Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lenn and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Speaker 3: Part three in our series on urine based communication in
Speaker 3: the animal Kingdom. Humans, of course, have the gift of language,
Speaker 3: which is a wonderful multimodal information sharing tool of infinite versatility,
Speaker 3: and the fact that we possess the capacity for complex
Speaker 3: language is maybe the most unique and amazing thing about
Speaker 3: us as a species. But one mode of communication that
Speaker 3: we don't really use but which is quite popular throughout
Speaker 3: the animal kingdom is communication through urine. So in the
Speaker 3: last couple of episodes we discussed a whole bunch of examples.
Speaker 3: We started off in part one talking about male Amazon
Speaker 3: river dolphins, which have been observed doing this amazing thing
Speaker 3: where they pee on each other's faces using aerial streams
Speaker 3: that project over the top of the water. Still an
Speaker 3: open question as to why they do this, but the
Speaker 3: leading explanation seems to be that it's some kind of
Speaker 3: information sharing about fitness and competitive ability. We also talked
Speaker 3: about why animals with urinary bladders usually have voluntary control
Speaker 3: over urination as opposed to it just kind of leaking
Speaker 3: out whenever, wherever, And we also got into a bit
Speaker 3: about urination as a socially negotiated activity in human culture.
Speaker 3: In the last episode, we talked about the vast, mysterious
Speaker 3: world of scent marking in dogs, including all the different
Speaker 3: kinds of information that we know dogs do share with
Speaker 3: each other through urine, but also about how much there
Speaker 3: is to this olfactory literary scene that we still don't understand.
Speaker 3: One interesting question that came up in the context of
Speaker 3: dogs was whether dogs can actually attempt to lie or
Speaker 3: at least exaggerate with their urine Marx one study finding
Speaker 3: evidence that smaller dogs may try to deceive other dogs
Speaker 3: about their size by way of increasingly obtuse leg angles
Speaker 3: when marking an elevated object. Then we also talked about
Speaker 3: the fascinating example of lobster urine. The simplified version is
Speaker 3: that lobsters pee out of their faces into other lobsters faces,
Speaker 3: and these urine exchanges help lobsters navigate highly variable scenarios,
Speaker 3: including courtship and mating, as well as competition and intimidation.
Speaker 3: And we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, returning first, I believe, to the waters and
Speaker 2: discussing something we teased out a little bit in our
Speaker 2: discussion of lobster.
Speaker 3: That's right, so yes. In the previous episode we talked
Speaker 3: about urine based communication in crustaceans. I wanted to return
Speaker 3: to the aquatic domain to mention p mail in fish.
Speaker 3: So here I wanted to get into a couple of
Speaker 3: things from a paper called Aggressive Communication in Aquatic Environments.
Speaker 3: This was published in the journal Functional Ecology in twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: The author is Johim Frohman, and Frohman is a behavioral
Speaker 3: ecologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. I got interested
Speaker 3: in this guy's work because I saw him quoted in
Speaker 3: an article in Scientific American, which was covering the Amazon
Speaker 3: River dolphins, talking about how other aquatic species can use
Speaker 3: urine for communication. One example cited in that article had
Speaker 3: to do with mating among sticklebackfish. Apparently, female sticklebackfish can
Speaker 3: get information about male stickleback fish from their urine, but
Speaker 3: in this case not just the kind of health, dominance
Speaker 3: and fitness information we've been mostly talking about so far. Instead,
Speaker 3: the stickleback female is looking for information about the male's
Speaker 3: immune system to see if the male's immune system and
Speaker 3: tissue is compatible with her own. So anyway, I looked
Speaker 3: up this paper in functional ecology. It is focused primarily
Speaker 3: on aggressive communication, a communication used to negotiate competition and
Speaker 3: fighting among rivals that live in the water. Now, obviously,
Speaker 3: using urine for information sharing works a little bit differently
Speaker 3: in aquatic environments than it does on land. Now, why
Speaker 3: would that be? Well, for one thing in the water
Speaker 3: froman points out that you cannot place long lasting territorial
Speaker 3: scent marks. So a dog will tag its physical environment
Speaker 3: with territorial marks it peas on the world, and in
Speaker 3: doing so, it fills the world with information about itself.
Speaker 3: And also it smells the marks left by others in
Speaker 3: the same places. So for the dog, you can consider
Speaker 3: space itself kind of marked up with socially relevant metadata.
Speaker 3: It is a urine based social augmented reality.
Speaker 2: That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, with all
Speaker 2: of our augmented reality VR innovations that we're working on
Speaker 2: Google Class and all of that, we're essentially trying to
Speaker 2: create a world of dog pe and the reading of
Speaker 2: dog pe for the human experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would be like if we could walk through
Speaker 3: space and just find objects throughout the physical environment tagged
Speaker 3: with the profiles of people who have touched them more
Speaker 3: peen on them, I guess.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: Lots of other land based mammals that we've talked about
Speaker 3: do this. You know, last time we talked about the
Speaker 3: dwarf mongooses who leave the antogenital scent marks by doing handstands.
Speaker 3: But you can't really do this kind of thing in
Speaker 3: the water because you're in the water. Froman mentions a
Speaker 3: couple of reasons for this. First of all, chemical cues
Speaker 3: tend to be soluble in water, so the water will
Speaker 3: actually just wash them away, diffuse them, and get rid
Speaker 3: of any local marks that you leave pretty quickly. Beyond that,
Speaker 3: there is a different microbial environment in the water. Fromen writes,
Speaker 3: quote the ubiquitous bacteria in aquatic environments might rapidly degrade
Speaker 3: any scent mark. So for aquatic species, it's just a
Speaker 3: lot harder to associate a chemical mark with a physical
Speaker 3: location across time. Chemical cues in the water tend to
Speaker 3: be more temporary, used for what Fromann calls short term interactions,
Speaker 3: and they will also more often be associated spatially with
Speaker 3: your own physical body from which they emerge, rather than
Speaker 3: a fixed, separate place in the environment. So I get
Speaker 3: the feeling that in the water there's going to be
Speaker 3: less of what you were talking about rob with this
Speaker 3: sort of the werewolf character that can go into a
Speaker 3: room and see the past in the room. Because of
Speaker 3: all these scents associated with physical locations. In the water,
Speaker 3: everything just kind of gets washed around. So I wonder
Speaker 3: if in the water there may be a more Oh,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Maybe you can get little tiny whiffs
Speaker 3: of things that may have once been nearby, but they're
Speaker 3: going to be a lot less associated with physical places.
