosphere. So we know that
they did like a long, less less angled trajectory so
that it wouldn't have as much friction that would make

(23:48):
it explode. So, and they've also been doing things like
reducing the amount of payload. So where once they said
we will be able to take this massive amount of
payload to space, and you know, now they're like, we're
gonna basically just be able to take the rocket.

Speaker 3 (24:03):
So but then but then we can send smaller rockets,
do the big rocket, and then what and then we
can release those that payload from the small.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Rocket, launch the rocket, and then send everybody, one at
a time up in the space elevator.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, and if anybody has news to uh, let us
know the details. And you know, if we're wrong and
they've actually exceeded these expectations and understandings, let us know.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
I'm just I'm just I'm getting really really frustrated with
this because I want this to work. I want there
to be a way to get all of the people
who want to Mars.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
There, like that friendship.

Speaker 3 (24:59):
Important.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, yeah, it's And I see somebody in the chat
as saying sounds like it was a successful test if
they met their goal. But my question is did they
set their goal to be met or did they set
a goal that was actually ding helping to where we're
trying to get to, right, And if it's all about
shareholders and futures and stocks, then you need to perform

(25:28):
in a way that it looks like you're being successful.
And so the bar is and they have at a
level that you can meet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they can't.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
They can't lose the Artemist contract. They have to replace
the SLS which has been canceled. They have to like
there's nothing that can do the Artemist mission, and you know,
there's all this and and Boeing's not doing it. So
it's kind of like if SpaceX doesn't, who will. There's

(25:59):
this interesting space and if SpaceX loses, then that's going
to be the company it's done. So yeah, very interesting.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
And what I was gonna say to Justin's thing about
like space coverage also always being kind of positive. I
would actually argue, I'd say that a lot of like
NASA coverage over the years, especially that we've talked about here.
It's hopeful, it's optimistic, but it is certainly realistic. And
when NASA messes up or when something does not go

(26:33):
as planned, there is a detailed post mortem that we
discuss on the show, usually about exactly what went wrong
and how or this went right in this way, in
this way and this way, but the rover crashed into
the planet after it took its measurements or whatever it is,
right Like, there's always that conversation because this is these

(26:54):
are literal moon shots, right, This is like trying to
do something that's never been done before, and so I
think you need that objective view to be able to
like properly be optimistic and hopeful to see what is realistic.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
I mean, to be fair, getting to the Moon has
been done before, and they're not doing that yet.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Come on, right, Yes, they can't even lead the upper
orbit yet.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
So this is the classic.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
The new Glenn rocket also did a great flight, but
you know, it's the recyclable boosters that keep being a problem.
I don't know, we're doing great at launching rockets and
putting satellites in orbit, but.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Are we So here's the difference. Also, here's another difference,
like when you have government running a thing, there's a
lot of great buiaocracy and things can get budget bloated
because everybody tries to take advantage of a government contract.
They yeah, it's extortion. When you have to contract out,

(28:02):
it's usually a form of extortion. The government is bad
and negotiating. Now over, however, the benefits of those programs
are sort of for everyone. The other side is you
get rid of all the breiocracy, you streamline it, and
you have a business oriented model and great, maybe maybe
you know that's fine, but it's only ever going to

(28:25):
benefit fit a few. So like the we've been launching
stuff can be you know, is there really our stuff
that's going up there? There?

Speaker 1 (28:33):
There are many many engineers and incredible scientists who have
been involved in the development of these new rockets and
these new efforts. So regardless of what we may actually
you know, be joking about or saying criticizing the company
and the way that they are approaching things, you know,

(28:54):
like you said, sometimes companies make promises and then they
have to like make the ends meet, and that is
not necessarily the problem or the fault of the employees.
And there are incredible researchers, engineers, scientists who are involved
in these efforts and I have the pleasure to know
some of them. And you know, getting to space it

(29:15):
is a moonshot, you know, getting us out there. It
is a dream for so many and it's hard. Let's
do it, but not in a way that like you know,
hurts all the other people anyway, justin.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Oh, okay, are we.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, let's talk sorry.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
About all right? This is a Australian psychology research paper. Uh,
this is this is a warning really about psychedelic therapies.

(30:04):
There's some fear from these psychology researchers that mental imagery
and people with adding mental imagery to people with aphantasia,
which I can't say which is a weird thing. Affantasia afphantasia.
I think that's right as weird as I can say it.

(30:25):
If it's elephantasia, then it's not a problem. I just
say affantasia. It's got an issue. So this is a
kind of a strange condition. Actually, Kiki might have this.
Do you have this? Have you ever been diagnosed with
affhantasia diagnosed.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
No, but I do have issues visualizing objects things in.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
My so it's also very visual dreams.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
There's like it's weird.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
But when I don't have it, you have it.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
No, if I try to think of an apple, or
I think of an action, or do it. If I
try to imagine it, it's just it's like a concept.
It's not an image.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
So let me give you the folcause that might be.
There might be degrees to it. This is an advantage
is known as blind mind's eye. People of affantasia recall
personal memories with your details. Unless vividness visual mental imagery
is absent, completely gone. They cannot visualize objects, people, places,

(31:30):
or memories. And they also recall personal memories with the
with that less detail. Okay. Recent reports, including one published
case study and one preprint, along with some antidotal accounts,
describe individuals with affantasia gaining a new capacity to visualize

(31:50):
after a single dose of ayahuasca or pilocybin. I knew
it was going to be that, and these reports, anecdotal
or case study, preprint, whatever, those all come with positive
self reported outcomes during and after the experience, including even

(32:14):
up to a year post experience follow up, right, what
the What they're kind of concerned about though in this
in this sort of warning is that one of the
one of the things that can become an issue is

(32:35):
in psycho psychiatric neurological conditions are intrusive thoughts and memories
and sometimes these intrusive thoughts and memories or cravings or
maladaptive daydreaming, UH, come with images. Unwanted images can be
sort of that you know, intrusive thought maybe image based,

(32:58):
and their previous research has shown that it's much lower
in people with a fantasia. They don't have the intrusions
because they don't have like a mental trauma intrusion thing
that happens. Right, So they're warning is sort of that,
you know, you would want to maybe warn people at

(33:21):
least that it's possible that they could have, you know,
some some problems if they have like a PTSD, but
they haven't had image control issues or even images. The
PTSD may be hidden anxiety maybe hidden, a major depression
may be hidden. They may be hidden things. Because one

(33:43):
of the therapies to combat all of those is largely
focused on image control, where you're learning to control the
imagery that you see in your mind so that it's
less traumatic. I guess. So it sounds like it sounds
like a good thing because they also expand this to

(34:05):
ketymine and LSD and some others. But those reports that
they're talking about and psilocybin, the sort of uh, you know,
one off controls or what have you, one case study,
they're usually they're usually going to be working in the
opposite direction. They're usually reducing intrusive thought patterns. Is the

(34:31):
way that they're controlling the I guess the amygdala is
the is the warning? Is that right?

Speaker 2 (34:37):
That?

Speaker 3 (34:38):
Maybe it was like the warning ancient warning system of
the brain, But that's in.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
Like teeny tiny microdoses, right, is when it's used for that?
Is that? No?

Speaker 3 (34:50):
Yeah, you're talking about programmers who are playing around with drugs.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
No.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
I thought that, like a lot of the studies that
we've had on the show had to do with microdosing
things like psilocyberal honesty, Yeah, that remove intrusive thoughts and
things like that. Yeah, but that would take a pook.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Therapeutically, there are, yeah, Therapeutically, there are treatments that involve
therapeutic doses and that Yeah, that's what they're looking at. Yeah,
that's what they're looking Well, that.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
Was interesting, I get, I get why they're doing this warning.
It's because this is the thing that they've studied, both
the condition and then the fear is that these people
may not want to be given. Sort of reminds me
of the if you could take a pill that would
make you autistic thing we were talking about, would you

(35:43):
do it? Like whether if there could be a pill
that could make somebody autistic, lose many of the symptoms
with that effect their personal You should.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
All try each other's perspectives. Fear here is temporarily right,
that's the fear, right, is that it would Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
That it would not be temporary, right, because if it's
not temporary, then you're stuck with it, and you then,
after the fact, have to decide if you want your
mind's eye open, if you want all these images. Maybe
you don't like having images. Maybe I don't know.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
If you've never day dreamed about something terrible happening to
people that are around you in the middle of the
day and then that suddenly happens, how terrifying.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Speaking experience, Wait a second, what are you talking about
that that's never happened to you.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
You, especially as a parent, you were just kind of
like sat there and and like watched an imaginary scene
take place while you're where your child like walks over
and does something extremely dangerous, like you never kind of
just like okay, okay, constantly.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
And then the way you said it made it sound
like then it happened like you manifest a meeting.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
I meant. I meant, if you've never had that experience
with the daydream, right, and then all of a sudden
you have your first daydream of that nature, that would
be terrifying and terrible, and you want to turn it
back off.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Right, But as apparent like I've had that almost hot
like every way in which my child could die within
the home. Oh yeah, Like I.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
Push I pushed the stroller, and I just somehow imagine
the stroller like hopping a fence and landing into a
body of water and just.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
Like many will this float and the next thing you know,
you see Blair with the pontoons on the side of
the stroller ready for anything there. It can be too safe.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
Moms, you all need the land air water stroller invented
by Blair.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
I don't know, says justin I am autistic, careful, Oh,
we're not making fun of anybody. But the question was
it was if you didn't catch the story last time,
it was they may have got drug that can that
they're working on and it's like mice or something. But
one day, maybe ready that could reverse the symptoms, not

(38:15):
the whole thing, but at least some of the behavioral
symptoms of autism. And Blair was making the argument that
it would anybody want to take that if you know,
if you're totally happy being who you are, and how
much does that change somebody's personality? And are we talking
about changing a person more than just a medical need

(38:36):
at that point? And then the question is, well, as
long as it's or the point I guess we were
hoping that it could come to is that it would
be temporary, so you can kind of try it on opposed.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
To so, but regardless of trying things on or not,
This study particularly is saying that psychedelics, ayahuasca and mushrooms
for people who are autistic or have PTSD potentially can

(39:13):
no okay, but can be can allow for visual if
you're a fantastic.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
A fantasia, if you're a fantasic.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
It kind of takes that away, and so suddenly you
are able to visualize things that may be problematic that
you couldn't visualize before. Or maybe it's used in therapy.
It could be great because you can see it as
opposed to just conceptualize it for the first time.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
Yeah, And most people who have had this experience have
had positive feedback, but it's a small number, and so
they're just sort of saying that this needs to be
part of the informed consent, right, so that you need
to be aware that you may be suddenly having images
in your mind before that you I haven't experienced before,
and he might not like it, and it might not

(40:03):
go away before you before it Like that sounds like
a big deal, because then we.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Might it's really tough.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
Yeah, yeah, because then we when we played the opposite game,
and then again it's like, here's a drug, but you
may no longer be able to picture things in your
head anymore. Gosh, yeah, that'd be so frightening. But then
I'm like, you know, be a little bit of freedom
in that too.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
No, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
It's a little bit frightening to think that.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
But if it was temporary the other way.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
But if it might not be reversible, Oh that's a
big deal. Now. Now you're not talking about a side effect,
You're talking about a life change. Geez.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah, it's like taking LSD and having visuals forever. Yeah, everever.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
Ever.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
That was a fear back in the seventies. You know.

