Justin: Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!
Without the darkness, there can be no light. Without light, there is no energy, no quark. Without the quark, there can be no atom. Without the atom, there would be no matter and no mass, no gravity. Without gravity, there’d be no way to get down with our bad selves.
And while getting quarky within the dark – much like the following hour of our programming does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of California at Davis, KDVS or its sponsors – the more you look, the more it becomes clear.
The universe is an intricate, complicated place where even the most basic components are far from intuitive to our human perspective. Without this unintuitive complication, we would not be here. Without science, we wouldn’t know where here is or even where or when here is. And so, we couldn’t be possibly saying, This Week in Science, coming up next.
Good morning, Kirsten!
Kirsten: Good morning, Justin! Welcome everyone to another installment of This Week in Science because science happens every week, everyday.
Justin: Yeah. It keeps going and going and going.
Kirsten: Going and going. Just like the little engine. It’s a science engine that could, that’s right. Today is World AIDS Day. Unfortunately, it’s not cured yet. And in fact the numbers keep increasing according to researchers and experts.
So, days like today are important to open up people’s awareness of the fact that even though we have drug cocktails that allow people to live with HIV and have long productive happy lives, it doesn’t get rid of it. We don’t have a cure yet. So, keep on moving science. That’s all I got to say.
We have lots of science news today.
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: Shake, shake the paper at it. I brought stories about the complexity of life, the mixing of sensations and some serious space news involving tsunamis and Titan.
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: But not necessarily at the same time or place in space.
Justin: Huh?
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: I have got a slight mental lag.
Kirsten: I’m just – I have to laugh, sorry.
Justin: I got a naked mole rat and science has finally figured out another way in which women are different from men, aside from the obvious.
Kirsten: Really? One more way?
Justin: Yet one more way.
Kirsten: Don’t tell the ACLU.
Justin: The who?
Kirsten: The American Civil Liberties Union.
Justin: Why? What do they care?
Kirsten: Yeah. It’s all those legal stuff trying to, you know, equality of the sexes and all the time, you know.
Justin: Equality. They can be equal but different, please.
Kirsten: Yes okay, all right.
Justin: I don’t want them to be the same that would ruin much of my perspective on life. I don’t think I’d get out of bed in the morning. What? They’re all the same now? Forget it.
Kirsten: Forget it. It’s not worth it.
Justin: No, I’m not leaving the house.
Kirsten: Well, fortunately for you and for me, for all of us, complexity abounds even at the most simple levels of the world. Researchers publishing in three different papers in Science today, this is a pretty major review they have done and what is called “extensive quantitative study” of the bacterium better known as mycoplasma pneumoniae.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Yeah. It’s a typical pneumonia causing bacterium. So, it’s a very small single-celled prokaryote. And prokaryotes don’t have nucleus – nuclei, like those of us in the multi-cellular world which are known as eukaryotes for having a nucleus. Prokaryotes, no nucleus.
So, they don’t have a nucleus. They’re really small, especially this mycoplasma pneumoniae, it’s one of the smallest of the small bacterium. And they don’t depend on the host cells. It is a parasitic bacteria but – and disease-causing but it doesn’t rely on the host to help with reproduction.
So, unlike say, a virus which incorporates itself into the host cell and then uses the cellular DNA to replicate the viral…
Justin: Zombie cells.
Kirsten: …instructions. Yeah. Turning a host cell into a zombie. The mycoplasma doesn’t do this. It just gets in there and goes, “Oh, we like the stuff that’s around here. This environment’s kind of nice. We’re going to stay here.” And then, cause some trouble for you, the organism but enjoy being me, the pneumoniae bacterium.
Okay. Anyhow, these researchers, these teams, research groups at EMBL’s European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany and the Centre de Regulacio Genomica…
Justin: Wow! Pronunciation-o-rama. Way to go.
Kirsten: …in Barcelona, Spain. Yes.
Justin: Barcelona?
Kirsten: Barcelona. Yes, you have to have the lisp. They looked at this bacterium. And the different groups looked at different aspects of the bacterium to see what was going on. One group looked at the transcriptome.
What’s the transcriptome? Well, the transcriptome is all of the in-between stuff, the RNA transcripts, that – it’s the little segments of RNA that are probably or potentially, eventually going to be turned into proteins. The little pieces of instructions that kind of shuttle back and forth within a cell.
So, you have the DNA which is the main set of instructions. And then you have the RNA transcripts, which are kind of like the little messengers and the little – they run around telling things what to do in a cell.
One group looked at the transcriptome. Another group looked at the metabolome which is basically looking at all the metabolic processes within a cell going, “Okay, this is what’s happening with sugars. This is what’s happening with the oxygen. This is what’s happening, you know, with ATP.” This is what basically, figuring out structure of the metabolism within this bacterium.
And a final group looked at the proteome which is actually looking at all the proteins that are the products and actually go about doing work within the cell.
Okay. So we have these three different areas that group’s looked at. They found, that just like in eukaryotes, it’s pretty complex even though it’s a little teeny-tiny cell. And a lot of what was going on in the bacteria was really similar to eukaryotes who don’t have nuclei. Very, very similar.
A large – this article from the EMBL’s website suggests, they say that a large proportion of the transcripts produced from the DNA of the bacterium are not translated into proteins. And so, there’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of going on at the low levels not turning into proteins in the transcriptome but actually may be telling things what to do, a lot of little intermediate things.