Speaker 2: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: So anyway, what are these short term interactions. They include
Speaker 3: things like mate choice what Froeman calls social decisions, detecting
Speaker 3: predatory threats, and sharing information about those threats with other conspecifics.
Speaker 3: The best research on chemical communication underwater has been focused
Speaker 3: on crustaceans, hence all the lobster research we talked about
Speaker 3: last time. There's a bunch of similar work on crayfish
Speaker 3: as well, and Frohman discusses a lot of the same
Speaker 3: stuff we got into. For example, the finding that the
Speaker 3: presence of aggressor urine during competition between lobsters and crayfish
Speaker 3: can actually reduce fighting. Essentially, the information in the urine
Speaker 3: better allows at least one of these crustaceans to figure
Speaker 3: out that the fight is not in their interest. So,
Speaker 3: in a way, you could think of actual physical fighting
Speaker 3: in nature often being the result of confusion or ambiguity.
Speaker 3: You know, it happens when the competitors don't have enough
Speaker 3: information to figure out in advance who would probably win.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is something that that you can you can
Speaker 2: certainly relate to human gambling scenarios. In some cases, you
Speaker 2: could be talking about actual gambling for money or various
Speaker 2: games and little card games and apps in which there
Speaker 2: is like the gambling of some sort of unit but
Speaker 2: not actual that doesn't have an actual monetary value or
Speaker 2: at least an avert monetary value. There is often often
Speaker 2: comes down to a question of should I fold or not,
Speaker 2: or should I you know, up the ante, should I
Speaker 2: keep playing and trying to evaluate do I have a
Speaker 2: shot at winning? And you know, that's very much the
Speaker 2: same math that's going on for these various organisms using
Speaker 2: the data that is available to them, which might be
Speaker 2: available to them in the form of urine.
Speaker 3: That's a good analogy. Yeah, so the sharing of the
Speaker 3: urine could essentially be like the poker players just showing
Speaker 3: each other their cards. You're like not keeping them hidden anymore,
Speaker 3: so one player immediately knows I'm just going to fold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Or there's always going to be a certain amount
Speaker 2: of data on the table, right yea, and that that
Speaker 2: is often going to be the main data you're going
Speaker 2: to go on in a card game. Now there's the
Speaker 2: added wrinkle, of course in a card game, and that
Speaker 2: your opponent may want you to venture into combat that
Speaker 2: you couldn't win in order to increase the spoils of
Speaker 2: the game. Generally, it's not quite what you're looking at
Speaker 2: when you're dealing with mate competition in the wild.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that'd be interesting to see if there are
Speaker 3: examples of that in nature, where like the opponent would
Speaker 3: want to keep, you know, getting you to up the
Speaker 3: ante and bluff you along. But yeah, usually I think
Speaker 3: even the stronger party would prefer to avoid a fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, so froman here mentions a variable called resource holding
Speaker 3: potential RH. You might see this referred to in some
Speaker 3: papers like this. Basically it's a variable that means an
Speaker 3: individual animal's ability to win a fight. So urine helps
Speaker 3: communicate your RHP, making the actual fight unnecessary. So after
Speaker 3: talking about urine and RHP in crustaceans, Fromann goes on
Speaker 3: to talk about fish, saying similar uses of chemical signals
Speaker 3: have been observed in several African cichlid species and in
Speaker 3: some tilapia to establish RHP dominance without needing a fight.
Speaker 3: But here we get to something interesting that came up
Speaker 3: in the last episode. In part two, we talked about
Speaker 3: some good reasons for thinking that dogs use urine based
Speaker 3: signals to encode not only the kind of fixed feeling
Speaker 3: information about individual identity, health and fitness, sex, and mating status,
Speaker 3: but much more flat leading momentary things like psychological information.
Speaker 3: Remember the example we talked about last time was that
Speaker 3: domestic dogs have been found to detect biomarkers of stress
Speaker 3: in human urine, and they seem to use that information
Speaker 3: they use it in cognition and learning. Still to be
Speaker 3: determined to what extent, if any, dogs use that information
Speaker 3: from scent markings urine markings about each other, but it
Speaker 3: seems quite plausible that they do that they're saying, oh,
Speaker 3: not just this is Jeff the dog down the street,
Speaker 3: and not just health status, does it have parasites and
Speaker 3: all that, but also like Jeff is stressed out or
Speaker 3: Jeff is happy, and that might affect how the dog
Speaker 3: that smells the pee behaves. We don't know for sure,
Speaker 3: but it seems plausible that it does so to some extent.
Speaker 3: This kind of I would say, makes sense to us
Speaker 3: with dogs. It's fascinating, but it's not crazy, because we
Speaker 3: already think of dogs as emotional animals with emotional inner lives.
Speaker 3: Their feelings and motivation states are familiar and meaningful to us.
Speaker 3: But it seems there are some likely equivalents to this
Speaker 3: pea based emotion or at least motivation state sharing, even
Speaker 3: among the colder and less snugly inhabitants of the water.
