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Season 6 Episode 6: Neutrino-Hunting Trees, and the Auditory Secrets of Fish with Dr. Allison Coffin

• Jason Zackowski • Season 6 • Episode 6

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Imagine trekking to witness an awe-inspiring eclipse and stumbling upon a radical idea that trees might just be the next big thing in neutrino detection. That's exactly the kind of unexpected twist you'll find in our latest podcast adventure.

Our guest, neuroscientist Dr. Allison Coffin, joins us to shed light on the remarkable similarities between fish and human auditory systems and their implications for treating human hearing loss. We'll explore the regenerative prowess of our underwater counterparts and the tantalizing possibility of harnessing this power to revolutionize human health.

As we segue from discussing the sensory wonders of the deep to reflecting on the bonds we share with our terrestrial companions, this episode takes an emotional turn. From the heartfelt tale of Polaris, the once-feral tabby cat, to the touching stories of pet love and loss that resonate with all animal lovers, we celebrate the creatures that touch our lives.

And, as a nod to our generous Paw Pack supporters, we express our gratitude for enabling us to share these stories of science, nature, and the indelible connections that weave them together.

For Science, Empathy, and Cuteness!

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Speaker 2:

Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zekowski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold onto your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there.

Speaker 2:

This is episode 6 of season 6. I don't know if the weather we got is the last hurrah of winter, but it's the start of March and we have been pounded by snow. There is so much snow out there and, excitingly, on one of our treks we found the beaver is still kicking it. The beaver chewed up out of the ice and has been moving around, so we might talk more about that in the family section. Chris and I are planning a couple's getaway to go see the eclipse, and we do have to fly it's way out of the path of Alberta. In fact, we will never see a total eclipse where we live unless we drive or fly. I've never seen one in my entire life, and neither has Chris and it's. I think it's time for us to see one. This one's supposed to be excellent, so Chris and I have had fun taking a look and planning that Alright.

Speaker 2:

Well, what's on the show today In science news? We're going to be looking at trees as neutrino detectors. That's so wild. And in pet science it's going to be more about the human animal bond, precipitated by a now viral clip of John Stewart getting extremely emotional over the loss of his dog. Our guests and ask an expert is neuroscientist Dr Alison Coffin. A super fun interview. I can't wait for you guys to hear it. Okay, the bad joke. I've been waiting for tree puns waiting. So here's a couple. Hey, how do trees get online? They just log in. And what's a trees favorite dating app, timber. Okay, I'm with the show because there's no time like science time. This week in science news we're going to take a look at a study that proposed using trees to detect neutrinos, not just any neutrinos, tau neutrinos.

Speaker 2:

Now a little bit of background on neutrinos. I'm not expecting the average person to know or remember what they are, and neutrinos are subatomic particles. They belong to the leptin family. Leptons are elementary particles, meaning that they're not made of smaller stuff. Some leptins you've probably heard of is like the electron and the neutrino, and the electron neutrino and the muon, and then there is some spooky ones like the tau neutrino. So that's what we're going to be talking about.

Speaker 2:

Tau neutrinos are electrically neutral and almost don't interact with anything, which means they're very difficult to detect, and they're produced in huge astrophysical processes. Things that people who study the cosmos would be really interested in, like the center of the sun and, when stars go boom, supernova, as well as stuff from outer space like cosmic wind bombarding the earth. These tau neutrinos are particularly interesting to scientists because they can oscillate between all of the different neutrino flavors as they travel through space, and it gives cosmologists and astrophysicists insight into the properties of these very, very tiny and spooky particles. Neutrino detectors are extremely large and very sensitive. There's a viral clip of Dr DeGrease Tyson in cosmos floating on a dinghy deep under the ground in Japan, which was one of the neutrino detectors on earth, and the ones designed to detect the highest energy neutrinos from space are even more rare. Like the neutrino detectors, there's not very many of them. Super high energy neutrino physicists have built detectors in the ice cube neutrino observatory in Antarctic ice and this one called the KM3 net in the Mediterranean sea.

Speaker 2:

Tau neutrinos can produce radio waves when they interact with the earth. So those radio waves that are produced from, like a new truth, this tau neutrino bonkin into something. That is how they detect. The neutrinos are present. An experiment was proposed using 200,000 antennas around the world to detect these radio waves. But if you wanted to make 200,000 antennas, that would be super cost prohibitive. I don't even know what the expense would be. So physicist Stephen Perreira suggested using trees as natural antennas to detect radio waves produced by the interaction with tau neutrinos.

Speaker 2:

Previous research has shown that when neutrinos go through a tree, the tree itself produces radio waves, and all you would need to do, I guess, is attach wires to the trees to collect the signals. This was more of a thought experiment than an actual experiment, because some other physicists were like I don't know, steve, I think you're out to lunch here because they were worried about how sensitive it would be if it would be able to detect high frequency radio waves. And the biggest of all is like wouldn't the tree leaves get in the way? It's the tree itself, not the leaves. And what happens if the tree leaves fall off? How would you calibrate the tree for different seasons. It was a paper that was submitted to ARXIV in January and is being looked at. A different physicist Many who are saying that while this is a natural solution that has been sitting under our nose, it just might cause more problems than it's worth. These, these little studies come across my feed and I saw trees detecting neutrinos and I was like you know, this is short, it's sweet and it's really interesting. So I guess, hook up some wires to your nearest tree, jack it into some kind of radio receiver and listen to the sounds of neutrinos bonking into the trees.

Speaker 2:

That's science news for this week. This week in pet science let's talk about pet loss, but also crying in general. So this is both pet related but science related as well. I guess the reason why I'm deciding to do this within the pet science section of the podcast is we were tagged a lot and we saw the very viral clip of John Stewart talking about the loss of his dog. He was crying on a show, he was choking back tears and what he said was really powerful. You know, like he just wished everybody just had that one good dog. And that just hit me and that hit many dog owners, and I'm not going to lie, my eyes walled up. I was remembering our lost dog Kellen, and that got me thinking that seeing, you know, seeing a man cry on TV or get emotional like that is super rare, like especially on live television. The only other time I can think of that happening live is maybe you know a politician talking about you know, tragedies, school shootings, for example, or athletes male athletes losing and crying tears of frustration, or winning and crying tears of joy. You don't really see that kind of emotion on TV and in doing some research there was an article in Psychology today that was talking about it that you know from childhood boys are told not to cry.