Another surprise, it has a very small genome. But it’s really flexible. And they found that a lot of the proteins actually have multiple purposes. So, that’s like multi-purpose proteins where they have a very small genome but then everything kind of gets repurposed and used for lots of different things so that the bacteria can end up actually being way more – can actually end up succeeding in more variable environments and doing pretty well.
Justin: Cool.
Kirsten: Yeah. One of the group leader says, Anne-Claude Gavin says, “The key lies in these shared features. Those are the things that not even the simplest organism can do without and have remained untouched by millions of years of evolutions – the bare essentials of life.”
And so, I think, this quote really gets at what the researchers were trying to do by taking a look and characterizing what’s going on in one of the simplest bacterial cells and finding out what is really similar to the complexity of eukaryotic cells. What are the shared features? What are the things that are absolutely required for life to work. You know, what does a cell need to just be able to function?
And so, looking at this very simple bacterium, they’re able to start getting at the answer to those questions. And I don’t know, I think this is potentially leading into the idea of bacterial designing. So, researchers, geneticists who are actually starting to think about designing our own bacteria for specific purposes say, like the production of petroleum.
Justin: Oh, absolutely.
Kirsten: You know.
Justin: Which they already – I mean, that’s how we have petroleum on the planet.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: And it is from bacteria in the first place. But yeah, if we could…
Kirsten: Maybe producing diesel, maybe producing just, you know, sugars or gases or whatever we need for energy.
Justin: We want them to do it in a more timely fashion.
Kirsten: Right. Maybe designing more bacteria who can breakdown nuclear waste.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: You know, if we can design our own bacteria, just mix and match pieces and parts of bacteria, you got them to do what you want them to do, you know, it would be cool.
Justin: I’ve been a big fan of that for a long time, too. I keep – I think I’ve said it on the show before too that we shouldn’t be funding these super sites where they’re trying to, you know, spending billion dollars a year trying to clean up these sites that nobody’s going to, anyway.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Just put that money into the scientific research of figuring out how to actually remove them through something like bacteria.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: I think it would be much more productive in the long run.
Kirsten: Yeah. I think this is a pretty major endeavor what these researchers have done. And it’s just getting at the very basics of what is needed for life. What is needed for life to take place? Once you have that little, you know, lipid bilayer membrane, what do you need to put inside it to actually make something be alive?
Yes. It’s a great question.
Justin: Yeah. And then, I mean, it’s both ends of that question. One is how does it get to the point where it’s a living organism. The next is how does it continue down that path from bacteria into the other life forms of the planet.
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: Blind, nearly hairless, pink, plump, naked, mole rat. In the news this week, the University of Illinois at Chicago researchers reported in the December 9th issue of NeuroReport – which I’m assuming is out early because it’s not December 9th yet – that adult naked mole rat brains can withstand extreme oxygen deprivation for periods exceeding a half hour that is much longer than the brain tissues of other mammals.
The findings, they were saying, may yield some clues for treating brain injuries associated with heart attack, stroke, accidents where the brain is starved to vital oxygen.
John Larson, associate professor of physiology and psychiatry and Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences, studied naked African mole rats, small rodents that live about six feet underground in colonies of up to 300 members.
Kirsten: Whoa.
Justin: And it is tight living quarters down there. Breathing can sometimes be a luxury.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Yeah. There’s a very limited air supply in their – I guess, their bury – digs underground and low oxygen and a high carbon dioxide content there from all the other critters that are down there, I’m supposing.
The air they breathe is so foul, it would be fatal, lead to irreversible brain damage in any other mammal. But the naked mole rats studied were found to show systemic hypoxia – what’s that – adaptation.
So basically, hypoxia is the oxygen starveness of the brain.
Kirsten: Yes. Lack of oxygen or…
Justin: Yeah. So – but they were adapting to it so that the lungs and blood as well as neuron adaptations were allowing brain cells to function at oxygen and carbon dioxide levels that other mammals cannot tolerate. Wow! Maybe I just need this in general, soon.
“In the most extreme cases, naked mole rat neurons maintain function more than six times longer than mouse neurons after the onset of oxygen deprivation,” says Larson.
“We also find it very intriguing that naked mole rat neurons exhibit some electrophysiological properties that suggest that neurons in these animals retain immature characteristics, immature characteristics.” This is I think where this is going to be going.
All mammal fetuses live in a low-oxygen environments in the womb. Human infants continue to show brain resistance to oxygen deprivation for a brief time into early childhood. Interesting. So then maybe, that’s why they can like, teach babies to swim just by throwing them in the water.
Kirsten: They hold their breath naturally.
Justin: But naked mole rats, unlike other mammals, still retain this ability well into their adulthood. From a researcher here, Park, “We believe that the extreme resistance to oxygen deprivation is a result of evolutionary adaptations for surviving in a chronically low-oxygen environment.”
Very interesting.
Kirsten: Yeah. I think that it’s fascinating, the idea that we can learn ways to help ourselves by studying these really odd creatures with, you know, really neat adaptations to whatever environments they have. You know, how have they adapted to…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …an environment. What makes them special and then can we use this to learn about ourselves, to develop therapies for ourselves. Fascinating.
Justin: Haven’t we seen this in humans? Am I like completely mistaken or aren’t sherpas, like the people who go way up into the high Himalayan mountains.
Kirsten: Well, there are – there is an adaptation in the oxygen-carrying ability of the blood cells, the hemoglobin. And I believed – or maybe somebody can correct me on this.