Speaker 3: I think you could say that lobsters, as we talked
Speaker 3: about last time, and even fish, to some extent, pee
Speaker 3: their feelings. Frohman mentions that quote in juvenile nile telapia
Speaker 3: or Oreochromis nylocticus, the exchange of chemical cues informs about
Speaker 3: the sender's motivation and about individual identity, and then also
Speaker 3: speaking about neolam prologus pulture froman rites quote. In this species,
Speaker 3: members of both sexes change their urination patterns during agonistic
Speaker 3: encounters agonistic meaning aggressive encounters. Competition quote blocking olfactory contact
Speaker 3: between contestants led to an increase in fight intensity and
Speaker 3: to a higher rate of overt aggressive attacks, in line
Speaker 3: with what we've talked about before, but going on quote,
Speaker 3: As larger individuals excreted, larger amounts of urine, chemical cues
Speaker 3: might be a reliable proxy of the opponent's body size,
Speaker 3: which might be beneficial, especially under turbid conditions. Furthermore, an
Speaker 3: aggression mediated increase in urination frequency was accompanied by an
Speaker 3: increased amount of conjugated eleven ketotestosterone in the water. Thus,
Speaker 3: urine might not only transfer information about the contestants resource
Speaker 3: holding potential, but also about the opponent's motivational state. So again,
Speaker 3: something about what this the urine might communicate, something about
Speaker 3: what is going on essentially in the brain, in the
Speaker 3: nervous system of the other fish, what they want, what
Speaker 3: they intend to do, which I guess it's debatable whether
Speaker 3: you would call that motivational state an emotion, but I
Speaker 3: think the case could be made emotions and motivational states
Speaker 3: have significant overlap, at least in humans and in other animals.
Speaker 2: We can think of yeah, yeah, I mean from the
Speaker 2: human standpoint, if there is a standoff between two human beings,
Speaker 2: the broadcasting of emotional state, be it an honest broadcast
Speaker 2: or an attempted deception, is going to be an important
Speaker 2: part of that standoff. You know, how mean are they looking,
Speaker 2: how cool are they looking, and so forth.
Speaker 3: And of course this squares with what you were talking
Speaker 3: about last time, rob with the lobster urine in competition
Speaker 3: between aggressive lobsters. The urine shares state information about, for example,
Speaker 3: prior victory or defeat in these agonistic encounters. Sounds a
Speaker 3: lot like again people, people might quibble with the use
Speaker 3: of the word emotion, but that feels something like emotion
Speaker 3: to me, like feeling victorious or feeling defeated.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I believe one of the papers was I
Speaker 2: was talking about there being a lot of serotonin in
Speaker 2: the urine of a victorious lobster. You know, it's is
Speaker 2: that an emotional stay Maybe not, but it's saying something
Speaker 2: about like where that that creature's physiology is following a
Speaker 2: specific victory.
Speaker 3: So I don't know. When we started doing this series
Speaker 3: about urine based communication, I don't think I realized we
Speaker 3: would come up with so many examples where it looked
Speaker 3: like the urine was not only sharing just the more
Speaker 3: relatively fig I mean, I guess nothing biological is really fixed,
Speaker 3: but the more stable sort of biological health information, not
Speaker 3: just that, but sharing something like psychological information, sharing something
Speaker 3: the urine says something about what's going on in your
Speaker 3: nervous system and in your brain, which we may call
Speaker 3: emotions or we may call intentions or motivations. That's being
Speaker 3: communicated through urine as well. And to me, that makes
Speaker 3: it a lot more like what we think of with language.
Speaker 3: I mean, we've made these distinctions before about the differences
Speaker 3: between what you can say with urine versus what you
Speaker 3: can say with language. Obviously, language is going to be
Speaker 3: much much more versatile because you can intentionally, voluntarily craft
Speaker 3: an infinite number of different kinds of messages, truthful or deceptive,
Speaker 3: and urine may not have that level of versatility, but
Speaker 3: it can communicate not just these sort of stable facts
Speaker 3: about the body, but can communicate this fleeting information about
Speaker 3: the mind. And if you want to get touchy feely
Speaker 3: the soul. I guess that just causes me to think
Speaker 3: about P based communication as something with more potential for
Speaker 3: kind of meaning and complexity. You know that it carries
Speaker 3: potentially emotional information that it lends itself more to the
Speaker 3: idea that there could be P based literature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think yeah. By and large, all this
Speaker 2: information we're looking at does drive home the fact that
Speaker 2: humans just don't don't speak urine. For the most part,
Speaker 2: we have a very blunt understanding of what urine is
Speaker 2: and what it can convey, and it's just a much
Speaker 2: richer experience for other animals, to the point that it's
Speaker 2: not really urine for them anymore, not in the human sense,
Speaker 2: like our language for urine is kind of inadequate to
Speaker 2: truly describe what it is for various other species. Now,
Speaker 2: I want to bring things back to the mammal world here,
Speaker 2: to the surface world, in particular, to talk about the
Speaker 2: fleming response. This may have been on some of your
Speaker 2: mind as we were talking about this topic in earlier episodes,
Speaker 2: because in evaluating the urine communication of another it may
Speaker 2: prove necessary to assume the fleming response, as it was
Speaker 2: dubbed by German zoologist Carl Max Schneider in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 2: but the expression itself had been known to naturalists since
Speaker 2: at least the eighteenth century. The term flemen apparently comes
Speaker 2: from upper saxon German, where it means to curl the
Speaker 2: upper lip and or to look spiteful. It's not just
Speaker 2: for smelling urine, but that's certainly one of the odorous
Speaker 2: bouquets that it picks up on.
Speaker 3: So the word am I understanding in the human context
Speaker 3: originally refers to an expression like a sneer, the curled lip.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a sneer that you know, honestly, I don't know
Speaker 2: that you see. I don't know. I feel like you
Speaker 2: don't see people make this face a lot, and we'll
Speaker 2: come back to one of the reasons why. But in general,
Speaker 2: like how often do you see someone do like a
Speaker 2: spiteful sneer in which they expose their upper teeth? Like
Speaker 2: the main example I was finding. I found a couple
Speaker 2: of articles that had a picture of Harrison Ford doing
Speaker 2: the face, you know, maybe accidentally in the midst of
Speaker 2: talking or something. But for the most part, the main
Speaker 2: thing I was reminded of is the snarl that Bella
Speaker 2: Lagosi gives in some of the in some one particular scene,
Speaker 2: but also some production stills for the nineteen thirties Dracula.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, you attached a picture in the outline, and
Speaker 3: I can see that he he almost looks not quite
Speaker 3: human here. It looks a bit like a like a
Speaker 3: big cat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's key because we do see
Speaker 2: this in cats. We see it in big cats, and
Speaker 2: we see it in house cats, and in the world
Speaker 2: of house cats it is sometimes informally referred to as
Speaker 2: the stinky kitty face.