Speaker 2:

Crying is important for many reasons Like one. It's a natural response to sadness, grief and frustration. We've all felt such frustration and sorrow. Crying is just a natural part of that. Crying can also reduce stress. It's been shown in studies to help release built up tension and stress hormones. It triggers the release of endorphins in our body's natural feel good chemicals like oxytocin, which during a good cry me don't feel so good, but after it can help improve your mood and reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. Crying also connects us with others. It's a universal human experience and it might foster social connection and empathy. When we cry, others see that we're sad and they offer their support. Sharing those emotions through crying can help us feel more understood.

Speaker 2:

We've spoke before on the podcast about how the loss of a pet is equal to the grief felt by losing a close family member and while other people may not agree with that or you may not have that experience yourself, when they study it, when the science is done, that's what it comes back. As it doesn't take more than a few seconds to check repositories of science studies to see there's dozens of studies that have looked into pet loss from 2002 to 2016 to 2022. There's one done in the University of New England and the study found that the loss of a pet can lead to the same symptoms of acute grief, sadness, anger, guilt, as well as physical symptoms like appetite change and sleep disturbances, as the loss of a close family member. That's just one of dozens and, interestingly enough, in human history, pre-victorian times, people cried a lot more. You just have to read the accounts of that time of men weeping over the loss of a spouse, a child, a friend. It was a lot more common and Victorian times rolled around and it's like no bottle it all up, and we're still dealing with that in North American culture. Other cultures, like, for example, the Japanese culture, is extremely stoic, while other cultures are maybe a little bit more open, and one of the most open cultures for expressing visible emotions is the Latin countries. In closing, it's a bit of both. I guess, though, the point I'm trying to make is that the loss of a pet is extremely painful. It's backed up by science. You shouldn't feel any guilt about feeling so sad, but you also shouldn't feel guilt about expressing that emotion, and if you're a man listening to this, you should know that crying is okay, and if we can all stop judging folks who cry and just show a little bit of empathy, the world will be a lot more kind place.

Speaker 2:

That's Pet Science for this week. Hello everybody, here's some ways you can keep the science podcast free Number one in our show notes. Sign up to be a member of our Paw Pack Plus community. It's an amazing community of folks who love pets and folks who love science. We have tons of bonus Bunsen and Beaker content there, and we have live streams every Sunday with our community. It's tons of fun. Also, think about checking out our merch store. We've got the Bunsen stuffy, the Beaker stuffy and now the ginger stuffy. That's right, ginger, the Science Cat has a little replica. It's adorable. It's so soft, with the giant fluffy tail, safety glasses and a lab coat. And, number three, if you're listening to the podcast on any place that writes podcasts, give us a great rating and tell your family and friends to listen to. Okay, on with the show. Back to the interviews. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I have Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Dr Allison.

Speaker 2:

Coffin with me today. Allie, how are you doing? I'm good, I'm good. Thanks for saying yes to chatting with us.

Speaker 4:

Thanks for having me. I'm excited. A podcast about science and animals that is one of the best things ever, in my opinion.

Speaker 2:

We think so. We think so. Where are you calling into the show from? Where are you in the world?

Speaker 4:

I am calling from Vancouver, Washington, which is nowhere near Vancouver, Canada. Just got to throw that out there. We are just north of Portland, Oregon, across the Columbia.

Speaker 2:

River. I'd imagine some people do get confused on certain flight bookings.

Speaker 4:

Yes, many people get confused, which is why I usually just say I live near Portland and leave it at that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I noticed you're from Vancouver and I was like, oh, Vancouver's gorgeous. And then I don't know anything about your Vancouver. I only know, Are they Coover?

Speaker 4:

Oh, this Coover is gorgeous too. So I'm on a small branch campus of Washington State University, or small satellite campus whatever you want to call us and on a clear day, which of course doesn't happen often this time of year in the Pacific Northwest, I can see Mount St Helens from my office window.

Speaker 2:

The Pacific Northwest is just oh what a wonderful place to explore and lucky enough to live in. Yeah, Allie, could you talk to us a little bit about your training in science? Like I introduced you as an associate professor of neuroscience, You've got a doctorate. What's going on there?

Speaker 4:

What's going on is that, while being a professor was the goal for a very long time, the neuroscience part was a bit of a meandering journey and one could almost say a happy accident. So I'm going to go back way back to when I was five years old and I was one of those little girls that wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to chase sharks. I had no idea what I was going to do if I caught a shark, but the idea of seeing them, chasing them, real understanding them, understanding shark behavior to me was just fascinating. And I saw my first shark in the wild when I was five or six. I was on the dock. The shark was in the water. It was a nurse shark, so it wasn't particularly scary, although my mother was snorkeling near it. This was down in the Florida.

Speaker 4:

Keys and she brought her head up and said I just saw a giant catfish. And I looked down and even at five or six I said no, no, mom, that's a shark. And she freaked out and jumped out of the water and scratched her knee on the dock and told everybody that she got attacked by the shark. So that's what started. The whole thing was this fascination with sharks. And I got a bachelor's degree in marine biology from Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, florida. And while I was in undergrad I was taking a fish biology class and learned that some fish make sounds to communicate with each other, so things like toadfish and drums, which get their name because they drum a muscle on this little gas bladder, their swim bladder. So basically it's like drumming on a vibrating balloon. And I thought, wait, wait. Fish make sound and they talk. That's at least some. That's super cool and really weird.

Speaker 4:

And then I applied to graduate school, interested in I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do yet, maybe something around studying fish sound. I didn't get into graduate school the first time, so I regrouped a bit. I was applying for PhDs, regrouped a bit, worked for a few years, wound up doing a master's degree in fisheries biology at the University of Minnesota. I'm originally from Minnesota and had gone back there to kind of figure out my next steps with studying fish populations and how those could be managed for sustainable fisheries in Lake Superior.

