Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Creature Feature, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden.
Speaker 1: I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about something totally radical. That's right,
Speaker 1: my dudes. We're talking radiation. And guess what, I've got
Speaker 1: a real, live particle physicist to talk through some of
Speaker 1: the big questions about the universe, such as what is radiation,
Speaker 1: how does it affect humans and animals? Can birds survived?
Speaker 1: Cher nobil and what are the radst baddest radio resistors
Speaker 1: in the world. Discover this and more as we answered
Speaker 1: the age old question would you rather get killed by
Speaker 1: a giant radioactive hamster or killer bananas? So today I'm
Speaker 1: especially excited because joining us is particle physicist at you
Speaker 1: See Irvine and co host of Daniel and Jorge Explain
Speaker 1: the Universe, Daniel Whitson. Welcome, Daniel, Thanks very much for
Speaker 1: having me on. I'm excited to be on your Creature Features.
Speaker 1: What kind of horror name would we give this one?
Speaker 1: Because we're talking about radioactivity and how animals adapt to it,
Speaker 1: and I feel like that is there's a lot of
Speaker 1: like creature feature movies like that, like The Radioactive Swamp Lizard.
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan of those movies though, because in
Speaker 1: those movies, every single time the scientist is the bad guy.
Speaker 1: It's always evil scientists can't think about the consequences of
Speaker 1: their research, you know, blinded by greed or ambition, and
Speaker 1: ends up destroying the world. Right exactly as if the
Speaker 1: scientists just like I want to make a mega hamster
Speaker 1: that's radioactive and no one can stop me. For I
Speaker 1: am driven by science. It's never been my motivation. And
Speaker 1: I take some motivation to get a bed in the mornings,
Speaker 1: but it's never mega death hamster. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: a bad motivation necessarily, but it's not your motive vation,
Speaker 1: and then I can respect that. Yes, So, so I
Speaker 1: am really excited to learn about radiation. I know a
Speaker 1: little bit the basics of it, you know. I know
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily all Homer Simpson at the power plant,
Speaker 1: you know, but there's a lot in that that we
Speaker 1: don't learn from the Simpsons. So what what is radiation?
Speaker 1: Like we think when we think radiation, we think, you know,
Speaker 1: nuclear waste. But it's a lot more than that, right,
Speaker 1: It is in fact, and the most general way to
Speaker 1: think about radiation is that it's just energy deposited by
Speaker 1: waves or particles. Usually we think of radiation, you're thinking
Speaker 1: of things like gamma rays or X rays, and that's
Speaker 1: a good example of radiation, and those are all just
Speaker 1: different kinds of light. But but radiation can be either
Speaker 1: waves like light, or it can be particles like you know,
Speaker 1: tiny little bullets like protons or neutrons. But the key
Speaker 1: thing to understand is that radiation really is like a
Speaker 1: tiny little bullet because it's deposit energy in your body,
Speaker 1: and that's not always good. You know, every time you
Speaker 1: get you go out in the sunshine and you get
Speaker 1: warmed up, you're absorbing the sun's radiation. So not all
Speaker 1: radiation is bad, you know, just like too much radiation
Speaker 1: is bad, or particles with too much energy are bad
Speaker 1: because they will rip through you like a bullet. So
Speaker 1: it's a very general term and only sort of parts
Speaker 1: of it are bad. But you know, the bad parts
Speaker 1: get more pressed than the good parts. And that's something
Speaker 1: I was gonna ask about because when non physicists like
Speaker 1: me here radiation we kind of think of like a
Speaker 1: nuclear bomb or geranium. But there's a difference between ionizing
Speaker 1: radiation and other types of radiation, right, yeah, exactly, Like
Speaker 1: nobody says, hey, I'm gonna go outside and soak up
Speaker 1: some radiation that sounds nice and toasty, or the radiation
Speaker 1: that now though that sounds that sounds bad. Us were
Speaker 1: like time to get those radiation rays. Yeah, exactly. So
Speaker 1: there is radiation that your body just absorbs and deposits
Speaker 1: a little energy and it warms you up, you know,
Speaker 1: and that's okay usually um, But then there's particles and
Speaker 1: photons that have enough energy to really do damage. And
Speaker 1: so if you thinking, like if you zoom in microscopically
Speaker 1: to your body, your body is made out of cells,
Speaker 1: which are made out of molecules, and each of those
Speaker 1: molecules has atoms. And the microscopic picture there is you
Speaker 1: have like a nucleus, protons and neutrons, and surrounding that
Speaker 1: are electrons, and they're all tied together with various chemical bonds. Right,
Speaker 1: you have like one atom next to the other one
Speaker 1: they're sharing electron for example. So what happens when when
Speaker 1: radiation comes in, like a high energy photon for example,
Speaker 1: it comes in, it kicks that electron off. That's what
Speaker 1: ionizing means. It makes it an ion, it removes the
Speaker 1: electron and that's not good. Right. You had some happy
Speaker 1: chemistry going on to make your life function and now
Speaker 1: you have different chemistry, which is usually bad, although you
Speaker 1: know sometimes it's good, right. I mean, you know, our
Speaker 1: DNA is made out of proteins, which are made out
Speaker 1: of molecules, and those can get kind of messed up.
Speaker 1: And that's why. I if you get a really bad sunburn,
Speaker 1: that's you know, that is a type of radiation. It's
Speaker 1: not always good. You go out, you get a little
Speaker 1: bit of sun, that's okay. But the more sun you get,
Speaker 1: the more you're actually exposing yourself to UV radiation and
Speaker 1: that can actually start to mess with your cells on
Speaker 1: the DNA level, which is kind of it's hard to
Speaker 1: imagine that you can just like start messing with your
Speaker 1: DNA by standing out in the sun, but that's exactly
Speaker 1: what happens. Yeah. I think of d N a sort
Speaker 1: of like is the hard drive for your body. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, storing the recipes for everything you need to do,
Speaker 1: and then thing comes in and basically flips a bit
Speaker 1: and says, oh, you're gonna have a cup of sugar,
Speaker 1: and now you're gonna have a cup of assault. Like,
Speaker 1: now the recipe doesn't work anymore because you've screwed it up.
Speaker 1: And right if my if my DNA is like my
Speaker 1: hard drive. And then there's like a billion screenshots of
Speaker 1: cute animals on the desktop, all unorganized, completely making the
Speaker 1: desktop unusable, and then you v radiation gets it and
Speaker 1: then it scrambles all those cat pictures and turns them
Speaker 1: into like one mega hamster picture, that nuclear hamster exactly.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. And although you know you should speak
Speaker 1: to this because it's biological, but sometimes you want that.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you want a little bit of change, right, Like
Speaker 1: evolution requires mutations in your DNA, and so you want
Speaker 1: some mutations, and naturally occurring radiation from the sky or
Speaker 1: from whatever from the ground is part of what gives
Speaker 1: you that variation. So one way to explore new new
Speaker 1: recipes for life is to incur little mistakes in your DNA,
Speaker 1: and radiation is an important way for that to happen.
Speaker 1: You just you want the right amount. You know, you
Speaker 1: want to be in the goldilocks zone exactly. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't want to get blasted with radiation, but a little
Speaker 1: bit it's not bad for life in general. And we're
Speaker 1: actually going to talk about that contradiction in the framework
Speaker 1: of Chernobyl, which I think a lot of people are
Speaker 1: familiar with. It's because it's such a big deal. It's
Speaker 1: one of the biggest nuclear plant disasters in the world,
Speaker 1: and it was an awesome TV show. Yeah, I cannot
Speaker 1: watch that TV show. I really should because I've heard
Speaker 1: it's great and it's at least somewhat historically accurate, but
Speaker 1: like just the idea, it's yeah, I think it's I
Speaker 1: remember reading hospital descriptions of like what was happening to
Speaker 1: the patients who had gotten this acute radiation poisoning, and
Speaker 1: basically they were you know, their skin was falling off there,
Speaker 1: you know, they were melting from It's just like something
Speaker 1: I never want to imagine happening to a human. So
Speaker 1: it's's it was definitely in the very bad category. But
Speaker 1: I want to go on the record is saying it
Speaker 1: was not the fault of the scientists. It was all
Speaker 1: the politicians and the bureaucrats and all that stuff. So
Speaker 1: and I think the show kind of the show portrays
Speaker 1: that accurately, right, Like they show how because um so
Speaker 1: for people who maybe don't know or or just kind
Speaker 1: of know very generally. On April, the Chernobyl nuclear power
Speaker 1: plant in northern Ukraine had a routine safety test that
Speaker 1: ended up triggering a nuclear chain reaction, which sounds there's
Speaker 1: a lot of steps in between obviously that I'm skipping over,
Speaker 1: but it was there is a lot of political pressure
Speaker 1: on them to complete these tests even though it wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily safe, and a lot of like basically safety safeguards
Speaker 1: that had been ignored leading up to the disaster. So
Speaker 1: it wasn't something that just happened out of the blue, right,
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, exactly. They had built a very sort
Speaker 1: of fragile style of reactor because it was cheaper, um,
Speaker 1: and then the whole confluence of events led to a
Speaker 1: spot where they couldn't control the reaction anymore and basically exploded.
Speaker 1: It turned from a nuclear reactor essentially into a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 1: And you know, the difference between those two is like
Speaker 1: whether it's a controlled the knob dial so you're just
Speaker 1: letting a little bit of heat out, or it's totally
Speaker 1: uncontrolled than just taken off right, it's like making delicious
Speaker 1: fries versus a grease fire. It's a seemingly small difference,
Speaker 1: but now it's Yeah, I think it is. It is
Speaker 1: important that this was not mad scientists gone awry. It
Speaker 1: was mad politicians trying to save a few cents on
Speaker 1: construction here and there, and until you basically ignored a
Speaker 1: lot of safety guidelines that you that could have prevented
Speaker 1: this from happening. I think something that the show captured
Speaker 1: really well was the sort of weirdly invisible nature of
Speaker 1: the of the danger. Like you could be standing near
Speaker 1: Chernobyl and you wouldn't feel anything immediately. You can't sense
Speaker 1: the radiation. It's not like it's physically pushing you over
Speaker 1: or anything. You don't feel the tiny little bullets hitting you,
Speaker 1: but they are. They're there. They're shredding you. And the
Speaker 1: longer you stand there, the more you get shredded, the
Speaker 1: more something could change something critical bit in your DNA
Speaker 1: and end up giving you cancer. Yeah, it's really horrifying.