Speaker 3 (40:59):
Oh, they made up so many things that were just
making the up stuff about that drug and about others.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
I'd love to know something that they haven't made up
about jumping spiders.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Oh sure, Well, this is a study. Actually, I found
an article written by a young whipper snapper named Justin Jackson.
But so you can help me out with this. But
I had to bring it because it's all about jumping
spiders and their preferences in mating and how they may

(41:32):
accidentally hybridize themselves to extinction. Oh yeah, So this is
about two different species of jumping spiders. They are some
of them kind of have a larger tendency to be
a bright red than others, And basically it boils down

(41:54):
to the fact that the females of both species of
jumping spiders prefer red colored males, and so they will
often hybridize because they are preferring this male that is
of another species because he's flashier and prettier and of
a preferred color. And so they did a whole test

(42:16):
in the lab around this, which I really liked, the
kind of the design of which included having females acclimate
to a male for five minutes and then they had
fifteen minutes of free interaction and then they either ended
in copulation or cannibalism, as spider situations often do, and

(42:39):
they measured body mass after the trial.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
Also, yes, yeah, one question I had that I didn't
get answered. Yeah, looking at the study, like some of
them ended in cannibalization, but then they weighed them.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yes, No, they weighed them to see if there was insemination.
That would be my assumption, right, is that you want
to you want to see if there's a transfer of
material from the male to the female, right, because was
the copulation successful ultimately, because if the copulation is successful,
then that would result in a hybrid offspring. If they

(43:18):
were just kind of flirting' then you don't have to worry.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
About it, right, I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, So both species, the females preferred the males that
were more likely to be red. They they both about
three quarters of them preferred the red colored males versus
about a quarter of the non red colored males. And
then they even painted them which I really like. The

(43:48):
when they painted the non red males read it increased
their mating success to almost fifty percent. And then when
they painted the red spiders brown, they wor aed at
about eleven percent success, so they went down from like
a seventy five percent to eleven percent. So it was
all about the color red.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Although what was I thought it was as interesting when
they I think when they painted the red spiders red,
they dropped. They went down to like that same fifty percent,
So the red paint wasn't as good as the natural.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yes, that's also true. So they want they're looking for
all natural red spiders and so this is part of this.
Uh yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
It begs the question of what is the red that
the spiders are seeing? You are the Is it just red?
Are there ultraviolet components?

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Is there?

Speaker 1 (44:43):
You know?

Speaker 2 (44:44):
What?

Speaker 1 (44:44):
What are the all the frequency components that the red is?

Speaker 2 (44:49):
That is a great question. Is the red somehow linked
to another fitness measure? We don't know? Is it? Is
it linked via a previous and cestral situation where there
were there there was an indication of something that is
no longer valid. Is it something that is associated with

(45:10):
a chromosome that is also associated with something right, there's
a bunch of different reasons that they could be focusing
on red, but ultimately, because of this kind of like
runaway association, it's possible that in the wild this could
lead to a complete species extinction via hybridization, which sounds scary,

(45:32):
but part of the reason I wanted to bring this
story was this is how nature works. So unless unless
something that we are doing is somehow artificially putting kind
of the thumb on the scale in some way, like
if we are accidentally turning these this one species of

(45:53):
spider's red, which I do not think is happening, or
if we are pushing these two species to cover the
same habitat, which has not previously been the case. I
don't believe that is happening. But if humans were doing
something to push this selection to happen, then we could say, oh,
this is bad. However, this kind of stuff happens all

(46:16):
the time, and has happened all the time throughout evolutionary history.
Sometimes for a reason, like we were talking about, there
could be a fitness measure related sometimes for no reason
at all. Mutations are random, selection can be random, and
so this could be us observing because in this exact timestamp,

(46:37):
we are observing this phenomenon something that has happened thousands,
if not millions of times over evolutionary past. Right, that
there has been a hybridization two extinction of a species
naturally in the wild. And so I kind of that's
why I wanted to bring it up. Yeah, exactly like
Neanderthals is that, like, this is a normal phenomenon in

(46:59):
nownatural selection. So you know, the kind of the framing
of it does make it sound scary like, oh no,
this jumping spider might go extinct, but animals did go
extinct before humans, not at the same rate, but they did.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
Yeah, it's worth thinking about what is happening. I think,
you know, my bringing up the red and the people
putting red on it, because we've in ecology and ethought
ethological studies, we have this idea of you know, a stimulus, right,
and a stimulus a response to that stimulus, and when
you have something like the red dot on the side

(47:38):
of us eagle their beak. It's called a supernormal stimulus.
And you can make that red. It doesn't matter who
If you put lipstick on it, that's more red. That's
just a bigger red spot for the babies to poke at,
to say, press button, get food, And it's supernormal stimulus
is high heels and red lipstick or red ferraris or

(48:01):
and I keep going to like red things because it's
just easy and whatever as a super normal example. But
in this situation where just like you mentioned, it went
down when we put red on it, we understand that
red is not It is a stimulus, but it is
not the super normal stimulus. It is something else that

(48:21):
they actually got in the way of. So this idea
of hybridization, I think is very interesting. And when hybridization happens,
it's not extinction, it's just evolution and the mixing of
zeros and ones. Right, Like, yes, Ian, we've come to

(48:42):
understand I've got a little bit of Neanderthal in me.
What they didn't go away, I still carry it, you know,
or whatever, like.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, the redhead genes speaking of red are Neanderthal, right,
So it's yeah, you're right, it's it's you say hybridization
to extinction because the kind of quote unquote pure version
of this species wouldn't exist anymore.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
However, species, But what does that mean exactly?

Speaker 2 (49:11):
That is the kind of the quote unquote version of
that species that we have picked in that exact moment
in time. Who's to say how many hybridization events has
happened in spider evolutionary history to get us to this point.
We don't know, so, you know.

Speaker 3 (49:30):
And the other part of it is how did brown
the brown males get started? And it could be pretty
interesting history, right, maybe a giant maybe it was younger
dryess or you know, the a dusty time or even

(49:52):
a frozen time when the surface of everything changed colors
and it happened to be the brown one still managed
to blend into the ground, but the red ones stood out,
and so they were getting predated upon to the point
where the browns took over and that was the match,
that was the selection process that you know, made it

(50:12):
to the brown they're in. These are in very disparate areas,
you know. There uh, some are up there in Washington
and Canada. Some are in the Four Corners region that
are brown, and they're separated and in between them as
all of these these red ones, so at some point
it makes it look like their territory must have been
much much bigger than it currently is. And we're just

(50:36):
seeing the the red brown spider ratio heading maybe back
the other way and not so much you know, like
a give and take kind of.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
It's a moment in time for us. Yeah, the yellow
billed magpies of the Central Valley very different from all
the other black build magpies everywhere else.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
And the other thing too that we're leaving out of
this is this is this is the distinction by female selection, right,
Like this is also very driven by one sex of
the species deciding this. And so we can maybe even
see that if we looked at the Neanderthal lineage, because
it you don't see paternal male lineages anywhere in the

(51:22):
current modern which would be tough to get to at
this point anyway, So it may have been it may
have been just this is all speculation, but it could
have also been like female Neanderthals preferring the young current
modern humans of the day Homo sapiens as we interacted,

(51:43):
and it may not have worked the other way. The
female humans may have been like Neanderthals.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
No thanks, What about the spiders? What about the spiders?
Who knows? They don't answer our questions. What do we
want to say about the spiders? I'd like to tell
you all that somebody had a pig lung transplanted into
their chest and it didn't go well.

Speaker 2 (52:13):
Oh, man, I thought this is gonna be a good story.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
Well, it's the first time it's ever been or maybe
it's been attempted before, but this is the first time
that a genetically modified pig lung has been transplanted into
a human recipient. The human was already brain dead and
on life support systems, so the person had no reason

(52:42):
to need this lung for survival at this point in time.
It was attempted to test the idea of being able
to transplant pig lungs into people and figure out what
kind of zeno transplantation issues there might be. So pig
organs aren't supposed to be the end all be all

(53:05):
for getting people new organs, and they didn't expect this
to go completely one hundred percent well and to keep
this person alive beyond this experiment. But what they did
learn is that this bomba miniature pig. It had six

(53:26):
Crisper gene edits that are focused on minimizing immune system
responses in a recipient. However, by twenty four hours there
was a lot of edema swelling that was occurring. They
don't know whether or not that was the result of

(53:46):
blood flow issues because of the transplant itself, or whether
it was actually a rejection issue. They also found that
there was three and six days later antibody mediated rejection
that they saw and they say that it was primary
graft dysfunction. And so this occurred and this is the

(54:07):
leading cause of death in lung transplant patients. And they
saw that they were able to keep it going and
some recovery was taking place by day nine, but that
was the end of their experiment and so they didn't
follow it any further. So the recipient, while brain dead
and on life support, was also being given anti rejection

(54:29):
meds to modify manipulate the response to the lung transplant.
And there is though the factor that this person was
on life support the entire time, so they don't actually
know if the lung was functional at all. So this

(54:49):
is kind of just a test. It was kind of
just a test of can we put it in there
and what happens, And even though it had been modified
to minimize rejection, the recipient still said, Neil, Wow.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
That's really interesting. So I guess what is like a
normal human to human lung transplant success, right? Is it decent.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
For lung transplants? I am actually not sure.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
I think that's right, okay, because that sounds like really difficult.
That sounds like a tough transplant to succeed with, even
in the best circumstances. But the other thing I think
is really interesting is maybe this is a dub. But
like I didn't. It didn't occur to me that you

(55:46):
could like donate your body to science before your dead.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
That's what the whole organ donation driver's license thing is, Blair.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
No, I thought that was if you were dead, right.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
But you're not dead, you'd say it's okay, And if
you die then they take your organs, right.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
But in this case, the person was alive. They were
they were brain dead, and they were oh they needed it,
yeah they were.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
They were take it from a guy who is sleeping.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
The guy got a pig long No, No, I understand that,
but I'm saying it sounded like the patient who received
the pig long was already you said, already brain dead
and on life support permanently. Right, So that person somehow
indicated you can do science on my body before I

(56:41):
am dead. Yeah, which is different than being an organ donor. Right,
but that's still something that is completely different from saying
I want to donate. My body decides, and that's that's
a huge benefit.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
Want. Because I also would like to point out that
I have the standing on do not unplug order even
if I'm in the deepest and darkest of comas and
I have shown no response. I mean here, I'm fine,
didn't need any of you anyway.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
Just keep your body going. I'd like it. I'll stay quiet.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Do not put any pit parts in me unless absolutely necessary.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
Oh sure, sure, sure so and Arlen Lore in the
chat is saying brain dead is dead, So I understand
what you're saying. However, legally that is not true.