Speaker 4:

And then I was taking a class in fish biology again, imagine that and we had a whole section on fish sensory systems and fish hearing and whatever reason that just grabbed my attention. I'd never really thought about when I got interested in fish making sounds to talk to each other about the receptor side, the hearing side, that if some fish are making sounds to communicate with other fish, that means fish can hear us. And that's really what got this part of my career started was just this fascination with fish hearing and fish ears something nobody else thinks about? So I did a PhD at the University of Maryland with Dr Arthur Popper, who has been called the godfather of fish hearing.

Speaker 2:

Wild okay.

Speaker 4:

Yes, there is such a thing, not nearly as dangerous as say the godfather in the movie there's no mafia involved.

Speaker 2:

I have a proposition for you. It's about fish hearing.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I got these fish ears. What do you want to do with them? Yeah, and it was during my PhD that I was studying the cells in the ears of these fish that I started to realize that we could study fish ears not to just understand what the fish is listening to, but we could also learn more about our own hearing. Because the cells in the fish's ear they're called hair cells because they have little hair-like things on the top. They're in the inner ear. They're not like the hairs that stick out of old dude's ears, they're just like the hearing cells, the hair cells in our inner ears that allow us to hear. So not only can we use fish to understand what fish are listening to, we can use fish to understand how our hearing cells work and how they're damaged by things like loud noise or certain drugs or loss as we age, and how we can develop therapies to prevent or restore. Prevent, damage or restore.

Speaker 2:

So wild it's like in biology. Is that an analogous structure? Is that the idea? Like the two, so they're actually to use the technical term. They're homologous cells. I'm sorry, wrong thing.

Speaker 4:

Yes, they evolve from a common evolutionary ancestor. The structures themselves, parts of the ear, are homologous to one another, so parts of the fish ear are Different species, same ancestor.

Speaker 2:

Wow, okay, that's cool.

Speaker 4:

Yep, oh yeah. No, I would say, and I think most hearing scientists would agree with me, that the hearing cells in the ears of all vertebrates are homologous.

Speaker 2:

Wow, they all evolve from a common ancestor, that is very cool, I did not know that.

Speaker 4:

So yeah, so that's really what got me started on my current journey, which was to primarily use fish as a biomedical model, specifically zebrafish to better understand human hearing loss and prevention, did a little bit of a foray into some other stuff. Actually did spend a year and a half in Canada at Queens University in Kingston Ontario, working in Fish Vision, which was tons of fun, but funding didn't quite work out, so wound up for another postdoc at the University of Washington in Seattle, and that's really when I started doing more of the biomedical work that I still do and my whole lab group does in our lab.

Speaker 2:

So how does this translate to your day job now In neuroscience? That's my question.

Speaker 4:

I guess the next step yeah, so neuroscience isn't just about the brain, it's also about our senses, because we get sensory information in from our eyes, from our ears, from our taste and our smell and our touch and a whole bunch of other senses because there really are way more than five and our brain processes those stimuli, that sensory input, and then we make decisions on what we're going to do. Do we smell cookies? All right, let's go follow our nose and find the source of those cookies?

Speaker 2:

Don't talk about cookies. I haven't had supper yet, oh no.

Speaker 4:

Sorry man, All right. Okay, do we smell skunk? Do we then go in the opposite direction?

Speaker 2:

Yes, how about that? You gather up your dogs and your life. Let's appetize them. Walk is over, guys. We're going this way.

Speaker 4:

Exactly right. So neuroscience involves sensory information. Really, it's a subfield called sensory neuroscience and that's where my neuroscience work comes in. So in my research lab here at Washington State University, vancouver, I have an amazing team of graduate students and undergraduates and technicians, and often high school interns, that study primarily zebrafish, which are basically like the lab rat or lab mouse of the fish world to understand hearing and hearing loss. We also do some work in some other fish species, which I am happy to talk about but will not go on and on because you might not want me to go on and on.

Speaker 2:

It's fascinating that fish can hear. I guess they can hear. So what are some of the things that your lab's working on? It must be varied and wild, but can you tell us a few little things? That's going on right now?

Speaker 4:

Oh, I'm happy to, and it's definitely varied and wild, In fact, if you were here tomorrow. Tomorrow we are referring to time in my lab as controlled chaos, because we have time points for two reasonably large experiments going up once. So we'll have eight people working simultaneously on two different teams, and one of those teams is and part of some of our larger projects, like I said, is understanding how these hair cells, these hearing cells, can be done to damage, so how they can be damaged by certain medications, how they can be lost as we age, how they can be damaged by noise, and how we can prevent that damage or restore it. And fish have almost all fish. I say that just because when you've got over 30,000 species of fish, you always find a fish that doesn't fit. Whatever you say. Oh, fish do this.

Speaker 2:

It's a weirdo fish outlier.

Speaker 4:

Right, you get the weirdo fish outlier that like has to breathe air, for example.

Speaker 4:

But in this case, almost all fish have these hearing like cells, these hair cells, not just in their inner ears, which they do have these ears, but also on the outside of their body in a system called the lateral line, which helps them to detect water movement near them for things like avoiding predators and finding things to eat and sensing water movement for like current, so that they can figure out where to migrate and swimming in schools better.

Speaker 4:

It's not just vision that helps them all coordinate, that like beautiful dance that we think of as a school, a big group of fish, but also sensing the movement of the fish near them, based on water movement. So that's done with a system called the lateral line and because they have these hair cells, these hearing cells in the lateral line, we can look at the outside of the fish and tell a lot about what these cells are doing, how they are damaged by, like I said, things like drugs or aging or noise, and then how we can test potential therapies in order to prevent that damage. So that's one of the main projects going on, or sets of projects going on right now, One of our big projects that we're just starting up is around the potential for some COVID medications to perhaps cause hearing loss.

Speaker 2:

Wow, like the. What is it called pex lovin Is that.

Speaker 4:

Pax lovin actually looks to be, really safe, at least for hearing cells. I can't just vibrate or say anything about anything else, but based on the safety profiles it looks really good. And I'm not. I say this very carefully because we don't have clinical evidence that these COVID drugs are causing hearing loss. It's not that people are taking drugs, particularly some of those 900 drugs and clinical trials and saying, oh, I lost my hearing. So I want to make it very clear people should take the medications that their physicians prescribed for them. It's more that with over 900 drugs and clinical trials, it's likely that some have the potential to cause very mild hearing loss. And since their drugs are often, or medications are often used in the elderly or taken by the elderly, who've already lost some of their hearing anyway as they age, it's really hard to say if there's a modest change in hearing because they're getting older or because of some of the medications they're taking.

