A (1:52)

Quo.

B (1:53)

No missed calls, no missed customers. Insects are the quiet engineers of our ecosystems, pollinating plants, recycling nutrients, and sustaining food webs. But years of habitat loss and pesticide use have pushed a lot of species to the brink. Protecting these insects means giving nature a chance to rebalance, restoring wildflowers and native habitats. I'll talk with Dr. Harland Patch about how we can bring the buzz back to our skies. And at the same time, there are some insects we need to avoid. So tuck your pants into your socks or douse yourself in Bug spray. Because we're also going to talk about Lyme disease, that mysterious illness that's transmitted by the pesky tick. But before we get into all things insects, let's talk about genetically modified horses. Because it turns out scientists recently created the first genetically edited horses. They did this to make the horses faster so they can play polo, of all things. I'm Dr. Samantha Amin, and this episode of Curiosity Weekly is all about how humans are reshaping the wild. There's no shortage of controversies when it comes to CRISPR technology. But the latest comes from a somewhat surprising the world of Argentinian polo. Let me explain. An Argentinian nonprofit research organization called Chiron Biotech created the first genetically edited horses in using crispr. They did this to make the horses faster so they can play polo. What's more, the horses are also clones of a prize winning horse, making them extra interesting when it comes to considering the ethics and future use of these types of technologies. CRISPR Cas9 is the gene editing technology commonly just called CRISPR. It's like a genetic scissor that can make precise targeted cuts in DNA and even slot new instructions in. There are a ton of ways this can be used to treat or prevent genetic diseases in humans like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell. So the researchers in Argentina used CRISPR on the cloned horse fetuses to tweak their myostatin. It's a gene that helps regulate muscle development. The goal of the changes was to lift the brakes so that mussels could grow beyond the limits of their genetics, giving you horses that are faster and stronger than the original horse they were cloned from. Now you can imagine that this news didn't go over very well in the Argentinian polo scene, with traditional breeders arguing that genetically edited horses have an unfair advantage in the sport. The Argentine Polo association actually banned gene edited horses from competition, but curiously, they still allow cloned horses to compete. While they may not be able to compete in polo for now, the CRISPR horses do signal a wider use of gene editing when it comes to animals. There are a handful of companies that are already using CRISPR to alter livestock's genomes in the hopes of creating more efficient ways to make animal products and increase resistance to disease. For example, there's certain cattle that have been altered so that their hair is shorter and slicker, making them more tolerant to hotter climates. Yay for climate resilience, I guess. Overall, while CRISPR is really precise, there are still chances for off target effects if these changes made to animals are heritable There could be huge effects on wild populations and maybe even the humans who might eat them. There's a lot of hope when it comes to crispr for sure. But for now, I hope the genetically edited baby horse clones get to enjoy their pastures and don't have to worry too hard about their polo careers.

A (5:31)

Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never look so good.

B (5:38)

You look the same.

A (5:39)

But with this camera everything looks better. Especially me.

B (5:42)

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

A (5:44)

Selfies check please.

C (5:46)

With Verizon, new and existing customers can get the new iPhone 17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever. Plus a new iPad and Apple One with eligible phone trade in and unlimited ultimate best 5G sweetmetrics data United States 1 East 2025 All Rights Reserve, Trade in and additional terms apply for all offers. See verizon.com for details.

A (6:01)

Tonight's Meal Tilapia Surprise with boiled cabbage. Begin cooking steps 1 through 50 now.

B (6:06)

Are you kidding me? Making dinner shouldn't feel like doing piece puzzle with Blue Apron's new One Pan, assemble and bake meals. The hard part's already done. Pre chopped ingredients, zero stress. Just assemble, bake and enjoy. No complicated steps, no mountain of dishes. Try assemble and Bake today. Get 20% off your first two orders with code APRON20. Terms and conditions apply. Visit BlueApron.com terms for more.