Speaker 3 (57:41):
Let's see you live in it might be BRAINDEADA has
a lot of different laws depending on where this happens.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
Brain dead is usually if you unplug life support, the
brain is no longer going to keep activity going to
keep the heart and the lungs moving, and so the
life support keeps respiratory, the respiratory and cardiovascular system going,
and that keeps you alive and keeps fluids going. But
your brain is not making the electrical activity to control anything.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Right, So technically my understanding is like, right, but until
the plug is removed, you are still alive.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
So that's under definition what staycause that's.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
That's what I'm saying, is it's like you can't.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
Okay, just if that was true, we'd be like and uh, yeah,
actually we have a congressman from from what's that down
in the southern south San Francisco with all the graveyards, Coma, Coma,
thank you. We have a new congressman from Coma because

(58:53):
the on life support population there who have not been
interred but have been managed to keep there themselves.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
Okay, but justin you're making a joke.

Speaker 3 (59:03):
What exceeds the minimum requirement for having their own congress person?
We would we have the technology to have this everywhere
we did, but justin, that's not far.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
Off for something that actually happened recently when a congress
person was missing and it turned out they had been
in a nursing home for months and unable to care
for themselves, but still an active congress person. Yes, so
you're making a joke, but that's close to our reality.

Speaker 3 (59:32):
Actually.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
All right, So Blair, you asked about the survival rate
or success rate of long trans transplants that are not pigs, that.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
Are all just to give time.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
I've had this for a while.

Speaker 2 (59:45):
You you people.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
So as of June twenty fourteen, medium median survival of
five point eight years of eighty nine percent. But it was.
It has been shown that chronic lung allographed dysfunction develops
in about fifty percent of recipients about five years after

(01:00:08):
lung transplant, and that's one of the major issues. So
quality of life after about five years, as the immune
system slowly decides that it's going to attack and eat
the lungs, it gets harder and harder.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
So really not longations.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Yeah, but I feel like I would. I would not
handle because I never get sick. I assume that my
body is like attacking anything that is it deems foreign.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
Do you have allergies?

Speaker 3 (01:00:49):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:00:49):
Nothing, Okay, So that's indicative of not necessarily attacking anything
that's foreign. Allergies are a HyperAct of immune system that's
going after stuff. If you don't have allergies, you might
do well with a transplant.

Speaker 3 (01:01:05):
Okay, well then okay, well I've got to change my
my order to fill me with as many young, big
parts I want the it's the old pig parts, like
I want a fresh, young, healthy pig part. If you're
going to.

Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
Oh my gosh, and it must be genetically modified justin yes,
do you want to tell me a story real quick?

Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
Oh? What does it say that I got there? Oh?
So this is just a fun one.

Speaker 2 (01:01:36):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
The COVID nineteen shots that we are used to just
going into like the local pharmacy or whatever and getting Uh,
there's a big question about whether those are going to
be available because the the new Health Secretary are.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
F.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
Kennedy fired every member of an Advisory Committee on Immunization
Practices this year. Yeah, AIP, and basically for insurance companies
pretty much base whether or not they pay for something

(01:02:19):
by whether or not it was recommended by ASIP. Actually,
nineteen states have laws and regulations that only let pharmacists
administer vaccines recommended by ASIP. So there's there's states where
because it doesn't have a recommend they're like, we'll.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
Get rid of it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
We don't.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
There's nothing to recommend, there's no one to recommend. There's
nothing there anymore. So no more vaccines because no one's recommending.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Is that the bottom line?

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
It's kind of what it's sounding like, right, And I finally,
I think understand the anti vaxxers. I finally get it,
Like it took me this long. It's about who you trust.

(01:03:13):
And I trusted that panel, and I trusted research, and
I trusted doctors everything. So if they all came made
the vaccine, looked at it, tested it, approved it by
the you know, I would I would feel very comfortable
taking it. However, if our Francis Kennedy Junior his team

(01:03:45):
comes up with their version of a vaccine, would I
take it? Hell no, you can't trust those things. God,
what they put into them.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
I get it now, Like my science Yeah, crystals and
swamp water in there. I like the.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
Science version, and I'm not going to be a big
fan of the woo woo version of what they're calling vaccine.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Raw meat and raw milk in there.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
Yeah, now, I get it. Now, I understand what it
would be like, finally to not trust health advisory information
from your own government, from your own government, I get
it now. It took it took. It took this extreme
change for to be like, yeah, I would probably be
an anti vaction. I probably if when they come up

(01:04:38):
with the nonsense that they're going to come up with
that they're going to try to get people to take
I think I'm going to abstain from it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
Pretty you might not have to worry about the COVID
vaccine because they might just be like getting rid of
it this year anyway, so it might not be an
issue in a couple of months, So keep an eye on.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Why not bring you back? It was so fun the
first time. Nothing went wrong. Economy was good, everybody survived,
it was fine.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
Yeah, speaking of medicine and trusting your friends, Blair, You've
talked previously about chimpanzees putting insects in their wounds, and
there is a new paper out just published in Scientific Reports,
and it's the first insights of insect applications to open

(01:05:28):
wounds by chimpanzees.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
In the wilds in East Africa.

Speaker 1 (01:05:34):
So the no Goo Goo chimpanzee population in Kibale National Park,
you've gonda there were six individuals super large sample size
between November twenty twenty one and July twenty twenty two,
they were observed three males three females put in flying
insects in their wounds. Mostly they were taking the insects

(01:05:57):
and grabbing them and then putting them in their mouths
and then taking them and either applying them with their
fingers or toes or their mouth to their own wounds.
There was one observance of the application to another individual
in the group. They observed also other individuals in the
group watching while this was happening. So there's a question

(01:06:19):
as to is this how it's learned kind of a thing,
But the question is why what's going on? And what
was interesting about this insect medicine is that we don't know.
There was no testing of whether insect applications helped wounds
heal any faster. But the chimpanzees, even though they put

(01:06:42):
the flying insects, and it was only flying insects, never
crawling insects, so only insects they had wings, they'd get
them in their mouths. They didn't completely destroy them and
smush them, but then they never they didn't eat them
after they used them. They would mess around with them
a little bit maybe, and then they discard them like

(01:07:03):
a band aid or something, so they were not food.
It wasn't a toy. I mean it was maybe a toy.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
Yeah, no idea.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
But this is another observance of this behavior in a
separate population of chimpanzees. And so you know, it's really
starting to question, you know, the like, where and why
this behavior came up? Why these flying insects? Why not others?
You know, what's going on here? Why don't they eat them?

(01:07:34):
And is their learning that's happening? We don't know. I
don't know anything.

Speaker 2 (01:07:40):
The only way to find out next time you have
a cut. They just kidding, don't do that by hit it.
Oh my god. First gather a bunch of them, put
them in the blender, make a nice paste, then put
that on the wound. Just kidding, good, oh god.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
This is this week in science. Thank you so much
for joining us this evening. I am going to ask
you right now to please share twists with your friends.
If you enjoy it, head over to twist dot org
if you are interested in our show notes. Additionally, you
can click on the Patreon link if you'd like to
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some really cool twist merchandise, help support the show so

(01:08:23):
that we can keep paying our bills here. It would
be really great, and thank you so much for your support.
We really can't do it without you, really can't. I
mean we could, but it would be like just the
three of us talking. And I don't know how, I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:41):
You're the best everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
Thank you for being here, Thank you for your support.
You know what it is right now, it's that time
in the show where we like to set It's time
for Blair's animal.

Speaker 3 (01:09:00):
Five pigs meal a pdf. You want to hear about
the animals except more giant pad squirrel in.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
That what you got Blair?

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
Thank you so much for asking. I want to talk
about let's what should we do first. Cane toads. So
cane toads also known as marine toads. They were introduced
to Australia nineteen thirty five. They were introduced to various
islands of the Caribbean around the same time, and in Oceania,

(01:09:43):
like in Hawaii for example, And they were brought into
all these places to eat cane beetles and guess what
they did everything.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
But they like other things.

Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
Yeah, and so they have been just a complete nuisance.
They have reached havoc on all of these different islands,
but definitely Australia has done a lot to try to
remove all of these cane toads. They're excellent eating and
reproducing and they are just overrunning all of Australia. So

(01:10:21):
pretty funny that in a space where there's just so
many terrifying animals that you could run into, the cane
toad is the big problem, which if you've never seen one,
they're not as big as a bullfrog, but they're they're
pretty sizable. They're like they're bigger than a softball. Probably

(01:10:42):
they look cranky, mm hmmm. Yeah, they're very funny.

Speaker 1 (01:10:46):
They're funny. A lot of people really enjoy them. But yeah,
they're not nice.

Speaker 2 (01:10:53):
No, And the other problem is that they can eat
like small rodents, they can eat lizards, they can eat
other frogs. But also no, not your cats. Australia would
love it if they eat cats. Cats. They're a huge
problem there. But the other problem is that lots of
animals try to eat them like birds, and they have

(01:11:15):
a very particular poison that they secrete from their parotid
gland which is behind their eyes there and so because
they are not from Australia. The animals that might eat
them have not co evolved with that poison, and so
it pretty much kills them. And so not only are

(01:11:36):
they just kind of like eating all animals out of
house and home, but any predators that try to eat
them will get sick and or die. And so they
have just caused this huge problem. Well, researchers have just
now stumbled onto potentially a solution to this problem, and

(01:11:58):
that's their gene editing.

Speaker 3 (01:12:00):
And so.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Specifically they're using Chrisper cast nine to delete part of
their DNA to prevent them from metamorphosing. So frogs, of
course start as tadpoles and then they metamorphizzos they turn

(01:12:25):
into a frock age the change.

Speaker 1 (01:12:30):
And so.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
If they don't do that, then you're stuck with a
bunch of tadpoles. Now, sure that's a problem for a
bunch of reasons, like they can't leave a water source,
they're stuck. They may or may not be able to
reproduce as tadpoles. But the other thing is that they
are cannibals when they are tadpoles. And so if you

(01:12:56):
have a few tadpoles that are forever tadpoles they call
them peter pan tadpoles will.

Speaker 1 (01:13:03):
Never grow up.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
Then they will just sit there in this body of
water and eat and eat and eat. The other tadpoles, well,
they'll eat each other, and then they'll just be left
and not able to grow up and have babies. And
so it should reduce the population.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
But because they're cannibals, they'll also eat and eat and
eat everything and never grow up into the parts of
the life cycle that eat less.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
Right, And also they will not grow up to then
mate and pass that mutation along. And that is the
real problem here is that right now you'd have to
take a fertilized egg and a glass needle with a
cast nine mixture injected into that egg and then put
it into the water. So obviously you can't do that

(01:14:00):
to fix all of the cane toad problems. This is
really just as like a this is a key to
a piece of a puzzle, like how can you make
this work? It would have to be kind of like
the mosquito gene drive. Mm hmmm.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
Yeah, they're not doing that because it's the wrong part
of the life cycle.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
But right right, So, so basically all they figured out
is in isolated ponds to be able to create nuisance
tadpoles that will eat the other tadpoles and will not
be able to grow up. Essentially, that also sterilizes them

(01:14:41):
so that they don't have an ecological risk. They can't
have this runaway into another species or into you know,
like uh oh all of the cane toads are like
this now, which would be fine. It's Australia, it's a
it's an island. That's not an issue.

Speaker 1 (01:14:57):
But if cane toads happened to interbreed with other native toads,
you don't want it to be like.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
Ah, they're forever tadpoles too. Yeah, that would be bad.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
But so.