Speaker 4:

But your study, your study hopes to show that so we're using fish.

Speaker 2:

Like okay, gotcha.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so we're using fish. We're. That's one of the great things about zebrafish is that because we're using these larval fish, they're the sides of an eyelash, they're basically swimming eyelashes with these hearing cells on the outside of their bodies, so we can put them into different drugs, let them swim around for a day and then put the whole fish out in the microscope and add fluorescent dyes that light up these cells and then we can count them and say how many cells are there, do they look healthy or not, and then do more follow-up experiments based on our initial results and we can look at all 900 drugs or 900 plus drugs, because we have hundreds of these little swimming eyelashes.

Speaker 2:

Okay, you answered. My question was how do you determine if a fish has lost its hearing? I was assuming like one of your grad students was, you know, whispering, put downs across the tank and if the fish got angry or something like that, you knew they could still hear. I didn't understand really how that was happening, but this makes more sense than my idea.

Speaker 4:

I mean, your idea has merit, depending on what you tell the fish, because you know we don't necessarily speak like fish language. We might be telling the fish we think it's an insult, and the fish might think this that all it heard was your voice.

Speaker 2:

Oh man.

Speaker 4:

You know, think about talking to your dog, your cat, which I know we'll get to in a bit. So much of it is tone of voice, right, so you could tell your dog you're a bad dog. But if you say it in the you're a bad dog, they think it's the best thing ever in their wag, their tail. So you know, how do we really know what the fish thinks is a put down?

Speaker 2:

I love it. Hey, I do have a question. I just kind of like follow up here. Do we know why folks lose their hearing as they get older? Like generally, you, me and everybody listening? As we age, our hearing gets way worse generally. What what's is it? Like everything else? Like there's just what do they call telomere breaks? Is that? Is that what's going? I don't know. Like it's just that's curious to me now.

Speaker 4:

That's a great question. It's a bunch of different factors I was going to make a total smart out comment about for those in long term relationships. We lose our hearing as we age so we don't have to listen to our partner over time. But that's not really the case, although I've known some people to use it as a good excuse. No, really it's so. We only have in our ears we only have about 14 or 15,000 hair cells, hearing cells when we're born and we don't make more. So if you think about it, that's like we have billions of neurons. So I think the last time I did the calculation it was like if the entire population of the US could think, but only 40 or 50 people could hear in the entire country. That's like the ratio of hearing cells to brain cells.

Speaker 4:

So we have very, very few hearing cells to begin with, and they're really sensitive to sound Like we can hear whispers, we can hear really loud sounds, we can hear this great, this dynamic range of sounds. But these cells, that means they're also really sensitive to damage. So we know that loud noise causes damage to the cell. So it really loud noise Like don't ever, you know, jack hammer, without proper hearing protection, don't stand next to a jet engine, don't stand right next to the subwoofers at a concert without well at all back up a few steps. We're hearing protection. We know that that can cause mechanical damage, but it also causes biochemical damage. It increases oxidative stress in these cells. We hear a lot about oxidative stress in all kinds of cells as we age. Hearing cells are no different. But unlike some of our cells, we can't make more of them, so once they start to die, they're lost.

Speaker 2:

Oh my goodness, I think I read that somewhere that they're not replenished like ever. Is that correct? No, or just very, very, very slowly.

Speaker 4:

That's correct, although now you had mentioned a question about like cool fact. So the cool fact is that fish can regenerate those cells and we can't.

Speaker 2:

Go fish.

Speaker 4:

Right, it actually turns out fish, turtles, frogs, birds only mammals that pretty much suck at regenerating things. Yeah, like, we're really good at a lot of things, but we can make music, we can write poetry, we can place sports, we can do all kinds of different things. When it comes to like fundamental things like regenerating cells in our ears or our eyes or our brains, we're pretty lousy at that, and most other vertebrates other than mammals are really good at it.

Speaker 2:

Well, like, lizards can quote, unquote, regrow like limbs, sort of.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, exactly Right, and we unfortunately don't. So it's one of the great things about studying fish is not only are there cells like ours, but they have stem like cells in their ears that divide and make new hearing cells, and that happens throughout life, so their life. So we can then ask well, what's different about those cells in the ears of a fish? They're called supporting cells because they support the hearing cells. What's different about the cells in the ears of a fish that they can divide and make new hearing cells, whereas in the ears of a mouse or a rat or a cat or dog or human, those similar supporting cells don't divide and therefore we can't make new hearing.

Speaker 2:

Oh my goodness, it's like, have you got a plan lock? Turning those on Like that's a huge deal. That's a huge deal for a million study, especially with humans. I can see oh, it is.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, and it's not just my lab that's interested in those questions. Like there are a lot of labs that are trying to figure out how these fishy tricks work and so many other labs, so many other my colleagues that are trying to figure out what puts the brakes on in the mammalian ear, like why can't mouse ears and human ears make more of these cells? So it's like what's hitting the gas pedal in something like a fish and what's hitting the brakes in something like a human?

Speaker 2:

That's wild, though I do have to caution anybody who's listening that's wanting to like do some gene splicing. I do believe Dr Connors tried to do that and he became the lizard and is one of Spider-Man's main enemies. You got to be careful with that.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, you know, I don't really recommend biohacking, not such a good idea.

Speaker 2:

You get some fishy fishy ears. I guess you got to talk underwater.

Speaker 4:

And you never know what else you might do. Like, do you really permanently want gills? You know that might be fun to go snorkeling or scuba diving, but I wouldn't want to have gills every day and walk around with my head in a bowl full of water.

Speaker 2:

It'd be like Kevin Costner he had the best of both worlds as that guy in the water, oh yeah. He had the gills right behind his ears so he could be on land and in the ocean.

Speaker 4:

And that would be awesome and I don't think we know how to do that. I agree with your caution of the listeners. Don't try to go randomly splicing bits of fish genes into your own DNA. It's not a good idea.