But I believe the myoglobin which is in the muscle cells, the oxygen-carrying molecules in muscle that there are adaptations as to how much oxygen they can carry which allows them to survive better to perform more efficiently in environments where there’s low oxygen such as high altitude.
Justin: Yeah. So, there is some evidence of human beings being able to adapt to environment in that way, too.
Kirsten: Oh, yeah.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Yeah, yeah. We are quite adaptable.
Justin: And like the – well, I don’t know this might be going taking it – but it seems like there are also the problems with alcohol in many parts of the world where alcohol hasn’t been very long versus, you know, the European tolerance for a drink. It might be that – is it possible to become genetically more tolerant of alcohol over generations?
Kirsten: It depends on whether or not it’s a genetically controlled trait. There’s the enzyme that breaks down the alcohol. It’s definitely something that is controlled for, genetically.
And so, whether or not you have that enzyme and then how active that enzyme is, is probably is genetically controlled. So…
Justin: And then diet, too.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Just like our high-fatty diets also seem to affect some parts of the – like the – never mind.
Kirsten: You’re going into…
Justin: I’m going to keep postulated.
Kirsten: Postulating.
Justin: Because I don’t – I’m light on stories. So I’m going to keep postulating questions for the audience.
Kirsten: I’m not light on stories. So…
Justin: Okay, bring it.
Kirsten: You’re listening to This Week in Science. And right now, I have a story about the end of the world. This Week in the End of the World. The oceans can’t take it any longer or can they? We don’t really know.
Justin: Hey, I thought we knew.
Kirsten: We don’t really know what is the carbon dioxide-carrying capacity of our oceans.
Justin: There’s one way to find out. Push it to the limit.
Kirsten: Let’s just push it to the limit. Well, a Yale geophycisist taking a look at some data, reanalyzing some data from 20 years ago and also looking at some newer data that’s been taken more recently about carbon dioxide levels and the annual and inter-annual variation has found that the timeframe of the inter-annual variation were once used to be five months is now increased.
So, this lag between the change in temperature and the change in carbon dioxide levels, there’s a lag, used to be five months, 20 years ago, now, it’s increased to 15 months because there was a little much longer lag time in how the temperature and carbon dioxide changes fluctuate compared to each other.
Now, what he suggests is that this is because the oceans are absorbing less carbon dioxide whereas in the past that used to absorb or the oceans absorbed much more carbon dioxide. And as a result, they are able to release carbon dioxide and adjust – excuse me, more quickly than they are able to now.
Researcher Park says, “Researchers have used climate models that suggest the oceans have been absorbing less carbon dioxide but this is the first study to quantify the change directly using observations. It strengthens the projection that the oceans will not absorb as much of our future carbon dioxide emissions and that the pace of future climate change will quicken.”
Yeah, he found correlations, very strong correlations between sea surface temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in tropical ocean areas. However, in areas where there are lots of trees over land and where there’s lots of biomass that can soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide as well, there is not much correlation between the temperature and the carbon dioxide on these inter-annual scales.
Yeah. And what they find – what do you found in those areas, there’s a large annual CO2 cycle, synchronizing with the seasonal growth and decay of plants.
Justin: I like his quote in here, Park’s quote.
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: “Think of the oceans like soda. Warm cola holds less fizz. The same thing happens as the ocean warms up.” Wait, what? The ocean is turning into a flat soda?
Kirsten: Yup. It’s like…
Justin: I don’t think…
Kirsten: It’s likely even the soda, when you first, yeah.
Justin: I don’t think that’s right, that warm cola holds less fizz. I think – if it gets warm, if it’s been open and sitting out and the fizz gets out, but I don’t think it matters if the soda’s – if it’s – if I had the cap on there, it doesn’t matter if it’s been in the fridge or if it’s been out on the table. Somebody needs to talk to Park about his analogies.
Because there’s nothing that connects warm – I mean, he’s right about the oceans, I’m sure. But that’s going to connect some warm soda with…
Kirsten: You know, if you open – so, if you have two sodas, one of them is warm…
Justin: Okay. Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …so, they’re both closed. One is warm and one is cold. If you open both of them at the same time, the warm one – I think this is an experiment we need to do.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: We have to see. This is our experiment we need to do today to find out…
Justin: Because I’ve already gotten out if I’m wrong.
Kirsten: Yeah. I’m trying to think of this. So, it definitely – temperature definitely does have an effect on a solution’s ability to hold a gas. So, the reason that carbonation works if you super saturate the solution. So, you’re pushing more carbon dioxide into it…
Justin: Yeah. Get it in there.
Kirsten: …than it would normally want to carry on. So, you have to – and what they do is they put it under pressure to get the gas in there. In the first place, you open the can and the gas is released because the pressure is equalizing.
Justin: Okay.
Kirsten: Gas comes out, you have fizz.
Justin: But if there’s more fizz from the cold one, I’m going to see it because it just got taken out of the fridge and placed on the counter and the other one was already sitting there. So, you shook it up a little on the way.
Kirsten: But I think that’s an experiment that we need to do.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Open up two exactly – like they have to be exactly the same either bottles or cans of soda.
Justin: Yeah, two liter bottle thingy’s…
Kirsten: Yeah. Two liter bottles are probably easy because then you can see also…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Open them up which one has more bubbles come out, the warm or the cold.
Justin: Yeah. Right.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: It’s on.
