The Science Pawdcast

Episode 20 Season 7: Exoplanet Pics, Plastic to Painkillers, and Dogs Detecting Pregnancy

• Jason and Kris Zackowski • Season 7 • Episode 20

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We explore groundbreaking science developments from space discovery to environmental innovation and canine intuition. The James Webb Space Telescope has directly imaged an exoplanet for the first time, marking a pivotal moment in our quest to understand distant worlds.

• JWST captures first direct image of an exoplanet orbiting star TWA7, 111 light-years away
• The Saturn-sized planet orbits 52 astronomical units from its star within a gap in the star's dusty debris disk
• Scientists used a coronagraph to block the star's light, enabling them to see the much dimmer planet
• Researchers genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to convert plastic waste into acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol
• The bacteria achieved 92% conversion efficiency in 48 hours, offering potential solutions for plastic pollution and sustainable pharmaceutical production
• Though promising, this process is not yet scalable for industrial applications
• Study reveals 65% of participants noticed behavior changes in their dogs during pregnancy
• 27% reported these changes occurred before they knew they were pregnant
• Dogs showed increased attention-seeking, guarding behavior, and anxiety around other dogs
• Canines can detect changes in human biochemistry, emotions, and scent during pregnancy

If your dog detected your pregnancy before you knew, we'd love to hear your story! Check out our Patreon at the link in show notes to support the podcast and join our Paw Pack community.

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Speaker 1:

Hello science enthusiasts. I'm Jason Zukoski. And I'm Chris Zukoski, we're the pet parents of Bunsen, beaker, bernoulli and Ginger.

Speaker 2:

The science animals on social media.

Speaker 1:

If you love science.

Speaker 2:

And you love pets.

Speaker 1:

You've come to the right spot, so put on your safety glasses and hold on to 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. We're on holidays, chris.

Speaker 2:

We sure are. We started actually at the end of June. I went to the bitter end of June, but you definitely had a few extra days off than me.

Speaker 1:

I did. As I mentioned, I banked a couple days doing these science shows for the district, which are, quite frankly, a ton of extra work. So the deal they made is we can't give you any time off now, but at the very end of the year you can take a couple personal days for free and on us. I thought that was cool. It's not a bad deal.

Speaker 2:

It isn't a bad deal, but the main thing is that the kids got to see Amazing Science.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And speaking of Amazing Science, we've got three articles this week, Chris. One is about the new development from the JWST, which is very exciting, and the other is the possibility of turning our plastic waste into painkillers Cool. And then the third one is do dogs really detect when people are pregnant? Now, we didn't have a dog for both of our children and then when you were expecting, there wasn't any dogs around really, so this will be interesting to see.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm interested to find out a little bit more.

Speaker 1:

All right, let's hop to it. There's no time like Science Time. This week in science news, the first of two articles is about space and the JWST. So every summer I buy books and then I usually have a book I've been waiting to read all year. And the book I read in basically a day and a half is Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and it's all about space and planets and other stars. So I saw this news article that jumped right out at me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you were gobbling up that book and you kept telling me about it, about how awesome it was and how much you enjoyed it, which I delight in your joy and you were talking about it turning into a movie. And then you watched the trailer and you're like, oh, I wonder how they're going to do this part and I wonder how they're going to do this part. And then another part came on the trailer and you're like, yeah, so you're very excited about this series, for sure.

Speaker 1:

You're very excited about this series for sure. Yeah, I'm very excited. It's a book unlike any I've read. It starts off like an interstellar slash Martian book, meaning that there's a lone protagonist who has, I guess, an interstellar. There was a couple people, but anyways like a lone, very small crew or a single person and they're all by themselves and they have to survive to save humanity or save themselves. But it definitely takes a big twist about, I don't know a quarter of the way into the book, which is the twist is just amazing. It is very cool is that we have known for many years, chris, that there are planets beyond our own in our solar system and our telescopes have had to use other methods to detect them. One is the transit method, where they have to kind of wait for a planet to go in front of a star and then it blots out the light, and then they use calculations to calculate that it's an exoplanet the light, and then they use calculations to calculate that it's an exoplanet.

Speaker 2:

But for the first time ever, the JWST like took a picture directly imaged an exoplanet, which is wild and this discovery was reported on June 25th in nature, and what they found is the planet orbits the young star called TWA7, which is not near to us. It's 111 light years away and it has a mass that is roughly equivalent to Saturn, and Saturn's my favorite planet.