Speaker 2:

The mech setting. The mechanism is fascinating, though.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I think it really is.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, yeah, really quick. One of the other studies that we're doing is in these plain fin midshipman fish. So they're bigger, they're several inches long, like eight, 10 inches long, and they're marine fish, they're saltwater. They're found here in the Pacific Northwest, and this gets back to my original love and fascination about how some fish make sound. So in these fish the males are these big, what they're called parental males or nesting males. They build nests in the summer under rocks and they at night, they hum to attract females. They go, hmm, and if you're a female midshipman fish in the summer, you think that's the best thing you've ever heard.

Speaker 2:

Have you seen that? Have you? Seen the have you watched the Barbie movie? Is it like when Ken is playing to Barbie on the beach that's? Is that kind of a thing?

Speaker 4:

Not really, because if I remember the movie, correctly that didn't actually work for Ken no it works way better for the midshipman fish Ken probably should have taken some lessons from them.

Speaker 2:

There we go, Ken Ken's got to listen to them.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, exactly yeah. Ken just needs to go sit in his corner and sing. I'm just Ken, which was awesome, but really these midshipman fish have it going on.

Speaker 2:

They've got the love song, gotcha.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, they've got the love song. But what I'm really interested in is that one of my colleagues, joseph Naros at the University of Washington, showed years ago that the hearing in the females actually changes throughout the year, so that in the summer, during the breeding season, it's not just that she's more interested in what the male fish is saying, she's actually better able to hear it what?

Speaker 2:

That's wild.

Speaker 4:

And if you take a female fish in the winter, in the non-reproductive season, and you give her some extra estrogen, her hearing gets better.

Speaker 2:

It's like when it's time to reproduce she can hear the males better, but when it's not, it's like turn the hearing off, just ignore them completely.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, pretty much right, yeah, and so we're really interested in what's going on in the ear, like what is estrogen doing to change hearing throughout the year.

Speaker 2:

That is so cool. And again, do you use the microscope technique to like figure this out?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, we do a lot with the microscopes. We also. We work with this colleague of mine at University of Washington and he in this case does test their hearing. So he plays sounds to the fish and then he has little electrodes on the surface of the head and records the signal from the brain when the fish hears something. So it's called an auditory brain stem response. These are actually done at humans as well, with little suction cups on the head, and suction cups don't really work that well in a slimy fish. So we just stick little pointy electrodes just right on the head they're not actually going into the brain and we can hear. Then we can say, oh, fish's brain responded, it heard the sound we played to it.

Speaker 2:

That is so cool. That is so wild. I told you fish was Allie. This is so. I did not know. This is where the conversation was going to go.

Speaker 4:

This is just why don't you just tickle pink here. And I get to nerd out about some of my favorite stuff which is fishy, and people get sick of hearing me.

Speaker 2:

So this is so much like again, if I didn't have like a bit of a time limit, I would key. I have a list of follow up questions on my along here, so is it okay if we go to the next, the next question? If that's okay, Absolutely so. Doc, that was absolutely fascinating. I had no idea our conversation would go this way and it's just been absolutely enthralling. But you also do a whole bunch of like psychom stuff. I would love to know more about that too.

Speaker 4:

Thanks, yeah, the association of science communicators, that is an international nonprofit. It's where, a professional organization for all of those that are communicating science. So people like you that are hosting podcasts on cool sciencey things and bringing pets into the conversation, people that are doing YouTube explainer videos or tick tock dances in the lab while showing off science techniques or blogging podcasting Like anybody that's communicating science is a science communicator, whether they recognize it or not. In fact, my favorite, couple of my favorite examples of science communicators are around food and beverages. So I was in Hawaii a few years back for vacation and was touring a small chocolate factory on Oahu and the woman there was talking about how they get chocolate from the cacao beans and the process of making the chocolate and crafting these different chocolates. And that was science. That was science, communication and action with amazingly tasty results.

Speaker 2:

I guess when people come to your lab there's no sampling.

Speaker 4:

No, no, no. You know we're mostly working with these little tiny larval zebrafish. Like I said, they're like swimming eyelashes.

Speaker 2:

I'm teasing, I'm teasing.

Speaker 4:

I don't, yeah, you'd have to bread a lot of those to make a meal, although we do some work in salmon. So there you go, it's right here in Vegas.

Speaker 4:

Mm. Hmm, yeah, so it's. We're the professional society for the science communication community. We really try to be the hub that connects science communicators across the country and around the world for professional development, networking and really just finding a sense of belonging. Because I don't know if you've experienced this with your podcast, but so many of us that are doing science communication related activities Again, whether that's the podcast, the blog, informal after school events, whatever it is feel like we kind of fell into it by accident. Oh, yes, Very, very much. It wasn't necessarily what we set out to do as a career. It's been coming from many of us aside gig and so many people say you know, I didn't even know that what I was doing was called science communication and I thought I was the only one doing this thing. So that's why we exist.

Speaker 2:

That's so cool and you've got a whole website that I like I was looking through it. We'll make sure that's linked in the show notes for everybody.

Speaker 4:

Excellent. Yeah, our major event is the science talk conference. We actually started the organization with the name science talk and then changed the name in 2022 to the association of science communicators to better reflect who we serve, which are those professional science communicators, so the annual conference is called science talk that, science talk 24 and that is coming up April 11th and 12th in Portland, oregon. We also have a virtual option and virtual events start the week before start, april 3rd, and we'll be going then over the course of about 10 days. We have public events associated with the conference. I think this year we're doing a science themed cabaret in Portland one night. Got a couple of team members organizing that, so it should be really fun. That's cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know that the point you made just real quick for us. Personally, like we, I fell into this and, completely by accident, I'm a science teacher, I'm a chemist myself and I teach high school chemistry. And then I posted a photo of one of our dogs wearing a lab coat, and then the rest is history. So quite right.

Speaker 4:

Exactly that's. It's amazing how that works Right. So I got my start in an organization called Toastmasters. I've been international, been around for 100 years, as of this year actually and was joined Toastmasters as a graduate student, just to practice my own communication skills, so that when I got to my thesis defense I went from oh crap, there are eyeballs staring at me to this will be fun, let's talk about my work. And it was really that start to just improve my own science communication skills for my mental health, so that I would be less dreading my dissertation defense. That led to me then starting to teach science communication workshops to other students, teaching communication to business professionals, then starting to meet other people that were doing different science communication things that all said, huh, there are other people doing similar things, we should meet each other. And that's how we got our start with the science conference.