Speaker 3: I didn't know about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of these things where you know, as
Speaker 2: a cat owner, it's gonna obviously things are going to
Speaker 2: vary depending on the exact nature and personality of your cat,
Speaker 2: but it's something you'll pick up on them doing from
Speaker 2: time to time. They might be checking out something that
Speaker 2: you would associate with a smell, like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: a spot on the couch or a pair of shoes,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. It might also just be a
Speaker 2: little less clear what they are responding to, but generally
Speaker 2: the idea is that they are assuming this kind of
Speaker 2: a sneer that also looks a little bit goofy. And
Speaker 2: what they are doing is they are heightening their exposure
Speaker 2: to the odor so is to better analyze it. Interesting, So,
Speaker 2: in general, across various animals, you're going to see this
Speaker 2: generally entailing a curling back of the upper lip, exposure
Speaker 2: of the top teeth, and breathing. And then they're going
Speaker 2: to breathe in slowly through the mouth alone. And this
Speaker 2: is all about allowing better access of smells and pheromones
Speaker 2: to the specialized vomer nasal organ, the vino or the
Speaker 2: Jacobsen's or this is a chemoreception organ in the roof
Speaker 2: of the mouth. This occurs in ungulates as well horses
Speaker 2: and girafts, which both smell and in the latter example
Speaker 2: of the diraffe, they also taste the urine of mares
Speaker 2: that are in estrus.
Speaker 3: Huh okay, well wait a minute. That makes me wonder
Speaker 3: if all these other mammals have a vomor nasal organ.
Speaker 3: Do we have one? Can we can we smell with
Speaker 3: the roof of our mouth like this?
Speaker 2: Humans do not, so far as anyone can apparently tell,
Speaker 2: have one of these, at least not a functional one
Speaker 2: as adults. According to twenty fourteen's Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences,
Speaker 2: second edition by Moon. At all vomor nasal organs are
Speaker 2: prominent in the fetus and show up vestigially in adults.
Speaker 2: Though there has apparently been a lot of back and
Speaker 2: forth debate over this, it seems like the majority of view, though,
Speaker 2: is that while some primates have functional vomit nasal organs,
Speaker 2: main like New World monkeys, chimps, and humans do not.
Speaker 2: Interesting I'd also point out something that I saw reference
Speaker 2: in an article is that the obviousness of the fleming
Speaker 2: response to humans in another organism, like how pronounced the
Speaker 2: fleming response is, doesn't necessarily correlate to how strong their
Speaker 2: ability to sense things happens to be, which I guess
Speaker 2: is kind of a no brainer when you're driving home
Speaker 2: like that. But you know, some fleming responses are really wild,
Speaker 2: like included a photo here of a horse's fleming response
Speaker 2: where they just look like mad demons, whereas certainly a
Speaker 2: housecat's fleming response just looks a little bit funny, you know,
Speaker 2: But our interpretation of it doesn't actually necessarily give us
Speaker 2: any clues into how strong their ability to sense things
Speaker 2: happens to be. But we again. We certainly see it
Speaker 2: again in ungulates and dogs and cats and other mammals.
Speaker 2: I've even seen articles looking at the fleming response in
Speaker 2: things like sea otters and elephants. So it's it's all
Speaker 2: over the place.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. I'm going to be on the lookout for
Speaker 3: it now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you spend any time with cats, you will
Speaker 2: see the stinky kitty face from time to time. And yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just a sign that there's some sort of smell
Speaker 2: going on. Don't take it personally. It doesn't mean it's
Speaker 2: you or something in your environment. They might just but
Speaker 2: something has occurred or they've noticed something that requires just
Speaker 2: a little more in depth analysis.
Speaker 3: Well, I would like to transition to something else, but
Speaker 3: we're gonna stick with mammals at least for the moment.
Speaker 3: So I want to mention an interesting paper I came
Speaker 3: across about social urination in mammals, which may or may
Speaker 3: not turn out to be communicative in nature. This paper
Speaker 3: was by Ana Onishi, James Brooks, Sota Inoe, and Shinya Yamamoto,
Speaker 3: published in Current Biology in twenty twenty five this year,
Speaker 3: and it's called socially contagious urination in Panzees, So I
Speaker 3: hope that title's got your interests peaked. The authors here
Speaker 3: are affiliated with a few different institutions in Japan, such
Speaker 3: as Kyoto University. I was also reading an article about
Speaker 3: this paper in Scientific American that I wanted to flag.
Speaker 3: This was by Megan Bartel's from January twenty twenty five,
Speaker 3: so apparently the lead author on this paper, ana Onishi,
Speaker 3: was inspired in part by the fact that humans often
Speaker 3: seem to treat urination as a social behavior. This kind
Speaker 3: of came up in our first episode of the series.
Speaker 3: Despite the fact that we often think of urination as
Speaker 3: a solitary activity, an activity where we seek at least
Speaker 3: a visual isolation for the sake of modesty, in reality,
Speaker 3: people often do treat urination or trips to the bathroom
Speaker 3: as social occasions. So think about it like this. You
Speaker 3: are out somewhere and a restaurant or a concert look event,
Speaker 3: and somebody from the group you're with says they're going
Speaker 3: to go to the bathroom, and then somebody else says, oh,
Speaker 3: wait up, I'll go with you, and then somebody else
Speaker 3: says me too. Hey, it is actually a socially organized
Speaker 3: social trip to the bathroom. People are urinating as a group.
Speaker 2: You know, I hadn't thought about this as much until
Speaker 2: you mentioned it. But you could also factor our social
Speaker 2: technology into this equation and say, well, what even if
Speaker 2: you go to the bathroom by yourself during one of
Speaker 2: these situations, there's a very strong possibility you are going
Speaker 2: to check your phone and in doing so, you are
Speaker 2: going to engage in some alternate online socialization whilst going
Speaker 2: to the bathroom. I don't know to what extent we
Speaker 2: should factor that into all of this, but maybe you
Speaker 2: could make a case for even solitary urination is social
Speaker 2: given the right technology.
Speaker 3: Socially coordinated, synchronized trips to urinate are actually very common,
Speaker 3: and this is not just part of American culture where
Speaker 3: where I'm familiar with it. The author of this scientific
Speaker 3: American article actually mentions there is a word in Japanese.
