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Welcome to the Rest is science. This is Field notes are. Well, sometimes Thursday, sometimes Wednesday, depending on what part of the world you live in. Episode where Michael and I delve into a whole host of curious items and questions.
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That's right. Today I'm going to be showing off some pretty neat little things, including this, an alternate periodic table arrangement. Does the periodic table have to be so table y Does it have to be so rectilinear? How would God like the periodic table to look? Well, we're going to address that today, but first we're going to start with questions from you all.
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This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
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If you wanted to type out the entire human genome, you would have to type at 60 words a minute for eight hours a day for about 50 years.
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Okay?
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That's the scale of the DNA rulebook inside each one of your cells, telling it when to grow, when to divide, and when to stop.
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And different tissues read that same rulebook in different ways. So a skin cell doesn't behave like a lung cell.
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And cancer can begin when those instructions change, not one dramatic moment, but through small, gradual edits over time.
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Now, cancer isn't one disease. It is more than 200 types shaped by where those changes to the rul happen and how cells respond.
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Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, backing studies across all types of cancer work that
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takes years of very careful, steady progress to deliver each breakthrough.
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For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org thereest ISS we gather here tonight to bring women back
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to their rightful place. The Testaments, a new Hulu original series
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from the executive producers of the Handmaid's Tale. It's easier to accept a story than believe that the people around you are monsters.
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The battle isn't over.
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There comes a time when you have to take action, when you have to
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choose your own destiny. Never quite as it seems.
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Watch the new Hulu original series, the Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers.
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have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs.
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So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, right first up, we've got this really lovely question that came in. So Matt asked which technological or scientific heist had the biggest impact on the world. I love the story of Byzantine Emperor Justinian breaking the Chinese silk monopoly by smuggling silkworm eggs. Are there any others? In short, now, okay, I didn't even know this silkworm story. Did you, Michael?
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No. Me neither. No, never heard of it.
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Okay, so the Byzantine Empire, which is eastern Rome, essentially, they're like obsessed with silk. They love this stuff. However, the Silk Road, where all of this silk came through from China, was controlled by these Persians, who were basically the Byzantine's bitter rivals. And so every time that they wanted to buy any silk, they had to pay their enemies a premium, which is. I mean, that's going to sting, right? But then what happened was these two monks who, who lived in Central Asia, they approached the emperor and they were like, okay, look, we know, we know how this, how silk is made. It's not growing on trees, which is this, this common myth, this secret that people have been a rumor that people have been spreading. They knew that it came from worms. So what they did is they got these walking sticks, they hollowed them out, these bamboo canes, they hollow them out, and then they stuffed these canes with loads of silkworm eggs and then also mulberry seeds right in there. Right. Which is the only food that silkworms eat instantly. And then they took two years to cross over this, like, thousands of miles of territory with their sticks in hand. And if the eggs had hatched or been frozen or anything along the way, then of course, the mission would have failed. But they managed to get there. And then as a result, these mulberry seeds were planted, the trees flourished, the eggs hatched, and thus silk, not just in China, was possible, which I love that. Like, what an amazing, amazing story. So I tried quite hard to find something that could beat that or could at least match it. And I think I found one which I would argue had an even greater impact on the entire world than just stealing some silkworm mix.
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Okay, let's see if that's true.