Speaker 1: I mean it's I think it is sort of something
Speaker 1: that feels especially relevant now when we are facing this
Speaker 1: the pandemic, which I hate bringing it up all the time,
Speaker 1: but it's just ever present, and it's when you have
Speaker 1: something that's invisible, you can't see radiation, you can't, at
Speaker 1: least not with human eyes. You can't see something like
Speaker 1: coronavirus with human eyes, but it's there. And then when
Speaker 1: we ignore scientists, like I think, now I didn't watch
Speaker 1: the cher Nobil series, but I think someone told me
Speaker 1: about this scene where there's like a scientist in a
Speaker 1: helicopter with like, uh, the helicopter pilot and then like
Speaker 1: the politician and they're like, you know, he's saying, like
Speaker 1: we gotta fly over and show like things aren't so
Speaker 1: bad or something. He's like, no, if we fly over,
Speaker 1: we're gonna die because we're gonna get It's like, well, no,
Speaker 1: we don't see anything. And it's like it's just like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, just listen to the scientists. Please, im
Speaker 1: I yelled at the screen. In so many movies, please
Speaker 1: just listen to the scientists. It's like Redisaster. Every disaster
Speaker 1: movie starts with someone being like, we don't need to
Speaker 1: listen to scientists. Let's let's do budget cuts on this
Speaker 1: this little little device that will save human lives. But
Speaker 1: it's it's been happening a while. So what happened when
Speaker 1: the actually triggered a nuclear chain reaction, was a steam
Speaker 1: explosion and reactor core fire released airborne radioactive contamination. So
Speaker 1: it that is like, yeah, like you said, a nuclear
Speaker 1: bomb essentially, So it didn't just kill people in the explosion.
Speaker 1: The ionizing radiation that was a result of the explosion
Speaker 1: hospitalized a hundred and thirty four power plants staff and
Speaker 1: fireman and killed twenty eight. Like I said, in the
Speaker 1: worst way you can imagine. It's really uh, it's a
Speaker 1: fascinating story, but if you are sensitive, I would avoid
Speaker 1: reading these detailed accounts because I when I read it,
Speaker 1: it's just like there were a lot of nightmares. Let
Speaker 1: me leave it at that. So that's in your top
Speaker 1: five worst ways to die? Yes, exactly. I there's no
Speaker 1: good way to die, but this is one of the
Speaker 1: worst ones. Well, sometimes some of the time I want
Speaker 1: to hear what else fleshes out that top five? But
Speaker 1: that's a good that's a good question. I've got to say.
Speaker 1: It's got to be if you're a tarantula and you're
Speaker 1: getting slowly eaten by a parasitoid wasp over over the
Speaker 1: course of a month, when you're paralyzed and it's slowly
Speaker 1: eating your non essential organs so that you stay alive
Speaker 1: longer and and nourish it's young longer. But so that's
Speaker 1: maybe the worst one. But this is a this is
Speaker 1: a second. Yeah. Yeah, I'm laughing because it makes me nervous,
Speaker 1: not because I think it's funny. And one of the
Speaker 1: one of the real dangers of Chernobyl, which I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't appreciate, is it's not just
Speaker 1: the energy from the explosion or the radiation immediately from
Speaker 1: the explosion that washes out and it cools off. You
Speaker 1: have these, as you said, radioactive contaminants which continue firing
Speaker 1: little bullets, like little bits of new clear fuel and
Speaker 1: byproducts and nuclear reactions. Those are little atoms that are
Speaker 1: constantly falling apart, and when they fall apart, they shoot
Speaker 1: off little particles, neutrons and electrons. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: distributing billions and billions of tiny little automatic weapons all
Speaker 1: over the Earth that are constantly just shooting. And they
Speaker 1: went up into clouds and floated across the Earth and
Speaker 1: into Europe, and it was it's a huge tragedy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, in the following decade, there were all this
Speaker 1: increase in cancer death. So it was like in the
Speaker 1: ten years following it, and the number is probably higher
Speaker 1: than this, but at least fourteen radiation induced cancer deaths occurred,
Speaker 1: and there was an increase in childhood thyroid cancer near
Speaker 1: the area. But of course that's just recorded cases. I
Speaker 1: feel like it's very likely there were more that just
Speaker 1: couldn't be traced to Chernobyl. UH. And so the Chernobyl
Speaker 1: exclusion zone is a thousand square miles, so that's two
Speaker 1: thousand six d square kilometers where radioactive contamination is high
Speaker 1: and access is restricted to people because it's it's still dangerous,
Speaker 1: like you can't you still can't go It's less dangerous
Speaker 1: than it was thirty years ago, but you still can't
Speaker 1: go in because, like you said, there are still these
Speaker 1: things like releasing these this ionizing radiation that can still
Speaker 1: get in your body and start knocking around your DNA.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about that that concept of free radicals,
Speaker 1: which is like I think tossed around a lot, like
Speaker 1: this idea of like a free radical entering your body,
Speaker 1: and I hear a lot of stuff like someone's got
Speaker 1: some pomegranate juice and they're like this is gonna fight
Speaker 1: free radicals, And it's like, well, what does that even mean?
Speaker 1: Like what is free radicals? And what are antioxidants and
Speaker 1: what does this have to do with radiations? So free
Speaker 1: radicals actually sounds like a fun thing, like hey man,
Speaker 1: like free radicals, dude, totally cumular like, But it's basically
Speaker 1: as as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: But it's just an uncharged particle that has an unpaired
Speaker 1: electron and it's it wants to find another electron. M yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Like an atom is really stable when it's got all
Speaker 1: the electrons that fill a shell, right, Electrons don't sit
Speaker 1: on top of each other, they like fill up this
Speaker 1: ladder of energy levels that's surround the nucleus and uh
Speaker 1: and and there's specific shells, like there's two electrons in
Speaker 1: the lower shell than larger numbers and larger numbers. And
Speaker 1: some atoms are really stable because they have a complete shell,
Speaker 1: so they're like completely block the charge of the nucleus
Speaker 1: and they're totally balanced. And other atoms have like a
Speaker 1: few electrons hanging out just past the edge of that wall.
Speaker 1: And if they don't make a complete shell, it's very
Speaker 1: easy for those electrons to interact with other atoms. And
Speaker 1: so for example, when an oxygen molecule which is O two,
Speaker 1: splits into two individual oxygen atoms, they have these unpaired
Speaker 1: electrons and become unstable free radicals, and they're always going
Speaker 1: out there to try to find something else to bond to, right,
Speaker 1: And that actually happens naturally in the human body through
Speaker 1: the process of converting food into energy. So getting like
Speaker 1: introducing free radicals into the body can be through your environment,
Speaker 1: but it can be during normal processes, and that we
Speaker 1: actually have We produce antioxidants to counter free radicals naturally,
Speaker 1: so we have this system of like, okay, so you
Speaker 1: you know, we'll be splitting these oxygen molecules in the
Speaker 1: course of producing a TP converting food into energy, and
Speaker 1: but as long as we have enough antioxidants that basically
Speaker 1: are these little guardians that protect us from the free
Speaker 1: radicals were okay. So yeah, and you know, sometimes, as
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier, these free radicals can be produced
Speaker 1: because of radiation, Like a high energy photon comes in
Speaker 1: and it knocks off an electron which otherwise would have
Speaker 1: mail made a really nice cozy ship l for your molecule,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden you have a free radical.
Speaker 1: And so that's another one of the dangers of radiation, right,
Speaker 1: And the reason that free radicals are dangerous it's similar
Speaker 1: to like what we've been mentioning earlier. It's that they're
Speaker 1: basically careening around disrupting your proteins and lipids in DNA
Speaker 1: because they're trying to find an electron that will, you know,
Speaker 1: like you were mentioning, create that complete shell. And it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, I need an electron to complete me, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to take it from wherever I can find it,
Speaker 1: even if that means like messing up your DNA. So
Speaker 1: antioxidants actually work by giving free radicals that much needed
Speaker 1: electron to balance them out. But the problem with giving
Speaker 1: an electron is that then you can become a free
Speaker 1: radical yourself, because then you become unbalanced. But the anti
Speaker 1: accident can actually spare that and remain stable. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it so it can like say, hey, like don't bob
Speaker 1: or Mr DNA like where mrs DNA like come to me.
Speaker 1: I have some electrons that you can use, and I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna go crazy just because I gave you an
Speaker 1: electron like the paramedic of the chemical world, just like
Speaker 1: going around putting out fires everywhere exactly, or like a
Speaker 1: trained lifeguard versus someone who doesn't know what they're doing,
Speaker 1: like saving a drowning person, because if you go and
Speaker 1: just try to like save a drowning person, they'll like
Speaker 1: pull you under. But a lifeguard can go out with
Speaker 1: a booing and be like, hey, you know, I can
Speaker 1: I know how to help you without us both getting
Speaker 1: dragged under here. So if you don't have enough of
Speaker 1: these antioxidant lifeguards, you can actually you know, that's when
Speaker 1: bad things happen in your body. So you can actually
Speaker 1: get free radicals, not just from radiation but from pollution
Speaker 1: cigarette smoke. So when you have that imbalance of too
Speaker 1: many free radicals and not enough antioxidants, you will suffer
Speaker 1: from what's called oxidative stress, which can play a role
Speaker 1: in many diseases, anything from cancer to parking sense to Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1: You're basically messing with your body's molecules at that atomic level,
Speaker 1: and that is naturally that can cause a lot of
Speaker 1: problems for your body and is implicated in a lot
Speaker 1: of diseases and conditions. None of those diseases are on
Speaker 1: my top five favorite ways to die either, like they
Speaker 1: don't sound pleasant, Yeah, what would like? I guess my
Speaker 1: favorite way to die would be to be eaten by
Speaker 1: a giant radioactive hamster. But you know, would you then
Speaker 1: gain that hamster's proportionate strength or whatever? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think it would gain my strengths, like my organizational abilities,
Speaker 1: because it eats me, right, not how that logic works
Speaker 1: in comic books at least, you know, comic book physics
Speaker 1: and biology is totally divorced from reality. But it's fun.
Speaker 1: No way you lie. Um. Yeah. And and people also
Speaker 1: should understand that, like radiation comes from all sorts of places.
Speaker 1: It's not just your Noobyl electronobyl, very bad, very dangerous,
Speaker 1: but there's radiation everywhere. Like you're getting radiated right now
Speaker 1: because there are tracing right now. Yes, oh god, well
Speaker 1: you know totally pedantically you're listening into this podcast. This
Speaker 1: podcast is coming to you through acoustic waves. That's radiation
Speaker 1: that's not gonna damage you, it's not gonna blow off
Speaker 1: and ionizing radiation, right but there is ionizing radiation right now,
Speaker 1: like from the sun. You get UV radiation from the sun.
Speaker 1: There are cosmic rays. These particles from space come down
Speaker 1: with really high energy and create these like showers of
Speaker 1: basically bullets um and they can hit you. And then
Speaker 1: there's radiation from the ground. There's even radiation from bananas.