C (6:31)

If you love to travel, Capital One has a rewards credit card that's perfect for you. With the Capital One Venture X card, you earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy. Plus you get premium benefits at a collection of luxury hotels when you book on Capital One Travel. And with Venture X you get access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. Open up a world of travel possibilities with a Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet?

A (6:57)

Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See capital1.com for details. You've worked hard to build your business. Simplisafe helps you protect it with SimpliSafe for Business, AI powered cameras watch over your entry points and instantly alert live monitoring agents. They can deter intruders before they get inside. It's protection built for growing companies. 24. 7 monitoring, no contracts and a 60 day money back guarantee. To get 50% off your new system, go to simplisafe.com podcast. That's simplisafe.com podcast for 50% off. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.

B (7:34)

The decline of insect populations is a major issue Our world's facing. About a third of the world's food relies on insects that are pollinators, making their downturn a major threat to our ecosystems and global food supply. Now we hear people say, save the bees. But with habitat destruction, pesticide use and biodiversity loss, climate change, how do we really do that? And is it only the bees? That's why I'm speaking to Dr. Harlan Patch, who's an assistant research professor at Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. Pollination is one of our world's most important ecological processes. So we'll get into what helping pollinators actually means and how all hope is not lost. Welcome to the show, Harlan.

A (8:17)

Thanks for having me.

B (8:18)

Okay, first things first. What does rewilding really mean, especially when it comes to restoring bee populations? And then a follow up will be, how does that differ from, like, more traditional conservation approaches like building bee gardens or installing habitats?

A (8:35)

So rewilding is usually used with the idea of putting things out in the natural world in places that have low abundance and diversity of species, reestablishing some species and then letting that go. It contrasts with traditional conservation because there's little human intervention after that initial point. The idea is to rebalance communities and let natural processes occur.

B (9:04)

So you're like, you're putting them there and then letting go, letting nature take over from there.

A (9:08)

That's usually the way it's described. I should tell you that in terms of pollinators, that's probably not the best way to do things. Although it's an idea that people have talked about for mammals, and it's a model for large organisms like mammals. But for insects, and certainly for pollinators, it would be something different.

B (9:29)

Oh, can you tell me what now? I gotta know.

A (9:32)

Yeah. So one of the great challenges is, well, if you want to support pollinators, is you should plant more flowering plants. They get their pollen for their protein and lipid, and they get nectar for their carbohydrates from those plants. And so you should just plant more flowering plants. Unfortunately, in most parts of the world, if you just plant flowering plants and walk away, those areas will get invaded by invasive species and also by native plants that are just colonial plants that will eventually sort of, in the eastern United States or someplace like that, lead to succession and turn into forests. So all your flowering plants will go away. So you need to understand the ecosystem you're in to know exactly what to put there. So if you're planting a Midwestern prairie, you certainly would plant it as a prairie, and it would go to Succession as a prairie. But it would take some human management, some burns and other things to make sure that you maintain the species composition that you want. So it's not just like releasing a bunch of deer and the natural world comes back. It does take human management and it depends on your goals.

B (10:36)

Okay, interesting. I have more questions about that based on stuff I've seen online. But first I just want to ask the part about building habitats or bee hotels and houses. Is that a good alternative instead of just doing the flowers everywhere, like these little housing structures?

A (10:54)

You need to consider both. And so when we consider the flowering plants, that's for the nutrition for pollinators, but they also need someplace to live. 70% of our bees live in the ground. We just want to talk about bees. We can talk about many other species. 70% of bees are ground nesting. So you need to have open ground area for those to nest into the ground. 30% about are wood nesting or stem nesting bees. They are often associated with forests. So if you want to have those bees and encourage those bees, they need to have nesting sites. And we know that in many places the old dead standing trees are cut down and humans use those. If you want to have those bees, you should have those trees around or you can build structures which will definitely require management for those bees to live in. So you have to understand again, once again, your habitat and what you're targeting.

