More Fun Than Fossilized Feces

Kiki Sanford (0:00)

This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 1079, recorded on Wednesday, October 14th, 2026 More fun than fossilized feces.

Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and today we will fill your head with stingers, spiders, and schizophrenia. But first, thanks to our amazing Patreon sponsors for their generous support of Twist. You can become a part of the Patreon community at patreon.com/thisweek in Science. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.

We ask that you listen carefully and think about what you hear on this show. You will not be tested explicitly, but information learned from this program might enable evidence-based decision-making, if applied to situations properly. Remain curious, ask further questions, never assume one source is enough. However, we are glad that you have chosen to be here for This Week in Science. Coming up next.

Blair Bazdarich (1:48)

Good science to you, Kiki.

Kiki Sanford (1:51)

And a good science to you too, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. Back again to talk about all the science that we thought was important enough to bring to the show this week. There's a lot more science out there. There always is. So many discoveries. No one can cover all of it.

But we like, you know, the good, the bad, the fun. I do not have fossilized feces for the show tonight, in case people were wondering. No, that's just, yeah, sorry. I just wanted people to be interested, you know.

Blair Bazdarich (2:30)

That's advertising, Kiki.

Kiki Sanford (2:33)

No, it's more fun than fossilized feces. Okay. You know, we're going to have more fun tonight.

Blair Bazdarich (2:39)

Yeah, fair. So just without bringing the full story, they found some fossilized poop?

Kiki Sanford (2:44)

Yes, there were fossils. There were skulls, there were fossils, there was fossilized feces, and, you know, science ensued.

Blair Bazdarich (2:53)

Great.

Kiki Sanford (2:55)

You're welcome. Sounds good. For the show tonight, I'm going to start the show off with the kind of climate and public health news. So it's like the reality check right off the top. But then I've got stories about quantum computers. I've got some old dogs. I've got cephalopod brains and schizophrenic guts.

And I cannot wait to talk about all these stories, especially the cephalopod brains. OK, I know you'll like it. Blair, what is in the animal corner?

Blair Bazdarich (3:33)

I have bee stingers. I have reef sounds. I have sea spiders and I have dead elephants.

Kiki Sanford (3:40)

No.

Blair Bazdarich (3:42)

Natural causes.

Kiki Sanford (3:44)

And hopefully it's like a happy story. It is actually. Yes.

Blair Bazdarich (3:49)

It's a neat story. It's not, again, natural causes, not human cause dead elephants. So it's like a good circle of life stuff.

Kiki Sanford (3:57)

Because usually when you're talking about dead elephants in the animal corner, it's about poaching or conservation or something.

Blair Bazdarich (4:04)

No, this is not.

Kiki Sanford (4:06)

Oh.

Interesting. It's got a twist. All right, everyone. Well, we are going to jump into the episode. But before we do, I want you to know that if you are not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us where we stream live weekly Wednesdays around 8 p.m. Pacific time-ish, every week-ish on Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. So we go out on those three platforms. Yeah, I know. It's a lot of ish. There's a lot of ish going on in the live version of the show. But the recordings are on those platforms as well. So if you miss the ish, you can catch it later. We are also on a lot of social media platforms, like Blue Sky, Instagram, what is it, Threads, Facebook. This Week in Science, also at Twist Science. You can look for our accounts and be notified when new episodes are coming out, be reminded about stories that we've talked about. There's fun stuff to share all the time. Additionally, our website is twist.org. This Week in Science is at twisttwis.org. That's where you can find links to show notes and also to our Zazzle store and our Patreon community. We are listener supported, so those links are incredibly important for us all.

Did I do it? Did I do it all?

Blair Bazdarich (5:36)

You talked about all the ish that's fit to dish. Yeah. So let's do it.

Kiki Sanford (5:42)

It's time for the science. Okay. Okay. Jumping in, jumping in, jumping in. We are going to start, like I said, with the reality checks, with the news of what's kind of happening in the world. This week, we have news of a climactic nature.

So coming out of Oregon State University, which some scientists at Oregon State University were lead on a report, the 2026 State of the Climate Report, Challenges and Opportunities, that was published in Bioscience this week. This report covers aspects of what's going wrong with the climate. And there have been a couple of stories that additionally came out that are kind of covered in this report a bit. There was a recent doubling of global warming rate. So what does this mean? This means that the rate, the speed at which we are approaching a permanent increase of one and a half degrees Celsius over the baseline temperature that was acknowledged a couple of decades ago.