Speaker 1: Like bananas have potassium in them. I knew bananas were
Speaker 1: up to something. See, that's this is why you don't
Speaker 1: trust a banana. I don't trust a banana. No, I'm
Speaker 1: definitely in the anti banana side of that big political discussion. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I'm very anti banana. And now I have confirmations bananas have. Wait,
Speaker 1: so why do bananas have radiation? Well, they have potassium
Speaker 1: in them, and the potassium is radioactive. It decays and
Speaker 1: so it you know, very gradually shoots off you know, positrons.
Speaker 1: And if you eat a banana, they used to be
Speaker 1: like one percent of your average daily exposure to radiation
Speaker 1: comes from a banana. But if you took like a
Speaker 1: truckload of bananas and you try to drive them across
Speaker 1: the border, then you know, the U s ports they
Speaker 1: have radiation monitors and they will like, hold on a second,
Speaker 1: are you smuggling in ten kilos or ten tons of
Speaker 1: bananas or is that a dirty bomb, you know, And
Speaker 1: what's the difference really between a banana bomb and a
Speaker 1: dirty bomb? How many? How many bananas would it take
Speaker 1: to kill someone? There's so many ways to kill people
Speaker 1: with bananas. I mean you lay them out flats of
Speaker 1: their slippery, you just drop them on the person, or
Speaker 1: you just I mean through radiation, like like sure you
Speaker 1: could drown someone in bananas, but I mean like through radiation,
Speaker 1: like a million bananas. Would that do it? A billion bananas? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you spend a day with a billion bananas, that
Speaker 1: would seriously increase your cancer risk. So that's officially not
Speaker 1: recommended from the physics point of one day, a billion
Speaker 1: bananas writing that down no reason. But you know, if
Speaker 1: you take an airplane trip, that's a lot more radiation
Speaker 1: because this radiation that comes from space, it's mostly attenuated
Speaker 1: by the atmosphere. The atmosphere is like a huge blanket
Speaker 1: that protects us. But you go upen an airplane, there's
Speaker 1: much less atmosphere between you and space. So like flight
Speaker 1: attendants and pilots, they get cancer a lot more than
Speaker 1: other people. Yeah, I didn't really think about that, but
Speaker 1: that makes total sense. So if you fly on a plane,
Speaker 1: you should not eat bananas, not only because the smell
Speaker 1: is offensive to me, but also it's bad to compound
Speaker 1: your radiation unless you're hoping to create the mega hamster
Speaker 1: death monster, in which case you should eat a lot
Speaker 1: of bananas and flying a lot of airplanes in order
Speaker 1: to eat bananas, right, exactly, exactly. Well, So when we
Speaker 1: get back, we're actually going to keep talking about chernobyl,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna talk about how animals are affected by chernobyl.
Speaker 1: Because even though there are all these signs and fences
Speaker 1: and all these signs in Russian that tell you to
Speaker 1: stay away because it's very dangerous, animals don't pay attention
Speaker 1: to signs at Russian. They just go right ahead. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna find out how these animals have been adapting
Speaker 1: to chernobyl. Since antioxidants are so great at protecting your
Speaker 1: body from free radicals, should you start taking antioxidant supplements. Well,
Speaker 1: it's good to have a very diet rich in nutrients
Speaker 1: that have antioxidant properties, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes,
Speaker 1: and more. But you have to be careful with supplements, vitamins,
Speaker 1: or any product making big promises about its antioxidant benefits.
Speaker 1: Unless you're planning to live in space for a while
Speaker 1: or somewhere else you'll be exposed to high amounts of radiation.
Speaker 1: You can probably get plenty of antioxidants from a healthy diet.
Speaker 1: You also want to eat a veraiety of healthy food
Speaker 1: so you can get different types of antioxidants that help
Speaker 1: your body in different ways. I know it's the boring,
Speaker 1: not fun answer, but supplements, unfortunately have not been found
Speaker 1: to be able to do the job of these healthy habits.
Speaker 1: Research has been muddled and there's been no clear evidence
Speaker 1: showing that antioxidant supplements do anything to help prevent disease
Speaker 1: such as cancer. Additionally, taking antioxidant supplements is not without risk.
Speaker 1: There are some studies indicating that taking too much beta
Speaker 1: keratin from supplements may increase the risk of lung cancer
Speaker 1: and smokers, and two high doses of vitamin E from
Speaker 1: supplements may increase the risk of stroke and prostate cancer. So,
Speaker 1: unless you've been directed to take these supplements by your doctor,
Speaker 1: your best and safest bet is to eat healthy fruit, veggies, nuts,
Speaker 1: and so on. I know I'm not your mom, I
Speaker 1: can't tell you what to do, and I'm being a
Speaker 1: total nag but come on, eat a vegetable. Your comes
Speaker 1: the broccoli trained to to. When we return, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about some birds who have managed to adapt
Speaker 1: to the chair Nobile exclusion zone. Is it because they
Speaker 1: eat their vegetables spoilers? No, not really. It's no secret
Speaker 1: that I admire birds. Their audacious, adorable, feathery little dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: and while they can be spectacular survivors, they're simultaneously vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Noise pollution can interfere with bird's abilities to find mates
Speaker 1: and communicate. Pesticides weaken and kill off birds in great numbers.
Speaker 1: Deforestation and drought is radically impacting many species of birds.
Speaker 1: Some of the most iconic and endangered birds species are
Speaker 1: being impacted by humans and surprising ways. Endangered California condor
Speaker 1: chicks are being killed by litter that their parents mistake
Speaker 1: for food to feed them. Birds face a lot of
Speaker 1: chan o lounges, primarily from humans mucking around with our environment,
Speaker 1: but sometimes birds are able to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds,
Speaker 1: such as the deadly contaminated waste lamp of the chair
Speaker 1: Noble Exclusion Zone, turning radioactive lemons into lemonade. I want
Speaker 1: to preface this by telling everyone don't go and take
Speaker 1: Instagram photos near Chernobyl. I think it is. That's like
Speaker 1: good advice, right, it's good advice. I just don't do
Speaker 1: anything near Chernobyl. Eat bananas, take photos, walk your hamster.
Speaker 1: None of that stuff is a good idea, right exactly.
Speaker 1: There was like a brief trend, and I feel like
Speaker 1: this was probably overblown, like probably only a couple of
Speaker 1: people did it, and then it was like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: this big trend. But still some people went over to
Speaker 1: Chernobyl and took like Instagram photos because of the TV show.
Speaker 1: Its like, but didn't you watch the TV show? I
Speaker 1: think again, it's a testament to like the weird invisible nature,
Speaker 1: like sneak in there. You don't get shot immediately, you
Speaker 1: don't die immediately, you don't feel it, your skin doesn't
Speaker 1: crisp up or anything great. Um, and so you just
Speaker 1: feel like, oh, it's probably fine. But it's it's like
Speaker 1: playing like time delayed Russian roulette, Like maybe you'll go
Speaker 1: and you will cancer, but maybe you will get cancer
Speaker 1: in ten years and you'll never know if it was
Speaker 1: because you ate that banana or winter Chernobyl. It's time
Speaker 1: delayed to invisible Russian roulette with like thousands or millions
Speaker 1: of tiny bullets. But animals, they are happy enough to
Speaker 1: play Russian Roulette, especially if it means escaping from humans.
Speaker 1: So researchers have been checking out like what's been happening
Speaker 1: in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone because again because humans can't
Speaker 1: live there, and poaching is very restricted because if you
Speaker 1: go and poach there, not only is it like ecologists
Speaker 1: want to restrict poaching, but for people's health. Like if
Speaker 1: you poach an animal that's been exposed to radiation, guess
Speaker 1: what you're exposing yourself and whoever you're giving the animal
Speaker 1: to also to radiation. It's not you know, you once
Speaker 1: that animal eats something that has like some radioactive contamination,
Speaker 1: then the animal is contaminated, and then if you eat
Speaker 1: that animal, then you're contaminated. So it's not because these
Speaker 1: things last a long time. They're going to be there
Speaker 1: for decades or thousands of years, depending on the on
Speaker 1: the element. And also they spread, like one little atom
Speaker 1: shoots off a bullet, it can hit another atom and
Speaker 1: then make it radioactive. And it's not just something where
Speaker 1: it's like the poison dilutes eventually, you know, it just
Speaker 1: keeps firing bullets. It really is weird because it is
Speaker 1: similar to a virus. Now we're talking about actual molecules actually,
Speaker 1: like on the atomic level, it's not like it's not
Speaker 1: a virus, which is you know, a bunch of molecules
Speaker 1: that has formed into basically a structure that replicates, but
Speaker 1: it is it behaves in a way that is somewhat
Speaker 1: similar in that it can create Basically, it's like quote
Speaker 1: unquote offspring radioactive particles. So you can think of it
Speaker 1: as like propagating itself. So you know, we don't we
Speaker 1: don't count that as life. I don't like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of debate about whether we even count viruses as life.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting when it's like you don't think
Speaker 1: of particles as being able to propagate or have offspring,
Speaker 1: but they absolutely can't. Now that's true. Particles turned into
Speaker 1: other particles and atoms can trigger the same reaction and
Speaker 1: other atoms. Um. I've never actually thought about whether, um,
Speaker 1: you know, a particle is alive, but some people a
Speaker 1: lot of people ask us questions on our podcast, like
Speaker 1: what's it like to be a photon? You know, if
Speaker 1: you're traveling the universe at the speed of light, what
Speaker 1: is it like? And and it's a fun philosophical question
Speaker 1: but totally unanswerable. Um yeah, I mean it's the question
Speaker 1: of what life is like. It's still like, you know,
Speaker 1: the argument is still stuck at like, well, virus isn't
Speaker 1: technically alive or is it? You know, so it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of a it is a tricky question to answer.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's it's one of those things that
Speaker 1: I think science and philosophy sort of like butt up against,
Speaker 1: where it's like at a certain point it becomes a
Speaker 1: philosophical question not a scientific one. But yeah, it is
Speaker 1: I would say, like in terms of like biologists would say,
Speaker 1: like no particles are not alive, that's that does not
Speaker 1: count as life. But well, I agree with biologists on
Speaker 1: that one. But but I feel like some of these
Speaker 1: questions you have to wonder, like what is the point
Speaker 1: of asking the question? What are you trying to get at?
Speaker 1: Because you know, are you really learning anything? It seems
Speaker 1: to me a lot like the Pluto controversy, like is
Speaker 1: Pluto a planet or a dwarf planet? Like it doesn't
Speaker 1: change anything about the universe. If you give it this
Speaker 1: label or that label. So what does it matter if
Speaker 1: viruses are called alive or not? In the end, it's
Speaker 1: an artificial distinction. We can argue about how to apply it,
Speaker 1: but we don't learn anything by deciding one day that
Speaker 1: we're gonna call them alive or not. You know, it's
Speaker 1: all We're all one anyway, It's all one big quantum
Speaker 1: field hippy, All right, settled? No, But I think it's true.