Speaker 3: It is suri sean t s u r E s
Speaker 3: h o n, which refers to the phenomenon where people
Speaker 3: get up and go to the bathroom as a group.
Speaker 2: That would be interesting to get into. It makes me
Speaker 2: think of the various yo kai traditions that involve the
Speaker 2: potential threats, or at least that you know the very
Speaker 2: scary things that it can occur when you go to
Speaker 2: a dark bathroom at night by yourself. Yeah. I can't
Speaker 2: help but wonder to what extent these two things might
Speaker 2: be connected culturally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the bathroom stall ghosts. And there are other examples
Speaker 3: of biological activities that seem to be socially contagious. One
Speaker 3: example is yawning. I think we've all experienced this. Somebody
Speaker 3: else yawns, you see them yawn and then you yawn yourself,
Speaker 3: or maybe even inter species contagious yawning. You yawn and
Speaker 3: then your dog yawns, vice versa. A very interesting question
Speaker 3: about why seeing somebody else yawn makes you more likely
Speaker 3: to yaw. Maybe we could come back to that in
Speaker 3: the future if we haven't done a whole episode on
Speaker 3: that before. Have we actually don't remember.
Speaker 2: I don't think we have. Yawning. Yeah, that would be
Speaker 2: a good one, you know, if only to generate the
Speaker 2: responses that I can't believe they did an episode on yawning.
Speaker 2: So boring. No, it's probably pretty exciting.
Speaker 3: Also, scratching, Hey, that's exciting. What's more exciting than the scratching.
Speaker 3: Scratching is contagious as well. Socially contagious scratching. You see
Speaker 3: somebody scratch, you're more likely to scratch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, scratching could be Yeah, it could easily be its
Speaker 2: own episode as well. That one gets pretty intense anyway.
Speaker 3: So, while observing chimpanzees as a doctoral researcher at the
Speaker 3: Kyoto University Wildlife Research Center, the lead author of this
Speaker 3: paper Onishi thought she observed a similar pattern of socially
Speaker 3: contagious urination among the chimpanzees, so she staged a quantitative
Speaker 3: experiment to measure whether this was really the case. The
Speaker 3: way it worked is researchers studied a group of twenty
Speaker 3: chimpanzees living in captivity at a place called Kumamoto Sanctuary
Speaker 3: in Japan, and they filmed them and reviewed more than
Speaker 3: six hundred hours of footage to meticulously track exactly when
Speaker 3: each ape urinated, where it was at the time, and
Speaker 3: who was nearby. Then they created a computer simulation of
Speaker 3: randomized chimpanzee urination to compare the actual results to and
Speaker 3: the analysis revealed that chimpanzees were not just peeing randomly,
Speaker 3: there actually was social correlation. On average, an ape was
Speaker 3: significantly more likely to pee if another ape had just
Speaker 3: peed within the past sixty seconds, and especially if that
Speaker 3: ape was very close by within ten feet so up ip.
Speaker 3: Another interesting factor b yond time and proximity was social rank.
Speaker 3: The researchers looked into whether the identity and social rank
Speaker 3: of each urinate or mattered in how much how much
Speaker 3: influence there was from one eight peeing to another eight peeing,
Speaker 3: and the identities did matter. So they initially looked to
Speaker 3: see whether the ape equivalent of social friendship was an influence,
Speaker 3: and it seems the answer there was no, but social
Speaker 3: rank was an influence. As quoted in Scientific American, Onehi
Speaker 3: said quote, I initially expected that if social influences existed,
Speaker 3: they might resemble those seen in yawning, such as stronger
Speaker 3: contagion between socially close pairs. That in itself is an
Speaker 3: interesting thing about yawning, that, like social social closeness, makes
Speaker 3: the yawn more contagious. But that is not what they found,
Speaker 3: continuing the quote from Onehi. Instead, we observed a c
Speaker 3: your influence of social rank, with lower ranking individuals being
Speaker 3: more likely to follow the urination of others. So if
Speaker 3: you are a lower ranking chimpanzee in the group, it
Speaker 3: might be more like the boss PE's ip or maybe
Speaker 3: you know the cooler person ps ip. Now some caveats here.
Speaker 3: Obviously this was done in captive chimpanzees, and when a
Speaker 3: behavior is observed in captive animals, it's always worth asking
Speaker 3: whether the same behavior is seen in the wild. Some
Speaker 3: strange traits emerge in zoos or labs or sanctuaries that
Speaker 3: are not seen in wild conspecifics. The researchers here believe
Speaker 3: for a number of reasons that this probably is also
Speaker 3: true in the wild, but that's worth investigating on its
Speaker 3: own and follow up research. But finally we come to
Speaker 3: the question of would this contagious urination count as communication?
Speaker 3: If one ape is getting a signal from another ape
Speaker 3: to do something, I think that is communication. Though it's
Speaker 3: funny because here it's not, as far as we know,
Speaker 3: anything like the smell of my urine will now give
Speaker 3: you updated information about my health that you can use
Speaker 3: in determining how to act. Instead, it's more like the
Speaker 3: fact that I am peeing informs you that it is
Speaker 3: also time for you to pee. Now, what is the
Speaker 3: value of that? Why would it be biologically useful for
Speaker 3: one ape to signal to another that it's time to pee.
Speaker 3: It's possible that it could have some role in maintaining
Speaker 3: general social cohesion in a way that's hard for us
Speaker 3: to understand. So like, when you think about it, a
Speaker 3: lot of synchronized group bonding behaviors among humans would be
Speaker 3: really hard to explain the exact biological utility of except
Speaker 3: to say that we just know because we are humans
Speaker 3: and we know how we feel when we do them.
Speaker 3: We can say that doing these things together at the
Speaker 3: same time makes us feel more bonded and helps motivate
Speaker 3: us to cooperate with each other in other domains. So
Speaker 3: there is clearly some synchronized activities just contribute to social
Speaker 3: cohesion and bonding. Not always easy to say why, but
Speaker 3: they do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean you know this way, you're not
Speaker 2: splitting the party every time every time this random individual
Speaker 2: wants to pay or needs to pay.