Speaker 1:

And yes got.

Speaker 2:

It's got a ring on it, many rings, and the mass is about one third of Jupiter. Now it orbits actually quite far 52 astronomical units. And an AU or an astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and the sun. So it's 52 times farther from its star than Earth is from our Sun. And how they were able to see it is, it appears, within a gap between the first and second ring of a dusty debris disk surrounding the star. So they like to look at newly formed stars with the dusty debris to be able to maybe see these exoplanets.

Speaker 1:

That's one of their strategies and taking an actual picture like a direct image is extremely hard, because stars like our star are wicked bright and planets are so much smaller and they don't emit their own light. They reflect light, so they're just drowned out by their own star's light. So here's the cool thing how did they then take a picture? The JWST has a chronograph. This is like a light blotter it blocks out a star's light and they can look at things that don't emit light nearby, and the team looked at these young stars from pole on, so that means above the pole, and that gives them a clearer view of the planetary systems.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, jason, it was like a bird's eye view to give them a clearer view of the potential planetary system system. Twa7 is a star that is 6.4 million years old which, although you might think wow, that's old, it's actually quite young when you're talking about stars in space, and its debris disk contains three distinct rings, and what the James Webb Space Telescope detected was a faint object in one of the gaps, which alerted them to say, hey, maybe that's potentially an exoplanet.

Speaker 1:

But they don't want to be wrong.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they didn't want to be wrong, they want to rule out other possibilities. So the object could have been a background galaxy.

Speaker 1:

So the object could have been a background galaxy, but their calculations showed only a 0.34% chance that it was anything other than a planet. And they're pretty confident because other scientists that do the simulations they ran a simulation of what a planet would look like inside this dusty disk and it closely matched what JWST spit out. Good job, simulators. So the big deal, because this success really opens up the sky, or opens up the universe to discovering other exoplanets by direct imaging. I've talked to scientists on the show before and I've asked them will we directly image an exoplanet? And they weren't so sure. There'll be other telescopes we launch in the future, but they didn't think JWST would be able to do it and that's why this is turning heads and making all the space nerds like myself very excited. Yeah, and I guess if we ever have to send Ryan Gosling to the star to save ours, we know there's some planets orbiting it hey, there you go.

Speaker 2:

That's a nod to the book that jason was reading. Yeah, ryan gosling is rylan.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, ryan gosling is rylan.

Speaker 2:

Grace in hail mary yeah, all right, that's our first that's our first science news item.

Speaker 1:

Our second news item is turning waste into painkillers. I saw this one. It sounded too good to be true, and it maybe is, but it is such a wild way to get rid of plastic I thought we could talk about it.

Speaker 2:

We sure can. Now we're going to start by saying that this is not for the near future. This is something for the distant future. So don't expect that your plastic is going to biodegrade into Tylenol tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, please don't dig a hole, throw all your plastic crap in there and then expecting to get some headache medicine out of that pit in the day or two. It's ways down the road, you're right.

Speaker 2:

It is way down the road, but it's exciting in terms of pharmaceuticals and science.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So the main discovery here is the tagline scientists genetically engineered E coli, which we've all heard of before type of bacteria, obviously and they were able to turn plastic waste into acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol and Panadol. And this is relatively recent it's published in June 23rd in Nature Chemistry.

Speaker 2:

Jason, you know what I'm going to. Let you break down the complex science and how the process works, because you're able to talk about this maybe more accurately than I can all these different types of amino acids that are possibly going to be changed, and that's what they did.

Speaker 1:

So they modified these E coli so they could no longer produce PABA, which is para-aminobenzoic acid. This is a precursor, so something you need before you make folic acid, and the only way the bacteria could survive was if they got PABA from some other alternative chemical route was if they got PABA from some other alternative chemical route. So they set up these bacteria to basically die unless they evolved to eat some other chemicals. And the other chemical that they looked at was the Lawson rearrangement. This is a reaction that transforms nitrogen-bearing molecules into PABA. So nitrogen-bearing molecules is the plastic and PABA is the thing that the bacteria need to make folic acid and other stuff. Otherwise they die.

Speaker 2:

Just to clarify they gave the bacteria a compound that became PABA only if the Lawson rearrangement occurred. So the bacteria survived, which proved that they successfully carried out this chemical transformation.

Speaker 1:

Some didn't make it and the ones that did, they moved on to the next round. Okay, all right so how does this Off the Island Chris?

Speaker 2:

Survivor.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so how does converting plastic into these precursor chemicals work?