Speaker 1: I think it's true. I think that it's if you
Speaker 1: can think, if it helps to think about a particle
Speaker 1: as having a personality, it's that's fine if it helps
Speaker 1: you learn about it, as long as you realize, like
Speaker 1: when I say a particle wants an electron, it's not
Speaker 1: wanting it in the same way that a human wants
Speaker 1: a donut, but it may be the way that it
Speaker 1: acts like a human that's ravenous for a donut is similar.
Speaker 1: Where human will knock down boxes and like shove people
Speaker 1: through aisles to get to that donut. In a particle
Speaker 1: that needs an electron will do the same thing. So
Speaker 1: if those, if those kind of comparisons help you understand
Speaker 1: it better, it's that's good. But just you know, particles
Speaker 1: don't necessarily want stuff or do things like a human
Speaker 1: or even an animal does. But what is interesting is
Speaker 1: how animals have been adapting to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Speaker 1: And again, I think it's when we think about adaptation.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's easy to think about it in human terms
Speaker 1: of like you, you personally can adapt to a tough
Speaker 1: situation by making decisions, like you know, everyone's adapting to
Speaker 1: staying at home right now. But if you're an animal
Speaker 1: and you're adapting, that doesn't necessarily mean that you, the
Speaker 1: individual animal, is within your lifetime adapting to something. So
Speaker 1: these birds that have been studied are adapting, but not
Speaker 1: necessarily within one bird's lifetime. So these researchers have been
Speaker 1: collecting feather and blood samples from a variety of bird
Speaker 1: species within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and they found that
Speaker 1: the birds that have been living in areas with higher
Speaker 1: contamination actually have more antioxidants to fight free radicals than
Speaker 1: they encounter that that they will encounter in the exclusion zone.
Speaker 1: And so obviously, like we talked about before, having those
Speaker 1: antioxidants is really important if you are, say, living in
Speaker 1: an area where you're going to get this high dose,
Speaker 1: relatively high dose of radiation. And so what the confusing
Speaker 1: thing is that there may actually be a evolutionary benefit
Speaker 1: to these birds that are actually in the higher contaminated
Speaker 1: areas versus the slightly lower contaminated areas. So in a
Speaker 1: study published in it's called cher Nobles Birds adapting to
Speaker 1: ionizing radiation, researchers found that oxidative stress and DNA damage
Speaker 1: decreased as background radiation contamination increased within the cher Noble zone,
Speaker 1: which sounds really counterintuitive. And this again another another preface here.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean you should go bathe in radiation, that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean radiation is good for you. And this happened
Speaker 1: after several generations of selection, right, This is like, these
Speaker 1: are the ones that survived found some way to benefit
Speaker 1: from this situation. This is not like all the birds
Speaker 1: that wandered in got some boost. This is not your
Speaker 1: new SPA treatment, right exactly. So these birds are going
Speaker 1: through adaptations, meaning birds with higher levels of antioxidants are
Speaker 1: surviving and those who don't have those are dying off.
Speaker 1: And you, a human, are going to be in that
Speaker 1: dying off category. And when birds die of radation poisoning,
Speaker 1: do they have the same horrible effects. Is it like
Speaker 1: in the top five ways for birds to not die,
Speaker 1: to have their feathers fall off and stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't speak to what it's like to be a
Speaker 1: dying bird, but I it affects basically all animals bodies
Speaker 1: in a similar way that if it affects humans unless
Speaker 1: you have some natural resistance to it or evolved resistance
Speaker 1: to it. So that the result of this is where
Speaker 1: it's like the birds and needs like higher contaminated areas
Speaker 1: is very It's like, oh, wait, so they're getting higher
Speaker 1: doses of radiation. Why are they actually doing better than
Speaker 1: birds that are in still within chernobyl but in lower
Speaker 1: contaminated areas, And so that's a it's kind of a conundrum.
Speaker 1: But what could be the reason for this is if
Speaker 1: you're in an area where it's like more binary whether
Speaker 1: you live or die, So if you don't have those
Speaker 1: really high levels of antioxidants, that high level of protection,
Speaker 1: you just die. Whereas if you're in a slightly lower
Speaker 1: area where you live long enough to reproduce perhaps but
Speaker 1: you're kind of not as healthy and you like eventually
Speaker 1: do die, then you may not necessarily be pressured to
Speaker 1: actually have those those really high level of antioxidants. So like,
Speaker 1: if you're a bird, it's like, okay, I'm getting I
Speaker 1: mean like this really dangerous zone. I only live long
Speaker 1: enough to reproduce if I have extremely high levels of
Speaker 1: antioxidants like and enough that it's almost like overkill that
Speaker 1: it's really protecting me. But you know, if you're a
Speaker 1: burden sort of the it's still not good. It's still
Speaker 1: not a great area to live in, but you can
Speaker 1: kind of get away with not having those high levels
Speaker 1: long enough to reproduce. Maybe overall you're not as healthy
Speaker 1: because you're kind of like you're just kind of squeaking
Speaker 1: by and you you don't actually you aren't being as quickly,
Speaker 1: like the evolution isn't working as quickly on you. The
Speaker 1: the that selective pressure of the radiation, so you're it's like,
Speaker 1: well I managed to have babies and now my wing
Speaker 1: is falling off. But like so it's it's kind of counterintuitive,
Speaker 1: but a result like this doesn't mean oh, radiation is
Speaker 1: good for animals. It just shows that complex process of evolution,
Speaker 1: especially when you have this short period of time with
Speaker 1: an incredible selective pressure. That is something we don't really
Speaker 1: see very often, which is an immense amount of radiation
Speaker 1: that would not normally happen unless we had turned very suddenly.
Speaker 1: And isn't there also a cost, like the reason you
Speaker 1: have these antioxidants, which can you know, put out the
Speaker 1: flames of your radiation or your you know, savior drowning
Speaker 1: molecules you use, your analogy must come at some other cost,
Speaker 1: otherwise all animals would have it all the time. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it actually comes at the cost of production of types
Speaker 1: of melanins. So a lot of birds will want to
Speaker 1: have these really well again, not necessarily want to, but
Speaker 1: they have these vibrant colors, they have a lot of
Speaker 1: melanin production, and if you they actually have to trade
Speaker 1: off that melanin production to have that high level of antioxidants,
Speaker 1: and not having that melanin can affect their health and
Speaker 1: how they socialize and like sexual selection as well. So
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. It's not like, hey, why don't we
Speaker 1: all just like get huge amounts of antioxidants so we
Speaker 1: can live right next to cher nobyle. It's a very
Speaker 1: complex thing and one that researchers are still trying to
Speaker 1: figure out right now. So this is like one result
Speaker 1: of a bunch of studies that are trying to figure out,
Speaker 1: like what is going on with these irradiated birds. We
Speaker 1: don't know necessarily, right, And so the in the region
Speaker 1: where the contamination is sort of lower, and the birds
Speaker 1: that don't have these protections can survive, then it's still
Speaker 1: a disadvantage to have all those protections because it comes
Speaker 1: at all these other costs, right, right, And I think
Speaker 1: and now this is me speculating, and I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: but I do think I saw that there is a
Speaker 1: higher incidence of albinism in birds in this area, which
Speaker 1: would make sense because if we're talking about melanin production
Speaker 1: being affected by antioxidants, well, that may be protecting them
Speaker 1: from the radiation somewhat. But being albino as an animal
Speaker 1: is not always good for your survival. It makes you
Speaker 1: more visible to predators. So it's like, that's why we
Speaker 1: don't see a bunch of like you may see an
Speaker 1: albino squirrel once in your lifetime, but it's hard to
Speaker 1: spot them because they actually get picked off pretty quickly
Speaker 1: because they're so visible. So if you're a bird and
Speaker 1: you're you are subject to being preyed upon by other
Speaker 1: like other birds or say like the fox and the
Speaker 1: wolf populations there. Then you don't necessarily want to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: look at me. I'm like I'm I look like Liberaci
Speaker 1: And it's great. That's right. Every one of these mutations
Speaker 1: has lots of others effects. You can't just like turn
Speaker 1: one thing up or down. And evolution is not one dimensional.
Speaker 1: It's not like, Okay, today we're selecting for radiation. Tomorrow
Speaker 1: we're doing it for color. It's all or nothing, like
Speaker 1: either living or dying. Yeah, evolution is not character creation
Speaker 1: sliders unfortunately, But wouldn't that be great? I'd like some
Speaker 1: more hit points and some more wisdom. Um. I think
Speaker 1: the cool thing about this, the mutations that create protection
Speaker 1: against radiation, is where do those mutations come from? Maybe
Speaker 1: from radiation, right, So it's like radiation is triggered protection
Speaker 1: against radiation. So like meta radiation is really running a
Speaker 1: racket here. It's making money on both sides. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like that old Gary Larson cartoon where it's like
Speaker 1: a brick thrown through someone's window and there's a little
Speaker 1: note on the brick said bricks through your window. Call Oh,
Speaker 1: But it's like a bunch of tiny invisible bricks in
Speaker 1: the window, is your DNA Again, I want to reiterate,
Speaker 1: like you might think like from this one, so I like, oh,
Speaker 1: is radiation good for animals a good selective pressure. No,
Speaker 1: that's not not something that you can conclude from that.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot of research, a lot of
Speaker 1: debate amongst conservation is how animals are actually doing in
Speaker 1: the exclusion zone. So you might hear stories about how
Speaker 1: animal populations are actually increasing in the exclusion zones, and
Speaker 1: like there's a study published in in Frontiers in Ecology
Speaker 1: and the Environment that found large mammal population. So like
Speaker 1: gray wolves, raccoon dogs, and wars, their populations are actually
Speaker 1: slowly increasing in the exclusion zone despite the contamination. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that contamination is good for them. It means
Speaker 1: that humans are even worse than the radioactive contamination. It's
Speaker 1: that our lack of presence there is enough of a
Speaker 1: boost for them to basically have an increase their population.
Speaker 1: Even though I bet, now you know, I'm not a
Speaker 1: nuclear physicist, but I bet if like they had that
Speaker 1: area without the radiation poisoning, they'd be doing even better.