Speaker 2:

Before I started this podcast I had no idea right about other science communicators and and now I've just like I follow our account fall, the Bunsen and beaker account falls all these amazing science communicators all over the world and they're just so different and doing such great work in different areas of science. And you know like we needed a whole bunch more people during the pandemic and like that, that fell to science communicators who were just doing it to do it, rather than government agencies, which was a huge problem. And I've talked about this before. It's like the world was looking to the science communicator on tick to explain what was going on, rather than sometimes they're the governments, you know.

Speaker 4:

So, right and depending on whether that communicator on tick tock was a true science communicator, so communicating what we knew at the time, which, of course, was ever changing in the early days of the pandemic or was actively spreading disinformation and trying to lead people away from the scientific facts. It was really hard to know.

Speaker 2:

I guess the point I was making is like I would. What we, what the government needed, was somebody like you to explain to them how to do it Right, like how to be better at it.

Speaker 4:

They had people doing that I guess they did. It's just early in the pandemic. The government wasn't necessarily listening.

Speaker 2:

I think that was. We just needed more. You know, I just think of the some of the really really good science communicators and I'm on my soapbox a box a bit.

Speaker 4:

Oh no, I totally get it. We actually did a panel at the last Science Talk conference last spring featuring a few women who are epidemiologists that had become very public figures and I'll admit I'm blanking on names right now had become very public figures during the pandemic because they were on social media sharing science communication from the perspective of trained epidemiologists. But also most of them were parents as well. So talking about talking to parents about their own fears of trying to keep their kids safe while at the same time talking about the most up-to-date science that we knew, and I think they were very effective, but they also got death threats oh so gross, so gross.

Speaker 4:

And threats on their families. And it was just yeah, it was just atrocious what some of these people faced, just trying to convey information in a way that people could actually think about and use.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it was not to belabor the point, but they were heroes during that time. They were the people the, the average person, who trusted science, looked to for good information and kudos to kudos.

Speaker 4:

Absolutely, but one of the things that I think is really meaningful is that for so many of us that are in science in various ways so you and I and your guests on this show, and probably some of your listeners who are not just interested in science but may have science backgrounds themselves we all became pandemic information science communicators because our friends and family were asking these questions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I became. I became the de facto expert for my whole division because I was the science guy with the science dogs and I was like I'm not, yeah, this is not my area of specialty guys, like I can read a scientific paper but I'm not an epidemiologist.

Speaker 4:

Right. But you could read a scientific paper. You could explain messenger RNA and what it is and a little bit about, probably, how vaccines work and how they're stimulating the natural immune response, and so so much of that fell to all of us. Because so much of science communication comes down to trust in the messenger. And if we're trusted sources of information from the people that know us best our friends, our family, our colleagues then they're more likely to trust what we're telling them. So if we're doing our best to communicate that science accurately and by accurate science communication I don't mean boring people to- death.

Speaker 4:

But by saying this is what the latest science is showing us. Whether it's the vaccines or masks, this is what the science is telling us right now. People are more likely to pay attention and trust those they already know, where there's already a relationship 100%.

Speaker 2:

What a cool little chat we had. So thanks for indulging me on my little soapbox there.

Speaker 4:

Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for pulling me up on the soapbox with you. Because the science communication yeah, the last few years really showed why science communication matters so much. But science communication is all around us. It doesn't have to just be these big hot button social issues. It can be, like I said, the science of chocolate or brewing beer, or I was at a little mezcal bar in Sydney, Australia, last month and the bartender was talking about meeting these mezcal farmers in Mexico and how they distilled the mezcal. That was science communication and action right there. So science communication isn't just the big things that people talk about on the news or that we look at policy around. It's so much of how science impacts our daily lives. I love it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, when you tell somebody something that they don't know and why something works, I'd like to think that's deep inside even the most jaded person. They're curious, right? You pull that curious child from that five-year-old child out of them. That's always asking why, why, to explain the why, and that's really fun.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, and again, if it's not just hot button issues like there's a local coffee, well, it's not just local, but there's a coffee chain, the Dutch Brothers Coffee, and I'm pretty sure their baristas are required. It's a little drive-up one, so I'm pretty sure their baristas are required to ask, hey, what are you up to today? While somebody else is making your coffee and I'm often saying, oh, I'm on my way to work, oh, so what do you do? I'm a scientist. What do you study? I told one that fish could regenerate their hearing and she got so excited she went and told everybody she knew, and the next time I went through the drive-through she had to tell me that she just went and told people about the science she learned while helping prepare my coffee.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's so great, I love it.

Speaker 4:

It made my week. I was so excited because she was excited about the science.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, I know you're a professor and I'm a teacher, so you get that when you that aha moment when you're teaching kids and your kids are a little bit older than mine, but it's a really rewarding part of that career.

Speaker 4:

It very much is. Yes, I teach college students, although on our campus they're anywhere from 18 to 30s or 40s or older. We have a very broad age range of undergraduates on our campus, which makes for really rich conversation.

Speaker 2:

Lots of different life experiences there. Well, doc, thanks for talking to us a little bit about SCICOM. The folks who listen to our show and they know all about the Bunsen and Beaker account. That's our side quote unquote our side gig outside of my wife and myself as teachers, so it was fun to talk to you about that. We have a couple of standard questions on the podcast we asked our guests about. One is for a pet story. I was wondering if you could share a pet story from your life.

Speaker 4:

Oh God, I think I told you an email. You're going to have to stop me because there are so many. I will go with the ongoing pet saga, which is the neighborhood my husband and I live in had a feral kitten problem, so there were kittens and cats just wandering the neighborhood. So over the years we have worked with the local feral spay-neuter program. I've hired students to help transport cats that we've trapped to get them spayed and neutered and re-released into the neighborhood. Two of those cats from the neighborhood now sleep on our bed at night. So and I have three more that are currently showing up on my front porch the both the females are spayed. I'll admit the male came from somewhere else. I haven't trapped him yet, but I figure every female in our neighborhood has been spayed, so he has to go somewhere else if he wants to make kittens. So yeah, I'm a bit obsessed with cats and have two very adorable tabbies and a tortie, and they were all former feral from our neighborhood.