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):
They kind of have a start stop here a brand
new approach to taking care of an invasive species that
goes through a metamorphosis by stopping it from doing that
metamorphosis through gene editing. The other thing about it is
that at the same time they were able to make
them albino as well, so you can visually see which

(01:15:32):
ones are edited in which ones are not. So that's
very cool. But the other thing is that they are yes, absolutely,
they are not technically mutants. They are not technically genetically
modified under Australian law because all they did is make

(01:15:57):
a single deletion that that prevented them for metamorphosing. They
did not, like change a trait have been natural m
so so they're not genetically modified. They just deleted something.

Speaker 3 (01:16:12):
So I hang on, I'm sorry, I know I missed
part of this. Do they get a grown up toad?

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
They don't, and so that's the Problemso no, because the mosquitoes,
well they try, and.

Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
You put all the sterile males or females in and
then hopefully the babies are sterile or like, they never
grow up there. And then because you put so many
of the not mutant mutants into the population that it
messes up the reproductive dynamics, and you have and you
just have to keep doing it over and over again

(01:16:50):
until you just have a bunch of cannibalistic tadpoles.

Speaker 2 (01:16:54):
Yeah yeah, so Professor Emeritis Professor Emeridith Rick Shine, who
led the team behind this idea. He says, I would
be astonished if we could actually eradicate toads using the
kinds of methods we're talking about. But I think we
could massively knock down their numbers and make them a

(01:17:15):
relatively scarce animal. So he doesn't think you can completely
remove the cane toad by doing this, but he does
think you could impact the numbers. I just still I
want to hear what the strategy for making the edits
would be because as it stands right now, taking a
glass needle to a specific egg in a clutch of

(01:17:35):
thirty thousand is not going to help. So I don't know,
you'd have to find a way to just like squirt
it in the pond and have it infuse into the
egg somehow, right.

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):
Or like what they do with mosquitos is they have
the lab bread sterile mosquitos that then they release into
the natural area, and they release so many of them
that they get in the way of normal practices so
that they the males and female they think that they've
done the deed, but they haven't.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
Right. But see, I think you're gonna it's gonna be
a tough pill to swallow for the Australian government to
say I'm going to release thousands of toads.

Speaker 1 (01:18:23):
I'm not arguing that.

Speaker 3 (01:18:31):
Hard time understanding why you would do that versus just
like your your version of it, Kiki with mosquitoes just steriletoes.
Why what, at what point is it at all different?
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 2 (01:18:45):
Especially so it's because it's it's just it's specifically because
the tadpoles are carnivorous. So the idea is that instead
of just preventing a toad from reproducing, you're releasing a
carnivorous tadpole that never grows up into a pool and
they will systematically eat every baby tadpole in that.

Speaker 3 (01:19:05):
Any other kind. Okay, now that makes sense. Now now
I can see I can see the path. Okay, that
makes sense. I thought it just made him stuck them
at tadpoles.

Speaker 2 (01:19:14):
Yeah, yeah, they do that, but they also, you know,
they stay there much longer than they're supposed to be
before they die, and then they they get I really.

Speaker 3 (01:19:23):
Need an Australian tadpoles like Major fish Lake. The plane
because of gardnivorous tadpoles is decimating the fishing. Go ahead,
I can see you're having a fit these words.

Speaker 1 (01:19:42):
But seriously, Australian horror movie tadpole.

Speaker 2 (01:19:47):
Yes, and all it is is it's bigger and bigger.

Speaker 1 (01:19:53):
The dog goes out to the pond.

Speaker 3 (01:19:56):
Yeah, like what happens is bluffy.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
It's just the frog, the toad, pond, what.

Speaker 3 (01:20:04):
Tadpole, the dog, the cat, the cat, the mouse that the.

Speaker 2 (01:20:14):
Perhaps, yes, yeah, you want to talk about bird poop.
So uh. I originally read this uh the like the
headline for this article, and I went, duh, okay, so
I have to explain my thought process. Seabirds only poop
wall flying researchers observe, said du But I realized what

(01:20:37):
my brain did. My brain turned it backwards. In the
generally speaking, seabirds poop well flying and non seabirds, things
like pigeons or perching birds don't. Okay, and so right

(01:20:58):
before they want to lighten up, absolutely, and they don't
do a lot of pooping while they're in there. That's
not to say you can never be pooped on by
a pigeon that's flying over your head, but it is
much more likely that you will get pooped on and
by a seagull than by a pigeon in flight. And
so my brain was like, yeah, dues, seabirds poop all flying.
But the piece here is the only seabirds only poop

(01:21:23):
all flying. Seabirds do not appear to poop while perched
or specifically while floating on the water. Now, what I
love about this is that this was an accidental Okay,
this is an accidental study. Okay, so already more research
is needed.

Speaker 3 (01:21:43):
So this is an accident that can't be true.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
So researchers were studying how seabirds run on the sea
surface to take off, which is mechanically a really weird
thing that birds do. Is I'm an albatross or I'm
a sea goal or I'm a puffin, and I'm sitting
on the water and I all of a sudden decide
I'm gonna start flying in a second here, and so

(01:22:07):
you can kind of swim, which turns into a run,
which I am kicking my feet on the top of
the water and I'm flap flap, flap, flap, flapping, and
I get in there. And so that's like, mechanically, it's
a really weird thing that they can do, that they
can go from floating on the water to flying. And
so researching that watching videos, Leo Ousaka from University of

(01:22:31):
Tokyo found that they were dropping feces frequently, which like
it's a burn, duh. But then the more that he
looked at it, the more he thought the pattern was
really interesting. And what he found was these are specifically
streaked sheerwaters. They poop well flying, they do not poop

(01:22:51):
well they're floating on the water, and they do it
every four to ten minutes. So this is where I
have to bring in the numbers. He put because he
was noticing this, he put eraser size backward facing cameras
strapped to their bellies on fifteen streat sheerwater. So fifteen
birds already not sounding like an excellent sample size. It's okay,

(01:23:15):
but it's it's not excellent. Also, just this one species,
I will say. And he recorded and analyzed around two
hundred defecation events. Now I did some math. It's time
for math in Blair's animal corner. Okay, yeah, soo, man,
if they are pooping every four to ten minutes, all right,

(01:23:39):
And he looked at two hundred defication events. Now, in
a day, there is one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes.
So if you're doing the long one, they're only pooping
every ten minutes. This equates to cumulatestively slightly more than

(01:24:01):
a day in this bird's life in the number. And
then if you divide it by fifteen oh my god.
So then it's like, hold on, I have to finish
my math. So now if I divide that by fifteen, right,
so now we have, you know, about one hundred, and
then you divide that by ten, it's only it's only

(01:24:21):
like ten defecation events per No, wait, ten hours per bird.
I lost my units. I need to stoy geometry this again.
But basically my point is my point is the amount
of time that they're doing this here. Let me fix this.
So okay, so we have every ten minutes. Okay, we

(01:24:43):
have two hundred events, so that's roughly two thousand minutes.
Oh a footage. Okay, divided by fifteen, that's only one
hundred and thirty three minutes per bird. That's two hours
of birth. There we go. So this is not a
good amount of data. Ultimately, like two hundred defecation events

(01:25:06):
sounds really good, but once you dig down into the math,
now you're stuck with like I watch deep bird for
cumulatively like two hours, Like that's not very good. Right,
So yes, it's every four to ten minutes, but that's
for this very specific snapshot and this very specific subset
of this very specific species.

Speaker 1 (01:25:26):
Right, and now all that to say, yes, go ahead,
I would I say, and like, are you you're only
looking at them during a particular season, which may be
in where they're doing more foraging and more activity. And
bird defecation is a lot of urea, so a lot
of like ammonia nitrogen compounds which are gonna be the

(01:25:46):
metabolites from muscle use. And so maybe when they're flying more,
they poop more, you know, So it's like part of
just the metabolic energy, like sustaining the homeostasis of an
energetic flight over the ocean over a period of time.

Speaker 3 (01:26:06):
Yeah, So.

Speaker 2 (01:26:09):
There's pieces here that are interesting. So for example, they
estimated that the birds excrete about thirty grams of poop
an hour, which is about five percent of their body mass.
And some seabirds spend hours or days in the air,
and if they are doing that, then they do indeed
need to excrete as often as possible because if you

(01:26:30):
are a bird that weighs a pound, every thirty grams counts, right,
and so that is an important piece that you have
to constantly be dumping anything extra to keep your weight
down right, So that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:26:47):
And another side to this is from the metabolism physiology
point of like the human kidneys and processing just blood
flow through the kidneys is that you process the entire
bodies blood supply within twenty minutes. So every twenty minutes
you get like a new fresh supply of urine. So

(01:27:09):
if you're flying and you're doing all sorts of stuff,
then you know, maybe it's equally you know, how how
much of their kidney's working, because this is the cloaca,
the common eurogenital tracks, so it's this is everything.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
Poop, pee, it's all together. Yeah, absolutely, yes. So the
other thing that I thought was really interesting about this
is that, again I'm going to call this anecdotal because
of the amount of data that we have here, but
they found that on several occasions in their in their recordings,

(01:27:46):
the birds took off solely for bathroom breaks and then
returned to the water within a minute. So they they
came off of the water to poop and then came back.
So they are intentionally avoiding pooping while floating. This is
really interesting. This isn't just I am flying, therefore I
need to poop. This is I have to poop, therefore
I need to fly. And so, as Usaka says, they

(01:28:09):
have to flap their wings vigorously to take off, it
exhausts them. The amount of energy it takes to take
off as a bird is enormous, right, and so that
means that the risk of excreting in the sea outweighs
the effort to take off. So there has to be
a good motivation to want to fly just to poop.
And so there's a bunch of different theories of why

(01:28:29):
that might be. It might be because it would foul
their feathers, right, because like whatever compounds are in the poop,
if that touches their feathers at the same time as water,
their feathers could actually end up wet. It could ruin
the kind of hydrophobic character that the feathers have by

(01:28:50):
exposing it to some of the compounds in the p
and pooh, right it also and then the seals and
the fish, Yes, so that was the other one. Yeah,
they don't want to give away their location, right, Or
it could just be mechanical. Maybe it's easier for them
to release their bowels while they're flying versus when they're

(01:29:11):
on water.

Speaker 3 (01:29:12):
Like it's.

Speaker 2 (01:29:14):
I myself have never tried to poop while swimming, but
maybe it is more difficult. I don't know. Someone would
have to tell me about what that experience felt like.
But it's possible that having the water pressure right up
against the kloika could make it harder to release pieces right, So.

Speaker 1 (01:29:34):
Sorry, human body doesn't like to release while standing right,
there's a certain like ample. Yeah, anyway, you would think
what justin Well.

Speaker 3 (01:29:46):
I think I like the first version because because if
you poop in the water and then the wave hits you,
you're like poop. You can get covered by you know,
your own poop pretty quick or your neighbor.

Speaker 2 (01:29:57):
Yeah or whatever. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:30:00):
Kevin Ridden in the chat says you'll never get pooped
on by a seagull unless you're on a sailboat. I
do have one anecdote of somebody in a the driver
of a car I was a passenger room getting pooped
on by a seagull in the car because apparently it

(01:30:20):
was that poop was coming down at a trajectory that
just matched the open window. God. I was like, that's
really lucky. He's like, no, this doesn't feel like lucky.