Speaker 1: Probably you need the radiation poisoning to drive all the
Speaker 1: humans away, so you know, overall, I mean, it sounds
Speaker 1: like you're making the argument that overall is in that
Speaker 1: wind because damage the animals, but you damage the humans more.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like radiation treatment for cancer, right, you
Speaker 1: kill the tumor and were situation. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: I try to take a somewhat human positive perspective, where yes,
Speaker 1: it's true that the radiation is keeping us out. I
Speaker 1: think that the lesson we should learn from this is not, oh,
Speaker 1: let's blow up a bunch of nuclear reactors so that
Speaker 1: we have these animal conservation areas. I think it's that, oh,
Speaker 1: animal populations are so resilient. If we just gave them
Speaker 1: some more space and matt with author radiation, imagine how
Speaker 1: good they do. Like it's it's they are very they're
Speaker 1: very resilient, but they need just a little bit of
Speaker 1: help to bouts back after like all the Shenanigans were
Speaker 1: basically doing as humans. It's amazing to me how rapidly
Speaker 1: they can respond. You know that that to immediate like dramatic,
Speaker 1: short time scale catastrophes, they can come back and they
Speaker 1: can thrive. You know, we imagine like very slow climate
Speaker 1: change edging a population towards having heavier coats or thinner coats,
Speaker 1: or taller or shorter. But also if you have enough
Speaker 1: diversity in your population, even a shock, right, as long
Speaker 1: as some of them survived, then they can thrive in
Speaker 1: that environment. It's it's incredible. And also it he tells
Speaker 1: you about the importance of diversity, right, yes, exactly, and
Speaker 1: the importance of genetic diversity, which I think is something
Speaker 1: that it's like, we think about biodiversity in terms of
Speaker 1: different species, but it all so means like diversity within
Speaker 1: a population. So if you start to limit their genetic diversity,
Speaker 1: they can't adapt to these shocks because they just don't
Speaker 1: have a big enough genetic library to have, you know,
Speaker 1: an offspring that's like, hey, I've got like a billion antioxidants.
Speaker 1: Come at me, RAI. Because it's not, as you said before,
Speaker 1: it's not really adapting. It's not like they're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the problem, what are we gonna do about it.
Speaker 1: It's just like some of us die and some of
Speaker 1: us survive, and that's it. That's the adaptation. Right. So
Speaker 1: if you're a monoculture like corn is, then you've got
Speaker 1: no chance, right Yeah, Yeah, I love it if like
Speaker 1: there were bird scientists with their bird lab coats, like
Speaker 1: with a white board and they're going like, okay, what
Speaker 1: do we do, Like here's the situation. Unfortunately that's just
Speaker 1: not the case. I love it, that's that's my head canon. Birds,
Speaker 1: bird scientists trying to make antioxidants. But well then you
Speaker 1: might enjoy it. You know, there was an opportunity for
Speaker 1: dinosaurs to save themselves because the media that came and
Speaker 1: wiped out the dinosaurs. It made a near miss past
Speaker 1: the earth, but ten years earlier they could have seen
Speaker 1: it in the sky. So if those din if those
Speaker 1: dino scientists had been you know, on their game, they
Speaker 1: had enough warning to do something about it. Well, you see.
Speaker 1: The problem though, was the top dinosaur scientists was a
Speaker 1: t rex and he had these little half from glasses
Speaker 1: and he was trying to reach the blackboard, but his
Speaker 1: arms were so too tiny to make it, like like,
Speaker 1: professor Munchie, we can't see your writing because your arms
Speaker 1: are too small. And then he got mad and ate
Speaker 1: all the students and then you know, yeah, well that
Speaker 1: cleared that cleared the you know, that cleared the playing
Speaker 1: field for mammal scientists. So here we are exactly, a
Speaker 1: little little shrew like animals with lab coats exactly. You
Speaker 1: can actually type up grand proposals and submit them. And
Speaker 1: that's why we survived. That is adaptation right there. You
Speaker 1: may be wondering, if birds can adapt to high levels
Speaker 1: of radioactive contamination, why couldn't humans. Well, technically we might
Speaker 1: be able to after many generations and many deaths. And
Speaker 1: of course that's not even speaking of the quality of life,
Speaker 1: which doesn't sound so great and is one of the
Speaker 1: many reasons it's important not to contaminate the planet with radiation.
Speaker 1: The thing about humans is that we've got to trick
Speaker 1: up our sleeves when it comes to selective pressures. Instead
Speaker 1: of adapting our bodies through trial and air, which means
Speaker 1: a lot of dying, we can use our huge, ungainly
Speaker 1: brains to build society, science, medicine, and ideas that can
Speaker 1: help save our butts. For instance, sunscreen. The sun attacks
Speaker 1: us on a daily basis with pesky uvy radiation, and
Speaker 1: instead of waiting to evolve some hippo skin that produces
Speaker 1: a thick sweat which acts as a natural sunscreen, we
Speaker 1: just create our own out of zinc and it comes
Speaker 1: in fun fruity sense. So when people talk about humans
Speaker 1: evolving or adapting, I wouldn't necessarily count on our survival
Speaker 1: by waiting around to evolve a set of gills or
Speaker 1: some kind of internal radioactive shield. It's going to be
Speaker 1: our ability to cooperate, our pro social behavior and scientific
Speaker 1: discoveries that saves us. Or you know, we could steal
Speaker 1: d NA for organisms that actually have their crap together.
Speaker 1: We'll discuss whether that's even possible when we return. In
Speaker 1: almost every apocalyptic movie, the heroes are gritty, war toughened
Speaker 1: people with robot arms and nine o'clock shadows and spiky
Speaker 1: shoulder pads. But in the event of an earth blasting
Speaker 1: apocalypse or not necessarily the most likely animal or living
Speaker 1: creature to survive. So let me introduce you to a
Speaker 1: couple of organisms that are definitely gonna kick mad Max
Speaker 1: is sorry, but so Daniel. I imagine you've actually probably
Speaker 1: heard of tartar grades before. I have. I love tartar grades.
Speaker 1: They're amazing. I I thought you would like them, so
Speaker 1: we've actually talked about them on the show before. But
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go even more in depths on these incredible
Speaker 1: little they're also called water bears. They are also called
Speaker 1: moss piglets. They are they have adorable names, and I
Speaker 1: think they look super cute too. What I mean, if
Speaker 1: you've seen one, like really zoomed in, it looks sort
Speaker 1: of like a horrible monster, I mean, but a cute one.
Speaker 1: They're like a little nyoki with eight legs, with hooks
Speaker 1: on each leg and a little like whole buzz saw
Speaker 1: for our mouth. I think that's cute. Well, you know
Speaker 1: when they evolve into like actually literally bear sized objects
Speaker 1: on the moon and then come down and take over,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna come and ask you if you think they're cute.
Speaker 1: I mean, they'll be our overlords, so I'll say yes.
Speaker 1: Obviously you'll have to. You'll have to. It's the law.
Speaker 1: So they are one of the toughest little animals in
Speaker 1: the world. And they are animals. They're teeny tiny, and
Speaker 1: it's hard to sometimes like think of these like really
Speaker 1: really tiny microscopic organisms as being animals and not like
Speaker 1: bacteria or something. But they are animals. How small are they?
Speaker 1: I mean, are we talking like really microbe size? Are
Speaker 1: we talking that you could like see one on your fingertips.
Speaker 1: You can almost see it with the human eye. If
Speaker 1: you have really good eyesights, like if if you had
Speaker 1: a really big one and you had it like in
Speaker 1: a dish of water, maybe you could see like the tiniest,
Speaker 1: tiniest spec but I think typically you can only see
Speaker 1: it under a microscope. So they are about point three
Speaker 1: to point five millimeters long, which is point two inches,
Speaker 1: and I think that's kind of hard to visualize, like
Speaker 1: what that's like. So if you imagine like a grain
Speaker 1: of salt, I think four or five of them could
Speaker 1: stand on one side of a grain of salt, So
Speaker 1: they're they're small. I'm imagining like literally hiding behind a
Speaker 1: grain of salt, like ducking behind a grain of salt.
Speaker 1: You move a grain of salt, and then you zoom
Speaker 1: in on them, and they're like, we're just hanging out
Speaker 1: here smoking. They're all smoking cigarettes behind the grain of
Speaker 1: Tartar grades are supposed to be in class. What are
Speaker 1: you doing? Oh no, it's the principle. That's our new
Speaker 1: TV show. We're pitching right Tartar grade elementary school, exact
Speaker 1: baby Tartar grade babies and they're they're in high school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I may be one of the toughest animals in the world,
Speaker 1: but you broke my heart. Yes please, So they are
Speaker 1: found all over the world. They're found on moss, lichen,
Speaker 1: they're found in soil, dead leaves, sediment, in water, basically
Speaker 1: anywhere that they can have, just like even a little
Speaker 1: bit of moisture, they can be found. So they're also
Speaker 1: found in extreme environments like hot springs under polar ice
Speaker 1: and boiling mud volcanoes which aren't actual volcanoes, but it's
Speaker 1: just like boiling churning mud as like these hot gases
Speaker 1: erupted like this mud comes out. But they can be
Speaker 1: there if they want it seems it seems like a
Speaker 1: fun place to be, like a little tarte grade spa.
Speaker 1: So they like moist environments. But like I said, they
Speaker 1: can basically survive if they can retain a little bit
Speaker 1: of moisture, and they can also survive being dehydrated, so
Speaker 1: they can live through environments that should kill them by
Speaker 1: turning themselves into living mummies. So they are actually capable
Speaker 1: of self embalming, so they desiccate, they dry themselves out,
Speaker 1: and then the problem with turning yourself into a mummy
Speaker 1: or freezing yourself is that you will explode yourself like
Speaker 1: you'll damage yourselves. So like when you're when you're frozen,
Speaker 1: and then it's not the freezing that necessarily kills you,
Speaker 1: it's the thawing because as you thought out, these ice
Speaker 1: crystals form in your cells and basically they're like little
Speaker 1: Sharken's that explode yourselves. So that's gets bigger as it freezes, right,
Speaker 1: and so the cell wall that can't get bigger. It's
Speaker 1: frozen insane, right exactly exactly, so you explode. That sounds bad,
Speaker 1: It's that's definitely on my list of top five ways
Speaker 1: to not die. Yeah, So if if all Disney's head
Speaker 1: really was frozen, like you know, it's probably fine right now.
Speaker 1: But if we tried to thought out like this some
Speaker 1: internet conspiracy theory I'm not aware of. Yeah, uh, there's
Speaker 1: like a theory that Walt Disney froze his own head,
Speaker 1: Like I don't think it's true, was his own head,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, that would be that would be funny, like
Speaker 1: like a chicken that got its head chopped off, just
Speaker 1: enough time to get your head or something. Tartar grades
Speaker 1: have found a way to not explode when they are
Speaker 1: falling after being frozen, and also to survive being dried out.
Speaker 1: And extreme temperatures, so they will cover their internal cells,
Speaker 1: organelles and membranes and a special sugar gel called trehos,
Speaker 1: which is it's basically like this this material that keeps
Speaker 1: it from getting frozen, from getting overheated, or from getting
Speaker 1: dried out. And so it works to such a great
Speaker 1: extent that labs have revived tartar grade samples up to
Speaker 1: forty years later, and there are reported to amples of
Speaker 1: dehydrated tartar grades that were taken from like one hundred
Speaker 1: year old museum moss and and successfully revived. But I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's been able to be replicated or
Speaker 1: if that's just kind of an apocryphal story, but it's maybe.
