#WHATSHAPPENING | #STRANGESCIENCE

#WHATSHAPPENING and #STRANGESCIENCE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI
AM six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on demand
on the iHeartRadio app.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
What else is going on? Time for what's happening?

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Well, the biggest deal today is the news conference that
came out of the Pentagon earlier this morning, and in it,
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth talked about more details that
pertained to the American strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities.
He didn't get into the discussion of how successful, whether

(00:36):
they were successful, or anything. He railed against, of course,
the leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report that came out and
said it was leaked, it was not meant for public consumption,
and that very few of the media outlets that leaked
it actually referred to it as low confidence, which is
the way the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote that report because they.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Didn't have a whole lot of information.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
A day after the bombs fell, and Pete Hegseth, alongside
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said you've
got to remember something more importantly, which is this operation
proves we the United States, the most powerful military in
the world, can do whatever we want at any time.

(01:17):
Regardless of space time, whatever that them.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
There's been a lot of discussions about what happened to
what didn't happen.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Step back for a second.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
Because of decisive military action, President Trump created the conditions
to end the war, decimating, choose your word, obliterating, destroying
Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
We think he forgot to say that part.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
We think we're confident, but we think that's what he
needed to say, because again, we don't have the intelligence yet.
We haven't had enough time to figure out what the
battle damage assessment's going to look like. Prosecutors today in
the Sean Diddy Combs case began their closing arguments. They
said that Combs was the head of a kingdom, the

(02:07):
head of a criminal kingdom. Seven weeks. This thing has
been going on, culminating in its final days. The last
of the thirty four witnesses took the stand. The government
is being given four hours to make closing arguments. Defense
attorneys will make their plea to jurors as well. They'll
do a quick rebuttal, and then it looks like the defense,

(02:30):
it looks like the jury will begin deliberations on Monday.
The judge has said today is prosecution. Tomorrow is defense
with a quick rebuttal from prosecution, and then jury instructions
and deliberations would start on Monday. So something we'll keep
an eye on for what will be a holiday shortened
week next week. A couple of cities here in La
County have canceled July fourth events. They said that they

(02:53):
were citing safety concerns because of the federal immigration enforcement
operations that have been going on. Cut ahead, of course,
made headlines for the wrong reasons. When the Vice mayor
came out and asked where the gangs were, Kottahey said,
it's going to postpone it's July fourth celebration, which was
originally scheduled for July third.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
In addition to.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
That, the Bell Gardens city officials have announced they're going
to cancel the concert and two outdoor movie nights out
of an abundance of caution. Those events were scheduled for
tomorrow tonight, sorry July third, and then July tenth. They
were doing Thursday night events. Huntington Park announced that they
are going to postpone their Independence Day celebration on July third.

(03:37):
They didn't actually specify that it was because of immigration enforcement.
La Times has a pretty breathless headline that suggests that
measles cases this year are already passed last year's total,
and then when you look at it, it says that
this year there have been seventeen cases.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Last year there were fifteen cases, but in.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
Recent years that those numbers are minuscule. Back in twenty nineteen,
there were seventy three cases of measles in the state
of California, and before that, if you remember the big
outbreak that they connected to Disneyland, somebody had gone there.
December twenty fourteen through April of twenty fifteen, more than
one hundred and thirty people got the measles.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
So yeah, technically the.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
La Times headline is correct that there are more measles
cases today than there were an all of twenty twenty
four but it's still a pretty small number. A couple
of La restaurants have received one of the top honors
the three star rating by the Michelin Guide. Chef Michael

(04:45):
Kimrusti's seafood focused restaurant Providence and then the Zabala Spanish
restaurant called Somni received the top honors, an improvement over
each of those who would previously had two Michelin Stars,
but now that they've both got three, Huntington Beach PD
is launching an e bike safety program. They say they
want to mitigate the area's high rate of crashes. E

(05:08):
bikes have exploded in popularity. A fifteen year old named
Evan Eatman his eleven year old were gifted e bikes
for Christmas, and these two kids say, I love everything
about it. It's not very difficult, it's powerful, it accelerates
really easily. But in all honesty, they are The number