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I'll admit that trade route quite important, but this, this, I think, is also very important. Okay, so this comes from the 1700s, and Britain had worked out how to create water powered spinning frames where they could, they could produce textiles essentially at these, these speed and scales that were, I mean, untouchable. This is like, you know, at this point, Britain is like, incredibly dominant in textiles. This is like a really phenomenal thing. But the British government knew that we had this power, say we, as though I was involved. I obviously wasn't. But they had all these rules in place, so. So you weren't allowed to export any textile machinery. You weren't allowed to export any textile blueprints, you know, for, for the machinery and the skilled mechanics who worked on this machinery, they were not allowed to leave the country. Okay? Like, there was really strict rules in the immigration of those people as well. But then this guy, this 21 year old, he knew that if he stayed in England, his life wasn' going to be anything particularly special. But he realized that if he worked out how to build one of these things and then took himself, with all the knowledge in his mind to the Americas, then he could be like a king. He could, you know, live lavishly. He would be untold wealth. So he went off and got an apprenticeship at one of these, you know, water wheel, spinning machine places. And he memorized every single gear, every single spindle, every single dimension on the water wheel. This is for the Arkwright spinning frame. And he put it all in his brain. And I mean, this is a mole, basically, right? In the British textile industry. And then with all of this in his head, he then disguises himself, this is in 1789, as a farm laborer, to avoid suspicion. So nobody knew that he was this skilled worker, boards a ship for New York, doesn't have a single scrap of paper on him at all. Just the whole thing is like in his brain. And then when he gets to the Americas, he meets with Moses Brown. He's a businessman and working entirely, entirely from memory, he manages to rebuild this insanely complex machinery. So, okay, this is all very interesting, right? There's like this leak of the information that ends up going to the Americas. But the thing is, why this is such a pivotal moment in history, and in quite a dark way too, is that this is the birth of the American factory system. It's the end of the British monopoly. But crucially, this ripple effect of this is that at this moment in time, you know, 1789, lots of people, including lots of southerners in America, have thought that slavery might naturally fade away because it wasn't profitable to. To grow tobacco or rice anymore, right? But now all of a sudden, you
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have this American factory system that needs raw materials.
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Raw materials and can produce textiles at an ungodly rate. And just this bottomless demand for raw cotton. So this exact moment, right, the efficienc of Slater's Mills basically ended up feeding this. It changed the maths of human suffering, essentially. And Ended up feeding this demand for slavery in the south for, you know, many, many, many, many, many more decades to come, man.
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So then what. Whatever happened of this Slater guy? Like, you're over there in the UK right now. Do you see him as a traitor? As a little rat? Think.
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I mean, I imagine people thought of him as a bit of a. Bit of a Weasley little rat, but I also think at the same time that this is. I mean, look, now you have much better laws in place about patterns and intellectual property and so on, and. But I mean, I do also think that once an innovation has been created, it is sort of inevitable that at some point or another, when you have something that can turn a profit, that can. That can dominate a field, create a monopoly, it's sort of inevitable that you can't hold onto it forever. So, you know, maybe he was a rat, but maybe I think also he was probably an inevitable rat.
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That's right. If it wasn't Slater the Rat, it was going to be, you know, Richard the Rat or Veronica the Rat. It was going to spread, and America was going to get its claws into this spinning machine eventually.
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Yeah. Okay, what questions have you got?
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Okay, well, I. I loved this one, which at first I'm like, I don't know how to answer that, but then I got really deep into it. This question comes from Arlene Finn. Is there more data in the cloud or raindrops in the clouds?
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This question was made for you, Michael.
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I know, right? I love it. And of course, I fell down so many rabbit holes. As it turns out, back in, like, 2013, more than half of people thought that data stored in the cloud was literally stored in a cloud in the sky.
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No, that's adorable.
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I mean, and this was 13 years ago. You know, people were hearing about the cloud for the first time in their lives, and they were like, oh, I guess this is using the weather or something. Why not? I also found out that there was a giant problem at a Facebook server back in, like, 2013, around the same time, one of Facebook's data centers. The humidity inside wasn't controlled well enough, and so an actual cloud formed inside because of the air conditioning systems. The heat produced the ambient humidity, and it began to not just become foggy inside, but it started to rain. The droplets collected and it was like, oh, this is really bad now. This happened again 13 years ago as well. 2013 was a funny year for the digital cloud, and I think they do a much better day. They do a much better job now of protecting data centers from Producing their own weather and also protecting them.
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Well, this is. This is why they put so much effort into. I mean, the amount of electricity they use is largely for cooling, right? To prevent stuff like this from happening.
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Yeah, exactly. And they actually have to do a lot of ceiling, a lot of rubber sealing on the. The electrical components in data centers, like literal. Like raincoats, because you don't want something like this to happen, Especially nowadays when the cloud is so vitally important to our digital infrastructure. But let's talk about it first of all, I guess the first thing we need to ask is how much water is in the clouds? And there is no single amount. It depends seasonally, of course, throughout the year. The amount of clouds in Earth's atmosphere isn't always the same. But I'm specifically taking this question to be asking about clouds, not water in the entire atmosphere. Because, of course, there's a lot of water in our atmosphere. There's more water in the atmosphere than there is water in just clouds. And the problem, though, is that the water that's in the atmosphere is in the form of vapor. It's a gas. It's water vapor.