Speaker 1: It's pretty amazing. And you know, tartar grades are also
Speaker 1: unusual because they're one of the few animals that are
Speaker 1: on the Moon right now, that's true, didn't we we
Speaker 1: left some behind, right we crash landed. The Israeli's sent
Speaker 1: a lander up there with some tartar grades on it
Speaker 1: and it crashed, and so like, there are literally tartar
Speaker 1: grades on the Moon. We don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1: They're probably frozen, but you know, a little bit of
Speaker 1: maybe like a comet hits the moon or a little
Speaker 1: asteroid some water in it, and you could have momentarily
Speaker 1: living Targetar colony. Yeah, exactly from which to launch their
Speaker 1: eventual invasion onto Earth. Right, we've given them a foothold.
Speaker 1: I like to imagine they're all Matt Damon's in that movie,
Speaker 1: what was that movie called The Mars One the Martian
Speaker 1: Matt Damon's on Mars Martian. I thought it was called, Oh,
Speaker 1: Matt Damon's on Mars, That's what I call it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: a bunch of little Matt Damon's like making potatoes out
Speaker 1: of their own poop. But yeah, that that'll probably happen eventually.
Speaker 1: So they can serve they can potentially survive being on
Speaker 1: the Moon, at least for a while. So they can
Speaker 1: survive temperatures of down to negative four fifty eight degrees fahrenheit,
Speaker 1: which is negative two two degrees celsius. They can survive
Speaker 1: temperatures up to three hundred degrees fahrenheit, which is a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty degrees celsius. So you know, if we
Speaker 1: tried to do that, we die. I would certainly die. Yes,
Speaker 1: even though they are super extreme, they're technically not extreme
Speaker 1: aphiles because they can merely tolerate extreme environments and not
Speaker 1: specifically thrive in them, which I think is kind of
Speaker 1: a silly distinction, like, oh, okay, you can survive like
Speaker 1: three hundred degrees fahrenheit, but you're not extreme enough for me. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, sciences filled with these silly distinctions. You know
Speaker 1: your planet, you're not a planet. You and extreme a file.
Speaker 1: You're just totally awesome and crazy. Scientists are just like
Speaker 1: middle school clicks. I'm sorry, no, I'm kidding. I love scientists,
Speaker 1: but it's sometimes sometimes a little bit. So despite the
Speaker 1: fact that they're not technically classified as extreme aphiles, they
Speaker 1: can actually survive the vacuum of space for up to
Speaker 1: ten days. So in two thousand and seven, researchers exposed
Speaker 1: tartar grades to the vacuum of space and then they
Speaker 1: reeled them back in again. Like, no, they didn't have
Speaker 1: tiny little microscopic space suits for them to wear. They
Speaker 1: were just like floating out there, and over two thirds
Speaker 1: of them were revived. So two thirds of them survived,
Speaker 1: the majority of them, and they were piste off probably right,
Speaker 1: they were Superman. They're like, dude, bro, what what the
Speaker 1: hell is a question like when you do experiments on animals,
Speaker 1: you always have to get some sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: ethics reviews, like is this suffering and doing to this
Speaker 1: and will going to yield some valuable science? Does that
Speaker 1: also extended Tardi grades because there are, as you say,
Speaker 1: little animals like probably I would imagine it does. Hey,
Speaker 1: guys actually looked this up after recording. It turns out
Speaker 1: most invertebrates are excluded from animal research ethics laws which
Speaker 1: define animals as vertebrates. What the heck? Well, this mindset
Speaker 1: might be slowly changing. In two thousand and four, the
Speaker 1: National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia change their
Speaker 1: guidelines to include cephalopods such as octopuses and squid. Anyways,
Speaker 1: I was surprised to learn this. Now, back to my
Speaker 1: conversation with Daniel. While it's true that insects and probably
Speaker 1: tartar grades, as much as I love them, can't really
Speaker 1: it's not that they can't necessarily feel pain, but they don't.
Speaker 1: Their brains are so simple that it's hard to know
Speaker 1: like what suffering is to them, Like they are at
Speaker 1: that point, they're kind of like little robots, and like
Speaker 1: we subject robots to all sorts of things which may
Speaker 1: be bad. Maybe the robots and the tartar grades are
Speaker 1: going to like form an alliance and like stick it
Speaker 1: to us horrible humans. But yeah, I actually do think
Speaker 1: all I would have to check on it, But I
Speaker 1: do think you do have to still go through that
Speaker 1: process because it is an animal, it's a living thing.
Speaker 1: You might not have to do that with bacteria because
Speaker 1: it's bacteria. Nobody cares, right, no, exactly, my wife kills
Speaker 1: slaughters bacteria. But you know, tend to the nine every
Speaker 1: day in your experiments. But tartar grades, there are animals.
Speaker 1: So somebody out there is like, you know, thought about
Speaker 1: what is it like to be a tartar grade, and uh,
Speaker 1: hey maybe I hope it's fun until you get shot
Speaker 1: at into space as part of the experiment at least. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, actually, of those that survived, many of them
Speaker 1: did die soon after, but not before they were able
Speaker 1: to reproduce. So evolution calls that a win, like evolution
Speaker 1: calls that success story success right there, right. And so
Speaker 1: the reason that I bring up tartar grades is not
Speaker 1: just because they're awesome at space and cold and getting
Speaker 1: dried out, but it's when they're in space, like that's
Speaker 1: full of radiation, right, Like you're getting bombarded, like you
Speaker 1: were saying, with cosmic rays from the Sun. You're because
Speaker 1: we're you're not protected by the atmosphere. That's right. The
Speaker 1: Sun pumps out a huge amount of course of light
Speaker 1: but also just a raw particle, so protons and electrons
Speaker 1: streaming out a crazy high speeds. It's called the solar wind,
Speaker 1: and it's pretty dangerous. So astronauts, for example, when they
Speaker 1: go up into space, they get a big dose of
Speaker 1: radiation and and sometimes it's it fluctuates a lot, so
Speaker 1: the Sun could just like have a big solar storm
Speaker 1: and pump out enormous amounts of radiation that would kill
Speaker 1: you almost instantly. And so in the International Space Station
Speaker 1: they have special room that's that's lined with extra protecting
Speaker 1: so when a solar storm is coming, they basically run
Speaker 1: to the basement, you know, like in Kansas with the
Speaker 1: tornado and hiding that specially protected room. Otherwise they're almost
Speaker 1: literally toast. Oh my god, that's I'm surprised that Hollywood
Speaker 1: hasn't like picked up on that space station panic room.
Speaker 1: That's the second Netflix pitch. We came up with today,
Speaker 1: quimby get back to us. No, but space is filled
Speaker 1: with radiation. Absolutely, we are safe here under our atmosphere,
Speaker 1: but out there in space is a dangerous environment. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But for tartar grades, they actually have a surprising defense
Speaker 1: mechanism even when they're in space and when they're exposed
Speaker 1: to radiation. So tartar grades have a protective protein that
Speaker 1: shields them from radiation damage from ionizing radiation. It's called
Speaker 1: damage suppressor or d s UP, which sounds like hey,
Speaker 1: d s up sounds like a really cool, like, hey,
Speaker 1: I can survive being radical because I got de s up.
Speaker 1: So it is a protein that serves as armor to
Speaker 1: the tartar grades d n A. So it's thought that
Speaker 1: it maybe acts as kind of like it's similar to
Speaker 1: antioxidants and that it can sorb free radicals. But it
Speaker 1: is different in that it like actually kind of clusters
Speaker 1: around the d n A and actually forms a literal shield.
Speaker 1: So the result is that tartar grades can withstand many
Speaker 1: times more ionizing radiation than other animals. They can actually
Speaker 1: tolerate almost a thousand times more gamma radiation than a human,
Speaker 1: like an amount of radiation that when pumped into a
Speaker 1: human would kill kill us, like within a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: Like the tartar grade could actually survive. And so you're
Speaker 1: saying it acts like sort of a physical shield. It's
Speaker 1: like repels, it absorbs and repels the radiation. It's a
Speaker 1: pretty recent discovery, so I think some of the evidence
Speaker 1: is that it's actually absorbing these the free radicals and
Speaker 1: the radiation. So it's like, okay, you're trying to get
Speaker 1: an electron and then it just like absorbs it. Do
Speaker 1: you think it makes it like a puke pu sound
Speaker 1: when it bounces, It just bounces off it could it could?
Speaker 1: I think it does seem like beyond just acting as
Speaker 1: an antioxidant, is it is actually forming a physical shield
Speaker 1: that prevents it from getting to the DNA because it's
Speaker 1: so it's like clustered around the DNA rather than just
Speaker 1: like floating around and acting as like a lifeguard, it's
Speaker 1: just forming this cluster around it. So we don't we
Speaker 1: shouldn't just be jealous of tartar grades, although it is
Speaker 1: a natural response because they are the coolest animal, but
Speaker 1: they the discovery of de SUP may actually end up
Speaker 1: helping humans sometime in the future, maybe the distant future,
Speaker 1: who knows. But human kidney cells were engineered to be
Speaker 1: able to produce tartar grade de s UP, and those
Speaker 1: cells in studies actually suffered about fifty less DNA damage
Speaker 1: caused by X rays compared to cells without d s ups.
Speaker 1: So again, that doesn't mean we can just like get
Speaker 1: a syringeful of tartar grades and inject it and now
Speaker 1: you're like immune to radiation. Like it's it's a lot
Speaker 1: of steps between creating a kidney cell that can create
Speaker 1: this this protein and actually having a human who can
Speaker 1: create this protein in your body that protects your body
Speaker 1: from radiation. But it's really cool. It's like a step
Speaker 1: in that direction. Well, that's going to be important when
Speaker 1: we eventually have to rise up and overthrow our tartar
Speaker 1: grade overlords, Right, so it's good get started now on
Speaker 1: this kind of science. That's true. That's true. Or when
Speaker 1: we're kicked off Earth and we have to colonize another
Speaker 1: planet that doesn't have a great atmosphere, so we need
Speaker 1: some resistance. But yeah, it would be great like if
Speaker 1: we could give say astronauts like this decept protein, like
Speaker 1: get their selves to produce it, like it would offer
Speaker 1: them protection maybe not from a blast from a solar winds,
Speaker 1: but like the because like their cancer risk it's probably
Speaker 1: higher than you know, the average earth bound human because
Speaker 1: of all of the radiation they're getting. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's again, it's not like we're not like a year
Speaker 1: away from having tartar grade human eyebreds. But it's it's
Speaker 1: a cool it's a cool discovery that maybe eventually we
Speaker 1: could figure out how to introduce this protective protein to
Speaker 1: our own DNA. It must have some cost, right, Like
Speaker 1: tartar grades manufacture this thing to protect themselves, but it
Speaker 1: must cost them energy or slow down their DNA replication
Speaker 1: or something, right, isn't there a cost associated? Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure because this is a relatively recent discovery.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what like what the cost is. But
Speaker 1: usually if there, if it's something that it seems like, well,
Speaker 1: this has seems to have you know, countless kind of benefit,
Speaker 1: like there could be some costs, but it could also
Speaker 1: be Targar grades are really interesting in that they are
Speaker 1: capable of a lot of horizontal gene transfer, so they
Speaker 1: can collect they steal a lot of DNA essentially, and
Speaker 1: so it may be because they are able to steal
Speaker 1: and like borrow so much DNA that they can have
Speaker 1: this like two good to be true defense mechanisms that
Speaker 1: in terms of human evolution, like if we tried that
Speaker 1: kind of shenanigans early on in our evolution in the
Speaker 1: way that our evolutionary path has been, it may have
Speaker 1: just ended up hurting us more than helping us. So
Speaker 1: it's like something where yeah, there may be a cost
Speaker 1: to say like an animal like a human, that there
Speaker 1: isn't like that cost is not as bad for the
Speaker 1: Tartar grade. And so if what's interesting about like trying
Speaker 1: to engineer this for humans is that we can potentially
Speaker 1: try to take the benefits and then mitigate the costs.