(05:29):
of e bike crashes involving kids has doubled.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
In the last few years.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
I live in a spot that's got a five lane
road that goes gradually up this hill. It's a couple
miles long, and right down that middle lane, which is
supposed to be a turn lane, is where these kids
ride the bikes. They'll pop wheelies on them, some of
them wearing helmets, but they'll easily reach thirty miles an
hour going downhill, and it's not going to take a

(05:56):
car crash for them to be severely injured. They just
got to screw up at one point and they're off
of that thing in their head just becomes spaghetti on
the sidewalk. And then finally, if you're a huge fan
of Vogue magazine and who isn't, Anna Wintour is going
to be stepping down as the editor in chief. She's
leaving her position. She told her staff just yesterday. She's

(06:20):
not leaving Vogue entirely. She said she'll stay on as
the global Chief Content Officer and Global Editorial Director at Vogue.
Began her career as editor in chief back in nineteen
eighty eight. No word yet on who will succeed her.
Strange science is coming up at the bottom of the hour.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.

Speaker 3 (06:44):
We know how fires work. Fire burns your house down,
you make an insurance claim. Hopefully it's covered, right. That's
pretty standard. It happens thousands of times every year. Obviously,
at the beginning of this year had a few thousand
more of those kinds of claims. The State Insurance Commissioner

(07:07):
has now had to deal with and is trying to
put together statewide rules for smoke claims. Think of those homes,
whether they're in Altadena or near Altadena that did not
get burned but suffered severe smoke damage, or the Palisades Malibu,

(07:27):
anywhere in those areas where the home itself didn't burn,
but there was severe smoke damage. And there are a
couple of different things that we know about smoke damage.
First of all, it's much more widespread. You can have
smoke damage a couple of miles away from where there
was active flame. There was a fire in Colorado back

(07:49):
in twenty twenty one, the Marshall Fire, most destructive fire
in the state of Colorado, and found that people in
homes as far as two miles away from that burn
zone reported symptoms that were consistent with not just exposure
to smoke, but exposure to toxic smoke. Recurring headaches, itchy
runny eyes, metallic taste in their mouth, dry cough. But

(08:14):
insurance companies do not often test for toxic substances when
it comes to smoke damage, and when they do, they
do a couple of biggies, right, a couple of a
few harmful substances, but there are probably two dozen that
are often found in smoke that can cause lasting harm.

(08:34):
So some families who can afford it have taken this
into their own hands. They're paying out of pocket for
private tests with the hopes that they could then file
acclaim with their insurance and get reimbursed later.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Others, they don't have that luxury. They simply don't have
the money.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
New York Times did an interesting thing recently where they
put out a questionnaire at about five hundred people from
here in California, including people as far as a mile
and a half away from either one of the fires.
Responded to this questionnaire, and a majority of those had
homes that were still standing, but reported that insurance companies

(09:13):
did not want to pay for the testing after the
smoke damage. Dozens of those people who said that their
homes were damaged by smoke agreed to share the results
of the lab tests on their homes, almost every single
one of them. A study for fifty six homes a
total of one hundred and twenty two reports conducted by

(09:35):
sixty four different companies. All fifty six of those homes,
Nearly every single one of them showed a level of
contamination beyond just the maloder just beyond just the smoke smell,
which a lot of insurance companies will pay to fix
or at least partially. For example, one father sent his
toddlers close to a lab and discovered that the dress

(09:57):
tested positive for lead. Swabs of surfaces, slices of furniture,
extractions of drywall all showed the presence of a bunch
of different heavy metals, toxic gases, and other hazardous substances.
And like I said, there's no statewide plan, even an

(10:20):
industry plan for handling smoke claims. So the insurance Commissioner
Ricardi Lara has put together a task force to try
to come up with them. There's no accepted standard, despite
the fact that we have seen fires over and over
and over and over and over again that have decimated
these communities. Melissa Morrow is the mother of two teenage kids.