B (11:47)

Interesting. Now, what if you live in a more urban area like is and you have limited space, Is there a certain preferred method there compared to, like if you have so much backyard and, I don't know, acre of land, Couldn't be me, I live in Toronto.

A (12:02)

Right.

B (12:02)

That's not the case.

A (12:03)

Yeah, that's a really important point. Yes. We think of the world in a very different place. If you live in the middle of Yellowstone national park, that's different than living in the middle of Toronto. Right. It turns out in urban areas, most of the land around them, of course, been quite disturbed for often very long time, Many centuries in most cases. And so you have to think about that context. It turns out in some places in the world, cities can be more diverse in their bees or their other pollinators than the countryside or the agricultural settings. Particularly because in ag settings there's a lot of inputs, we call those herbicides and pesticides that can be detrimental. Where in cities, people don't really, you know, ubiquitously spray herbicide everywhere, they do use it. So cities also can have a lot of niche places where a lot of pollinators can live. So Cities can turn out to be, depending on what you compare them to, relatively good places that we simply need to add, say more flowering plants, more diversity of plants, or say more bee structures in those areas to help those bees. Yes.

B (13:08)

How does one go about measuring and testing which of these different methods is actually successful over time?

A (13:17)

So the traditional way to do it is if you want to know what insects are there, you walk around with the net or you put, like we put for bees, we use bowls that are colored that the bees will go into. There's all sorts of devices and traps we can use to basically sample the landscape. Our team and others are working on AI enabled devices that can remotely detect and identify species of different kinds of pollinators or different kinds of insects. And so those devices can now in this century be used and put out because they're autonomous and they can be networked and so we can monitor species that way.

B (13:57)

And what do you think about, like, is there a certain bias to what people tend to care more about when it comes to restoring? Like, why do you think this gap exists beyond bees?

A (14:07)

The second most important group of pollinating insects is flies. The flies are very important where it's cold. So the farther north you go, in fact, if you go to the very north part of Canada, that's all you'll have is tons and tons of flies. You go up mountains and at the bottom of the mountain you'll see a lot of bee diversity. Then there's bumblebees. They could go out when it's pretty cold. They're cold adapted. But as you get to the top of the mountain, it's mostly flies. So flies are really important. And most people think of flies as awful creatures, but in fact, many of them are quite beautiful. They mimic bees, they go to flowers and they're colored sort of black and yellow, just like bees. And they're really quite wonderful. So people just naturally don't like insects. So it's really fun for those of us who work on them because we get to talk about really cool insects and wow people and show them really interesting pictures because it's really an unseen world for most people.

B (14:59)

Now I'm really excited because I don't think I've appreciated that enough about flies before. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Again, we always just talk about the bees, which they're very important. But what other unknown insects are we missing in this conversation about pollinators?

A (15:13)

Well, the flies are one, they're a very important group. Other things, of course, butterflies do pollinate. They're also beetle pollinators and there are many say in the tropics they're bat pollinators. And you can find very interesting things on islands. There are lizards that pollinate and very unusual stories, but they're very important across the world. And I should also add that if you care about biodiversity and terrestrial systems on land, you should care about pollinators, because pollinators interaction with flowering plants is what creates the biodiversity we see around us. It's the little machinery that makes it all work. So they're very fundamental to the whole function of biodiversity in terrestrial systems.

B (15:59)

So for trying to maintain this biodiversity then, which I think that is a goal.

A (16:04)

Yes.

B (16:06)

So is it better to kind of focus on the habitat and think about native habitat restoration or these like wildflower patches as you mentioned, or like native flower patches, rather than trying to specifically protect certain populations of insects? Like, is that the better mindset to have?