Speaker 2:

I love that you're bringing them in and giving them like this wonderful place to live. I don't know if you follow our families like social media accounts, but we got a cat last year and this is my first experience with a cat, literally as you're talking, she jumped up on the computer and just about quit this whole interview and then she jumped up on my shoulder and she's perched up here like a pirate. So cats are just really cool. They're just really interesting creatures.

Speaker 3:

They are they're?

Speaker 4:

just cool. Yeah, our latest tabby Polaris. We weren't planning to keep him. I guess you would consider him a foster fail.

Speaker 4:

He was one of the feral in the neighborhood that I hadn't quite gotten around alive trapping yet, because I knew he was friendly. Some of the other neighbors seem to have raised him, so I figured I'm going to try to live trap the more feral ones and then at some point I'll grab him. And then I look out at my front porch one day this was a few years ago and he's sniffing around who we were pretty sure was his daughter, who we hadn't managed to trap yet, and I said that's it, no incest in this neighborhood Walked on the front porch, grabbed him, threw him into the cat condo in our garage. My husband had built a four by eight foot room in our garage with like a full height door and a shelf and we could socialize feral kittens in there. And I threw him in there and called the vet and then I was going to adopt him out because he was very sweet. But he was very sweet, so we wound up with an extra cat.

Speaker 2:

There are feral cats that make their way to our farm. We live just outside of a city, in Redger, alberta, and they come from wherever right and they find our place. We have a shop, like a big kind of quantity thing, and a bunch of little barns and there's chicken coop. So there's always cats showing up, and my father-in-law sounds very much like you, like he scoops up some if he can and domesticates them. So yeah, outdoor cats have a rough go sometimes. So it's nice to.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, we were. We did a lot of adopting out feral kittens for a while. We actually have done a great job trapping cats because we haven't had feral kittens in the neighborhood for probably four years, which I'm very pleased about. But there were times when I was trying to give away kittens so I would come to class and put up a picture of kittens on a slide to show my students to see if I can entice somebody to take them, Because at that point most of my friends that wanted cats already had cats and all of those cats are related. So I would try to get my students to adopt these kittens and they would say, uh, do you have an all white one? Do you have an all black one? They're putting in the request. I'm like we're not breeding cats, we only have patched tabbies, because that's what this neighborhood produces. The Tomcat is a patched tabbie.

Speaker 2:

That's all you get. This is the cat. This is the cat. There are no cat requests, right.

Speaker 4:

There's only yeah, there are just variations on brown and gray and white patched tabbies. There's nothing else here.

Speaker 2:

I'm sure they're just sweet, the sweetest cats. It doesn't really matter what color they are.

Speaker 4:

They're mostly sweet.

Speaker 2:

I mean they're trouble-making, they're cats oh okay, that goes without saying. Cats are. They range from occasional troublemakers to. You got to keep one eye on this cat all the time because you don't know what it's up to.

Speaker 4:

To some point my husband and I thought we should buy a leather couch. I have no idea why we thought that.

Speaker 1:

Did you get a wooden?

Speaker 4:

It was eventually held together by gaff tape and now I think it's under the deck on the backyard, and we bought the not as nice looking but a less destructible couch.

Speaker 2:

We got a new lazy boy couch and that was the one thing we asked the guy. Because he's like, oh yeah, there's lifetime warranty with these because they're kind of expensive. Right, I was like, does that lifetime warranty protect against cats? And he's like, yeah, absolutely, and I'm like I'm going to need that in writing. He's like, well, it's like inferred. And I'm like, no, you're going to like make a special clause called the cat clause clause.

Speaker 4:

I was about to say. As soon as you said clause, I'm like that's a total plan.

Speaker 2:

And they did so. Ginger is scratched. Yeah, ginger has scratched up the one side of the couch by now and all he said is we just got to give them the call and they'll come get it and replace the outside somehow. So I don't know, we'll see.

Speaker 4:

I totally need to talk to your sales guy because we have a lot of people who are like we have cats and we have furniture and we generally have destroyed furniture.

Speaker 2:

Doc, we usually ask our guests to share a super fact. You already mentioned yours. I was about fish regenerating their hearing you mentioned you had a PSA to go with it. What's that oh?

Speaker 4:

right. The PSA is that fish can regenerate their hearing, but we can't. So where are your plugs? It shows, I guess. The other super fact is I am a hearing scientist married to a drummer and a sound guy, so you never know when a show might break out or the next big gig is coming. Carry earplugs.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, man, concerts are so loud. I, back in the day when I was young, we're whippersnapper going to. You know what? Did I go to? The offspring, probably. I went to the. I don't know if you've heard the band offspring in green. I have went to a couple of those shows. They're really loud but I had earplugs, so good idea which is good, right, and young whippersnapper, come on, I'm.

Speaker 4:

I'm not going to say how old I am, but I've been a professor for a while and I'm still out for music, usually at least a few times.

Speaker 2:

Nice, yeah, what can I ask us a really quick, fun question what's? What's one of the best live shows you've been to that comes atop your head.

Speaker 4:

Last summer I took my childhood, one of my childhood best friends and her 16 year old daughter. We met in Denver, colorado, and went to see Tedeshi Trucks at Red Rocks and I'd never been to a show at Red Rocks and the venue lives up and surpasses every expectation of gorgeous outdoor venue. Overlooking Denver. There was cloud to cloud, lightning, there were fireworks as the sun was going down and Tedeshi Trucks, his husband and wife, who each had their own bands, so rocked up blues combined bands. I've heard them before. They absolutely killed it that night.

Speaker 2:

They're coming to Edmonton. I just Googled it. I'm sorry I haven't heard of this band.

Speaker 4:

If you like music rock, blues combination she's got an amazing voice Totally recommend it. It was also a ton of fun because my friend's 16 year old daughter plays guitars, played some drums, and you don't see that many women playing guitar. They're a lot of vocalists, and so for her to get to see Susan Tedeshi, not just as an amazing vocalist but just killing it on guitar, was so much fun. To show a teenage girl that women can just kick ass in music just as much as in science or anything else. That's cool.