Speaker 1: But that's really hard. That's something that takes probably decades
Speaker 1: to figure out. Time to get started, time to get
Speaker 1: started everyone, time to get crack it. It It sounds like
Speaker 1: a great grand proposal right there, Tartar grade human hybrids.
Speaker 1: It'll take a while, so we better start now preparing
Speaker 1: so before we go, I feel like we can't end
Speaker 1: the podcast without at least mentioning the baddest, rattiest radio
Speaker 1: resistor extremophile Dino Caucus radio duran's Have you heard of
Speaker 1: this bacteria? Actually have heard of this because my wife
Speaker 1: is a microbiologist here you see, Irvine, and so she's
Speaker 1: a big fan of the microbes and uh and what
Speaker 1: they can do and the amazing things they can do
Speaker 1: with all their extra copies of their DNA. It's a
Speaker 1: it's pretty clever. Yes, Now did I pronounce that right?
Speaker 1: Can you get your wife? I have no expertise in
Speaker 1: pronouncing bacteriological names. Unfortunate. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm like, you know,
Speaker 1: I learned it from reading, so I don't know. It
Speaker 1: sounds right to me. But it's also nicknamed conan the bacterium,
Speaker 1: So that's that's pretty cool. Maybe that's what I'll call
Speaker 1: it from name especial party exactly. So it is one
Speaker 1: of the toughest bacteria in the world and probably one
Speaker 1: of the toughest living organism ms in the world. So
Speaker 1: it is a spherical bacterium that usually travels in groups
Speaker 1: of four kind of clustered together, so it looks like
Speaker 1: a little lucky four leaf clover. And so here's a
Speaker 1: question that I actually have for you. So grays is
Speaker 1: a unit used to measure radiation. Right there, are lots
Speaker 1: of units to measure radiation. When we use units, it's
Speaker 1: like only useful, like when we think about it in
Speaker 1: terms of how it's relative to another thing. Right, So
Speaker 1: like we're so for now, I'm going to use this
Speaker 1: unit because it's the only unit I know about, and
Speaker 1: it's what I'm going to use to compare these things.
Speaker 1: But it's kind of arbitrary that I'm using this unit.
Speaker 1: It's just like like, here's a unit to demonstrate how
Speaker 1: tough these bacteria are, but the fact I'm actually using
Speaker 1: this like is not significant at all. So, and these units,
Speaker 1: these units are all interrelated, like a gray is equal
Speaker 1: to a hundred rats, and a rat is a radiation
Speaker 1: absorbed dose, which means like hundred ergs per gram. It
Speaker 1: tells you like how much energy is being absorbed by
Speaker 1: your body. Right, And they're all like I think Grays
Speaker 1: was like named after a guy that like made the discovery. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's it's not like because when I saw grays,
Speaker 1: I thought I was like, oh, is it like g
Speaker 1: rays like gamma rays, But no, it's just like named
Speaker 1: after guy name, last name was great. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: just their nicknames. Like gamma radiation is actually just a
Speaker 1: guy that went by like gray Hey. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: I'm just using it kind of like just to give
Speaker 1: a frame of reference. Um, So, human exposed to about
Speaker 1: five grays of radiation will typically die within a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks cher Nobil style. So tartar grades, which we
Speaker 1: just talked about, can survive around four thousand grays of
Speaker 1: radiation with some damage to its reproductive capabilities, which is
Speaker 1: kind of nitpicking at this point because they're still alive.
Speaker 1: The ConA and the bacterium or D radio durans can
Speaker 1: survive around five thousand grades of radiation with almost no
Speaker 1: ill effects. So that's a thousand times about what a
Speaker 1: human can survive. And when I say what a human
Speaker 1: can survive, I imagine if you're getting like five grades
Speaker 1: of radiation, that means you die within two weeks. Less
Speaker 1: than that means you're probably going to get cancer within
Speaker 1: the year. It's not like this is the happy Yeah,
Speaker 1: survive is a loose definition. Them survived there. So the
Speaker 1: D radio durans are conan. The barbarian can also sometimes
Speaker 1: survive up to fifteen thousand grades. So that's ten thousand
Speaker 1: times more than a human. Now, when I say sometimes survive.
Speaker 1: It's like, uh, it sometimes doesn't, so it's like, but
Speaker 1: but sometimes it can survive. That. So the fact like
Speaker 1: if you got a group of humans together and shot
Speaker 1: fifteen grades at them, all dead like that. No, big, big, no,
Speaker 1: big no, do not do that. People don't do it.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. My wife is always telling me how microbes
Speaker 1: can survive anything. You know, they're essentially almost impossible to
Speaker 1: wipe out because in there there's always one that has
Speaker 1: some crazy strategy for how to handle this situation. So
Speaker 1: how did you behind a grain of salt? All? So
Speaker 1: how did these microbes do it? What is the mechanism?
Speaker 1: Do they have a shield the way Tarte grades have
Speaker 1: or they just dodging those radiation bullets or what's going on? Well,
Speaker 1: it's actually something that you mentioned earlier. So they have
Speaker 1: redundant DNA and extremely fast DNA repair mechanisms. So they're
Speaker 1: basically like little wolverines. So as the ionizing radiation breaks down,
Speaker 1: it's d NA. Not only does it have redundant DNA,
Speaker 1: so it's like, hey, I have like several backups, so
Speaker 1: no sweat. It also is able to build back up
Speaker 1: the damaged DNA. Really quickly, So as these little tiny
Speaker 1: bullets are like blasting into the DNA, it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll just build that again. I got backups,
Speaker 1: No big deal. Everything is sink to drop box, so
Speaker 1: you know, deleted all you like exactly. It's like every
Speaker 1: little sister's horror story of like a big brother that's
Speaker 1: so fast at rebuilding his legos that you can't knock
Speaker 1: it down fast enough and he just like keeps rebuilding.
Speaker 1: It is that a personal story, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: general societal experience. What's interesting is that there is a
Speaker 1: little bit of evidence that suggests that it may have
Speaker 1: stolen some of these capabilities from eukaryotic self. So bacteria
Speaker 1: are not eukaryotes, they aren't in the same domain as
Speaker 1: animals and plants. It actually may have gotten some eukaryotic
Speaker 1: DNA through horizontal transfer of genes, so like basically, if
Speaker 1: you're a little bacteria and you swallow up some foreign DNA,
Speaker 1: you can actually incorporate that into your own DNA, and
Speaker 1: like that may have had a role in being able
Speaker 1: to have these really fast repair mechanisms, and so it's
Speaker 1: it's very interesting. It's kind of a similar story to
Speaker 1: the tartar grade where it's like, you know, just like
Speaker 1: if you if you borrow DNA from a bunch of
Speaker 1: different animals, like sometimes you can find or not even animals.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be an actual animal, but if
Speaker 1: you borrow DNA from other organisms, ones that you are
Speaker 1: not even remotely related to, it can actually benefit you.
Speaker 1: So it's it's just mediated through viruses and pages like
Speaker 1: the injecting new bits of DNA. It can it definitely
Speaker 1: can be Sometimes it's just directly these bacteria like engulfing something,
Speaker 1: but it can be mediated by by viruses injecting it
Speaker 1: into their things. Like basically if you get it in
Speaker 1: and the bacteria is different from an animal cell or
Speaker 1: even like a plant cell where it's like basically they
Speaker 1: just have all their stuff floating around like a big cell,
Speaker 1: and so if they can get that in there, they
Speaker 1: can potentially use it. Most of the time, it's not
Speaker 1: going to be useful for them. But again, bacteria reproduce
Speaker 1: that an incredible race. They've been around for hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of years. Sorry, probably billions, billions, billions of years.
Speaker 1: I'm so bad at like time scale, and I'm like
Speaker 1: they've been around for thousands of years now, but they've
Speaker 1: been around for billions of years. They reproduced so quickly
Speaker 1: that this is one of the reasons they can evolve
Speaker 1: these incredible survival strategies that seem really improbable because they've
Speaker 1: just had and so many opportunities to have this happen.
Speaker 1: And then if something bad happens, like they get a
Speaker 1: they eat a bad piece of DNA, or they have
Speaker 1: a bad mutation, no sweat, there's like millions of new
Speaker 1: bacteria ready to to take over and try again. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it is. This is why, like I think when
Speaker 1: we're like, well, why is like why is bacteria just
Speaker 1: like so hardy and so good. It's like they just
Speaker 1: they have an incredible capability of reproducing and um have
Speaker 1: lived for such a long time that they can basically
Speaker 1: cope with anything. They can eat almost anything. My wife
Speaker 1: tells me this story about how they were trying to
Speaker 1: scrub bacteria and microbes from the outside of various satellites
Speaker 1: and spaceships because they don't want to contaminate you know,
Speaker 1: Mars or the moon whatever with human life, and so
Speaker 1: they're spraying it with some stuff, some bleach stuff to
Speaker 1: kill everything, and they discover that it killed everything except
Speaker 1: for some new kind of microbe they haven't never seen
Speaker 1: before that eat bleach and it's like, yum, feed me
Speaker 1: more of that, you know. And you know they're microbes
Speaker 1: living on the outside of the International Space Station. And uh,
Speaker 1: to imagine like ever ridding the world of microbes seems impossible.
Speaker 1: Microbe just being like a kids, It's okay, it's safety bleach. No,
Speaker 1: don't listen to him. The one microbe that believed Donald
Speaker 1: Trump about that one. Yeah, hey, nanny's right, it's totally cool.