Kirsten: Yeah. I think that – this is a good experiment. We’re going to do this experiment this week.
Justin: And actually, you could – this is a great experiment to do at home.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Any of out there in the listening audience…
Kirsten: This would be a great experiment.
Justin: …that want to contribute to science. This is…
Kirsten: Let’s see.
Justin: We’re going to challenge Mr. Park’s assumption that warm cola holds less fizz.
Kirsten: I’m sure, he’s – I’m going to guess that you open the warm soda and there’s going to be more bubbles coming out.
Justin: I’m saying there’s going to be no difference and therefore global warming isn’t happening. I don’t know.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: No. It has nothing – I’m going to say his analogy is wrong, that’s all.
Kirsten: Okay. Yeah. His analogy – you’re right, his analogy could use some work. I mean, there are a lot of factors in there is it an open soda, a close soda, is it left out, is it not, what?
Justin: Warm soda does not hold less fizz, I don’t believe it.
Kirsten: Okay, moving on. You have more stories.
Justin: Yes. It’s my turn, isn’t it? Woohoo!
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: This just in. How are you doing? Between what we see and when we see it, there is a delay, a lag, a pregnant pause, a lost moment of time.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: No.
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: I don’t have enough time as it is.
Justin: Between the eyeball capture and the conscious recognition of an image, there is time lost. The eyes sees an object on the table then, wait for it, wait for it, keys! Oh, those are my keys! I was looking for those.
If it were too long, this delay, like a day or two, right?
Kirsten: That would be a problem.
Justin: Right. Our activities would need to be slowed down…
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: …considerably. We would have a very different way of being in the world. As it currently stands though, the exact number of this measurement of this delay is unknown. That is until a new study by Tel Aviv University psychologist researcher, Moti Salti has narrowed the gap down to a few milliticks of time.
In the study, neural activity related to conscious perception was measured as test subjects were wired into an electroencephalograph, an EEG. This measured their brain activity.
That then, it exposed them to – they got a bunch of visual stimuli which were mostly square cubes on a computer screen that flashed on and off very quickly. The EEG data showed that the conscious mind kicked out – kicked in at about half a second, somewhere between 300 milliseconds and 400 milliseconds after this exposure to the stimuli.
“We are hunting for the brain activity associated with conscious perceptions,” says Salti. “When you wander through this world, you see and hear things that may reveal themselves to your conscious mind and others that don’t. We are interested in what cues the brain gives us to open that unconscious perception to the contrast mind. What makes our conscious mind tick?”
Ooh, that’s quite a…
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Quite an undertaking. What’s an EEG versus – because there’s another study in here where I have the EKG. EEG versus EKG, what’s the difference?
Kirsten: ECG, EKG, electroencephalogram and…
Justin: Electroencephalograph is the EEG.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: And what’s an EKG? Why are they different? Or FMRIs? That’s what I’m looking for.
Kirsten: Okay. So, FMRI is completely different from the EEG or even the EKG or ECG. So, the electroencephalograph or the electrocardiograph, this is all measuring summed electrical activity…
Justin: Activity…
Kirsten: …on the surface of the skin, on the surface of the body.
Justin: Oh.
Kirsten: So, it’s like…
Justin: How are they even in the brain?
Kirsten: No, it’s not. Well, it’s electrical activity that’s probably produced…
Justin: Residing…
Kirsten: Yeah. Resides and is initiated in the brain. But not activity…
Justin: It’s like a magnetic field up there?
Kirsten: Yeah, yeah.
Justin: Wow! Wooh.
Kirsten: Every electrical – this is called the electromagnetic field. Every electrical signal also can do some magnetic field as well. Electricity and magnetism go hand in hand very often, pretty much all the time.
And the FMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging is based on the movement of water, I believe, in the brain or magnetic – there’s a giant magnet that they use to align electrons in the brain. And so, you can…
Justin: Isn’t that what happens when my hard drive gets like info put into it?
Kirsten: It might, yeah.
Justin: Like my computer’s hard drive. Isn’t that just aligning some…
Kirsten: Okay.
Justin: …magnetic re-aligning electrons…
Kirsten: Possibly, yeah, very similar.
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: But basically, what it looks at is changes in blood flow or metabolism in areas of the brain that are active. So, what you’re looking at in the EEG is just surface electrical activity and what you’re looking at in the FMRI is metabolism. You’re looking at blood flow. You’re looking at activity specific. And you can look actually in the brain at specific areas of the brain as opposed to just where electricity is happening on top of the brain.
Justin: What I find interesting about this, these 300 milliseconds to 400 milliseconds is pretty quick. I mean, we think of it as pretty quick, half a second.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Like what I was saying like, what if it was like a day or an hour between when you saw something and can really recognize what it was and we were just moving slower, would we notice?
Kirsten: That would be no good.
Justin: Would we notice that we’re moving slower?
Kirsten: No, because that would be a reality.
Justin: Or would we just slow all our functions down to match, you know, so it takes an hour, I see it there and everything would be – what if half a second is like, a really long time and we’re just not aware of it. Because we only can conceive of things in half second intervals.
Kirsten: Yeah. I think it would be neat to look at different animals who have different speed, so the sloth.
Justin: Yeah. That’s exactly the one I’m thinking, though, right?
Kirsten: Look at the sloth versus look at say, a humming bird.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: And look at different animals who potentially work in different neural time frames and try and see what their lag time is.
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: Is it different?
