Speaker 1: Oh hi, Hey, it's still your brother in law who
Speaker 1: rais his coffee beans, but in a cool way.
Speaker 2: Ali word, And not only is this.
Speaker 1: A day late, baby, but also this is the bonus
Speaker 1: episode that I promised you last week. So what I
Speaker 1: turned around the neuropathology episode on concussions last week so fast.
Speaker 1: It just gave me additional whiplash. So I came to
Speaker 1: my senses and I said, word, go back to bed,
Speaker 1: sleep a little more. You bashed your skull and that's
Speaker 1: a great excuse use it. So here is the CRISP
Speaker 1: Sunny follow up episode about concussions, about mTBI TBI CTE
Speaker 1: in the natural world, in animals. And if you're like,
Speaker 1: I don't know what any of those acronyms are, they
Speaker 1: don't make sense. And you're also like, wait, dude, you
Speaker 1: recently sustained a severe hospital grade concussion, then you're going
Speaker 1: to want to be be mosey. Back to the neuropathology
Speaker 1: episode from last week. It's a really, really great one.
Speaker 1: Lots of asides about why I ended up in an
Speaker 1: ambulance a few weeks ago and consequently why this episode
Speaker 1: is two days late. TBIs man, no joke. So this
Speaker 1: ologist reached out after mine because she's a researcher in
Speaker 1: the field and in the lab, and because severe neurological
Speaker 1: damage like CTE can only really be.
Speaker 2: Detected on autopsy.
Speaker 1: Thus it's a very controversial diagnosis in living people. A
Speaker 1: lot of folks butting heads about it, So she studies
Speaker 1: butting heads about it in bighorn sheep and musk oxen
Speaker 1: and all kinds of stuff. So she got her undergrad
Speaker 1: degree in the biology of organisms, populations and ecosystems in France.
Speaker 1: She went to Antwerp and Vienna for her masters in.
Speaker 2: Comparative vertebrate morphology.
Speaker 1: And then went and got a ding dang doctorate in
Speaker 1: evolutionary biology in Zurich, studying toothwear on animals. And we
Speaker 1: recorded this a week or so ago, and she was
Speaker 1: rounding out her postdoc in the lab of your favorite
Speaker 1: functional morphologist, doctor Joey Eidenberg i' Mount Sinai in New
Speaker 1: York City. Great episode, I'll link it on my website,
Speaker 1: But her postdoc is wrapping up, so use the links
Speaker 1: in the show notes to also reach out to her.
Speaker 1: If you are hiring someone rad because she is. You
Speaker 1: can also use the links in the show notes to
Speaker 1: join patreon dot com slash Ologies, where for a buck
Speaker 1: a month you usually get to send questions for me
Speaker 1: to ask ahead of time, except for this one, because
Speaker 1: like a goat brain on a lab slab, it was
Speaker 1: supposed to be all cut up and used for last
Speaker 1: week's episode. But whatever, it was weird and fun and
Speaker 1: you deserve to hear the whole thing, so for zero dollars. Also,
Speaker 1: you can support the show and my very fragile sense
Speaker 1: of self by leaving a review.
Speaker 2: I read all of.
Speaker 1: Them, and here's a still moist, freshy one. It's gross
Speaker 1: from someone by the name of Random Mattox who wrote
Speaker 1: the review. I gobble up almost every episode like a
Speaker 1: raccoon hits marshmallows. Also thank you to the reviewer who
Speaker 1: said that their whole family watches Brainchild and Listenologies and
Speaker 1: to get well soon.
Speaker 2: They wrote please take care of yourself, Alley, which.
Speaker 1: Was so sweet that made me cry, and it was
Speaker 1: signed huge Fangs, and I don't know if they meant
Speaker 1: huge fans or not, but huge fangs honestly better more fitting.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about while we're.
Speaker 1: On it, animals showing off by acquiring brain damage.
Speaker 2: Let's get into it.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about covid neuropathology, So get ready
Speaker 1: for the life of a retired ox, the sliced and
Speaker 1: stained brain, How to build a better helmet using sheep skulls,
Speaker 1: and how not to do that. Twitter, Flame Wars, Wild
Speaker 1: boar Wars, How a bunch of tangled proteins can really
Speaker 1: mess up a melon? What a melon actually is? And
Speaker 1: see Creature Gossip and the Coolest Cooler you will ever
Speaker 1: crack open with vertebrate morphologist, evolutionary biologist, and bovid neuropathologist
Speaker 1: Doctor Nicole Ackerman's. Oh my gosh, doctor doctor Headbut hello,
Speaker 1: hi Elly.
Speaker 3: It's doctor Nicole Ackerman's. I go by she her, but
Speaker 3: everyone calls me.