A (16:26)

I think you need both and I think it's appropriate. So there are very important species that say, live in habitats that are very threatened, that should be protected as individual species. But very broadly speaking, insects do pretty well in the world. The planet is covered in insects. There are a million species we know and maybe up to 7 million, maybe even more species. The best thing to do for pollinators. And there are a lot of things that can affect them, but we know across the world the main thing is just loss of habitat, a decline of flowering plants. And so it's important to conserve those things that we do have and to in places that we don't have those things, like in cities, we should add more flowering plants just as a rule of thumb. And if we can add more native plants because those native plants have co evolved with the pollinators in their area, it's a pretty easy thing to do. And most people can get behind just putting more flowers in the world.

B (17:24)

That's a pretty easy message to make it super easy. What do I search if I'm planting a bunch of flowers, which I'm a home gardener, so I love to plant flowers and plant vegetables, what should I be looking for? Like do I start with seeing what are native flowers to my area and kind of go from there?

A (17:45)

Yeah. So when we talk about putting plants in our gardens or restoring an area or something like that, it gets really sophisticated and complicated very quickly. Way beyond just planting flowers or native plants, you can get very specific all the way. We do a lot of work on which bees like certain flowers and certain nutrition in flowers and all these Things. There are many, many guides and many resources out there. You can come to the center for Pollinator Research at Penn State. We have a lot of list of gardening plants that you can use, both native and non. The rule for non native plants is they can't jump the fence and become invasive there. That's the ones we don't encourage. But there are some that can be good for landscapes, particularly in urban areas. They can live in urban areas pretty well and are easy to manage as well as the list of the native ones. So really what you want to do is go a little crazy. And you need to plant a high diversity of plants, as diverse as you can get them, with lots of shapes and lots of color that bloom throughout the year, and make sure those plants sort of work well together as a group of plants and as you said, appropriate for your area. It's very different if you live in the desert Southwest or you live on the top of a mountain in the Rockies, a very different kind of place. So always think about the place you're in, because your garden is not an island. It's the function of the landscape around you and the things that live in it.

B (19:06)

That's very helpful for me. Thank you. I'm taking those notes for planning my garden next year, so that helps me understand what people like me can do. I'm curious to hear more of what people like you like expert entomologists and ecologists. What are you all researching to understand how we can better support pollinators?

A (19:25)

Well, because we live at a time when there's a lot of consciousness about pollinators and insect declines more broadly, and there are real problems. It leads to a golden age of research in the sense that many people with many skill sets, many backgrounds. I started my own career as a working on the honeybee genome and doing genetics and things like that. Many of us were drawn to it because the questions were challenging and many different kinds of approaches were necessary. So there's a ton of. There's a whole world of research going all the way from behavior. I used to work on olfactory receptors, the genes that insects use to smell the world, and how that affected the plants. They chose all the way out to, as we're talking sort of landscape scale, whole ecological projects. And so people work on a whole variety of things, obviously studying disease, obviously studying the effect of pesticides. But if you ask the question, sort of what we put in the landscape, as I was saying, that is a hot topic of research, which plants are necessary? You can't plant all the flowering Plants, right? It's too expensive, there's too many of them and you don't have the time. So we have to make choices and that's what we work on a lot. What is practical? So in the city of Toronto, what would be practical to plant, what's available, what's affordable and what's manageable and what's good for biodiversity? So we try to answer those questions in our research and then give recommendations. It would be different if you lived on a farm. It would be very different if you lived in a very natural landscape. What we would recommend, I should also add, we could talk a lot about plants or our approaches. And the research we're doing, we really have to understand the management. We don't get the management right, it all falls apart. So it's very different than rewilding because we have to understand if we establish some plants and spend a lot of money on a meadow or something, are we keeping it the way we want it? Is it going in the direction we want to do it?