Justin: Yeah. What if the humming bird is like, you know, 100 or like 50 milliseconds…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …between seeing and recognizing.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: And we just seem just completely slow. It’s like, you know, like I figure a fly is pretty quick, too. You know, fly seems to like, I’m ready to – and I think I even got it…
Kirsten: Spider, spider.
Justin: …and I look and it’s gone.
Kirsten: Spider has to…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …be faster than a fly.
Justin: So…
Kirsten: Anyway.
Justin: So, we could be losing like a ton of the time that we have on the planet just by operating so slowly. It’s half a second to recognize a thing. All those half seconds over a lifetime between seeing things and being able to know that they’re there, we were like missing – like we can get it down to a quarter second, we would live twice as long.
We could do twice as many things. We would be able to read twice as many books. We would just everything. We would double our lifespan…
Kirsten: Okay.
Justin: …within our life span, if we could just get it…
Kirsten: Okay.
Justin: …from a half second down to a quarter second.
Kirsten: Too bad. And maybe this is the difference between some individuals. Maybe some individuals have, you know, split second faster or slower than others. Maybe there’s some amount to that.
But anyway, we have to go to a station break. And there’s…
Justin: Yeah. Maybe there is some – oh, I just heard you.
Kirsten: Hush!
Justin: Okay.
Kirsten: We have to go to a station break right now. We would be back in just a few moments with lots more of science. And hopefully, we can get Justin to not jabber, jabber, jabber so much. We can get to the science.
Justin: I am science.
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And we’re back with more of This Week in Science.
Kirsten: That’s right. And we have so much more science to get through. We’re going to be brainstorming over the next little bit. We have a – we’re going to have a giveaway for all you minions out there who are very excited about. So, we’re going to think up something very special, special contest for you guys. So, we’ll let you know, let you know what’s going on. But let’s see what’s going on in science. What else is happening?
This story from our intern Ali. She submitted a story, yes. Do you hear what I feel?
Justin: How come she’s not doing this story?
Kirsten: We’re going to work her up to that. We’re going to work her up to that. We’re going to work to working her up.
Justin: All right.
Kirsten: Yeah. You totally didn’t hear my intro. You’re like ignoring me.
Justin: I heard you were singing.
Kirsten: Right, right, right. I know. Do you hear what I feel? You know, it’s kind of…
Justin: Do you hear what I feel?
Kirsten: …like the Christmas song, you know, TWISmas. It’s another TWISmas carol. Did you know, researchers are suggesting that your skin helps you hear.
Justin: What?
Kirsten: Yeah. It’s what they’re calling as phenomenon where your eyes can fool your ears. It’s a phenomenon called the McGurk effect. This has been known for a while. And it’s your eyes, if they see somebody saying “ga” but the audio plays “ba”, people hear a completely different sound.
Justin: Than “ga” or “ba”?
Kirsten: “Da.”
Justin: Oh, wow! Really?
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: That’s wild.
Kirsten: It’s totally wild. Well, these researchers, Gick and Derrick, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the University’s Department of Linguistics, they wanted to know if little puffs of air that are produced when you make certain sounds are responsible for that way that we hear and why we hear what we hear.
So, they had a bunch of participants listen to recorded sounds through headphones. And they heard different combinations of sounds. So, “pa” and “ba”, and then “ta” and “da”. And over some of the sounds, during some of the sounds, they know that certain sounds, “p”, “t”, “k”, you produce a puff of air. They are the plosives, the plosive sounds…
Justin: So, the human expect to see those with the lips.
Kirsten: You would expect to see them in the lips but also because you’re producing, producing a puff of air when you make those sounds, they split the puffs of air up. So, they’re listening to the sounds through headphones but only on some of them did they produce – the scientists played or produced little puffs of air that they blew on the participants’ skin. And then they mixed it up.
So, where you would expect the air from “p” sound to be arriving on your cheek or your skin, somehow, they wouldn’t play a puff of air. They’d played it on a “b” where there is no puff of air.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: So, they disassociated the puff of air that normally comes with the plosive sounds from the sound themselves.
Justin: Okay.
Kirsten: And they found that there was a confusion. So, when – what they found that when the participants received an air puff with the inappropriate sounds, they were more likely to hear the wrong sound.
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: Yeah. “While subjects correctly,” this is from an article in Scientific American, “While subjects correctly identified these sounds in about 80% of cases when played without the release of air, the accuracy decreased by about 10% if the sounds were accompanied by puffs of air.” And so, what Gick says is that, “Largely in English, the difference between ‘pa’ and ‘ba’ is this puff of air.”
And they found that even air puffs sent to the ankle can help you differentiate sounds.
Justin: Like, if somebody’s close talking me to the point where I can feel puffs of air on my ankle…
Kirsten: Yeah. The close talkers.
Justin: Either something is going completely horrible or…
Kirsten: Why are you whispering into my ankle?
Justin: Or it’s really not that important if it’s a “ba” or “pa” sound.
Kirsten: Yeah. This – while this research sounds a little – it’s a little odd and you wouldn’t think, I mean, is the air from a puff created when you’re speaking really carried all the way to you? Can you really…
Justin: I don’t think so.
Kirsten: Can your skin’s mechanoreceptors really pick it up?
Justin: I don’t think so.
Kirsten: What is it about that puff of air?
Justin: I think it’s an addition of information.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: I think, it’s not probably that naturally occurring and watching somebody speak or talk.