Speaker 2: Nikki doctor head, but it is.
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit about how you ended
Speaker 1: up in I guess would this be functional morphology? Would
Speaker 1: this be like traumatic osteology? What would you call this field?
Speaker 3: So I'm in my post doc I'm combining functional morphology
Speaker 3: and neuroscience. So the functional morphology part is the skull,
Speaker 3: horns and head and movement part, and the neuroscience part
Speaker 3: is the actual cellular brain damage part.
Speaker 1: And how do you even do this?
Speaker 2: Work. Do you have to go out in the field.
Speaker 1: Do you have to find cancussed big horn sheep?
Speaker 2: How do you start?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I asked myself the same question because obviously
Speaker 3: this no one kind of looked at this before. A
Speaker 3: lot of people are like, bighorn sheep don't get concussions.
Speaker 3: Turns out no one's checked, so I figured out I
Speaker 3: should probably go check. And unfortunately I started all this
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty, so there was no field for me.
Speaker 3: But I had about a month where I started in January,
Speaker 3: so I had a few months before the pandemic to
Speaker 3: call up everyone I could possibly get a number for it,
Speaker 3: fish and wildlife in any state where there was a
Speaker 3: big horn sheep and say hey, if you have a
Speaker 3: dead sheep, can you send it to.
Speaker 4: Me totally normal so I can look.
Speaker 3: At their brain. And I actually got like six sheepheads
Speaker 3: from them, and they're all like natural deaths or like
Speaker 3: cougar kills, or one of them broke its legs so
Speaker 3: they had to euthanize it, so no sheep were killed
Speaker 3: for the purpose of my study.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 3: So the neuroscience part, they have a big walk in
Speaker 3: fridge full of random animal brains, and they happen to
Speaker 3: have Muskox brains in there, so I just added those
Speaker 3: to my studies.
Speaker 1: Well, and what have you found looking at those brains?
Speaker 1: Do you have to put them in an MRI in
Speaker 1: a CT scan?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So, actually, first we did MRI scan them, because if
Speaker 3: you have a very very bad brain trauma, you might
Speaker 3: get regional shrinkage of different parts of your brain. I
Speaker 3: mean at that point in a human you have behavioral problems.
Speaker 3: But I just wanted to first check, okay, is the
Speaker 3: brain intact on the MRI. All of our MRIs were clean.
Speaker 1: And if you listened to the neuropathology episode last week,
Speaker 1: you might remember that even though I did concuss myself
Speaker 1: falling down a flight of stairs and then collapsed and
Speaker 1: then convulsed and then collapsed again, my CT scan was
Speaker 1: clean and an MRI would have been totally fine. Look
Speaker 1: in a plus two. So those hospital machine big boys
Speaker 1: are helpful for seeing life threatening emergency brain bleeds, but
Speaker 1: they don't tell the full microscopic story. For that, you
Speaker 1: need rest, and you also to see it need either
Speaker 1: psychic wizard or a scientist with a hacksaw.
Speaker 3: Then once we had our pictures, I could go cut
Speaker 3: up the brain and take out a piece where I
Speaker 3: thought that there would be maybe some trauma if it
Speaker 3: was even there at all, and look at that under
Speaker 3: the microscope.
Speaker 1: What did you find?
Speaker 4: Okay, here we go.
Speaker 3: So it was a very long process. I don't want
Speaker 3: to make it sound like simple, like it took me
Speaker 3: a year to first troubleshoot the technique to stain the
Speaker 3: bighorn cheap brain because surprise, surprise, no one had stained
Speaker 3: a bighorn sheep brain before. And it uses immunohistochemistry where
Speaker 3: looking for a certain type of protein that kind of
Speaker 3: shows up when your brain gets damaged. And so I
Speaker 3: had to troubleshoot this this immuno histochemistry technique for about
Speaker 3: a year, but I figured it out eventually. This paper
Speaker 3: is actually currently under review, so it's a little bit
Speaker 3: breaking news, but it's gonna come out eventually. I found
Speaker 3: a few neurons. Actually, first in the musk oxen, which
Speaker 3: also butt their heads extremely hard, there were dead neurons
Speaker 3: and there were some sort of clumped up dendrites or
Speaker 3: like the neuron tails. And first of all, I was
Speaker 3: just excited to see just one of these. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's beautiful. It's like a big spider web under the
Speaker 3: microscope and it was perfectly stained.
Speaker 2: I was so happy.
Speaker 1: Wow, it takes a special and divine person to get
Speaker 1: giddy for musk ox head trauma.
Speaker 2: And we found her.