B (21:18)

Well, yeah, I have a few follow ups. It's exciting that we're in the golden age of this type of research. That's very exciting to know because it is something people are really concerned about. One thing that I've seen that I need to ask you about online is this idea of chaos gardening. And I've seen people putting a bunch of seeds from multiple indigenous plants into literally a salt shaker. And then there's someone who will skateboard and just shake, shake, shake the seeds as they go throughout their city. I guess it was because they were, they were looking at patches in the city where it was a lot of lawn. And so they were like, let's put flowers here instead. Which I guess gets into the whole debate about lawns and good or bad, especially for pollinators. I don't know if you have strong thoughts.

A (22:02)

Yeah, I do. In fact, I've written public articles about things like no momay and removing your lawn and putting flowering plants. The real challenge with that is there've been a lot of studies where people sample suburban lawns, for example, most of the plants, and it depends on again, where you are in North America that come into lawns are weedy plants from Europe mostly and these are dandelions and things like that. Because they didn't co evolve with our pollinators, they're really not good resources for our pollinators. They cause community conflict. So that gives pollinators a bad name and they can spread. And because many of them, you know, if you Have a sea of dandelions. That's not the diversity you need for the diversity of species you want to support. You will see bees on them, but they're usually the most generalized bee that is already out there. There's tons and tons and tons of them. So it doesn't really support biodiversity. If you want to actually help them in your lawn, change it to a very diverse pollinator garden. It's easier to manage. It's not only for one month in North America. That's kind of the wrong month actually for us because the campaign came from England and there a lot of those weeds, what you would call a weed, are native to England and they co evolved with those species. They're not native to us. So you should, if you want to dig up your lawn, plant a flower garden, inspire other people, make it beautiful and support the biodiversity that lives around you. It does take a little bit of work, but trust me, it's really worth it.

B (23:33)

Yeah. And it's so beautiful. I love walking by and seeing all these. Really. I love an interesting flower walking by and you see like, oh, I've never seen that before. Or I love this time of year when I can look forward to that specific flower that's everywhere.

A (23:46)

Exactly.

B (23:47)

You know, and it's, I even get excited when tulips first start popping up because it's, it's just an exciting thing. Of course now we, you've made this, this topic which I was feeling quite pessimistic about, feel a lot more hopeful. So thank you. And it feels tangible. But I should make sure that I hear from you what some of the impacts are from pollinator decline. Just so that we all like still keep in context why this is so important.

A (24:12)

So pollinator declines are concerning in a number of contexts. So and I should say there's, this is a, something that people have been thinking about more or less since the 1990s, but there's been precious little research. You have to understand that you must do these studies for many years, decades to really get a good handle. Because insect populations of any given species come and go with a different year. So this year I understand for many of my monarch butterfly friends has been a banner year for monarch butterflies. But we didn't see very many last year. I don't know how broad that is, but they do change over time. So we need long term studies and they're very hard to do. What we do understand is that where pollinators are declining in agricultural systems for humans, most of our, not our carbohydrates that comes from things like rice and corn and stuff. But our nutrients that we need, our vitamins and our minerals, come from pollinated plants. All those fruits that you're supposed to eat, that you're told to eat, they're really good for your diet, and they're very important for a balanced diet. All that stuff is pollinated. And so if you're in a landscape that has poor pollination services because there are not many pollinators, your fruits and vegetables won't be pollinated. You'll have very low yield. So that's one of the main concerns, say, in agriculture, broadly speaking, beyond that, because pollinators and their interaction with flowering plants is the fundamental basis of terrestrial ecosystems. Those pollinators produce all those flowering plants, the trees and the perennials and all those kind of things, all the fruits, all the nuts that all the other things eat, that the birds eat, that the mammals eat. It's very, very basic. So where you have declines in those, you could have declines in these other species. We know from some studies in Europe, where they've had declines of things like bees, there's an increase in the plants, say, that are pollinated by flies, because the landscape comes to do that. But so you'll have less of one and more of another. So it just gets unbalanced. And you don't have a lot of diversity in the area, which makes those communities very fragile. The fewer species you have of pollinators, the more fragile that community becomes and can reach a point, a tipping point, where it can collapse. Also, Laos of species is not just functional, it also makes the world a lot less beautiful.