Speaker 1:

Okay, so you take PET, that's polyethylene terephthalate, that's what's in plastic bottles. It's the precursor needed for this rearrangement, and these E coli that were engineered converted this pet chemical into PABA, so they were able to take this plastic thing and turn it into PABA, which is what they needed to survive. Now, with additional gene modifications, the E coli were then able to convert PABA into acetaminophen. So that's the big jump. So they had, like survivor round A sink or swim bacteria. Can they make PABA? They did, and then sink or swim round. Two, they modified a second round of E coli that turned that PABA into acetaminophen.

Speaker 2:

The other word that the study talks about is paracetamol, and I think that's another word for acetaminophen.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's the acetaminophen. Is paracetamol. Yeah, the bacteria did great 92% of the PET-derived precursor was turned into acetaminophen in 48 hours. That's pretty good. That is not bad.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it's significant, jason, because this process offers potentially a more sustainable method for producing painkillers, because currently, paracetamol is manufactured using fossil fuel-derived chemicals.

Speaker 1:

Technically, this way it will be as well, because plastics do come from fossil fuels, but they'll be recycled, right, we're not going to run out of plastic. There's so much plastic waste everywhere, everywhere, yeah.

Speaker 2:

You want to do plastic waste everywhere, everywhere.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you want to do potential environment benefits.

Speaker 2:

Sure. So this study and this breakthrough in science has environmental benefits, such as reducing that plastic pollution and reducing our dependency on fossil fuels, and it does represent a new way to upcycle plastic waste into valuable pharmaceutical compounds. But there is challenges to create this on an industrial scale. Right, it goes all the way up. The current method of breaking down the plastic is not yet scalable for industrial use, and this breakthrough could inspire developments of a more scalable and sustainable plastic degradation techniques in the future. But right now they just can't scale it up.

Speaker 1:

No, we're talking about a tiny amount of bacteria and a tiny amount of plastic. A few cultures of bacteria does not make a solution for the plastic waste around us, but it's a start and, just like any snowball rolling down a hill to become an avalanche, you do have to start somewhere.

Speaker 2:

You have to start somewhere, and that's what you always tell me You're like you just have to start.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I tell the kids that starting is the hardest part. You just have to start. Yeah, yeah, I tell the kids that Starting is the hardest part. You just have to start. And who knows, we might be talking about this in five or 10 years and you have a little plastic, a little bottle of Tylenol, and it's this Tylenol was made from plastic or something on it Recycled plastic. That's crazy.

Speaker 2:

And it's contained in a recycled plastic bottle.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, there we go, upcycle that back into painkillers.

Speaker 2:

Wow, the cycle is endless.

Speaker 1:

It is. Hopefully it does end, because plastic's not so good. We need it, though, but we need a way to recycle it. All right, that's science news for this week. This week in pet science, we're going to talk about pregnancy and puppies.

Speaker 2:

But not pregnant puppies.

Speaker 1:

We could talk about pregnant puppies, but that's not what this is about.

Speaker 2:

It isn't.

Speaker 1:

I know people see, remember when we got Beaker people were like, oh, gonna have bunsen beaker puppies. We're like no, we are not equipped for that speaker was a bit of a handful. Can you imagine 12 Bernoulli puppies? That would be a lot because he was a lot as a puppy.

Speaker 2:

He was a lot as a puppy and he's a lot as a dog now, but he's a good boy. He's such a good boy but he is so mischievous Like unbelievable.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, all right, let's get back to people. I don't know if you've seen those touching videos on social media where a woman finds out she's pregnant and the dog starts acting differently. Or they have the story of the dog resting its head on her belly and then, all of a sudden, there's a baby. It's very heartwarming.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I just actually saw one on the dodo.

Speaker 1:

On the dodo yeah. Yeah, two days ago the dodo on the dodo yeah, yeah, two days ago and, of course, I shed a tear because I love that. It's cute, we might have the wet blanket. Come to the situation chris, aka science, because, um, there was a study done to investigate whether pet dogs do change their behavior when owners become pregnant. Because that is either a myth, an old wild old wives tale, or perhaps it's real. Perhaps it does happen.

Speaker 2:

But I think they have to be careful looking at the different factors and having a real clear control, because then you don't really know what variable is causing the dog to potentially change. What factor is actually predicting these behavior changes?