Speaker 1: And when she described the spider web of dead neurons,
Speaker 1: I was like, yes, spiderweb patterns. I think I know
Speaker 1: what she's talking about. She's probably talking about these subrachnoid
Speaker 1: hemorrhages that I read about. So I went to go
Speaker 1: see what they look like stained under a microscope, and
Speaker 1: it turns out she was not talking about subarrachnoid hemorrhages
Speaker 1: at all. Those are totally different things. They both just
Speaker 1: happen to look spiderweby and the iracnoid layer is a
Speaker 1: layer under the skull between the brain and there. It's
Speaker 1: kind of webby and it houses fluid that floats your brain.
Speaker 1: She wasn't talking about that at all. So a bleed
Speaker 1: there is what.
Speaker 2: CT scans are looking for.
Speaker 1: But what doctor Ackermans is talking about is zooming in
Speaker 1: and in way past the scope of a CT scan
Speaker 1: to see little knots of insoluble tau proteins.
Speaker 3: And then you know, after that one single one. I
Speaker 3: kind of went further and did a really large amount
Speaker 3: of stains and counted them all by hand to see
Speaker 3: if there was sort of grouping of these dead neurons
Speaker 3: or dying neurons in certain areas, because if it was
Speaker 3: just like Alzheimer's, it could be sort of more dying
Speaker 3: neurons on the surface, going deeper and deeper as the
Speaker 3: disease gets worse. But if it's traumatic injury, the forces
Speaker 3: that are applied to the head when there's an injury
Speaker 3: kind of go into the folds of the brain and
Speaker 3: rip the cells at the bottom of these folds. And
Speaker 3: I actually found groups of they're called neurofibrillly tangles, but
Speaker 3: pathological neurons at the bottoms of these folds, and so
Speaker 3: that showed for sure that it was brain trauma.
Speaker 1: Actually, so after a life of headbutting or tackling or
Speaker 1: just thumping your skull on stuff, I guess, like me,
Speaker 1: those tiny tube filled towels ball up and Nikki says
Speaker 1: that she's finding them kind of like you would necklaces
Speaker 1: at the bottom of your purse. Just these delicate clocks
Speaker 1: of problems. But why, why and how do you think
Speaker 1: evolution kind of selected for this behavior in especially breeding males,
Speaker 1: even though it might lead to brain trauma.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is my question to myself as well. I
Speaker 3: have some theories. I guess you know, the goal of life.
Speaker 3: This is gonna seem really simple. But the goal of
Speaker 3: life is just sex. It's reproduction, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, maybe not you personally, but mother nature is
Speaker 1: just a tunnel vision, horny ghost inside each and every
Speaker 1: one of us.
Speaker 3: So once you get to that point, if you're able
Speaker 3: to reproduce and pass on your genetic material, if you
Speaker 3: have dementia or if you're a bit you know, damage
Speaker 3: in the brain, it doesn't really matter anymore. So one
Speaker 3: of my theories is just that, well, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: They don't live that long anyway. They might not develop
Speaker 3: dementia or Alzheimer's like we do in relation to these
Speaker 3: kind of illnesses. And I'm sorry, I know you just
Speaker 3: got a concussion, so I want to freak you out,
Speaker 3: although I'm sure the other experts you talk to freaky
Speaker 3: out enough already. But yeah, my theory is that maybe,
Speaker 3: first of all, maybe they don't live long enough to
Speaker 3: actually have really bad side effects. And second of all,
Speaker 3: maybe it just doesn't matter because like their life is
Speaker 3: not really really complex. I mean no disrespect to bighorn cheep.
Speaker 3: I love them, but they eat, they you know, evade predators,
Speaker 3: and they reproduce, so you know, they don't need to
Speaker 3: do puzzles and memory games.
Speaker 1: What about How do you think that those type of
Speaker 1: neurological impacts. How do you think it does affect them?
Speaker 1: Do you think that there's any loss of coordination or balance?
Speaker 3: You know, I would love to know it's We barely
Speaker 3: have a behavioral scale for mice, like it's established in mice,
Speaker 3: but almost no other species has a scientific behavioral scale,
Speaker 3: so we don't have a baseline to say this is
Speaker 3: normal behavior, and then based on that, what is different behavior.
Speaker 3: The only sort of hint that I have that something
Speaker 3: might be different is when I talk to the folks
Speaker 3: at the Musko's farm in Alaska. They have a bowl
Speaker 3: muskox who's like twenty seven years old, which is like
Speaker 3: twice his normal lifespan, and apparently he just hangs out
Speaker 3: in his field and stares into the distance all day. Okay, buddy,
Speaker 3: So I'm guessing there might be a little bit of
Speaker 3: something going on there, But I would love to have,
Speaker 3: you know, someone go out into the field and observe
Speaker 3: and see if they're you know, over the years, if
Speaker 3: they act differently. I'm assuming it would. It would show
Speaker 3: like in humans, you'd kind of have memory issues, you'd
Speaker 3: have yeah, loss of coordination. But one thing is for
Speaker 3: sure is that if they had a human head, they
Speaker 3: would not survive. It is actually their big skulls and
Speaker 3: horns that help. Even though they do get brain trauma,
Speaker 3: it helps protect them for long enough.