Speaker 2 (01:30:35):
Well, if they're doing it every four to ten minutes,
it's not very lucky, is it. It happens a lot.
But yeah, so ultimately, like why do we care? I
always like to ask that question, why do we care
how often birds are pooping? Why do we care how
they poop? Well, there's a lot of research on how
bird poop and other animal poop helps enriched soil. There's

(01:30:58):
not a lot of research on how bird poop and
other poop enriches the ocean. And in the case of birds,
that's bringing stuff directly from land into the ocean. It's
helping to fertilize kind of the phytoplankton and the stuff
we were talking about. So it is important for their

(01:31:18):
habitat to know kind of like how that works. But
you know, it's also it is really important to know,
like behaviorally if they need to do certain things to survive,
and defecation is part of survival. So next steps they
suggest for this study are to use cameras or temperature
sensors with longer battery life. I'm guessing that's why they

(01:31:39):
only had two hundred defication events. They want to combine
it with GPS to map the seabirds to look at
where they are releasing their droppings in the sea. They
could even then measure certain nitrogen phosphorus other levels in
areas that are high defecation areas. See if that kind
of correlates, you can see what kind of species are
in those areas where birds are pooping more. There's lots

(01:32:02):
that you could do to kind of explore this a
little bit more.

Speaker 3 (01:32:05):
So that is a big point too, because if they
didn't do this, they would have died off. Maybe there's
there's there are there have been saying is that. I think,
I don't know if you brought it or I brought it.
We talked about at some point about an ecosystem where
that was completely dependent on the birds of the island

(01:32:29):
pooping over the water, because yeah, the reefs and the
fish and the whole ecosystem there needed that to grow.
And that was also the food that the birds were
then eating as they would go and get the top
of that food chain, which was the fish. And if
you if they were doing all of their pooping on
the island, then there wouldn't be the fish population there

(01:32:50):
for them to eat, and they would have died off,
and they wouldn't be birds on that island or fish
surrounding that island right or the reef system. So so
it could also just be that's their role in their ecosystem,
and if they didn't participate in it, they wouldn't be
here if that wasn't what they did, right, Yeah, the

(01:33:14):
reed we see seagulls today.

Speaker 1 (01:33:16):
Eagles are so widespread though, I mean, we have seagulls
that use Mono Lake as breeding ground, Salt Lake, the
Great Salt Lake. We've got like seagulls that you find inland,
because seagulls is misnomer. They're goals, goals that end up
over the sheer waters are coastal like ocean going birds.

(01:33:37):
But not all birds are going to be the same.
And we obviously have a lot of poop covered rocks
that suggest there's a lot of birds that poop on
rocks as well. So the whole thing is an interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:33:53):
Very fear point. Yeo there and why yeah, yeah, but
I mean poop. I will argue pooping on a rock
is different from pooping on the ocean, and so I
think that that is definitely the poor language in in
kind of the coverage of the study was talking about
that as a binary, and of course that those are
not the only two options. You can poop on a rock,

(01:34:14):
You can poop on a tree. You can poop on
a boat. There are lots of places that you can
poop that is not just the ocean or the air.

Speaker 5 (01:34:23):
Yeah, this is like your book, is that like, yeah,
my doctor, you can poop on a rock, You can
poop on Yeah, you can poop in the air.

Speaker 2 (01:34:35):
Yeah. And I will answer one question in the chat
does poop? Does poop float or sink? So it depends.
Bird poop is in this case this particular kind of
bird poop, but usually bird poop that is eating a
wild diet is essentially liquid. It's like a white liquid.

(01:34:55):
Like he was saying, it's a mixture of urea and
and poop and so it is. It is mostly a liquid.
It had just kind of hit the surface of the
water and kind of disperse, And there might be sorry,
if anyone's eating, there might be some like chunks that
kind of sink down into the water column, but for
the most part, it is going to kind of disperse

(01:35:16):
onto the surface and then descend. For other animals that
are not birds, really depends on what they're eating.

Speaker 1 (01:35:25):
So thank you, Blair.

Speaker 2 (01:35:29):
Sorry, sorry, you're welcome. Every It's so funny. In my
day job today I spent so long looking at diagrams
of scat. This is a very poop filled day for me.

Speaker 1 (01:35:42):
Some days are poopy, and that's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:35:46):
Because it's science.

Speaker 1 (01:35:48):
Justin you have a story before we head out on
our tight ninety show.

Speaker 3 (01:35:52):
Yeah, what is it?

Speaker 2 (01:35:53):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:35:54):
It's the Is it that Justin trashes a story? Story? Yeah?
All right, I'll try to make this quick. This is
a kind in the University of Technology, which also is
a university of grinding equipment is part of their things.
A bunch of engineers in China. They're reporting on the
development of a lightweight lattice based limb design for a

(01:36:18):
bionic robot, which sounds very fancy, and what does it is.
They have a computer simulation that is designing for them
a lattice framework internally that can make it lighter weight
and still have all of the torsion and strength that
would need to be sort of the lower limb where

(01:36:39):
the you know, for something like a robot or something
that needs lots of torsion but also needs to carry
a load, you can have some bending, but not too
much that it becomes brittle. It is research on lower
limb lightweight of bionic robot based on lattice structure unit
published in scientific report. Researchers claim to have created an

(01:37:03):
innovative structural configuration library using a topology optimization and applied
it to designing this bionic limb Okay. Unfortunately, the paper
is entirely unreliable. It is unclear if this to me
at least, if this paper was poorly translated, unskillfully formatted,

(01:37:25):
ai manufactured, or simply contains errors. And actually I think
I haven't even better idea of what it might be.
But it did make it. It was submitted by the
authors in this form. It apparently was accepted for publication,
it was peer reviewed, made it through that process, and

(01:37:46):
it was made it through the publisher's editorial staff, who
can who can read everything. So there's there's some plausible errors.
There is a study that they sort of say like
this was proposed way back when and it was Evans
at all. Two thousand and one is incorrectly cited as

(01:38:10):
being from two thousand and attributed to Ivana, So that
could be a minor error, right translation error, transposing error
or something like this. In the introduction. It's not like
the citation at the end. The citation at the end
of the paper is actually correct, but in the bulk

(01:38:30):
of the paper it's incorrect. But that's not really a
big deal. They did twenty lattice structures that they were
going to be simulating in the computer that they're gonna
then test to see how well they matched, and they
have a little reference that sort of shows the weights
of things, and in there one of the things that

(01:38:53):
they tested, according to this is among the lattice structures tested.
Unit number fourteen demonstrates the stiffness in contrast to number one,
which exhibits the poorest bending performance, and with a maximum
deplacement of this and a relative density of that. Okay,
the problem is the relative density that it says that

(01:39:15):
looks like they're talking about number one actually belongs to fourteen.
So it's sort of like, Okay, maybe it was bad wording,
maybe it was something like that. Now later they also
in this state that the number one had the highest displacement,
but it shows the third highest displacement on the graphs

(01:39:37):
that they offer. Again, the relative density is attributed to
the wrong thing. So there's a couple mistakes there. Not
just that they got the density wrong, but they also
placed it in the wrong place. In terms of how
well it did against the others. Then they state that
when subjected to torsion, the number four lattice structure unit

(01:40:01):
experiences a maximum displacement deformation of zero one two with
the relative density of blah blah blah, and exhibits the
high stiffness of this. Okay, the problem is it is
mistakenly being given the density of yet another number thirteen,
so it's again confused the density of the one that

(01:40:26):
it keeps kind of going back to and talking about
as being a top performer, which is number fourteen. So
further issues. There's a detailed table showing the optimization. It
says it's been the volume has been reduced by twenty
three percent, which is fine. That seems to match its
stiffness was increased by a factor of one point ninety seven.
But there's never any point in which they explain how

(01:40:49):
that the stiffness was increased by a factor of one
point nine. There's no data backing up the stiffness increase.
It doesn't seem to be related to any of this
applied data. And they also say that it had a
weight decrease of over twenty three percent, But then you
look at the data that they provide, and it would
be nineteen point four percent, so that doesn't match either.

(01:41:12):
But there's a big tell there's a big tael coming
figure thirteen, which I think we have there if if
you're doing any kind of a sharing on this, if
we go down, I'm going to show this because this
is the part when I finally like I kept getting
confused because like none of the I kept trying to

(01:41:35):
what the study was saying about things, and then it
kept not matching their data tables. This one's really interesting.
So that very first sort of starry looking red line
that's going up there, and you look over the legend
that's number fourteen. Number fourteen looks like in this bending
displacement that it had the least displacement out of anything,

(01:41:59):
which is kind of nice for, you know, for it's
also like showing that it can, you know, handle torsion
and some other things. That's really much better than the
rest of them. Okay, so now with that up, I'm
going to read. I'm going to read a section of
this paper states that in figure thirteen presents the low

(01:42:21):
displacement curves under three bending points, a considerable difference in
deformation behavior was observed. Among the specimens, specimen number three
exhibited the greatest bending deformation, while specimen number sixteen experienced
the least deformation, recording only one point two seven eight.

(01:42:43):
But where is sixteen? Sixteen is not? The first sixty
is not the second sixteen is somewhere in there. But
the one that they have there that has the greatest deformation.

Speaker 1 (01:42:56):
Pop Actually like it's one of the higher anyways, it's
near fourteen. Yeah, fourteen is the least, right, Yeah, And.

Speaker 3 (01:43:07):
So here it's describing fourteen is the least on the
on the graph, but it's saying sixteen is the outer
limit in the text. And again it does this figure.
For the next figure, fourteen, which I don't think is
in this is shown in the study, does this again.

(01:43:28):
It presents low displacement curves of lattest structure units under
torsional conditions. This time three exhibited the largest angular displacement
and thirteen showed the smallest. And yet that one also
shows fourteen as having the smallest displacement under torsion.

Speaker 1 (01:43:47):
So it looks like nineteen might I don't know. It's
just a picture here, we can't see the data.

Speaker 3 (01:43:52):
But oh, so it's a different. It's a different one
than this is. So, yeah, you're looking at thirteen fourteen,
I didn't get added here, but fourteen it does basically
the same thing. Figure fourteen shows the unit fourteen having
the best result, but when you look at the text
analysis and the study, it's not mentioned. So this is

(01:44:17):
sort of to me, this was like the big kind
of like aha moment, which is it seems like it
might have been added after the fact. It's a hero
of the study. It's the thing making this significant is
there's this one thing that they discovered through their modeling

(01:44:41):
that's outperforming everything on all of these tests. And then
there's another tell because when they went when they went
to actually do testing, they picked number ten, they picked
very completely different one than the one that they have
they're showing as outperforming everything. So what this looks like

(01:45:02):
to me is a low impact paper that found a
result that might have been pretty expected without any like
anything that was being exceptional in the discovery other than
their futer modeling predicted correctly how we expected already things
to behave. But I'm going to quote because I got

(01:45:25):
a little I was this is this is justin writing
mad possibly this is an example of a low impact
paper that then found a second life within the murky
underworld of a paper mill. Poofrey adding in a layer
of fabricated significance to increase the impact of an otherwise
expected finding, because all of a sudden, this is here,

(01:45:53):
and then there's there's there's further aspects of this too.
Figure fifteen has another thing that again shows shows things
that can't be consolidated, that just sort of looks like
they've they've done sort of a combination, it seems, of
adding this this hero into their study, this fourteen that's

(01:46:15):
doing these amazing things, that's taking credit some places for
other one's work. Right, so oh, here's the one that
was the best. We'll just slap fourteen in its place.
But then forgot to change the densities that we're talked about,
and that's why it doesn't match up or they forgot to,
uh if they forgot to change their analysis portion of

(01:46:38):
it to include that one. And it's to me, this
is like so egregious also just because this is this
is a scientific paper, scientific reports that should have caught it.
This is within nature and you can say it's their
fast track. Okay, yeah, but it needs to get read.