Speaker 3: Beyond establishing and maintaining social cohesion, there are a few
Speaker 3: other ideas the authors mentioned. One idea is that coordinated
Speaker 3: urination may play, to quote the paper quote, potential roles
Speaker 3: in preparation for collective departure I evoiding before long distance travel.
Speaker 3: So you know, parents may be familiar with this, Like,
Speaker 3: you know, we're about to go on a car trip,
Speaker 3: you need to go to the bathroom before we leave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is a this is a big one.
Speaker 2: This is this is a frequent point of discussion in
Speaker 2: my household and.
Speaker 3: Even apart from long distance travel. One researcher quoted in
Speaker 3: the Scientific American article just pointed out the idea of
Speaker 3: a daily routine among chimpanzees. So at different times throughout
Speaker 3: the day, chimpanzees will often get up and relocate to
Speaker 3: a different place. These relocations as a group are generally
Speaker 3: controlled by higher ranking chimpanzees in the group, the group leaders.
Speaker 3: So it could be that the group leader pees, signaling
Speaker 3: I am about to initiate a relocation, it is time
Speaker 3: for the bathroom break before we move, And then the
Speaker 3: others notice that the leader is peeing and they follow
Speaker 3: suit because they know they're about to relocate. Another possible
Speaker 3: explanation that mentioned the authors mentioned could be quote territorial
Speaker 3: scent marking i e. Coordination of chemosensory signals. So what's
Speaker 3: better than you individually doing a territorial scent mark with
Speaker 3: your pee, getting all your buds to mark at the
Speaker 3: same time. One can imagine that this does a number
Speaker 3: of things. It increases detectability. Allah where we were talking
Speaker 3: about elevated scent marking and dogs, it's important to make
Speaker 3: your scent markings in the environment more detectable. But also
Speaker 3: you can think about the amount of information presented with
Speaker 3: a whole group peeing together instead of just one, you know,
Speaker 3: peeing individually, and maybe also more individuals peeing would communicate
Speaker 3: more of a threat level within the collective mark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, depending on sensitivity to these markers, you might think, okay, well,
Speaker 2: this is either a whole bunch of chimps and not
Speaker 2: just one individual, or if it is one individual, it's
Speaker 2: one huge chimps. There's no messing with this guy. This
Speaker 2: is not potential prey or some chimp that I can
Speaker 2: possibly best and about just best to keep my distance.
Speaker 3: So anyway, chimpanzee p based communication. They pee to communicate
Speaker 3: about peeing for the purpose of peeing. That's fascinating and
Speaker 3: maybe for other purposes as well. But yeah, I thought
Speaker 3: that was good man.
Speaker 2: All Right, as we round out this episode, I want
Speaker 2: to come back to a topic that I've teased out
Speaker 2: a couple of times in the previous episodes. And that
Speaker 2: is the idea that even if humans cannot speak urine
Speaker 2: as well as other creatures, and certainly can't read urine
Speaker 2: as well as other creatures, we do have the advantage
Speaker 2: of having technology. And this is where we get into
Speaker 2: the field of your analysis. Your analysis, via lab work,
Speaker 2: automated systems, and now even artificial intelligence, can reveal quite
Speaker 2: a lot about a person. Your analysis is used to
Speaker 2: detect and manage a wide range of disorders, to check
Speaker 2: overall health, to look for particular conditions, and or to
Speaker 2: manage known conditions. Some very general prognosis can be made
Speaker 2: visually with a human urine sample if you know what
Speaker 2: you're doing. But much in your analysis is revealed via
Speaker 2: lab work and via machines and technology. Yeah, uh, that's
Speaker 2: not going to become as a shocker to many of you.
Speaker 2: We've all had to give urine samples that the doctor before, uh,
Speaker 2: and they've given us the lab read out and or
Speaker 2: we've you know, we've paid for that that uh, that
Speaker 2: lab v on top of our visit. It's worth pointing out,
Speaker 2: by the way, technically urine does contain DNA, but DNA
Speaker 2: deteriorates quickly in human urine and is not the best
Speaker 2: source of DNA for say, forensic analysis and so forth.
Speaker 3: I don't know this is the reason, but I would
Speaker 3: imagine there are other chemicals in the urine that probably
Speaker 3: attack the DNA and break it down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my understanding. Yeah, so you know, things like
Speaker 2: certainly blood saliva, these are far better sources for DNA. So,
Speaker 2: like if you were dealing with like a hardcore like
Speaker 2: TV forensics example, I guess there might be a scenario,
Speaker 2: and there may be scenarios where some sort of a
Speaker 2: usable DNA information is obtainable via urine sample, but for
Speaker 2: the most part, like it's considered like not a great
Speaker 2: source of DNA. Now, in the last episode, we did
Speaker 2: mention in passing the idea of using someone else's urine
Speaker 2: as a way to dupe a drug test, a urinary
Speaker 2: drug test. This is indeed a well known aspect of
Speaker 2: human urine evaluation. Everyone's familiar with this an EVE. If
Speaker 2: you haven't been had your urine tested for work or
Speaker 2: some sort of legal process in the past, you've probably
Speaker 2: seen it on TV. I believe there's a famous episode
Speaker 2: of the Office that I only vaguely remember, but I
Speaker 2: know I've seen it that involves like drug testing of
Speaker 2: the Office, because what Dwight found half a joint in
Speaker 2: the parking lot.
Speaker 3: Oh do they have to pee for that? I don't remember.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was trying to refresh on this. I think
Speaker 2: like Michael Scott, the boss on The Office, ends up
Speaker 2: getting paranoid because he once quote got high accidentally at
Speaker 2: an Alicia Keys concert, and so he's like trying to
Speaker 2: pressure Dwide into giving him some clean urine that he used.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but though it has played for jokes here, I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess, I guess p fraud is a real thing
Speaker 3: in the world because absolutly some people are going to
Speaker 3: want to avoid the implications of a drug test.