Speaker 1: So horns and skulls ultimate helmets for hoofed and cud
Speaker 1: chewing pugilists.
Speaker 2: Who are motivated by sweet love making. Are there animals
Speaker 2: that aren't ruminants.
Speaker 1: That do that? Oh my god?
Speaker 3: Yes, Okay, so exciting, It's really exciting. Okay, this is
Speaker 3: going to blow your mind. So I actually wrote a
Speaker 3: little bit of a review about this last year during quarantine.
Speaker 3: So wales wal's headbutt what? We're pretty sure? Yeah, And
Speaker 3: like almost every group of whales has been either observed
Speaker 3: or just written about headbutting. The review that I publish
Speaker 3: has a picture of two bottlenosed dolphins jumping out of
Speaker 3: the air and headbutting each other mid air.
Speaker 2: What the fuck?
Speaker 1: So that blew my mind that had just suffered a blow.
Speaker 1: So a little more on that. What other ocean animals
Speaker 1: being each other with their literal melons? A melon apparently
Speaker 1: is a squishy part of a whalehead. And we're going
Speaker 1: to get to that in one second, but first we
Speaker 1: have to take a really really quick break from our sponsors,
Speaker 1: who allow us to donate to a cause of Nikki's choosing,
Speaker 1: And she selected the Society for Women's Health Research, and
Speaker 1: she said, as a biologist, I'm constantly running into illnesses
Speaker 1: that are poorly researched in women, if even studied at all.
Speaker 1: Concussions fall into that category, so I hope it's fitting.
Speaker 1: So the Society for Women's Health Research promotes research on
Speaker 1: biological sex differences and disease to improve women's health through
Speaker 1: science and policy and education. So thank you for helping
Speaker 1: us slam some cash into their hands. There's more at
Speaker 1: SWHR dot org and I'll linked in the show notes.
Speaker 2: So thanks sponsors.
Speaker 4: Mom, why did I call it Scottish cheese?
Speaker 2: Scottish cheese honey? And I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Did the dogs in other countries speak different languages?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I think so?
Speaker 1: When when we get there.
Speaker 2: Well, we've got to fix the car first. But there's
Speaker 2: someone coming to help us. Is it the man from Geneva?
Speaker 2: Not Geneva, he's from a Viva. Oh, there's the van.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: For car insurance with breakdown rescue, it takes a Viva
Speaker 4: visit a Viva dotta e to say fifteen percent acceptance criteria,
Speaker 4: terms and conditions apply. Minimum premium of three hundred and
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Speaker 4: See Aviva dotta E for details. Car insurance is underwritten
Speaker 4: by Aviva Insurance Arland dak Aviva Direct Arlund Limited is
Speaker 4: regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.
Speaker 1: Okay, back into it. Dolphins and whales who butt each
Speaker 1: other in the head.
Speaker 2: Like they're in a vin Diesel movie.
Speaker 1: So in her paper, doctor Ackermans cites that the ramming
Speaker 1: behavior has been observed in sperm whales, nar walls, humpback whales,
Speaker 1: bottlenose whales, bottlenose dolphins, and orcas, and she writes quote
Speaker 1: in pilot whales, unusual skull structures may even act as
Speaker 1: a form of antlers inside the head. What so we
Speaker 1: need so many satology episodes given that these things evolved
Speaker 1: out of the water to dry land, hung around on
Speaker 1: dry land, hoofed around, romped around, munching on grass, and
Speaker 1: maybe like deer eating birds.
Speaker 2: Michael, he ate a bird.
Speaker 1: And then they bounced back to the water and they modded.
Speaker 1: They're already motted fins from legs back to flippers, and
Speaker 1: dolphins have bigger brains than us, four to five times
Speaker 1: larger than we'd expect them to be for their size, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, did you know that dolphins can be
Speaker 1: like eleven feet long? I feel like no one has
Speaker 1: ever told me that anyway relative to that body size.
Speaker 1: They are the second most encephalized animals on the planet,
Speaker 1: which is a sentence I read recently that was written
Speaker 1: by the most encephalized species on the planet.
Speaker 2: But yes, why the headbutting? Why why? Why? Why?
Speaker 3: And one of the ideas is that this is maybe
Speaker 3: a conserved practice between all of the audiodactyls, because whales,
Speaker 3: you know, are part of the ardiodactyl hoofed animal family.
Speaker 3: So that's super exciting.