(10:41):
Her home did survive the fire in Altadena, but said,
this is crazy, It's blatant. How do you go from
being so thankful to now wanting your house to burn
down the five bedroom home that she lives in. She
and her husband asked the insurance company to do a
comprehensive test on the damage. Flames did burn their deck

(11:05):
and did melt their pool furniture, but the house itself
was spared. Their insurance company said they didn't want to
do it, but that they were going to plan their
they were going to send their own industrial hygienist crew
sent by the insurance company, spent a few hours. So
they swabbed about fifteen surfaces around the house and took
half a dozen samples of the air.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
But that was it.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
All they found. The three things they found char soot,
and ash. Nothing about lead, nothing about any of these
other toxic and potential heavy metals that could cause problems.
And in terms of cleaning cleaning up, the insurance company said,
you should probably just you know, wipe everything down, maybe

(11:53):
a special vacuum or a soot sponge. They spent seventeen
thousand dollars, hired their own industrial hygienis, spent about ten
hours as opposed to just a couple drilling into the walls,
into the furniture, collecting gases, more than two thousand data
points from hundreds of locations on that property, and basically

(12:15):
his report said that the house was unsafe to inhabit.
So there's going to be this fight going on and
it will continue for a long time figuring out what
insurance companies are going to be required to do. When
it comes to when they say it's just smoke damage,
how significant that damage might actually be all right, strange science.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
When we come back, you're listening to Gary and Shannon
on demand from KFI AM six forty.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
We love these strange stories, these strange science stories. So
let's kick that off, shall we.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Strange? Yes, it's like weird science, but strange.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
Gonna say this amino acid wrong, But that's what we
do to strained science is mispronounced things just to get
to get your anger up. Btain b taine b et
ai n e b tane a modified amino acid that
plays an important role when it comes to metabolism, and
btaine is a molecule that's made by your kidneys. It's

(13:17):
also found in some foods, and they're saying it can
produce a bunch of benefits just like exercise does, and
can slow some signs of aging, at least when you
feed it to mice. We don't know if it happens
in humans, but it's worth the shot, right. There's a
new study that came out in the magazine or journal

(13:40):
Sell that shows consistent exercise does raise levels of that
compound of btane, at least in young men. That study
also found that feeding that betain to the aged mice
boosts their immune health and their grip strength. How do
you study the grip strength of a mouse? For now,

(14:00):
obviously there's nothing that can replicate the actual benefits to
your body of just doing the exercise. Exercise itself sharpens
the mind. It can smooth and sooth i should say inflammation.
It can help your cells damage, repair damaged tissue, keep
some diseases at bay, or at least at the very

(14:21):
least eases some of their symptoms. But this deep level
molecular mechanism as to why it works is still not
fully clear. So a group out of China, the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, enlisted the aid of thirteen healthy young
men to lounge about for forty five days. That's really

(14:41):
hard to do, isn't it. Yeah, sure, it was lounge
about for forty five days, limit their physical activity, and
then have them run five k's every one or two days.
And the researchers would take the blood and the stool
samples from these guys and they would do a bunch
of measurements on them after their forty five day rest,
and then twenty five days into their new running routine,

(15:03):
and they said that they found the exercises were reshaping
the body at a molecular level. After twenty five days
of regular running, there were changes in immune cells, in
lipid metabolism, in the gut, microbiome, et cetera, but that
the biggest change was the abundance of that amino acid
that btane, And following up on those results, they then

(15:26):
started feeding btaane to mice. Old mice that drank water
spiked with btaan had stronger muscles, less inflammation, and more
youthful skin than their counterparts who did not get the supplement. Again,
still no answer as to how they were able to
test the grip strength of a mouse. There's a new
study also into spiders that says the female when you

(15:50):
look at a species of spider where the female eats
the male after sex, that the males are pretty picky
about who it is. They go a f for scientific
studies spent an ordinate amount of time and effort to
demonstrate something that is rather obvious, and in this case,
they have done it again. This one specifically is looking

(16:13):
at koi males and seductive females in the sexually cannibalistic
colonial spider Cryptophora citricola and It's about the relationship dynamics
in a group living spider cces, a species that is
where females are prone to eat the males after sex.
Researchers found that the males were selective about their mates.