Speaker 2: That's right. And while we did mention the idea of
Speaker 2: using someone else's urine as occurs in this episode of
Speaker 2: The Office or there there's the attempt to do this,
Speaker 2: and I've seen this particular plot point come up in
Speaker 2: other shows as well, we didn't mention another option that
Speaker 2: has certainly entered the market over the past many years,
Speaker 2: and that is the use of synthetic human urine. This
Speaker 2: is indeed apparently a product you can get that at
Speaker 2: least claims you know, I'm not going to get into
Speaker 2: certainly into individual brands or claims made by these brands,
Speaker 2: but you can go to places and you can buy
Speaker 2: something that claims to be synthetic human urine for the
Speaker 2: express purpose of duping a urinary drug testow. Now, this
Speaker 2: may be new to many of you, but to be clear,
Speaker 2: we've actually had synthetic human urine for a very long time.
Speaker 2: I was reading about this at on the website Maoclinic
Speaker 2: Proceedings dot org and they point out that German chemist
Speaker 2: Frederick Wohler, who lived eighteen hundred to eighteen eighty two,
Speaker 2: was the first to produce synthetic urine synthetic human urine
Speaker 2: back in eighteen twenty eight.
Speaker 3: Well, the date on that discovery makes me think that
Speaker 3: that was not intended to fool a drug test, so
Speaker 3: there must be uses for it beyond beyond just the
Speaker 3: p fraud.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, this was not for a drug test, Welder.
Speaker 2: It was a was a prolific and highly influential chemist.
Speaker 2: We may have brought him up on the show before.
Speaker 2: I feel like there's a strong possibility and the main
Speaker 2: tangible benefit of the at the time for the creation
Speaker 2: of synthetic human urine was for testing of medical equipment,
Speaker 2: and this is something it's still used for today. In fact,
Speaker 2: you can easily you can go online, you can find
Speaker 2: medical grade companies that sell synthetic human urine and it'll
Speaker 2: often be calibrated for very specific testing purposes, like you
Speaker 2: want to test this kind of medical equipment and you
Speaker 2: need synthetic urine to do so. Well, here's the right
Speaker 2: kind of urine for that test, okay. And so that
Speaker 2: was kind of like the broad call for synthetic urine
Speaker 2: at the time, but there was this there's an entire
Speaker 2: additional layer to Frederick go Whulder's contribution here as well.
Speaker 2: So his synthesis of human urea without the aid of
Speaker 2: a human kidney proved that organic compounds could be synthesized
Speaker 2: without the aid of the quote unquote vital force found
Speaker 2: in a living organism, getting here into the vital force
Speaker 2: theory or vitalism, which on the whole argue that you
Speaker 2: could not reduce life to a mechanistic or certainly a
Speaker 2: chemical explanation, like you couldn't you couldn't just create something
Speaker 2: that a human or animal body made, because there is
Speaker 2: something beyond our science in that body that is making
Speaker 2: the substance in question.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, So while I think you could still argue
Speaker 3: today that there might be something in the more ambiguous
Speaker 3: term life that is not quite captured in reproducible chemical experiments,
Speaker 3: basically all of the processes within the body could be
Speaker 3: recreated in the lab.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think getting back into our own blunted
Speaker 2: human understanding of urine, most people today certainly are not
Speaker 2: going to hear this and think, well, that's blasphemous. You
Speaker 2: can't synthesize human urine. Human urine is holy and it
Speaker 2: is made only by human body. Like, nobody's really probably
Speaker 2: feeling that because we don't think about urine as having
Speaker 2: any intrinsic value. It is just waste product that on
Speaker 2: the whole we prefer not to produce. It just kind
Speaker 2: of gets in the way. Of course, as we've been discussing, dogs, lobsters,
Speaker 2: so many other animals if they could express, if they could,
Speaker 2: you know, express feelings about urine, would disagree with us,
Speaker 2: and they might say no. A dog might say no,
Speaker 2: urine is holy. Urine is information, and it comes from
Speaker 2: a dog or it comes from some other animal, and
Speaker 2: that is what I'm reading, and the idea that you
Speaker 2: could fake that is just you know, abysmal p.
Speaker 3: Is vitalistic poetry. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So at the time this was actually a big
Speaker 2: deal though, because even though it was quote unquote just
Speaker 2: urine that was synthesized, it paved the way for so
Speaker 2: many world changing advancements in organic chemistry. So again coming
Speaker 2: back to today, yes, you can buy synthetic urine in
Speaker 2: various places, either for legitimate medical testing purposes, educational purposes,
Speaker 2: but also products that seem to be intended just for
Speaker 2: the duping of drug tests.
Speaker 3: I haven't looked these up. How are they marketed? Do
Speaker 3: they just say like, fool a drug test on them?
Speaker 3: Or do they have euphemistic language.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to mention any products by name, but
Speaker 2: some of them have like expectedly kind of goofy product names.
Speaker 2: You can definitely, or it seems to me, you can
Speaker 2: definitely tell the difference between a product that is marketed
Speaker 2: for clinical usage versus things that are marketed for the
Speaker 2: duping of drug tests. I think it's pretty obvious. But
Speaker 2: these products, if I'm understanding this correctly, and maybe the
Speaker 2: literature is a little incomplete on when things like this
Speaker 2: start popping up. But I believe we've had products like
Speaker 2: this on the market of some sort since like the
Speaker 2: late nineties, so they've been around for a while. I
Speaker 2: had not heard of them, so I thought this was
Speaker 2: maybe like a very new thing, But yeah, these products
Speaker 2: have been around. Some of them are banned in certain areas,
Speaker 2: certain states for example now because of their usage to
Speaker 2: try and dupe at drug test. Now, synthetic you're in
Speaker 2: in general the variety is aimed at drug tests, but
Speaker 2: also clinically they've grown quite advanced, and of course this
Speaker 2: has led to advancements in drug testing. So I was
Speaker 2: reading some some sources here that we're talking about how
Speaker 2: drug tests have had to look for new markers in
Speaker 2: synthetic urines that can then be targeted on a drug
Speaker 2: test so that they can figure out like, Okay, well
Speaker 2: this this is odd. This urine looks clean, but it's
Speaker 2: also obviously purchased, you know, at the local smoke shop.