Speaker 2: Why do you want any idea why they might do that?
Speaker 3: Same as with the big horn sheep and the other
Speaker 3: male animals. It's fighting for females and showing like which
Speaker 3: male has the superior genetics to be able to survive
Speaker 3: that basically wild, there's a type of wild forest hog
Speaker 3: that headbutts and it makes a crazy loud noise, and
Speaker 3: there are hornbills. They fly into each other's heads in
Speaker 3: mid air. So I wanted to name those guys because
Speaker 3: it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: So Nicky's twenty twenty one paper is titled Unconventional Animal
Speaker 1: Models for Traumatic Brain Injury and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, and
Speaker 1: in it she notes that this clash has been described
Speaker 1: by other researchers watching hogs and it produces a loud
Speaker 1: cracking sound, and she even included and cited a YouTube link,
Speaker 1: And naturally, I did as fast as my fingers allowed,
Speaker 1: and let me set the scene. Okay, We open on
Speaker 1: a springtime hillside serving as a verdant arena for two
Speaker 1: shaggy tusked contenders. They look like a cross between a
Speaker 1: farm pig and o war hog, but also wearing a
Speaker 1: Gillie suit, and they scratch at the soil beneath them
Speaker 1: and then run at each other's skulls over and over,
Speaker 1: and the weirdest part is that their tails are wagging
Speaker 1: so much. And I don't know if that just means
Speaker 1: they're excited or amped up, or if they love it. Whatever,
Speaker 1: They're relentless. And in her paper, Nikki writes quote on
Speaker 1: rare occasions, these head clashes can result in skull fractures
Speaker 1: and even death, raising the question of the cost that
Speaker 1: these fights take on the hog's neuro anatomy. Perhaps, she continues,
Speaker 1: similarly to the thick fat pad found between a sheep's horns,
Speaker 1: the giant forest hogs facial pads serve both as a
Speaker 1: means of protection and as a sexual signal. So in
Speaker 1: the wild, with a fatty, sexy brain cushion and some
Speaker 1: bony helmets, individuals prove their merit before a hopefully receptive
Speaker 1: and I guess ovulating audience. So next time you're out
Speaker 1: there and you're witnessing a soggy, beer soaked kerfuffle at
Speaker 1: a bar, just be glad no one in there is
Speaker 1: growing knives out of their temples.
Speaker 2: Can get real gnarley.
Speaker 1: I mean, is it so impossible for you to watch
Speaker 1: like a boxing match or like a UFC match with
Speaker 1: friends and not?
Speaker 3: Yes, I cringe every time something happens, And because every
Speaker 3: time you get a concussion or a brain injury. It's
Speaker 3: an exponential curve towards potential future problems like dementia, Alzheimer's
Speaker 3: PTSD seizures.
Speaker 1: It's like, why doesn't anyone fight by just bumping butts together?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Why can't they do it where they We've got so
Speaker 1: much flesh and no brain.
Speaker 3: There might be some species of sea slug that does that.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Do any animals pierce each other's heads with their fallacies
Speaker 1: in dick to dick combat? You ask, of course they do.
Speaker 1: This is Earth, But just be glad that it was
Speaker 1: Twilight and not the twenty fifteen paper cephalo traumatic secretion
Speaker 1: transfer and a hermaphroditic sea slug that inspired fifty Shades
Speaker 1: of Gray. Because slugs are out there and they are
Speaker 1: stabbing each other in the head with their dicks and
Speaker 1: putting secretions in there. Babies. Is there anything that you
Speaker 1: have to kind of cross reference at all with human
Speaker 1: impacts or is it just impossible to even extrapolate this
Speaker 1: information into Oh yeah, yeah, a.
Speaker 3: Lot of the cellular stuff is really similar to humans.
Speaker 3: And honestly, that's all I have to work off of,
Speaker 3: because like I said, not a lot of other people
Speaker 3: are looking at this. There's a lot of artificial induced
Speaker 3: traumatic brain injury and cheap to study the development. But
Speaker 3: it's really hard to study in humans too, because a
Speaker 3: lot of the data comes from post mortem brains. You
Speaker 3: can't really take a brain biopsy while someone's alive. So
Speaker 3: we're developing new techniques as you know, as technology gets better.
Speaker 3: But the actual overall data out there is not a lot.
Speaker 3: But I do use a lot of the human stuff
Speaker 3: to try and compare and prove that that is indeed
Speaker 3: what's going on.
Speaker 1: Do you have to put a call out on like
Speaker 1: the worldwide sheep brain Web where you've asked more people?
Speaker 1: Do you think the more that your information becomes public
Speaker 1: or when this paper gets published, you'll be able to
Speaker 1: get more samples.