(01:47:02):
It needs somebody to review it, and it needs to
be accepted by the journal as a real piece. And
I think the point of it is that nobody was
supposed to read this, that this is supposed to be
enough under the radar that somebody would get credit for
publishing it. Somebody we get paid for accepting it for publication.

(01:47:23):
The Scientific Reports takes money probably in the neighborhood of
twenty five to three thousand dollars if not more, to
publish this, And yeah, that it can be published without
being read is a red flag for quality control, in
publishing integrity. And yes, I somebody who's Arland I think

(01:47:46):
was mentioning earlier. Yeah, I think it should be retracted.
I think it should be a retraction, But I don't
think it's going to be because I don't think they care.
I don't think it's going to be read. There's other
I've seen. I've seen other coverage of it. We're like, oh, yeah,
they found this interesting lattice and this could be great
for robotics or you know, aerospace, blah blah blah. But

(01:48:10):
nobody's really reading the study. And at some point some
engineer will sit down with this having heard like, oh,
maybe they've got the they got the secret sauce on
this lattice. Let me see what they did. They're gonna
get part way through this and they'll catch it quicker
than I will, and they go just nah, this isn't
useful and toss it, and that's fine. They won't think

(01:48:31):
twice about it. But they're not going to go to
like scientific reports and be like wagging their old man
grumpy finger and saying, hey, you shouldn't.

Speaker 1 (01:48:38):
Have ever published this, old man grumpy finger.

Speaker 3 (01:48:44):
But it's not like these pupp these these paper mills,
and that's what it looks like. It looks like they
almost have like a different tone when they're talking about
this hero U configuration that they saw that they then
didn't test. It's obviously like added after the fact, and
it was done very sloppily, and it was done very crudely,

(01:49:06):
and it's very obvious once you realize what's happening.

Speaker 1 (01:49:10):
And what I'm looking through here is that it seems
as though they there was simulations that they they have
the lattice structural experiments, and they did print a bunch
of stuff and they.

Speaker 3 (01:49:28):
Printed all twenty and tested and then made one into
the act the little units, so stub units of those sections,
and then they the number ten units the one that
they actually selected to turn into a robotic women and
further testing. But yeah, the this what we were looking

(01:49:53):
at on that chart is the is the physical testing
m But you'll see the same thing in the simulations
where the it's almost as if they picked number fourteen
and tried to give it data that other units came
up with. At some point it's saying it's on the

(01:50:14):
simulations that it scored the lowest on you know, I
can't remember which compression or something like this one of
the tests, but even if you look at that chart,
it looks like thirteen is a little lower, But the
charts aren't scaled. The charts are scaled, so all of
the lows look like a flat line near zero, even

(01:50:36):
though they are point this or point that and dramatically different.
You know, one's zero point one two and one's one
or point four four, So those should be you know,
five ticks or so a couple of ticks different, but
they're just a flat line on the bottom because none
of their none of their graphic representations are scaled in

(01:50:56):
a way that you can see a difference between the
critical fact where you would want to see them, those
big performance differences.

Speaker 2 (01:51:04):
It's just sort of I was noticing that too, Like
those those figures we were looking at where there were
a bunch piled on top of each other. That's not
a helpful graphic, especially when they are all different versions
of lines with tick marks on them. It's very hard
to see what you're looking at.

Speaker 1 (01:51:21):
And so I mean very often. The images are in
studies are supposed to be there to help you understand,
but they are not necessarily the end all be all.
They should match what you're reporting, but the data is
the you know, is what it all comes down to,
and you can you can make mistakes on assessment and
how you present it.

Speaker 3 (01:51:43):
And how they present The only point where they present
raw data is the weights, and that's where I first
started to see all these discrepancies where they're attributing a
density to to one item but it belonged to a
different one. If they presented more raw data, maybe maybe
I would have caught it quicker, But they didn't. They

(01:52:05):
own that they're raw data that they provided for for
these What these assessments were based on is they showed
those infographics that are horrible.

Speaker 1 (01:52:15):
That you can just you're just getting so like spoiled
by open science and open data. I mean, come on,
what do you think researchers are just going to like
put their data out there for anyone to analyze and
like try to reproduce their experiments.

Speaker 3 (01:52:33):
Okay, And so here's the other here's the like geopolitical
version of it, which is Chinese engineers and authoritarian government
discover lattice building material system that can massively improve load

(01:52:53):
and tortion for aerospace, robotics, defense and cars and everything else,
and they shared it with an open an open so
like if there was a real study they did find
something great, and I don't think we would be hearing
about it in the first place. So like there's like

(01:53:13):
all kinds of layers of the then you could even
be saying, is this like an false flag the information,
like oh, we'll tell them that this works even though
it was terrible. Like there's all kinds of layers you
can put on top of it. But the fact that
in their own paper that they give you are all
of the examples of it not being of contradictions and

(01:53:36):
things not being aligned and not work like in for
it to still make it through a publication like that,
Like I need to start writing research papers and give
myself a long list. Does this pick stuff that nobody
wants to read. I figured out what that is pretty
quickly because they've had to cover some of those, and
I'll just start I'll just start getting like, you know, oh,

(01:53:58):
I have so many citations, and their citations are iffy
too because they're real citations, but there's so many of them,
and they don't seem to always have anything to do
with what we're talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:54:10):
And what we are seeing in some of these is like, actually,
what we're seeing in a lot of these graphs is
there's no error bars. These are data points. There's not averages.
They're just they did one test, they test and the
simulation and experiment the bottom of they matched so well.

(01:54:35):
It's amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:54:36):
See is exactly what I was trying to describe. See, Like,
you've got like between twelve and fifteen. They're all almost zero,
but the data points for them are all different, and
based on the data that they provided, fourteen is showing
they're at zero point one two and thirteen is at

(01:54:59):
point for something something.

Speaker 2 (01:55:02):
Okay, Okay, I have a question.

Speaker 3 (01:55:04):
I have a question.

Speaker 1 (01:55:05):
These are all different lattice structure units, and there are
individual measures of different structures. Why is this a line graph?

Speaker 3 (01:55:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:55:17):
I was wondering that same question.

Speaker 1 (01:55:19):
This, Why is why are they connected?

Speaker 3 (01:55:22):
Yeah? Yeah, no, no, there's no, there's no.

Speaker 2 (01:55:28):
I had the exact same thought. I was like, this
isn't a continuous This.

Speaker 1 (01:55:32):
Isn't a continuous measure, No lattice structure unit, so they're
all connected.

Speaker 2 (01:55:40):
Yeah, Like, this should be a bar graph.

Speaker 1 (01:55:44):
It should be a table.

Speaker 2 (01:55:46):
It should be a table. You're absolutely right. You could
even do a table with the little bars in it
if you wanted to make it really fancy looking. But
you're right, it should be a table. But they wanted
to adviscate the.

Speaker 3 (01:55:58):
And it makes it and and it and it and
there's the if you were back on it. The thirteen
that's supposed to be three or four times higher than
the fourteen is on a slightly lower pixel than the fourth. Thing, like,
it's manufactured. This is this is make it up world

(01:56:20):
that we're in. But if you pay, if you buy
the ticket, you get to ride at scientific advances. It's
not real anymore. It used to be. I don't think
it's real anymore. Now, I don't trust anything.

Speaker 2 (01:56:36):
Quite a few people in the in different chats are
saying they think that a large language model or a
I wrote it, which I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:56:43):
I actually don't. I actually don't because I think I
think there was a real study and I think somebody
has list.

Speaker 2 (01:56:53):
That's not to say there's not a study. You could
you you could feed your data to and ask them
to write you a paper and they include graphs.

Speaker 3 (01:57:02):
So I don't. I don't see. I don't see a
whole lot of at least the tells that I would
expect from something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:57:10):
And along those lines there is look author, there is
a great resource from Wikipedia. Wikipedia editors have created a
resource to identify AI or large language model writing in writing.

Speaker 3 (01:57:26):
Do we have time to drop that study in there?

Speaker 1 (01:57:29):
I know I will put it in the chat. I
will find it and put it in the chat. But
it's something that we should all be aware of. But additionally,
I mean, these are individuals from Chinese research institutions that potentially,
you know, they could have they could be great at English.
They could also have used AI to write it to

(01:57:50):
make it look really nice in English. But yeah, I
think it's interesting. I think any good assessment and peer
review of this would have should have ripped it apart,
just like you did.

Speaker 3 (01:58:06):
I have a new one next week that I think
is even more egregious something you do know. Yes, even
though it's more subtle, I think it's much more. It's
much worse.

Speaker 1 (01:58:20):
So I'm going to come into my last stories to
finish up the show tonight for our really really you know,
short tight show Phantom Limb. We've talked through the years
about the ideas of how phantom limb syndrome happens in

(01:58:40):
the brain right, and there's all these ideas. So when
you lose a limb and an amputation occurs for whatever reason,
there are people say, I, you know, you lose your hand.
People say, I can still feel the fingers, I can
still I know it's there, And people get really upset
about it because it's not there obviously, and they can't

(01:59:01):
use it. And so there are therapeutic methods that people
have come up with to try and train people out
of these feelings. As we were learning about phantom limb syndrome,
and I think it was Rama Chandrin No. There was
a neuroscientist down at like UCLA who was talking about

(01:59:23):
the mirror therapy where you put your amputated hand on
the side of a mirror where you can't see it.
You put your real hand, you know, the other hand
that's there, so that you can see it in the mirror.
And because of the mirror image, you can start like
imagining that you're moving it in synchrony with and so

(01:59:44):
you start to teach your brain what is real and
what is not through through this mirror image therapy, brain
plasticity knowledge started letting us come up with this idea
of wait, okay, so the mahunk the homunculus in the brain, where.

Speaker 2 (02:00:02):
Like our.