Kirsten: And it’s only a 10% decrease.
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: I mean, it’s not like 70%, it’s a 10% decrease.
Justin: Yeah. It’s more like adding a little bit of information that sort of like a misdirection.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Because there is the puff of air, your mind makes the assumption, connects those two and then is confused with, you know, the visual. It’s…
Kirsten: Right, yeah.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: So, your mind connects. Your mind does connect that puff of air though to those particular sounds.
Justin: But it’s like – like if you were talking, I mean, that the sort of – you’re connecting it because you know that’s what you do when you speak.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: I mean, really I like, I talk to a lot of people during the day. I don’t feel any puffs of air from them.
Kirsten: But you’re not thinking about it either.
Justin: I’m not thinking.
Kirsten: I mean, maybe this is something, it’s very subconscious.
Justin: Although, it’s being, I mean, hearing through the skin makes sense if you’ve ever gone to hear like drum and base. Like, play it really loud. I can understand like…
Kirsten: Boom, boom, boom.
Justin: …I can feel the base in like the ribcage and other places quite well.
Kirsten: Yes, yes. And I’m sure, yes. I’m sure, there is much to be said for being able to pick up vibrations of sounds and how that is a form – I mean, definitely your whole body as an ear of sorts in itself.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Yeah. The idea though is that maybe this could help technologies that assist hearing impaired or, you know, maybe there’s some, you know, cellphone speakers that are really bad.
Justin: I don’t want my phone puffing at me. No.
Kirsten: I know. It’s kind of weird.
Justin: No, that would be annoying.
Kirsten: Kind of weird. All right.
Justin: You know, like a button on like, the Facebook. You know, instead of the poke button…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: …it would be like the puff button. You’re sitting there and all of a sudden, a blast of air comes out of your computer.
Kirsten: Pa! Yeah, no thanks, Facebook.
Justin: This just in. Men and women are different.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Yes. Researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging – which is a way that they monitor the blood moving around in your brain – to study brain activation, they found that men and women respond differently to positive and negative stimuli.
Volunteers underwent FMRI while viewing pictures from the International Affective Picture Systems, IAPS, which is apparently a very widely used standardized testing system. So, it’s a bunch of photographs and visuals that lots of researchers used, which is kind of a neat idea if they’re using the same medium that…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …it can create little bit of standardization across these tests. The images were displayed in two runs: The first run only negative pictures were show, for the second run, only positive.
While viewing the negative images, women showed decidedly stronger and more extensive activation in the left thalamus, which relays sensory information to inform the cerebral cortex including the pain and pleasure centers.
So, women are sort of seeing it and it’s kind of feeling it. It’s sort of activating the area of the pain sensors on the brain there.
Kirsten: And pleasure.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: So, positive, negative emotions. So, if it’s positive, it’s like pleasure, negative, pain.
Justin: Yeah. It’s empathy. We’re actually…
Kirsten: It hurts me. It hurts inside.
Justin: Actually this is just the negative images was both in the pain and pleasure at the same time.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Sadistic empathy on the part of the women.
Kirsten: Sadistic empathy, great.
Justin: Men exhibited more activation in the left insula which assumption here – that it gauges these psychological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about action information from the insula is related to the other brain structures involved in decision making.
So, maybe it’s more of the fight or flight that’s resonating in the men.
Kirsten: This is totally falling in line with the whole idea, okay women just want to like talk about their feelings. You know, I just – I get you, yeah.
Justin: I can feel it.
Kirsten: I just talk about it, just let it out. While men are like, “Okay, let’s do something.”
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: “Can we fix this? Let’s fix it.”
Justin: Let’s fight or go shoot something or you want to watch a game?
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: There’s a couple of things we can do.
Kirsten: I love anything though that like, really delineates, “Men are this way, women are this way.”
Justin: I love that, too.
Kirsten: As if there is like no middle ground anywhere.
Justin: There really isn’t. There really shouldn’t be.
Kirsten: Oh, dear.
Justin: We can actually fix the US economy if women stopped working because then we wouldn’t have all this unemployment. I’m in the wrong crowd.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Okay.
Kirsten: Yeah. Blank stares.
Justin: Then go back to the one-income household. Everybody in the United States -there wouldn’t be competition for employers again. It would be fantastic. I’m not suggesting we do it. Just saying from a purely economic – I’ll just be quiet now.
Kirsten: Just stop now.
Justin: The more pronounced activation in the insular cortex in the men might be related to their autonomic components. I have an autonomic component?
Kirsten: Autonomic.
Justin: Autonomic.
Kirsten: Yeah. It’s all the stuff, your heart rate, your breathing, the things that keep the body going without you having to think about it.
Justin: Yeah. So it taps into there?
Kirsten: Yeah, to speed up.
Justin: Gets my heart rate up, gets me breathing hard…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …and digestion which means, if you’re too frightened perhaps – anyway, to help to adjust certain functions in response to stress for the overall environment, it’s responsible for that fight or flight response…
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: …to threatening situations. While viewing positive images, women showed stronger and more extensive activation in the right superior temporal gyrus…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …which is involved in auditory processing in memory. So, women like to remember the good stuff. They’re like, “Oh, this is cool.” And then their auditory processing is going. It’s like you said, sort of like the talking about it.
Men exhibited stronger activation in the bilateral occipital lobes…
Kirsten: Occipital lobes.