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm glad I asked, Doc. I appreciate that.

Speaker 4:

Oh, happy to talk music as well. That knew a lot of good shows.

Speaker 2:

Check out the Association of Science Communicators. We'll have some links in our show notes, so you're just one click away from connecting there. Well, this has been an absolute treat, ali. Thank you so much for being our guest today. I did not know where this conversation would go, and the journey has been amazing, so thank you.

Speaker 4:

Thank you so much, jason. This was so much fun to get to talk about science and science, communication and cats and fish and we didn't even and music and we didn't even get to talk about, like, mustangs and motorcycles and all kinds of other fun things, but we got so many of my favorite things into the conversation Sounds like down the road.

Speaker 2:

we need a park too.

Speaker 4:

Or just a road trip.

Speaker 1:

OK, it is time for Storytime with me, Adam. If you don't know what Storytime is, Storytime is when we talk about stories that have happened within the past one or two weeks. Dad, do you have a story? I do.

Speaker 2:

It's not really about one of our pets. It's about our de facto pet, the beaver. We had a wicked cold spell this last week. It's just starting to warm up and when it gets really cold. I think I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried about the beaver and I know Chris has been worried about the beaver. And on one of our walks down through the creek the beaver's still doing OK. He or she chewed up through the ice, made a little beaver hole. There's a whole bunch of beaver tracks everywhere.

Speaker 2:

I don't know. It was kind of the light was fading and I decided not to really decide to track the beaver. But it's good to see that Norbert is alive and kicking through that cold spell. I guess what that means is that this could be the last cold spell of the winter and we could be on to the full on melt. And when that happens Norbert's going to be around doing beaver stuff and I'm super excited for that. I'm super excited to get more footage of him and see what his dams do to the creek and how they change the water down there. As we said before, it doesn't really affect anybody if it's damned up a bit and we're just really happy to have the beaver on our property. That's my pet story, the facto pet story.

Speaker 1:

Mom, do you have a story?

Speaker 3:

I sure do. My story has to do with a gremlin named Ginger. We should have named her Gremlin. She's a ghoul. I bought a brand new bag of cat food for her and I brought it home. And you know what? All her other cat food bags go right by her water and it gets closed with a little closer from Ikea, no problems. Except there was still some food in her old bag. So I thought, oh, I'll just leave this new bag out on the kitchen table.

Speaker 3:

Mistake number one because Ginger went to the bag, started smelling it and I thought, oh, that's so cute, she's just smelling through the bag for her food. No, no, she chewed a giant hole in the side of the bag and I thought, well, this is terrible. So she did that and then I was like oh well, I guess I have to put the Ikea Clothes are on there faster. So I put that clothes it's like a clothespin thing on the bag. But then I don't know what it is about this food. It's the same kind, but she was knocking it over while it was by the water because she wanted to get the food out. So then I thought to myself self this is dumb.

Speaker 3:

So I put the bag of food in the pantry. And, lo and behold, the pantry door was open a little bit and she went in the pantry and I thought, boy, it's awfully quiet. No, she was sticking her paw in the hole in the bag and scooping out little pieces of food and eating them on the floor in the pantry. And I said Ginger, what are you doing? And she just meowed because that's what she does. She's super cute, her paws are like little mittens and she was scooping out the food. So now I guess I have to keep her food in the pantry, because she's also a gremlin and that's my story.

Speaker 1:

I'm trying to think of stories that I have. I've been studying for my second round of midterms. So I've got anthropology and biology next week and then I have chemistry and my math midterms the week after that, so not excited for those. So if you listened to the podcast recently or not recently, but before this you would know that I told a story about Beaker not letting me put my shoes on.

Speaker 1:

It's gotten a lot worse. She doesn't let me come upstairs anymore. So I come upstairs and she's like bringing me toys and I cuddle with her for a bit and I give her pets and I tell her, oh, am I going to kickups? And I tell her that she's a good girl, but that's not enough. She follows me around and then she cries and then she barks at me and then I pet her and then I cuddle with her a bit more and then I get up and then she starts barking at me again. So I guess I can't even come upstairs without her losing her mind.

Speaker 1:

And then one time I like forgot a few things downstairs and I accidentally took like three trips and Beaker was losing her mind upstairs because she was like, why are you going downstairs and upstairs so many times. But yeah, beaker is not letting me come upstairs anymore and she can't stand me leaving the house, not sure why. This morning the septic alarm was on and it was driving them crazy. So I plugged in the thing that pumps out the septic tank and that made it better. But Beaker was still losing her mind and Bunsen was like all up in my face. But yeah, bunsen and Beaker won't let me leave the house in the morning anymore, pretty much, which is kind of it's a fun game they're smelling my foot.

Speaker 1:

They do miss me. Beaker is why are you smelling my foot? Get your face out of there, stop it, anyway. Okay, that's my story. Beaker's behavior has not really changed. She's a little bit more cuddly than she's been, but she's a good cat. Yeah, anyway, that's my story and that's the last story of story time. Oh, my goodness, thank you so much for listening to my section of the podcast and I hope you had a nice day and I hope to see you on the next podcast episode. Bye-bye.

Speaker 2:

That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the science podcast. Special thanks to Dr Allison Coffin, who was our guest this week at what A Hoot. What an amazing conversation. Thanks, doc. We'd also like to give a shout out to the Paw Pack. The top tier gets their name read as a perk, and if you want to support us and keep the science podcast free, there is a link in the show notes to support us. All right, chris, take it away.

Speaker 3:

Bianca Hyde, mary Ryder, tracy Domingu, susan Wagner, andrew Lynn, helen Chin, Tracy Halberg, amy C, jennifer Smathers, laura Stephenson, holly Birch, brenda Clark, Ann Yuchita, peggy McKeel, terry Adam, debbie Anderson, sandy Brimer, tracy Linebaugh, mary Ann McNally, Fun Lisa, shelly Smith, julie Smith, diane Allen, breanne Haas, linda Sherry, carol McDonald, Catherine Jordan, courtney Proven, donna Craig, wendy, diane Mason and Luke Liz Button, Kathy Zercher and Ben Rathart.

Speaker 2:

For science, empathy and cuteness.