Speaker 1 (02:00:04):
Brain body map exists in our sensory cortex, that that
might be malleable, and that if you lose your fingers
or your hand, that the area of your face, your lips,
or your foot may encroach that because those neurons are

(02:00:25):
still active, they're like, hey, you're not working anymore. I'm
going to take over this practice. And the idea was
that over time, maybe the phantom limbs syndrome wasn't just
these old signals still being active, that it wasn't something
from the peripheral nervous system that it was actually happening

(02:00:48):
in your primary sensory cortex, and that it was a
result of plasticity and your lips being too excitable. So
if you or your nose say nos itches and all
of a sudden you're like, oh, I feel my hand.
My hand is here right. So people started saying, maybe
it's this overlapping of sensory areas, and that became the

(02:01:12):
accepted and acknowledged paradigm is that our sensory somatosensory cortex
could change. Well, a group of resources researchers just publishing
in Nature Neuroscience. They have a study called stable Cortical
body Maps before and after arm amputation. They actually hung

(02:01:33):
out with three adults before their arms were amputated and
for up to five years after. Very small sample size
only five people, but they observed behaviors, their their responses, explanations,
and also electro you know, fMRI and other measurements of

(02:01:58):
their actual brain activity. But they found is it, Hey, Nope,
our somatosensory cortexes are super stable and they just like
to be what they are, and that our lips stay
where our lips are going to be and are missing hand.
That is just neuronal material that's there and it's ready

(02:02:24):
should you get a hand in the future. And so
they tried to do a whole bunch of mirror training.
They tried to they did all sorts of of therapies
and different interventions to try and see what would happen,
and they found that there was pretty much no change

(02:02:45):
in the cortical map of the somatosensory cortex. So the
whole idea that brain neuroplasticity allows your lips to take
over the encroach into that area next to it and
be more sensory, and that our somatosensory cortex changes. According
to this study with only three people, but for a

(02:03:06):
very long time period, and it's the first time that
they've ever done this kind of a long term, longitudinal
study like this, it doesn't they don't have there's no change.
The activation is the activation and that's it. And so
what they suggest is that phantom limb syndrome is not

(02:03:27):
necessarily something that occurs within the brain and that it's
not something that is triggered within the sensory cortex. That
it actually might be something peripheral that we are not
aware of. But the bottom line is that we got it,
we have it. They say, we've got it wrong.

Speaker 2 (02:03:46):
We know what it is. Not that is the most
important part of doing science.

Speaker 1 (02:03:52):
And then so our and law here is saying, how
have we figured out how to regrow hands yet? And
the answer is no, not hand, but we do have
a Hey, what happened to that study? Where'd that one go?

Speaker 3 (02:04:07):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (02:04:08):
No?

Speaker 1 (02:04:08):
Anyway, so.

Speaker 3 (02:04:12):
I can't do hands, but we can do butt. No,
we can do.

Speaker 1 (02:04:17):
Rat spinal cords. They created three D printed channels for
uh spinal dissections. So basically they like cut rat spinal cords,
which it would be like you're in a car accident
and something severs your spinal cord and you'd be paralyzed.

(02:04:37):
We know that those neurons they kind of.

Speaker 2 (02:04:40):
Want to grow back together, but they're like, oh so hard,
and I don't.

Speaker 1 (02:04:44):
Really know where, and it takes a really long time,
and there's all these competing signals, and so the neurons
have a really hard time reconnecting. They three D printed
channels that they like put the neurons in the spinal
cord in and the nerve the spinal cord regrew in
the rats and so yeah, and it was faster and better.

(02:05:08):
It's like, you know, the bananic.

Speaker 2 (02:05:11):
Even would conduit. That's awesome, Yeah, the.

Speaker 1 (02:05:17):
Six dollars man and the banana woman. But we can't
regrow hands yet. But there are technologies that are being
advanced that may allow us to help in cases of
paralysis and understanding this about the way that the cortical
map stays consistent. This could help us with some of

(02:05:42):
our treatments for amputations, so x you know, the prosteses, Like,
there are lots that we're looking at now because we
know there are active signals that can come down to
the ends of the nerves at the end of the
amputated limb and that they're ready to go and they

(02:06:03):
want to do something, and so those signals can be
used and so maybe you do just need to put
a hand back on the limb and that part of
the kept cortical map will go back into work if
you do it right. So that's kind of what this
study is suggesting. But again it was you know, three people,

(02:06:23):
but it's a very a very solid result. Yeah, and
then even beyond that, if you got big thumbs, you
might have big brains. Researchers did an evolutionary analysis of
thumb size in primates and neocortex size and basically were like,

(02:06:47):
oh hey, look, there's no link to the cerebellum, but
neocortexes get bigger when your thumbs get bigger. And the
relationship they suggest has to do with.

Speaker 2 (02:07:01):
Dexterity.

Speaker 1 (02:07:02):
So I don't know, having to or being able to
manipulate objects with your crazy big thumbs gives you a
bigger brain and that makes you smarter. I don't know.
I would also like to say that whenever people do
these kinds of correlative evolutionary comparisons, take it with a

(02:07:28):
grain of salt, because correlation is not causation. And even
though they kind of controlled for body size, they basically said, well,
because body size, like it wasn't a thing really in
our data, we were just like, let's just get rid
of it.

Speaker 2 (02:07:44):
So yeah, it's one of the first things I thought of,
because I did see this study this week, was so,
did I get way dumber when I lost all the
dexterity in my hand? Yes?

Speaker 1 (02:08:00):
No, yes, when you spray in your hand, that's no.

Speaker 2 (02:08:05):
Of course I was thinking about that too, like people
who are born with certain disabilities related to their hands
or they have you know, arthritis or they have like
any sort of other kind of challenges with their dexterity.
That does not mean that their brain is not as
big as the average person. This is working on averages

(02:08:27):
across species, and so it's.

Speaker 1 (02:08:29):
Like, yeah, and this this is a study into evolutionary
adaptation to why do we have bigger brains than our
closest relatives? Right, Like why as primates Like people are like.

Speaker 2 (02:08:45):
It's because we ate fish.

Speaker 1 (02:08:46):
Oh, it's because we like to do downhill skiing. No,
it's because we have big thumbs.

Speaker 2 (02:08:53):
But it's more likely that dexterity followed from cognition if
you think about it, because like that has brought the
ability to manipulate tools, use things in a way you
haven't used them before. Think critically when you're holding something like.

Speaker 1 (02:09:11):
So there's you know, you have a big thumb, so
use it. Is your brain going to like get up
to the challenge?

Speaker 3 (02:09:18):
Right, that's assuming that's assuming it's a use thing. What
if it's just a developmental stage thing right where big
brains are developing, Like there's a thumb brain development uh
parallel that's taking place.

Speaker 1 (02:09:34):
That's what they say that not in utero in primates.

Speaker 3 (02:09:41):
Know what I mean what I'm saying that it but
maybe in primates, their brain and thumb go through a
significant development stage where they're both growing. And so if
you have that stage extended, you get a little bit
larger brains and then you get bigger thumbs and versus
some it's got a hoof.

Speaker 1 (02:10:01):
We know that there's like one of the I don't know,
one finger is like one of our fingers gets longer
with more testosterone or something.

Speaker 2 (02:10:10):
My question then is like, how's been looking?

Speaker 3 (02:10:14):
Next time you're in the room of your you think
your smartest friends measured their thumbs? Yea, measured their thumbs.
Take a look, take a couple of measurements. Are you
maybe maybe we're rushing to judgment just because of how
dumb it sounds.

Speaker 2 (02:10:29):
What about if you have hitchhikers some what does that mean?

Speaker 3 (02:10:32):
Brilliant? Brilliant? They used to Einstein is actually a famous
galaxy right there, My goodness used to hitchhike everywhere. But
he never you will never see him in a picture
wearing gloves can't get any of the fit.

Speaker 1 (02:10:51):
Hmm. So uh, you know, the researchers suggest that our
thumbs and brains co of that there was neocortex growth
tied to cognition sensory processing. It wasn't for movement control necessarily,
but because we were processing stuff better and had smarter

(02:11:16):
thinking that dexterity improved and intelligence than you know, both
together co evolution anyway. I also just want to say
correlations and this is a nice thing that you can't
really prove. Yep, yeah, this is this is one of

(02:11:39):
those great things you can't it. There's there's no I
can prove it. Kind of thing less story. So I
just want to I just want to talk about, though,
how we talk about the world as we go into
the week and we talk about the world. How many
times tonight have we used word to describe our world

(02:12:02):
that are interesting and complex and not related to urban
environments but related to nature. How much do we talk
about nature? I think on the show we talk about
nature a lot, actually, but.

Speaker 3 (02:12:19):
Well we have kind of so it's kind of like
unfair because we have Blair.

Speaker 1 (02:12:24):
So we talked about words pooping in the ocean or
in the air, or on rocks, red spiders.

Speaker 3 (02:12:32):
All Blair talks about is nature, nature, nature, nature, nature.

Speaker 1 (02:12:36):
But I mean, is there only one word nature? Nature? Nature? Nature?
I went to nature. Nature was nice. Then I went
to the hot, sticky, urban, jungle, asphalt, pavement, blah blah blah. Anyway,
researchers just published an analysis of the words using Google

(02:12:58):
Books n gram view you were for the period eighteen
hundred to two thousand, nineteen, mapping frequencies of words associated
with nature, river, meadow, coast, bow, beak, wing. He avoided

(02:13:24):
species names because those are very localized. But anyway, over time,
there is a clear decline in the use of words
related to nature in the books that are available in
this database. Now, the books themselves may be you know,

(02:13:46):
that's that is a biased sample set, but at the
same time, these are books from you know, eighteen hundred
to more modern day. Now, what do you think was
the big thing that kind of set this off?

Speaker 3 (02:14:01):
H People being in the world and no longer of
it on some level.

Speaker 1 (02:14:06):
Yeah, So the industrial revolution in the eighteen hundreds is
thought and urbanization is thought to have kicked this trend off.
But it's fascinating at how low the words in this
n gram frequency analysis have gotten compared to the eighteen hundreds. Currently, Yeah,

(02:14:30):
we're on a little tiny bit of a uptick, but
it's kind of sad everybody go touch grass.

Speaker 2 (02:14:40):
Well, so I'm looking at the scale on the year
part of the graph, I'm actually wondering if any part
of that uptick is during COVID, because it but it
was previous to, right, I see that it started before
that beacause like silent Spring. Sure, yes, absolutely, but specifically

(02:15:05):
during COVID, people were going into nature in a way
that they weren't before because that's all they were allowed
to do, and so that's interesting. I also, you know,
some of it could be generational if you're looking at
it on these larger scales, like, hey, in nineteen fifty
the TV was invented, there's a huge it was around

(02:15:26):
nineteen fifty. There's a huge drop right around that time,
and it continued to go down when like my generation,
we weren't just sent outside, come back for dinner, like
that didn't happen anymore. Right, So, Like it's it makes
sense that there would be kind of less and less
engagement with nature. But I do have hope that there

(02:15:48):
is more. There is more of a resurgence now of
people remembering like, oh, hiking is good, camping is good,
Like I'm going to go for a walk.

Speaker 1 (02:15:56):
Like, Yeah, So the recent searcher has a blog called
finding nature dot org and they have a post related
to nature connection, fear and the pandemic legacy. And in
twenty twenty one they actually assessed this and they found
that there was a connection to nature back in spring

(02:16:21):
twenty twenty, but then it dropped. And after it dropped
five years worth of data from one hundred thousand respondents
to the Natural England's People and Nature Survey, they are
able to say that twenty twenty to twenty twenty one
there was a massive decrease. It recovered a little bit

(02:16:41):
in twenty one and twenty two, and then there has
been further declined through twenty three and twenty four. The
fluctuations are about two percent. From twenty twenty three, nature
has seen a four percent rise with trends. Trends starting
to go separate ways, which are interesting. Yeah, but there's

(02:17:07):
variation from season to season, of course, but it's just
very very interesting to see that.

