Uncanny Science

**Blair Bazdarich** (0:00)
This is Twist, This Week in Science episode number 1067, recorded on Wednesday, July 15th, 2026
Uncanny Science. Hi everyone, I'm Blair Bazdarich, and today we will fill your head with the cinema, screen time for primates, and koala cures.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
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**Blair Bazdarich** (0:36)
Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The only constant in this world is change. Friendships fade, children grow up, historical knowledge shifts, the hip becomes passe. Decay, consumption, conflict, they are all part of life. In many ways, it is what makes life truly beautiful. Yes, nothing stays the same. Nothing is forever. Well, except for maybe a certain podcast, perhaps. One that persists year after year, dedicated to the dissemination of the latest science news. The players may rotate, the format may shift, but one thing is for sure. You can count on This Week in Science. Coming up next.
Good science to you, Minions. Everyone listening, watching, everyone joining me here for science today.
I'm Blair. Welcome to This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us. We have a great show ahead. It is perhaps a little bit abbreviated. I am the only host, once thrice of us, now just one. Kiki is off doing amazing things. She will be back, of course. Our dear Justin is still just living his best life in a lab in the evenings, or is it early mornings now? I don't know.
But regardless, you'll see us all again at various moments. We come in and out, but we are all dedicated to this wonderful show called This Week in Science.
This week, I actually brought four stories, one that is not part of the Animal Corner, and then three for the Animal Corner proper. If you are joining us for the very first time, the Animal Corner is my bag. I'm a zoologist.
I brought stories about, as I mentioned, the cinema culture and what it does to your body, the Uncanny Valley for primates, koala cures, and a new relationship in the ocean that we did not know about before. Caught on tape. So anyway, as we jump into the show here, I want to remind you that subscribing to Twist is the best way you can support us. That you can subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform or on YouTube or Facebook if you enjoy looking at our beautiful faces. And you can also just search for This Week in Science or go to twist.org and click on any of the various icons for your favorite way to consume media. But now it's time for science. Now usually we would have at least two, if not three of us here, sometimes four, if there's a guest, and we could all kind of ask questions and have a discussion about these various articles that we brought today, pieces of science news. Since it is just me today, I'm going to tell you what I learned. And I'm going to be looking to the chat to all of you who are listening or watching live to let me know if you have any questions or anything that you want to add about these particular stories. So I'll be monitoring that. But otherwise, you can always hit us up via email or social media, more on that at the end of the show, and you can let me know what you thought. But for now, let me go ahead and jump into my first story. So I'm actually going to kind of tell you what the log line for it is, like what the main crux of it is, and then I'm going to read you the very last sentence of the article, because I think it really gets to the crux of things, and I know that this is like I'm jumping all over the place. But the idea of this new piece of research out of Tokyo, Institute of Science, Tokyo in Japan, they have conducted the first longitudinal study examining the association between cultural engagement and physiological age, and they did their best to control for unmeasured, confounding factors that do not change over time, things like socioeconomic status and stuff like that.
And as you might imagine, overall they found that cultural engagement, going to the cinema, museum, or theater, is associated with a younger physiological age. I'll get into how they did this in a minute, but I'm hoping that most of you had the immediate thought that I had when I first read this article, which is, is the cultural connection making them younger, or do they have more cultural connections because they feel younger? If you feel bad, you're not going to want to go to the theater. If you feel young and vibrant and healthy, you want to go to the theater. So I do think that there is a potential for the inverse causation here. And so this is one of the things that one of the researchers said at the end is, this study is observational. There is no firm conclusions that can be drawn about cause and effect. We acknowledge that the findings could be explained by reverse causation, whereby individuals in better health are more able to take part in cultural activities. And so that was what I thought of immediately.