Speaker 3: This is the evolutionary arms race in the synthetic urine
Speaker 3: and the h and the drug tests.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course you can't help but imagine what
Speaker 2: would a dog think of all this? Like they would
Speaker 2: probably like like it would be, like, you know, because
Speaker 2: there's probably a similar discussion to be made around say,
Speaker 2: AI generated literature, you know, where you know, someone might say, well,
Speaker 2: how could you possibly be fooled by this? Like clearly
Speaker 2: was written by a machine and so forth, Like the
Speaker 2: dogs probably have a very low would have a very
Speaker 2: uh like low estimation of synthetic urines and like what
Speaker 2: it's telling them. Though I guess that's a that's a
Speaker 2: whole topic under it unto itself that we're not really
Speaker 2: going to get into today, into the like to what
Speaker 2: degree does synthetic urine fool animals that have these heightened
Speaker 2: senses to understand it?
Speaker 3: Or I wonder would the dog really have the concept
Speaker 3: of authenticity when reading the urine or would it just
Speaker 3: be like, huh, this is from a strange type of
Speaker 3: creature I've never encountered before.
Speaker 2: That's right, It would maybe be more like, this is
Speaker 2: a this is a weird communication that I'm reading. This
Speaker 2: is a very strange dog. More information is required. I
Speaker 2: probably need to see this dog in person now to
Speaker 2: be clear. Outside of the market for synthetic human urine,
Speaker 2: there is also a market for synthetic animal urines.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute. For Could this be for scent marking
Speaker 3: fraud essentially carried out by humans?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, in instances where there is some sort of
Speaker 2: a human interest involved in some sort of communication fraud
Speaker 2: with animal urine. One example of this that you can
Speaker 2: find pretty readily, say online, is synthetic deer urine. And
Speaker 2: this is apparently a product that exists because you have
Speaker 2: in the past used actual deer urine to say, you know,
Speaker 2: bait a buck, that sort of a thing. But there
Speaker 2: are a number of states that have banned the use
Speaker 2: of actual deer urine to help prevent the spread of
Speaker 2: chronic wasting disease and deer ah. Okay, yeah, Because to
Speaker 2: come back to urine in general, like urine, healthy human urine,
Speaker 2: for example, is generally thought to be largely sterile. But yes,
Speaker 2: there are various things that can be various contaminants, various
Speaker 2: illnesses that can be contracted through unhealthy urine.
Speaker 3: So this would be using animal urine fraud for the
Speaker 3: purpose of an attractant by hunters. But I've read about
Speaker 3: animal urine fraud being used for the opposite purpose to
Speaker 3: deter animals by using a predator urine. So you synthesize
Speaker 3: there's not really a cougar in the area, but you
Speaker 3: put cougar pee out there, and it supposedly it will
Speaker 3: keep away the pest animals that you don't want in
Speaker 3: your garden or whatever.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yes, and that is the other major synthetic urine
Speaker 2: product that you see. And this is another case though,
Speaker 2: where there are products that at least claim to use
Speaker 2: actual urine from say fox or a bear, or you know,
Speaker 2: whatever whatever the predator happens to be, and then there
Speaker 2: are cases where they're making a point of it being
Speaker 2: synthetic animal urine. I can't speak to the to how
Speaker 2: efficient these are, but you know, coming back to our
Speaker 2: dog example, if they are efficient enough to like raise
Speaker 2: the specter of a potential predator being present, then perhaps
Speaker 2: it is useful enough. We talked about chimpanzees. I want
Speaker 2: to mention that for medical purposes, you can also buy
Speaker 2: synthetic chimpanzee urine. I included a link here for you, Joe.
Speaker 2: If you look around for it, you can find it.
Speaker 2: There's one company in particular that has a website and
Speaker 2: they have various forms of synthetic human urine that is
Speaker 2: to be clear intended for clinical purposes and the testing
Speaker 2: of like medical equipment and tests and educational purposes as well.
Speaker 2: But you can also buy synthetic chimpanzee urine for the
Speaker 2: same purpose, because, of course the study of chimpanzee physiology
Speaker 2: and chimpanzee biological responses is vitally important for human medicine
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: But is it cheaper than the synthetic human urine And
Speaker 3: if so, with somebody trying to pass the drug tests,
Speaker 3: save a few bucks and get the chimpanzee urine instead.
Speaker 2: Well, let's check real quick. I'll pull up the website. Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm looking at the costs for simulated monkey urine. Okay,
Speaker 2: all right, okay, and then let's see. You know, it
Speaker 2: looks about like it's the same price for humans, so
Speaker 2: there's no there's no need to go cheaper for chimp urine.
Speaker 2: I have a feeling chimp urine would not work. I
Speaker 2: feel like they would catch you if you try to
Speaker 2: use chimp urine to synthetic chimp urine to pass like
Speaker 2: a work drug test. But also I should add that
Speaker 2: you're probably I'm thinking most of the people trying to
Speaker 2: pass a drug test using the synthetic urine They're probably
Speaker 2: not buying it from a biomedical company. They're buying it
Speaker 2: a like at the local smoke shop or something from
Speaker 2: some other supplier, which I'm assuming are you know, ultimately
Speaker 2: not the same corporation.
Speaker 3: Listeners, if anybody in the audience has ever tried to
Speaker 3: spoof a drug test by using like cougar urine or something,
Speaker 3: let us know how that went. Did it work?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Or in general, if there are people out there
Speaker 2: who have experience using synthetic animal urines either to attract
Speaker 2: or drive away organisms, write in with your experiences with
Speaker 2: these products. You know, we're not going to mention specific products,
Speaker 2: you know, obviously, but in general, I'd love to hear
Speaker 2: how this has worked. Like maybe get an idea of
Speaker 2: like where the where the science is in terms of
Speaker 2: making synthetic urine that can not only be useful for
Speaker 2: biomedical purposes and testing equipment in the human world, but
Speaker 2: potentially in communicating with other animals, even in a very
Speaker 2: blunt manner.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, and hey, we also we know we've got
Speaker 3: a lot of scientists in the audience. If you use
Speaker 3: synthetic you're in in your research, Let us know how
Speaker 3: what do you use it for?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. All right, on that note, we're going to
Speaker 2: go ahead and close out this episode, but yeah, right in,
Speaker 2: we'd love to hear from everyone. Just remind it that
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
Speaker 2: culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and
Speaker 2: on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just
Speaker 2: talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact death, Stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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