B (26:31)

Yeah, I mean, facts. Who doesn't get happy when you see a colorful flower? I sure do.

A (26:37)

That's exactly right. It makes our world more beautiful. And, you know, in the 19th and 20th centuries, putting green spaces into cities was vital to making them livable spaces. In our century, it should be to make them more ecologically diverse and more florally diverse. And that's what we should accept. Nothing less.

B (26:57)

If folks are trying to attract pollinators to their backyard, are there concerns there with how that might balance things out with pests that may also come for their vegetables? Or is more pollinators typically good for pest control?

A (27:11)

So if you want to bring back nature to your garden and you put a lot of flowering plants, you're going to get all sorts of things that you may not want. With vertebra, you know, vertebrates and other things will also come in there. You can bring in more pest species. It turns out that the more biodiverse your landscape is, the more you can even have predators, for example. So if you have a lot of wasps, people don't like wasps, but they're really efficient predators, and they will clean the little caterpillars off your. Your vegetables and other plants. And I like to encourage people to encourage the wasp as long as they're not a nuisance and stinging people or, you know, at this time of year, they get. You know, they're always coming out of the ground, and I get. I have all these bees on the ground, but they're actually wasps. They're actually really good for your garden. And the more diverse your garden is, the more of those you'll have. So there can be a lot of benefits, certainly for these kind of plantings. And usually you don't get a lot of buildup of heavy buildup of pests by planting more flowering plants.

B (28:10)

Okay, you've converted me on wasps because I did get stung for the first time recently, and it's been like eight days, and it's. It's better, but I still can't fit my ring back on my finger.

A (28:20)

Oh, no. Exactly. Wasps are really cool. They're really cool.

B (28:25)

I will. If they're good for. For nature, I'll allow it. I'll suffer without a ring for another week. Thank you so much. Dr. Harlan Patch is an assistant research professor at Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. Thank you for joining us, Harlan. This was Illuminati.

A (28:42)

Thank you. Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never looked so good.

B (28:56)

You look the same.

A (28:57)

But with this camera, everything looks better. Especially me.

B (28:59)

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

A (29:02)

Selfies.

B (29:03)

Check, please.

C (29:04)

With Verizon, new and existing customers can get the new iPhone 17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever. Plus a new iPad and Apple One with eligible phone trade in and unlimited ultimate best 5G swords. Route Metrics Data United States 1H 2025 All Rights Reserve, trade in and additional terms apply for all offers. See verizon.com for details. If you love to travel, Capital One has a rewards credit card that's perfect for you. With the Capital One Venture X card, you earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy. Plus you get premium benefits at a collection of luxury hotels when you book on Capital One Travel. And with Venture, you get access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. Open up a world of travel possibilities with a Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet terms apply.

A (29:46)

Lounge access is subject to change. See capitalone.com for details. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's Premium Wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

C (30:12)

Of $45 for three month plan $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, Taxes and fees extra.

B (30:18)

See mintmobile.com A mochi moment from Sadie who writes I'm not crying, you're crying. This is what I said during my first appointment with my physician at Mochi because I didn't have to convince him.

C (30:30)

I needed a GLP one.

B (30:32)

He understood and I felt supported, not judged.

C (30:35)

I came for the weight loss and.

B (30:36)

Stayed for the empathy.

C (30:38)

Thanks, Sadie.

B (30:39)

I'm Mayra Amit, founder of Mochi Health. To find your mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com.

C (30:46)

Sadie is a Mochi member, compensated for her story.