Speaker 3: First of all, I think we need to trademark that
Speaker 3: because I need a worldwide cheap web because I wish
Speaker 3: it was that easy to get samples. I don't know,
Speaker 3: I don't think there really is a system to get
Speaker 3: samples like that. I just called fish and wildlife because
Speaker 3: I happened to be in the US, But I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's really interesting for this topic because it's something that
Speaker 3: everyone internally thinks, Oh yeah, bighorncheap headbutting concussions like that
Speaker 3: totally makes sense, But it's not something that a lot
Speaker 3: of people are willing to investigate because there's not a huge,
Speaker 3: like financial gain behind it. I mean of it is
Speaker 3: for me is like understanding headbutting and all animals helps
Speaker 3: the human science and maybe we can learn from big
Speaker 3: horn sheep to help humans. But it's not like I'm
Speaker 3: gonna sell a helmet to the NFL right off the bat.
Speaker 3: I mean, NFL, please call me. But like, I don't
Speaker 3: don't know if that's gonna happen. So I'd love to
Speaker 3: get more samples. If there are people out there with
Speaker 3: big old cheap samples, send them to me. But it's
Speaker 3: a it's that's the hardest part.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I bet.
Speaker 1: Do you find that there's a lot of controversy when
Speaker 1: it comes to concussions.
Speaker 2: Or TBI or mTBI or CTE.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I was not plugged into that subculture at
Speaker 1: all before I ate shit down the stairs. But yeah, like,
Speaker 1: what is there a lot? Are there a lot of
Speaker 1: differing opinions based on what is making money?
Speaker 3: I have opinions, Yeah, I know there's a lot of
Speaker 3: sort of pseudoscience people that freak out about it. Actually,
Speaker 3: on our Twitter thread, I think that happened.
Speaker 2: It was weird.
Speaker 1: It was weird, and we had one tweeter keep popping
Speaker 1: up in the replies like a fucking marmot with comments
Speaker 1: about how football should not take the blame for any
Speaker 1: CTE and that all the impact athletes with post mortem
Speaker 1: evidence of CTE likely just.
Speaker 2: Happen to get it elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Like coincidentally, this person also had the emoji of a
Speaker 1: football in the bio. Anyway, Doctor Ackerman's Nicole a wonderful
Speaker 1: person to follow on Twitter so you can tweet and
Speaker 1: ask her about how woodpeckers have more accumulations of tau
Speaker 1: proteins compared to non pecking bird species, and doctor Ackermans
Speaker 1: will even do things like treat her followers to a
Speaker 1: twenty five part thread on how to deflesh a skull
Speaker 1: should you need to.
Speaker 3: But I try to avoid that. I like stick to
Speaker 3: my sheep so I don't have to deal with the
Speaker 3: human part. I understand why people freak out. It's scary.
Speaker 3: There are some people. For me, it's really frustrating. Is
Speaker 3: the biomechanics area where they use this sort of bioinspired materials.
Speaker 3: They think, like I said, big horn sheep don't get
Speaker 3: concussions because sheep are amazing and like they are perfect.
Speaker 3: And then they don't actually look at a biological background,
Speaker 3: but they create devices based on this without you know,
Speaker 3: looking at the basic science. One example is the que caller.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you've looked into this yet, so
Speaker 3: do take a look at the controversy behind the queue collar.
Speaker 3: It's this collar that goes around your neck and sort
Speaker 3: of tightens around your veins and arteries, and it's supposed
Speaker 3: to Okay, the basic idea is that it's supposed to
Speaker 3: increase the pressure in your head similar to the arterial
Speaker 3: pressure of a bighorn cheap because they live in altitude
Speaker 3: and they have higher pressure and this causes less concussions.
Speaker 3: In theory, if you didn't know any biology, this would
Speaker 3: be a great idea. Unfortunately, no one's arterial pressure increases
Speaker 3: that high, even if you're on the top of Matchupeachu.
Speaker 3: I guess they didn't google that. Oh no, I mean yeah.
Speaker 3: So the problem is this made it to the Popular Science,
Speaker 3: and the actual paper got a lot of traction and
Speaker 3: without people you know, think this could actually be dangerous
Speaker 3: to football players and youth athletes because it's based on
Speaker 3: a faulty premise. Although I will have a sort of
Speaker 3: other thing to say about this is that it may
Speaker 3: work for other reasons, including maybe a sort of placebo
Speaker 3: effect that you feel protected because you have this on
Speaker 3: that but we don't know. They're like testing it, but
Speaker 3: there's a I don't know. This really frustrated me because
Speaker 3: it could be dangerous and people didn't bother to look
Speaker 3: at the real science behind it. This is my own
Speaker 3: personal vendetta. Yeah, every time I see a paper when
Speaker 3: they say big horn cheap don't get brain trauma, I'm like,
Speaker 3: no shake for computer. But to their credit, I haven't
Speaker 3: published yet.