Justin: …which are associated purely with the visual processing, so, yeah – that kind of makes sense in other realms, too.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Men being more visual about the good times, women, more about the memory and the auditory. What is the auditory? Is it sort – could that be an internal conversation that they’re having with themselves about seeing good things?
Kirsten: Yeah. That I think is really interesting. I don’t know what that would indicate. But it just, yeah. This is a fascinating difference into, you know, that maybe underlies and supports a lot of the assumptions of how women look at the world versus how men look at the world.
Men are looking at – men want the visual cortex is going because you’re looking at the world being perceptive as to what’s going on because then your autonomic system is going, you can act on it and you can do something. Where women are kind of internally processing, linking memories, you know, having the emotional context.
Justin: Andrzej Urbanik, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Radiology at the University Hospital in Krakow, Poland I think the one that did this study. And he believes that these differences may indicate that women analyze positive stimuli in a broader social context.
So, it’s not so much as it’s just pleasing right now. But what does this mean in the bigger picture?
Kirsten: What does this mean?
Justin: But as we reported in the past…
Kirsten: What does this all mean?
Justin: …ladies just a word of warning out there, when you go and talk to your girlfriends about your problems ad nauseam, it actually can make things worse.
Kirsten: Yeah. That is something that if…
Justin: That’s come up.
Kirsten: That has come up. If you focus on the negative too much and keep going over and going over it, then it actually can help reinforce those negative perceptions…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …and make it worse.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: So, you know, there is an upside and downside, whatever.
Justin: And fight for your right not to work. It’s not as bad as you think.
Kirsten: Shush. Just hush.
Justin: It can actually be quite nice.
Kirsten: TWIS in space. Time for some space in news. This story from LARSS NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory space craft, the STEREO space craft, basically two space craft that have, you know, STEREO vision…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …of the sun.
Justin: Clever.
Kirsten: Taken these pictures of the sun from multiple sides. We can see what’s going on from multiple angles, two angles, and we’re looking at the sun. They got data back from February of 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. Yeah.
STEREO caught this eruption and beamed back images of what was going on. And people at the Solar Physics Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center and elsewhere have analyzed these images and they’re saying that solar tsunamis are real. That there is – it’s not a wave of water, says Spiros Patsourakos of George Mason University.
Justin: It’s very unusual that came from the sun, I’d be very astonished.
Kirsten: Yeah, “Not a wave of water”, he’s the lead author of a paper reporting the finding in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, “But a giant wave of hot plasma and magnetism.”
Justin: Yeah, baby.
Kirsten: Yeah. They call this a fast mode magnetohydrodynamical wave or MHD wave for short. This one was 100,000 kilometers high and moving outwards at a velocity of 250 kilometers per second. Otherwise…
Justin: Whoa!
Kirsten: …if you were to calculate that’s 560,000 miles per hour.
Justin: Wow! That’s moving.
Kirsten: Five hundred sixty thousand miles per hour, a 100,000 kilometers high. The energy contained in this was equivalent to 2400 mega tons of TNT. It’s a lot of power. It’s a lot of power.
Justin: They got to get things out of it. I mean, I think, we might have understood what the power of TNT was once when we were going around blowing stuff up in mining. What’s – I don’t know how powerful TNT is. I have no idea.
Kirsten: Boom. Strong. But anyway, because of this observation of STEREO, they now know that these tsunamis are real. It’s not a shadow or a trick of the eye or, you know, some artifact of measuring the equipment they’re using to measure it.
Because they were able to capture it using STEREO A and STEREO B in concert, they’re positioned at right angles to each other. They were able to get an image from the side of the eruption of the wave and from the top down of the wave from where it initiated and then how it moved across the surface of the sun.
Justin: Basically, yeah, 3D image of it, you can produce some of that.
Kirsten: Yeah. And they say that by watching how the waves propagate and bounce off things, we can gather information about the sun’s lower atmosphere that’s available in no other way. Tsunami waves can also improve our forecasting of space weather, like a bull’s eye, they marked the spot where an eruption takes place, pinpointing the blast site can help us anticipate when a coronal mass ejection or a radiation storm will reach the earth. It’s pretty cool.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: And another group, this is moving on from tsunamis to Titan, scientists at CalTech have been checking out Titan, which is a moon of Saturn looking at the lakes that are found at the moon’s north pole but not at the moon’s south pole.
They have cracked the mystery, they say. And that it has to do with Saturn’s eccentric orbit. And that similar to the movement of glaciers on earth via the Milankovitch cycles which have to do with how we’re moving around the sun and are several thousand years in periodicity. That, Titan, has tens of thousands of year variations in climate driven by orbital motions.
Oded Aharonson, the CalTech professor says, “Also on Titan, there are long-term climate cycles in the global movement of methane that make lakes and carve lake basins. We may have found an example of present-day climate change analogous to the Milankovitch climate cycles on earth on another object in the solar system.”
And the paper can be found at Nature Geoscience, an asymmetric distribution of lakes on Titan as a possible consequence of orbital forcing. Thanks to (Michael) for sending in this article.
Justin: This is real quick. This is one I found on the physorg.com.
Kirsten: I love it.
Justin: And I almost don’t think it’s real. But I’m sure it is. Computer chip maker, Intel, wants to implant brain-sensing chip directly into the brains of its customers to allow them to operate computers and other devices without moving a muscle.
Kirsten: I’m not surprised. But isn’t it a little early to be doing that?