(16:34):
They favored the younger ones duh, and the well fed females,
maybe because the males hoped they wouldn't get eaten. Another
fascinating strained science story that's coming up, specifically behind those
light bulb moments, you know when you say aha or
eureka or whatever. There have been a whole series of

(16:56):
books that have been written about light bulb moments and
the actual brain science that goes into those.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
We'll talk about that when we come back.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
We're in the middle of austrange science.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
We saw that lake, I think they called it to
Larry Lake here in central California where outside of Fresno,
there was a lake that had kind of come back
after this naturally occurring lake after it had been dammed
and irrigated, and you know, they've changed basically the water
table of the Central Valley. When agriculture came in they're

(17:32):
seeing something like that out in the outback. In Australia,
Catty Tanda Lake Eyre is a thirty seven hundred square
mile ephemeral lake and despite the fact they call it
a lake, it rarely has any water in it. They
get about five and a half inches of rain in
that part of Australia every year, and they said it's

(17:54):
more like a giant saltpan in the South Australian desert,
in fact, like we see the Great Salt Flats here
in the United States. A British speed record breaker in
nineteen sixty four used the racetrack that was this just

(18:14):
dried saltpan to record a world speed record at four
hundred and three miles an hour. In nineteen seventy four,
the lake filled to its capacity for just the third
time on record. That flooding has been taken as the
high water mark and they haven't seen it since then.
But as of right now, this year, tropical Cyclone Alfred
dumped a bunch of rain on that Queensland area, the

(18:37):
water flowing down to this Catty Tanda Lake Eyre, and
they said it appears to be filling for just the
fourth time in one hundred and sixty years a huge
tourist boom as people go check that out.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
The waterbirds that.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
Have made their way inland now are also one of
the reasons why so many people are headed out that direction.
If you're a fan of books on neurology, listen. I
know not everybody's going to say, oh yeah, that sounds great.
But Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink, and in
it he talked about the difference between our gut reactions.

(19:14):
You know, something that happens immediately, and we just react
to something. Sometimes it's we react to the way someone looks,
or re react to a sound.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
We react in a way that.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
Is faster than we can consciously even make a decision,
which takes a lot of brain power and a lot
of time. There's another book called Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.
Doctor Daniel Canneman a similar book, much more detailed in
terms of the science behind all of that. But this
continues to be one of those issues where people are

(19:46):
fascinated by what is the difference between the flash reaction
to something and an actual time spent by your brain
making a decision about something. Cognitives psychologists have talked about
how to distinguish insight from analytical problem solving.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
It's a better way to put it.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
And they say that the insight kind of lives by itself.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Not everyone agrees for that.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
With that, there's a psychologist out of Temple University and
he says that insight might not be as different from
analytical thinking as it seems. And he says that insight
also comes from the brain gradually building on what it
already knows, which incorporates new information each failed attempt that exists.
Your brain constantly learns and alters the way it's going

(20:36):
to react to something based on how many times you've
experienced this thing. Now, that doesn't explain some of the
very early experiences that we have when we're kids, when
we're babies, there are things that we react to instinctively
without any previous exposure to it. I mean, think about
when you put a baby down in a crib and

(20:58):
their arms kind of shoot out like they're falling. Well,
they've never fallen before. How would they know to do that?
What is it about that?

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Now?

Speaker 3 (21:11):
This psychologist says the main feature of insight is the
emotion that someone feels after they find an answer or
they create something that seems new. That's that aha moment
that I was talking about, the Eureka thing, and whatever
happens in your brain at that time, he says, releases
the right chemical or something happens in your brain neurologically

(21:32):
that reinforces whatever it was that you did that was correct,
or that you solved a problem that you hadn't been
able to solve before. All that exists in this world
of trying to figure out how your brain works.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
Now.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
A couple things.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
If you want to listen to any part of the
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(22:13):
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Speaker 2 (22:24):
That's a great way to help us out as well.
And don't forget.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
On the weekends, the Gas Weekend Fix shows up, which
is a segment of the show that does not appear
during the week and is only for people who are
subscribing to the podcast. John Cobelt Show is coming up next.
We'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Stay dry. Everybody you've been listening to The Gary and
Shannon Show.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
You can always hear us live on KFI AM six
forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.