Speaker 1: So and how are they when when people say that
Speaker 1: bighorn sheep don't get brain trauma, obviously you know from
Speaker 1: looking at it firsthand that that's false. But also from
Speaker 1: what I understand, concussions have to be clinically diagnosed. So
Speaker 1: unless you're a bighorn sheep's doctor asking about symptoms, you
Speaker 1: can't diagnose a big horn sheep with ausion because you
Speaker 1: can't have them fill out a form right ali, that.
Speaker 3: Is exactly correct. And you know sometimes in humans they
Speaker 3: get up and walk away and you think they're perfectly fine.
Speaker 3: So how would you even tell in a sheep where
Speaker 3: yeah they look fine, But like, I don't know, what
Speaker 3: does a fine sheep look like?
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: You can't ask them if they're experiencing any disneys or
Speaker 1: tingling in the limbs necessarily, you know. Yeah, what do
Speaker 1: you think is the hardest part or the most frustrating
Speaker 1: part about the work?
Speaker 2: I mean we've just talked.
Speaker 1: About, you know, flimflam and making a helmet and safety
Speaker 1: gear that are not sound, but anything else that's just
Speaker 1: gets your goat.
Speaker 3: I get really impatient when it comes to writing grants
Speaker 3: because you don't have a success rate, but it takes
Speaker 3: a really lot of time, and people kind of think
Speaker 3: that your ideas are dumb because like, for my stuff,
Speaker 3: it's not immediately saving the world, so obviously no money
Speaker 3: is coming my way, and the job market kind of
Speaker 3: sucks when you're an academic. I know you've covered this
Speaker 3: with a lot of other guests before.
Speaker 1: Ah, yes, the broken system of academia. Do you suffer
Speaker 1: and help change it or do you take care of
Speaker 1: your mental and physical wellbeing.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the bright side.
Speaker 1: What about the stuff that gets you really excited about
Speaker 1: your work.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm obsessed with evolution. I think it's so crazy
Speaker 3: like that it works, like basically that the world is
Speaker 3: just random chaos and eventually if you throw enough pasta
Speaker 3: to the wall, it like sticks and that makes an animal.
Speaker 2: Like that's so cool.
Speaker 3: And every day even actually from your podcast, every time
Speaker 3: I listen to a different expert, I found out some
Speaker 3: weird thing that I think I wasn't going to care
Speaker 3: about about, like spider claws or something, and then the
Speaker 3: whole new world of awesome things that are going on.
Speaker 3: So I'm just excited about it every day. And animals
Speaker 3: are awesome.
Speaker 1: It's just so cool to think that we're just a
Speaker 1: collection of successful mutations. You know. Yes, yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: like something mutated. It happened to work for the time
Speaker 1: and the place we're at and go. You know, I
Speaker 1: always think about that when you think about luck or success,
Speaker 1: it's just a lot of mutations on mutations on mutations.
Speaker 3: And then when you look at something like comparative evolution,
Speaker 3: where you have like a Tasmanian tiger compared to a dingo,
Speaker 3: and they look exactly the same. They have almost the
Speaker 3: same tooth pattern, the same size, the same limbs, and
Speaker 3: they're not related at all. Ones a mammal like a
Speaker 3: placental mammal, and ones a marsupial, And meanwhile, they look
Speaker 3: almost exactly the same. I proof that evolution is pretty cool.
Speaker 3: I don't know it's like formed by the different habitats,
Speaker 3: but I don't know. It's just fascinating.
Speaker 1: Oh and one more question. When someone sends you a
Speaker 1: sheep head, what kind of box does that come in?
Speaker 3: I'm so glad you asked. Usually it's in a cooler
Speaker 3: filled with ice and really tightly duct taped. It actually
Speaker 3: worked really well. I got it FedEx over night last time,
Speaker 3: and it was still fresh when I got it. Because
Speaker 3: brains have an expiration date, you want them fresh. If
Speaker 3: you freeze them, the crystals can kind of damage your
Speaker 3: sample depending on the technique you're doing, so under thirty six.
Speaker 2: Hours is best. What so I got.
Speaker 3: It shipped overnight and it worked, so that's not what
Speaker 3: I do know.
Speaker 2: It was a whole head.
Speaker 1: By the way, did the Fish and Wildlife Department just say,
Speaker 1: like we happen to have like a freshly dead one,
Speaker 1: like right here.
Speaker 3: I just gave them all my number and I said,
Speaker 3: when a sheep dies, call me, And then they did.
Speaker 3: And I was at the met at the time. I
Speaker 3: think it. I was like, okay, so send.