Speaker 2 (02:17:19):
We've got.

Speaker 1 (02:17:21):
We've got factors like mood and in this English assessment,
they've got happiness kind of coming back up again, even
though going out into nature is decreasing. Through twenty twenty four,

(02:17:42):
but anyway, they're just saying, Hey, everybody, we're really disconnected
from nature right now, and we're not using words about
nature as much anymore. So that's maybe go touch grass
and come up with more words for it.

Speaker 3 (02:17:59):
Yeah, I want to know what missing words are, like
bring them back, Like what did people stop saying? I
wonder that I need that list.

Speaker 1 (02:18:08):
Yeah, so there were some of the words that were
let me see if I can.

Speaker 3 (02:18:16):
If I can find it now and we are at
minimum fourteen goal poops into the show.

Speaker 2 (02:18:24):
So many gold poops.

Speaker 1 (02:18:26):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, I don't know how many words
have been lost or whatever. But we've also we've got
urban growth, nature degradation, agent, life cycle, nature connectedness. That's
decreasing intergenerational transmission. They're looking at words like our archetypal

(02:18:48):
natural elements and terms that evoke sensory or visual aspects
of the natural world. So cops, leaves, bud, do, mosses, mountain, heath, meadow, nature, more, lake, marsh, blossom,
and so these are not even rare words, but they're

(02:19:10):
just used less and less in the literature that we're publishing.

Speaker 2 (02:19:17):
I use those words all the time, liar, Cops.

Speaker 3 (02:19:20):
No, I do.

Speaker 2 (02:19:21):
I I mean not that one, but I do. I
do also work for a parks apartment, so it's a
little bit of a cheat.

Speaker 1 (02:19:32):
Also, yeah, I say trees, a lot birds, trees. Anyway,
look outside outside nature nice good, Yeah, but what.

Speaker 3 (02:19:45):
Would you say, like, oh, this morning Maya Hearts is
swelling like the tide is it crescens across the amber
waves of like you know, like this is all people
had to relate to. They will back in terms of
farming and nature because they didn't have like anything else. Yeah,

(02:20:07):
I mean they are. All of our metaphors were nature based.

Speaker 1 (02:20:12):
And what's actually very interesting is there was another study
out this last week talking about museum experiences and how
in like educational museum engagement experiences often for the kids
sections they're related to like a garden, and there's very
very often they create these garden like environments for kids

(02:20:35):
to experience stuff in. And the author was saying, we
really need to reconsider this because do you know how
many kids have never seen a garden? Like to expect
that a white colonial narrative of growth is appropriate for

(02:20:57):
educational experience experiential edge ducation for everyone is uh not
necessarily the way we should do it, so you know there.

Speaker 3 (02:21:10):
Maybe because none of the white kids would understand.

Speaker 1 (02:21:12):
What that is think outside that you know, uh box garden.

Speaker 3 (02:21:20):
I think, I think that idea is the bee's knees.
And I think anybody who runs away, well they'll be
the cats meow my gosh, there some hot dogger is
going to come along and take the idea and like no,
but I'm saying like everything had to have an animal
or a nature or a thing or you know between

(02:21:40):
your ears, like they are all they had, like you
know kids today like no, I.

Speaker 2 (02:21:46):
Think I think that's That's what I was wondering, is
like physical if you if you took the time to
categorize all these books right by these different eras, are
there new categories now that did not exist before, Which
means then it's not that these words are disappearing, it's
that there are more now. There's maybe dication of experience.

(02:22:10):
So if you if you like took it, if you
looked at like, okay, a distribution based on the on
the different types of literature, like amongst the different types,
nature had an equal share amongst the different types. Does
nature still have an equal share or does it have

(02:22:30):
a similar share rights. And that's really the question is
because now we have dragons, and we have spaceships, and
we have like vampire sex. I don't know, like we
have all these different things.

Speaker 3 (02:22:48):
That we did as an example right there. So there's
an example right there. The title of the book about
vampire sex in the old days was the Birds and
the Beat.

Speaker 1 (02:23:00):
Now it's called twilight.

Speaker 2 (02:23:02):
Isn't that natural?

Speaker 3 (02:23:04):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:23:05):
Come on, it sure is. It is.

Speaker 1 (02:23:08):
Come on, look outside, it's twilight.

Speaker 3 (02:23:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:23:12):
So I think I think this is a very very
important discussion or you know, definition of what what words
are used for and why, and so of course our
literature is going to represent our lived experiences.

Speaker 2 (02:23:31):
But historically we used to.

Speaker 1 (02:23:35):
Think of ourselves as like, you know, the colonial kind
of you know, scientists, we're separate from nature. We own nature.
We are human, we're better than all of it, and
we would observe nature, and it was a thing that
we were looking at, but we weren't part of it.
Has the use changed in a way that are we

(02:23:56):
becoming more part of it? Are we becoming more part
of our earth? Or is it still this? I think
that's important.

Speaker 3 (02:24:03):
Saying that you gotta be careful when you say colonial,
I think you're more picturing like a nineteen fifties scientist
than the because the colonial people were pretty close to
the earth.

Speaker 2 (02:24:13):
They didn't have no no, no is not necessarily a
specific year either, justin like there were still colonies of
the nineteen fifties in the world.

Speaker 1 (02:24:22):
I mean even Darwin went around with a freaking gun
and shot birds and put him on.

Speaker 3 (02:24:28):
His samples to take home. Yeah, it's normal, kill.

Speaker 1 (02:24:33):
Them and then you bring them home. Dominance, for I know,
I think.

Speaker 3 (02:24:39):
It was science. I don't know. If about dominance that
seems like it.

Speaker 2 (02:24:44):
Then why did he eat everything? Was that for science? Well,
there would love to eat everything because.

Speaker 3 (02:24:51):
That back then, that's what they did. They just ate
everything because that was Yeah, you didn't go to the
rest experiential it was there wasn't one there. You had
to eat the birds that were there, that's all. You
did not have to eat the bird to the restaurant
on this.

Speaker 1 (02:25:08):
Because the New Galapago's cruise experience the islands in a
different way the way that Darwin did. Eat your way
across the Galapaosh, Yeah, what's for dinner, Darwin?

Speaker 3 (02:25:28):
Those people just ate anything they could.

Speaker 1 (02:25:31):
They didn't get more inches.

Speaker 3 (02:25:33):
They were always hungry.

Speaker 2 (02:25:34):
There's so little more?

Speaker 1 (02:25:39):
All right? Well, uh, anyway, we're supposed to go outside
and get connected with the nature for our mental health.
Go touch grass, read a book about nature because we
need more nature words in our lives. Go write a
nature book. Put more nature and grams in the freaking
Google database. Are we done?

Speaker 3 (02:25:57):
But don't trust anything you read on nature because it
might that be real science.

Speaker 1 (02:26:02):
Science, Science Advances is not nature. It's they're different, but
it's nature.

Speaker 3 (02:26:07):
It's in Nature Joint.

Speaker 1 (02:26:11):
No, No, are you kidding? Triple as Science is triple as.
Nature is British el Sevier.

Speaker 3 (02:26:23):
Oh say I think you said Science Advances.

Speaker 1 (02:26:25):
Science Advances is science. It's triple as. It's a different journal. Yes,
but there's Nature Communications, which is similar to Science Advances.
It's like they're all the equal footing.

Speaker 3 (02:26:37):
Science Advances is Nature. Boom, think, oh my god, we
have to go. Oh no, then here does Science Advances
triple as? Why is it both? It's not both?

Speaker 1 (02:26:51):
Are you looking at an AI search endine result?

Speaker 3 (02:26:54):
No, I don't think I have that turned on. No, Science,
it's Advance and here it is Science Advances. This is Wikipedia.
Not to be cute confused with advanced science. Science Vans
peer reviewed most of this open access scientific journal from
the American Association of the Advancement of Science. So of

(02:27:14):
course Kiki is right. I just wanted to make that clear.

Speaker 2 (02:27:19):
Dude.

Speaker 1 (02:27:20):
I've been doing this longer than you.

Speaker 3 (02:27:25):
I like two weeks. Whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:27:28):
Hey, shout out of time. We all like the show.

Speaker 3 (02:27:33):
Second night, blare, no are we not there?

Speaker 2 (02:27:38):
Okay, you jumped the gun. You jumped it, jumped it.

Speaker 1 (02:27:40):
Hey, everybody, thank you so much for joining us for
this really wonderfully long show with all sorts of commentary, colorful,
poopy stories, and all sorts of things. We do hope
that you share it with other people. And I really
want to say thank you for those of you that
are here in the chat who have popped in and
out in the little number that I can count as

(02:28:01):
we're as we're doing the show, as we see the
numbers go up and down. It's really wonderful just to
see that there are people here with us. Thank you
for commenting, thank you for being a part of this,
and thank you for just yeah, thank you for being here.
We appreciate you. Shout outs to you. Shout outs also Fouda.
Thank you so much for your help with show notes

(02:28:21):
and social media. Gord Ur and Law and Fauda everyone else.
Thank you for keeping our chat rooms really great places
to be. I saw that somebody like deleted a comment
in Twitch for me today. Thank you so much for
doing that, identity for Thank you for recording the show, Rachel,
thank you for editing, and thank you too. Robert Norland,

(02:28:43):
Robert W. Farley, Lauren Giffordanie Lewis, Evean Mondel, Alan Biola,
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(02:29:04):
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(02:29:25):
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Tony Steele. I'm doing great tonight. You all are better.
Thank you for your support on Patreon. If you would
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(02:29:48):
you know, get a friend.

Speaker 2 (02:29:50):
To do it too.

Speaker 1 (02:29:51):
On next week's show, we.

Speaker 3 (02:29:53):
Will be back broadcasting live from our YouTube and our
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Speaker 2 (02:30:03):
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If you enjoyed the show, get your friends, to subscribe
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Speaker 3 (02:30:20):
For more information on anything you've heard here, Today's show
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Speaker 2 (02:30:32):
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(02:30:53):
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Speaker 3 (02:30:58):
We look forward to discussing science with you again next week,
and if you've learned anything from the show, remember.

Speaker 2 (02:31:07):
Farther hope.

Speaker 4 (02:31:11):
This week in science, This week in science, This week
in science.

Speaker 2 (02:31:22):
This week in science, it's the end of the world.

Speaker 3 (02:31:25):
So I'm setting up shop.

Speaker 2 (02:31:26):
Got my batterer refurl it.

Speaker 4 (02:31:28):
Says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice,
show them how to stop the robots with a simple device.
I'll REVERSI all the warming with a wave of my
hand and a little coffee is a couple of grass.

Speaker 3 (02:31:44):
Because this week's science.

Speaker 4 (02:31:46):
Is coming your way, so everybody listen to what I say.
I use the scientific method for all that it's worth,
and I'll broadcast my.

Speaker 3 (02:31:56):
Opinion all over the well. It's this week in Science,
This week in Science, This week in Science.

Speaker 4 (02:32:06):
Science, Science, Scire Science, This week in Science, this weekend Science,
This week in science, This week in science, This week
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Speaker 3 (02:32:20):
This week in Science,

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