B (30:52)

Recently, during a production meeting, one of our producers asked a simple question with a surprisingly complex answer. Why do so many celebrities have Lyme disease? Lyme disease is a bacterial infection caused by, get this, a tick's spit. When a tick bites someone, their gut bacteria moves into their saliva and then into their prey's bloodstream. You can get symptoms from a rash to body aches to fever and headache. But if it goes untreated, Lyme disease can cause damage to the cardiovascular system and the nervous system, as well as it could cause arthritis and neurological problems. So the first problem when it comes to diagnosing Lyme is that there isn't really a lot of consistency in the symptoms. For example, an early indicator of Lyme disease is the signature bullseye rash around the tick bite. People often don't remember getting bit by a tick, and that rash can be tricky showing up in other places, not looking like it does when you Google it, or not showing up at all. And if someone comes to the doctor complaining of a headache, fever, tiredness and muscle aches, but they don't have the telltale signs of a tick bite. They could get diagnosed with something more common, like the flu. The second issue is that the diagnostic test for Lyme disease, it can't really tell you about the timing of the infection. If you happen to save the tick, you can send it to a lab to see if it carried the disease. But if you didn't, the next most common step is to get a lab test that detects antibodies against the Lyme bacteria in our blood. Now, the challenge there is it takes time for our immune cells to create those antibodies, so a positive result might not show up until weeks after the initial infection. In addition to the diagnosis being complicated, cases of Lyme disease are on an uptick in North America, and I'll give you three guesses as to why that's right. It's climate change. Warm weather is great for tick survival and reproduction, and as a result, tick populations are surging and expanding their range across the continent. But looping back to my producer's question, I'm curious why so many celebrities have Lyme disease. Think Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne, Bella Hadid, and Justin Timberlake. Is it because they're around more ticks than the average person? Or do they have more resources for the diagnostic odyssey that patients with Lyme and related conditions have to journey on exposure or access? Who knows? And since cases are on the rise and it's so hard to diagnose, prevention is more important than ever. So knowing if you're in a high risk area, wearing long pants and long sleeves when you're out in nature, and checking for ticks after are a must. It's the best way to prevent Lyme disease. The more you know for Warner Bros. Discovery Curiosity Weekly is produced by the team at Wheelhouse DNA. The senior producer and editorial correspondent is Teresa Carey. Our producer is Chiara Noni. Our audio engineer is Nick Kharismi and head of Production for Wheelhouse DNA is Cassie Berman. And I'm Dr. Samantha Yamin. Thanks for listening.

A (34:07)

Dude. Did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never look so good.

B (34:14)

You look the same.

A (34:15)

But with this camera everything looks better. Especially me.

B (34:17)

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

A (34:20)

Selfies check please.

C (34:22)

With Verizon, new and existing customers can get the new iPhone 17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever. Plus a new iPad and Apple One with eligible phone trade in and unlimited ultimate best 5G sweep metrics Theta United States 1H 2025 All Rights Reserve, Trade in and additional terms apply for all offers. See verizon.com for details. If you love to travel, Capital One has a rewards credit card that's perfect for you. With the Capital One Venture X card, you earn unlimited w double miles on everything you buy. Plus, you get premium benefits at a collection of luxury hotels when you book on Capital One Travel. And with Venture X, you get access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. Open up a world of travel possibilities with a Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet?

A (35:03)

Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See capitalone.com for details.

B (35:06)

Hey, I'm Paige Desorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear. I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage. I like to call them my granny panties. Actually, I never think about underwear. That's the magic of Tommy John. Same they're so light and so comfy. And if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it. And the bras? Soft, supportive and actually breathable. Yes. Lord knows the girls need to breathe. Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery, soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night. That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas. Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly. Put yourself on to Tommy John. Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John. Save 25% for a limited time@tommyjohn.com comfort. See site for details. Sixteen years from today, Greg Gerstner will finally land the perfect cannonball.

C (36:00)

Epic splash. Unsuspecting friends.

B (36:03)

A work of art. Only possible because Greg is already meeting all these same people at AARP volunteer and community events that keep him active.

C (36:11)

And involved and help make sure his happiness lives as long as he does.

B (36:15)

That's why the younger you are, the more you need AARP. Learn more@aarp.org local.