Justin: Intel believes its customers would be willing to have this chip implanted in their brain so they could operate their computer without using the keyboard or a mouse, using thoughts alone.
The implant could also be used to operate devices such as cellphones, TVs, DVDs, remote control based in your brain…
Kirsten: I’d like to take a poll.
Justin: …hands-free in the brain.
Kirsten: How many people out there would be willing to implant a chip in their brain?
Justin: You know…
Kirsten: Implant a chip in your brain to be able to have hands-free computing, Tweet me @drkiki.
Justin: Yeah. You know what, this is one of those things that you think it’s like, “Well, that’s so strange. Putting a chip in your brain.” But you will get so used to it that you would never want to not be with the chip.
Because here’s the example, my first car with keyless remote. First couple of times, I kept walking up to the car and I would still put the key in there. And like, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got a button.” And I would hit the button to unlock the door or while the key was in the door. Because it’s just, you know.
And then I got so used to it. I walk home to my front door and I’d hit the remote from my car to try to open my front door because I wanted it to open every door. I wanted it to open everything.
Kirsten: Open everything.
Justin: And now, they have the ones where you could just put it in your pocket, right? It’s got the little transponder chip on the key fob. So, you don’t even need to press a button, you can just walk up to the car when you’re a couple of feet away, you pull the handle, the door is unlocked. You get in, you press the button – you don’t even need to put it into ignition – you press the button and the car starts.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: So, after messing with that for a while and then it’s like, I can go back to one of the key fob, I got to reach into my pocket and even find where I put my keys and press the button.
I think if you’ve spent no more than a month of the brain chip where you didn’t need to actually find your phone or you don’t need to push any buttons and you could go to your computer and didn’t have to put your fingers all on your keyboard that’s got…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: And then you just look at it and surf just staring at your computer, you would get so used to it. You’d just be frustrated with all the meatspace…
Kirsten: With everything else.
Justin: …interactions that you have to get through to get to the…
Kirsten: Yeah. I have one response on Twitter. (S-Study) says, “yes” he would be willing. We have to get to our listener mailbag. It’s time. It’s the end of the show. (Sherman Dorn) wrote in and says, in regards to the Rom Houben case, the car accident victim who allegedly had locked-in syndrome rather than be in a persistent vegetative state.
He says, “I think you’re right to be skeptical. It looks like both the family and the doctor are believing in the discredited technique of facilitated communication in terms of Rom Houben’s alleged writing.”
He mentions neurologist Steven Novella, and his blog, where Steven has written a great commentary on the issue and so, I suggest people go there if you want to read what Dr. Novella has written about the Rom Houben case.
But everybody seems to agree that it’s most likely he’s locked in. There is some amount of cortical activity that the – scanning the brain for cortical activity is actually probably accurate and the science behind it is valid. But this facilitated communication is where we’re having an issue.
Justin: And quickly the part about that that also does kind of worry me is having been locked in for 20 years to be in a communicative state after – basically 20 years of some serious amount of isolation.
Kirsten: But we don’t know if he’s in a communicative state. We don’t know that.
Justin: But that – huh?
Kirsten: That’s what we don’t know. The facilitated communication is bunked. This is something that has been used. It’s basically – there’s a person holding his hand to facilitate communication.
Justin: But wait, I mean, that’s my point is that after 20 years of not being able to communicate. Even he was in this locked in state, the fact that he would be conversational and have like words…
Kirsten: Oh, yeah. Yeah, having like…
Justin: And not be like, “Ahhhhh!!!! Get me out!!!!!”
Kirsten: Exactly.
Justin: Like, yeah. I mean, it’s been kind of frustrating. I’ve been, you know, stuck here for 20 years. It’s a drag, man! But…
Kirsten: It is drag, man!
Justin: It’s good to be back.
Kirsten: Wow! I’ve got so many responses from people on Twitter. People saying, “Definitely not”, “That would be a really bad idea”, “Yes”, “laugh out loud”.
Justin: Some common response in there.
Kirsten: Some people are interested in the security issues. So, there’s interesting, interesting amount of information out there.
Justin: I want to know if they can clock me down to a quarter of a second because if it does, that gives me twice as long to live.
Kirsten: Definitely. So, I’d like to give a shoutout to (Patrick Hartnett) from Ireland and his white doggie, (Boxer Comet) who listen on long walks to TWIS. Thanks for listening in Ireland.
Justin: Making dogs smarter.
Kirsten: Yes. On next week’s show, we’ll have much more science.
Justin: Yes. Oh, that’s right. And these others things to say, we are available via podcast. You can go to our website, www.twis.org. And for instructions on how to sign up for the podcast or you can just go to the iTunes and look up This Week in Science in their podcast directory.
Kirsten: Yeah. And for more information on anything you’ve heard here today, show notes are going to be available on our website. Thanks to our wonderful intern, Ali. We also want to hear from you. So email us at kirsten@thisweekinscience.com or justin@thisweekinscience.com.
Justin: Put TWIS somewhere in the subject line otherwise, your email will get spam filtered into oblivion.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: So, we do want to hear from you. If there’s anything you would like us to cover, address a story or suggestion or an interview, let us know.
Kirsten: And we’ll be back here on KDVS next Tuesday at 8:30 AM Pacific Time. We hope you’ll join us again for more great science news.
Justin: And if you’ve learned anything from today’s show, wait for it, wait for it, remember…
Kirsten: It’s all in your head.
Podcast: http://www.twis.org/audio/2009/12/01/407/