Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10:34 — 32.3MB)
Making Memories, Finding The Trace, Viral Tree Discovery, Deaf Gerbils, Ibuprofen Threatens Hearing, Smart Sharks, A New Monkey, Genome Uses, Physics Gets Weird, Stem Cell Protection, TWIWRD, And Much More…
Disclaimer, Disclaimer, Disclaimer!!!
the wonderful world we live in is populated, largely it sometimes seems, with people who are determined to make misery out of their company…
Whether through radicalized religious actions of the few, or the political propaganda of prejudices put forth as a party platform for the masses…
Hatred, violence and righteous ignorance seem to abound around the world as a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ill-conceived thinking that serves no greater purpose than to sustain itself by inflicting suffering on humanity and inviting the same in return…
And since the company you keep says a lot about who you are…
The company of mankind defines us all, in some cosmic sense…
the good, the bad, the woefully ignorant and the wickedly brilliant alike…
What separates the terrorist from the string theorist, the dictator from the doctor of science…
How do we keep ourselves separated from the miserable ruiners of reason
From the inexplicably enthusiastic extinguishers of enlightened logic
From the emotionally enslaved worshipers of medieval dogma dedicated to the extinction of intellectual pragmatism…
What can we do to keep our minds out of the muck and mire these silly humans would have us wallow in?
What would we do if not for… This Week in Science… coming up next.
Making Memories
Researchers at Case Western Reserve of Medicine have been working with the brain to figure out the mechanisms of short-term memory. They discovered that each cell in the hippocampus held a specific memory for up to ten seconds when stimulated with electrical current. Could this lead to short-term memory restoration in humans?
Virus discovery messes with our family tree
Why you should care about deaf gerbils
Stem cell research with deaf gerbils provide hope for stem cell therapy in deaf humans. Why gerbils and not mice, you ask? I don’t know, but they’re so adorable…
Ibuprofen could make you deaf
In a study of almost 30,000 women results pointed to a possible link between taking ibuprofen two days a week and hearing loss later in life. That headache may be rough, but is getting rid of it worth your ability to hear in fifty years?
BLair’s Animal Corner
Sharks: Not only deadly, but smart.
In a recent controlled experiment lemon sharks exhibited social learning. Researchers trained some sharks to perform a specific behavior to get a treat, and then put sharks ignorant to the behavior in a tank with the trained sharks. The naive sharks quickly caught on and performed the behavior, even once isolated from the trained sharks. Uh oh… what will helpless swimmers do once sharks have learned to work together?!
Get a free audiobook at Audible.com!
We only use 1% of our Genome, or do we?
10,000 genes described!
Protect your stem cells during radiation therapy!
TWIWRD:
Remote-controlled Cockroaches
If you love TWIS, please support us by donating below:
I'm the host of this little science show. 
17:10 Once upon a time the planet may have been ruled by giant viruses?
18:20 Maybe viruses, which are often RNA based, could have been in charge.
18:50 We didn’t come from monkeys, we came from a virus!
You’re suggesting that first life took the form of viruses instead of cells.
Clearly, this is not possible, because a virus relies on a host cell to replicate!
Yes, there are good reasons to expect that precursors to life were RNA based.
Such proto-life is no more closely related to a modern day virus than the I am.
That’s actually the whole point of this article!!!
26:00 Why are these women even taking all this Ibuprofen?
26:20 Could what’s causing the inflammation be related to the hearing loss?
26:30 You’re diagnosing with what you’re using to treat the symptom with.
This 2012 study of women and the 2010 study of men are good studies.
Both use Cox proportional hazards multivariate regression to adjust for potential confounding factors.
This means all pertinent risk factors, such as inflammation, are controlled for.
28:30 Justin: Men weren’t studied. Blair: That does seem odd.
Yes, that does seems odd… maybe because its A LIE!!!
Justin just didn’t bother to do the research!
Kirsten, you guessed right that men were studied previously, good job.
Justin, please, SPEND AT LEAST 5 MINUTES researching stories you bring in!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100301091421.htm
http://phys.org/news186584476.html
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=analgesic+hearing+loss+men&l=1
Great episode, although there seems to be some weird slowing down (and thus tuning down) going on at around the half-way point. It might just be me, though.
The story on the arms in marine microbes is unclear. Justin keeps saying that some individuals within the population produce antibiotics to cure the rest of the population, but antibiotics are compounds that kill microbes. Did he mean “antidote”? The quote he read makes it sound like the antibiotic is meant to kill competitors, not cure kin. So maybe they are not the doctors but the assassins. The show notes do not reference the story, so I won’t have time to check for myself.
And I forget why Justin keeps saying Eco. li insted of E. coli, but it’s annoying, it interferes with comprehension of the story, and it’s time he stop. Does he say Peedih D. when everyone else says P. Diddy?
@Samuli, definitely not just you. I think it was happening last week too, but it’s less noticable without Justin.
I also heard horrible noises: cans popping, metal shearing, almost as bad as fingernails on a blackboard. Love the show so much it’s an addition. But you’ve go to fix the sound. I just couldn’t bear it last week.
Just wanted to tell you guys how much I enjoy your show. When I was a grad student, I always loaded up on podcasts whenever I had to do mind-numbing biology grad student tasks (pretty much everyday) of measuring hundreds of fish, etc. TWIS was really fun to listen to whilst losing my mind late at night in the lab! Now that I graduated, I like listening because it reminds me of rambling on about science articles with my grad student friends.
Cheers!
Yep, lotsa trouble with sound indeed… Still, I prefer having my TWIS each week with soundtrouble to not having it. Bigtime. Still love you guys so much, keep it up! And compliments on keeping Blair around, she is a treasure worthy of TWIS most definitely. Don’t give up! We need you!