Speaker 1:

So let's get to the study. Let's talk about that and the methodology. There are 130 participants in the study who were pregnant in the past or were currently pregnant. They used a questionnaire that assessed the dog's behavior before and during pregnancy. They also had cool things like owner dog demographics and how close the person was to the dog, which is important, right.

Speaker 2:

Is that bond between the dog and the owner?

Speaker 1:

What did they find? Chris, Because it's cool.

Speaker 2:

Well, 65% of participants reported a change in their dog's behavior during pregnancy and about 27% said the behavior change happened before they even knew that they were pregnant.

Speaker 1:

What did the dogs do? Like I've never been around this, I don't know.

Speaker 2:

I don't know so the behavior categories that they looked at to increase during pregnancy, some significant increases were found in attention seeking behavior, guarding around familiar people, guarding around unfamiliar people, and fear and anxiety toward other dogs, and there was no significant change reported in fear or anxiety towards the owner themselves. Interestingly, some predictors of the behavior change there was no significant effect from the dog owner demographics or the pregnancy symptoms or complications that may have arisen and, interesting, no significant effects from the relationship closeness, according to the scores of the survey so when they looked at what.

Speaker 1:

So that's interesting. So there appears to be a greater, like a statistical probability that dogs will react to pregnancy or even before. Um, you yourself know you're, but why do dogs do that? And I think if you've listened to this show long enough, you probably know dogs can detect changes in our emotions and our health extremely well. So if you are acting differently or you have a different, you're sweating different, your biochemistry is different. Dogs can detect that you might. I don't know if I don't want to point any fingers, but sometimes people who are pregnant might be a little bit emotional and have some mood swings due to hormonal changes. Behaviors change and, of course, those volatile organic chemicals change in pregnancy and dogs can pick that up. All of these are supported. Dogs mirror human emotional stress. Dogs have olfactory clues that they're cued into. You can train a dog just about any dog to detect when you're low in blood sugar. They can detect how you smell different when you have less sugar in your blood, which is wild.

Speaker 2:

So there's not a big stretch of the imagination to know these creatures who are so in tune to us and how we act and how we smell, could detect something like that. The study comes with some participants, mostly women aged 25 to 34, mainly located in the UK, and the dogs were mostly mixed breeds, evenly matched male and female, and most were sterilized, and the majority of dogs were aged two to four during the time of the pregnancy and they were owned by the owner for one to three years, and 77% had no specialized training in sensing all those things that you were talking about.

Speaker 1:

I guess one thing we should just mention before we wrap up is there's a self-reported bias. Whenever you get people to do a survey or questionnaire, so probably what they could do in the future and what maybe they're looking at doing, is you just you have some people who are perhaps trying to have children, so they don't know exactly when they are going to be pregnant, but they are actively trying to be pregnant and then you just have some dogs sniff out some sweat or some clothing or see if the dogs and some other dogs could detect if the woman was pregnant or not. But then that doesn't change. That dog wouldn't necessarily be around that person to see how they would change emotionally. The dog could probably detect the pregnancy. That would be a fun test, but not necessarily you wouldn't have that dog in the house because you'd have to have some kind of training for that.

Speaker 2:

But, Jason, the practical application of a dog being the pregnancy tester. You probably should go to the store and get a pregnancy test. I know, the dog isn't necessarily the most accurate predictor.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it would also spoil it right If some dog you have like out in public and there's like a dog and you're like, oh, what's that dog? It's the pregnancy detecting dog. You're pregnant. That would be an awkward time at the mall.

Speaker 2:

Maybe exciting, maybe shocking. Who knows right, who knows? You never know.

Speaker 1:

Here's the thing Since a lot of people listen to the show, let us know if your dog, at the time when you were expecting or before, acted differently. If the dog seemed to detect that you were pregnant, that would be cool to know, just on a our case basis. All right, that's pet science for this week. That's it for this week show. Thanks for coming back week after week to support us. We love that we have such a great core audience that listens to our show. One of the groups we would love to, one of the groups we always like to shout out, is the Top Dogs. That's the top tier of our Patreon community, the Paw Pack. We would love your support there as well. So check out the show notes, chris. Let's hear those names.

Speaker 2:

Amelia Fetting, rhi Oda, carol Hainel, jennifer Challen, linnea Janik, karen Chronister, vicky Otero, christy Walker, sarah Bram, wendy, diane Mason and Luke Helen Chin, elizabeth Bourgeois, marianne McNally, catherine Jordan, shelley Smith, laura Steffensen, tracy Leinbach, anne Uchida, heather Burback, kelly and cuteness.