Speaker 1: He's wearing like a dirty tank top. That's how I
Speaker 1: imagine this, like sleeves bag microbe. Yeah, it's it's a
Speaker 1: very incredible. It's like when you think about, well, well,
Speaker 1: why can't humans just have these crazy adaptations, Why why
Speaker 1: can't we just have DNA that protects itself from radiation. Well,
Speaker 1: like you know, we've been around very short amount of
Speaker 1: time on Earth. We haven't typically had to deal with
Speaker 1: huge amounts of radiation until recently, like oops, that might
Speaker 1: have been on us too when we started to tinker
Speaker 1: around on the sub atomic level. And and these these
Speaker 1: backup copies they cost right to have, like extra strands
Speaker 1: your DNA and all these repair mechanisms that slow things down.
Speaker 1: It costs a lot of energy, and so you could
Speaker 1: have it, but then you wouldn't have as much energy
Speaker 1: to run away from predators or you know, fight against disease.
Speaker 1: And so we're sort of tuned to the amount of
Speaker 1: radiation we naturally get here on Earth, and actually repairing
Speaker 1: DNA has a cost to like because every time you
Speaker 1: repair DNA there could be like a mistake paid, so
Speaker 1: there could be a mutation, which a lot of Again,
Speaker 1: most mutations are either neutral or bad. So you know, uh,
Speaker 1: it's while we need mutations to evolve. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like the thing that right now people are hearing like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, the one of virus mutates that's going to
Speaker 1: make the virus better. Not always like mutations just happen.
Speaker 1: That doesn't necessarily mean that's going to be good for
Speaker 1: the virus. Let me take your computer code and you
Speaker 1: just randomly replace one piece with another piece. It's not
Speaker 1: going to work better usually, right, usually just going to break.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, exactly, but like you do you reiterate that,
Speaker 1: like you know, millions of times over billions of years,
Speaker 1: Like eventually you're going to get basically a bacteria that
Speaker 1: eats bleach. Right, And and as you were saying, these
Speaker 1: things reproduce so quickly that the search scale is so
Speaker 1: fast because they have generation after generation after generation, and
Speaker 1: we're still like raising the first batch of kids, right,
Speaker 1: so our response time is pretty slow. Yeah, and we're
Speaker 1: one of the longest living animals on Earth. There are
Speaker 1: some animals that can outlive us, but they're they're quite rarely.
Speaker 1: Evolution really does seem to favor sort of these shorter lifespans,
Speaker 1: more frequent reproduction. But we just happened to find the
Speaker 1: evolutionary niche that favors longer lifespan, fewer offspring. But we
Speaker 1: make up for it by having this society that really
Speaker 1: has done an incredible amount to like being able to
Speaker 1: rule the planet because we've created this society. But that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that we are the most hardy animal or
Speaker 1: hardy organism on the world. It just means that we've
Speaker 1: sort of clevered our way around all these near near
Speaker 1: misses with death. Thank you mad scientists, right, remember, mad
Speaker 1: scientists have brought us all this quality of life so
Speaker 1: exactly exactly, but yeah, I mean, it is it isn't
Speaker 1: interesting because like I think, when we think about radiation,
Speaker 1: it's I kind of just wanted to bring it back
Speaker 1: to what we talked about at the beginning. It's not
Speaker 1: like mad scientists leading the charge, Like you're not like
Speaker 1: out there going like, let's blow up a bunch of
Speaker 1: nuclear plants and see what happens. No, I've never said
Speaker 1: that that's true. I definitely I've never said that. No,
Speaker 1: we do create tiny explosions, but they're really tiny. We
Speaker 1: smash like one proton against another proton to see what happens,
Speaker 1: and it's very safe, deep underground and all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. And you know, there are chances that the
Speaker 1: collisions we make could create a black hole that eats
Speaker 1: up the Earth, but we're pretty sure those chances are
Speaker 1: very very small. How sure are you scaled one to ten?
Speaker 1: If ten is very sure than ten, because because you know,
Speaker 1: these particles hit us from Earth, These particles are hitting
Speaker 1: Earth all the time from space much higher energies, and
Speaker 1: so if two particles colliding was going to create an
Speaker 1: Earth eating black hole, it would have happened already billions. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're pretty sick. Yeah, that's what they all say.
Speaker 1: Right before an earth eating black hole opens up. Well,
Speaker 1: we have never yet created an earth eating black hole,
Speaker 1: so our track record is perfect, and it's actually days
Speaker 1: days without creating an earth eating black hole. There's a
Speaker 1: website you can check. It's called has the Large hage
Speaker 1: On Collider destroyed the world yet? Dot com? And we
Speaker 1: promised to keep it always up to date. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's good. There's a very brief window when that website
Speaker 1: actually going to be useful. Yeah, well, you know these
Speaker 1: things all have expiration dates on the Yes, that's true,
Speaker 1: that is true. Well, thank you so much for joining
Speaker 1: me today, Daniel. I thought this was so great because
Speaker 1: I think it's sometimes hard to think about, like, well, wait,
Speaker 1: what does physics have to do with animals, especially like
Speaker 1: particle physics? Like okay, I can think about the physics
Speaker 1: of like a kangaroo jump of what what the heck
Speaker 1: does particle physics have to do with animals and evolution?
Speaker 1: And it's but it's also inter length. I mean, animals
Speaker 1: are made out of particles. Everything's made out of particles exactly.
Speaker 1: Particle physics is the foundation of everything. Man, Yeah, what
Speaker 1: about wait, what about a piece of toast? Is that
Speaker 1: particles or made out a little toastino particles. Past about combos.
Speaker 1: Combos can't be made out of particles. Now, those are
Speaker 1: not explained by physics. They're too delicious. It's just a
Speaker 1: mystery of science. Yeah, they're they're from a different universe,
Speaker 1: and it's just like no. I got into particle physics
Speaker 1: because I thought it was fascinating that you could like
Speaker 1: tear apart everything in the universe. Me and you and lava,
Speaker 1: and we're all made out of the same particles, just
Speaker 1: in different arrangements, even the rest of You've heard it
Speaker 1: here first, folks. He wants to tear everything in the
Speaker 1: universe art and science espexually tear it apart. Okay, sure,
Speaker 1: sure thing. Well so you've got you have a podcast
Speaker 1: that is called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. And
Speaker 1: what do you guys do on the podcast, Well, we
Speaker 1: tried to explain the universe. We talk about little particles,
Speaker 1: We talked about supernova as, we talked about black holes,
Speaker 1: we talk about stars within other stars. We talked about
Speaker 1: all the things that science has understood, but mostly we
Speaker 1: talked about the things that science has not understood, like
Speaker 1: what are the questions that science is asking right now
Speaker 1: about the nature of our universe, and I think people
Speaker 1: will be surprised to discover that most of the big
Speaker 1: questions we really have no clue about that how big
Speaker 1: is the universe? What is it made out of? All
Speaker 1: this stuff? We're really just beginning to its started to
Speaker 1: understand what are the answers and even what are the
Speaker 1: right questions? I love Yeah, I love that, And I
Speaker 1: was listening to one of your episodes. I love the
Speaker 1: reference to the Douglas Adams like the forty two, like
Speaker 1: you you can't get you can't just ask like what's
Speaker 1: the meaning of life because then you get some kind
Speaker 1: of bizarre answers like well, you can't interpret that you're
Speaker 1: not asking the right question. But yeah, it's I know that.
Speaker 1: For some interpretations of that is that it's scary that
Speaker 1: we don't know that much about the universe. But to me,
Speaker 1: it's actually really comforting because if we already knew everything,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, okay, then that's that's that. But not
Speaker 1: knowing stuff I think is not only exciting because it's
Speaker 1: like there's science isn't over. It feels like, oh, we
Speaker 1: already have iPhones, Like what Morkan. Science do, but there's
Speaker 1: so many discoveries to be made, and so many things
Speaker 1: we don't know. Questions, questions we don't even know how
Speaker 1: to ask yet, which is hard to think about, Like
Speaker 1: we don't there are questions out there we can't even
Speaker 1: think to ask, and that's incredible. So I highly recommend
Speaker 1: uh that podcast Daniel and Porgey explain the universe is wonderful?
Speaker 1: And where can people find it? You got anything else
Speaker 1: to plug any any anywhere people can bother you, any
Speaker 1: office hours you want to open up to the public. Um, Well,
Speaker 1: our podcast is produced by I Heart Media, so you
Speaker 1: can find it there, and I'm familiar with or anywhere
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts, of course. And we wrote a
Speaker 1: book together called We Have No Idea, which is about
Speaker 1: this concept that we're just beginning to make discoveries in
Speaker 1: science and that in a hundred years people will look
Speaker 1: back and sort of laugh at our latest ideas are
Speaker 1: notions or how the universe might work, and try to
Speaker 1: give you a preview for what we might discover the
Speaker 1: next few hundred years. And you joke about office hours,
Speaker 1: but I am a working professor. I teach and have
Speaker 1: office hours, and I have had podcast listeners look up
Speaker 1: by office hours and come on in from the street.
Speaker 1: This is pre pandemic days to ask me questions about
Speaker 1: dark matter and whatever. So if you have questions and
Speaker 1: you want them answer, to listen to our podcast. We
Speaker 1: also answer listening to questions well once once, once we've
Speaker 1: we've gotten through these pandemic times. I am just going
Speaker 1: to come over unannounced to have all these questions drop
Speaker 1: on me and be very welcome. So thanks very much
Speaker 1: for having me on your podcast. I learned a lot
Speaker 1: about biology and radiation and crazy birds, so thanks very much. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me. I learned a
Speaker 1: lot about radiation in physics because surprisingly I don't know
Speaker 1: all that much about a lot of things. And we
Speaker 1: have three new Netflix shows to pitch. That's true, that's true.
Speaker 1: One of them was Tarter Grades in High School again Netflix,
Speaker 1: Quimby get back at Us. Yeah, thank you guys so
Speaker 1: much for listening. If you want to rate, subscribe, download,
Speaker 1: there's a variety of buttons that you can press that
Speaker 1: interact with the podcast, and that actually really helps me.
Speaker 1: It teaches the robots that run these algorithms like, hey,
Speaker 1: this podcast is good and it also makes me feel
Speaker 1: really good. I read all of your reviews. I look
Speaker 1: at it like all the all the new new writings,
Speaker 1: and I read them and it just like I love
Speaker 1: it when I get feedback from you guys. Um and
Speaker 1: thank you to the Space Colassics for their super groovy song.
Speaker 1: Ex Alumina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: To listen to more podcasts like the one you just heard,
Speaker 1: or to listen to Daniel Jorge Explain the Universe, check
Speaker 1: out the I Heart Radio website, the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your ding Ding podcast. See you
Speaker 1: next Wednesday,