Speaker 2: Me the sheep.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: So this is exciting.
Speaker 1: I love the idea that the FedEx person has it
Speaker 1: on a dolly, just getting it up to your floor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's I mean, we have a pretty wild zoo
Speaker 3: of brains that come in and out. We work a
Speaker 3: lot with whales as well, as you know. Joy is
Speaker 3: a whale specialist, and the problem with that is the
Speaker 3: thirty six hour timeframe because once they die and they beach,
Speaker 3: it's usually quite soupy in there. So we're looking at
Speaker 3: explosions for brain trauma and whales too, but it's really
Speaker 3: hard to get good samples for those guys.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, never use whale and explosion in the
Speaker 1: same sentence again. So ask big horn experts big horny
Speaker 1: questions about why they destroy their brains for sex. The
Speaker 1: bighorns do that, not the experts, but honestly, the experts
Speaker 1: love talking about it. So learn more about doctor Ackerman's
Speaker 1: at Nicole Ackermans dot com, which is linked to the
Speaker 1: show notes learn more about systems biology guests doctor Emily
Speaker 1: Ackerman not related, whose episode is also linked to the
Speaker 1: show notes. Nicole's Twitter handle is Ackerman's Nicole, where she
Speaker 1: goes by doctor Sheep, which should definitely be doctor headbutt whatever.
Speaker 1: She also has a monthly podcast interviewing older folks about
Speaker 1: their unexpected life stories, and it's called Granny Stories. You
Speaker 1: can find out more about the Society for Women's Health
Speaker 1: Research at SWHR dot org. We are on Twitter and
Speaker 1: Instagram at Ologies. I'm at Ali Ward with one L
Speaker 1: on both. Thank you Aaron Talbert, who admin's Theologies podcast
Speaker 1: Facebook group with help from Bondi Dutch and Shannon Fealtis
Speaker 1: of the R That Podcast. Thanks Noel Dilworth and Susan
Speaker 1: Hale for all the behind the scenes help from social
Speaker 1: media wrangling to scheduling and merch Thank you you to
Speaker 1: Emily White of the Wordery for making our professional transcripts,
Speaker 1: Caleb Patten for bleeping them. Thanks to Kelly ar Dwyer
Speaker 1: for making my website she can make yours too, And
Speaker 1: to Steve Marray Morris and of course Sek cordoguez Thomas
Speaker 1: for helping edit Smology's episodes, which are short classrooms save
Speaker 1: versions of the classics. We just posted number nine, which
Speaker 1: was Litology with doctor Jane McGonagall. So that is up
Speaker 1: in your feed in case you have kiddos or you
Speaker 1: don't like asides. There's fear asides in it anyway. Of course,
Speaker 1: Thank you to lead editor and Fresh mullet har and
Speaker 1: Jared Sleeper of my Jet Media for sticking it all
Speaker 1: together every week, sometimes many times a week, often on
Speaker 1: sit Deadline. Happy birthdays to doctor Sarah mcattack McNaulty. You
Speaker 1: can listen to her episodes on squids. You can tell
Speaker 1: her you love her. On the sixteenth, Happy birthday mccurn's
Speaker 1: and sofalof as well. Nick Thorburn wrote and perform the
Speaker 1: theme music and if you stick around until the end
Speaker 1: of the episode, I tell you a secret, and this
Speaker 1: week it's that when it comes to doing skincare routines,
Speaker 1: I'm horrible at it. I hate it, I resent it,
Speaker 1: I don't like it. Oftentimes I don't remember what order
Speaker 1: to put things in. You got to use a toner
Speaker 1: and a serum and a moisturizer. I don't know what
Speaker 1: goes on when what about retinal I guess you don't
Speaker 1: use the sunscreen and night anyway, I don't know, and
Speaker 1: I was just thinking it would be dope to have
Speaker 1: a sticker kind of like the ones that go on
Speaker 1: bananas and with like a sun and a moon on it,
Speaker 1: and you can write a number, so at a glance
Speaker 1: you could just remember what things go and what orders
Speaker 1: at what time of day. Anyway, it's only a secret
Speaker 1: at the end because I will either never do this
Speaker 1: and I just wanted to tell someone about it, or
Speaker 1: I will do this immediately and maybe I'll put it
Speaker 1: in the merch store if other people are like I
Speaker 1: could use those I don't know. Also, thanks for bearing
Speaker 1: with the lateness last few weeks as I readjust to
Speaker 1: life when things are expected of my bruisy brain. Totally
Speaker 1: feeling better. I'm just kind of slow moving. So maybe
Speaker 1: algae will begin to coat my hair like a fine
Speaker 1: mossy halo.
Speaker 2: We can only help. Okay, bye bye, saw my head,
Speaker 2: but hum