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But.
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But a cloud is made of liquid water vapor that has condensed into very, very small droplets that are so tiny they stay aloft. And yet we're talking about tons and tons of water that just stays up there in these tiny drops. When those tiny drops touch each other and they get. And they kind of like form larger drops, suddenly they're too heavy to stay in the air, and they. They fall, and we call that rain. Now, clouds are also made of ice, and I'm including ice, and so I'm including solid water, ice clouds as well as liquid water, regular clouds. But as it turns out, I've got all my numbers down here, so I'm gonna be reading off of my notebook. How much liquid water is there in clouds? Around the average of the numbers I'm getting is a thousand cubic kilometers of water.
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A
What? A thousand cubic kilometers?
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1,000 cubic kilometers, which sounds a bit small, but keep in mind, clouds are very diffuse.
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I mean, sure, but if you think about it like, okay, so the earth is 40,000 km circumference. Right. So you're taking. So if you got all of the cloud together in one single block of water, it would be, you know, 1,000 kilometers, so a 40th of the way around the Earth in both directions and then 1,000 kilometers high. Yeah, I mean, that's. Admittedly, that's above the Karman line, but anything, it's quite A tall column of water.
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It's. It both sounds small, but it's also really big. I mean, we've talked before in our water episode, which if you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to that one. There's so little fresh water on Earth, let alone just total water. I mean, all the water on Earth is what, like, like a couple teaspoons on a foot diameter globe? Now we're talking not just about only water in the atmosphere, only water in clouds. 1,000 cubic kilometers, that's only 2,000 of a percent of all the water in Earth's atmosphere. And it's only 2 10,000ths of a percent of Earth's total freshwater.
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It's nothing.
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I want to get really specific here because that doesn't include water that is actively raining.
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Okay.
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At this very moment, it's raining in many places on Earth. And I found a fantastic Reddit thread where someone really did the math. They've since deleted their account name, so I can't give them credit, but they calculated that at any one time there are actively 5.4 quadrillion raindrops falling to Earth.
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A
I love this so much.
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Right? Okay, so we've got two things. And the reason I'm separating them isn't just to be cute. It's because raindrops and clouds are made of things of very different sizes. A raindrop is about 2,000 microns wide, about 2 millimeters wide. That's, that's the thing that hits you on the head when it's falling. But clouds themselves are made of drops that are only about 20 microns wide. So that's a good like hundred times smaller. I felt like we should separate them. So I took the size of a raindrop and a cloud droplet and I compared that to the total volume of water in clouds and found how many raindrops are actively falling and how many tiny or much smaller droplets are currently in clouds. And here's the numbers that I got. How many raindrops are there currently on their way to the ground? 2.38 times 10 to the 20th drops. That's a lot.
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A lot.
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That's like 238, quadrillion raindrops are currently having the ride of their life, but in the clouds there's 238septillion droplets on average at any given time. Now that we have those numbers, let's compare them to how much data is in the cloud. And this, it gets a little complicated because, I mean, we, I was going to say we don't know Is specifically. We don't know specifically how much water is raining or in clouds.
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I mean the estimates. But here's what I'm looking forward to. I'm looking forward to you making the. The unit switch from brain drop size to data, chunk size to data.
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Yeah. How do you measure data? That is the big question. Should I use bytes or bits? I've done both, so I could just share both.
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Go on. Yeah.
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The difference, of course, is that a bit. I prefer the bit answer because that also seems like a. The smallest piece of information. It's just on or off, a one or a zero. When you start talking about bytes, you're talking about bits. But then again, if we're going to talk about bits or bytes, should we talk about rain drops or water molecules? Right. Like things can get. Anyway, let's just continue on and then we can do some more, like, corrections at the end. So right now it's estimated that there are 240 zettabytes of information stored in the cloud.
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Wait, hang on. How many zeros is that?
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It looks like it's going to be 2.4 times 10 to the 22.
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Not much different to the number of raindrops.
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No. 24 sextillion bytes, which is equal to about 190 sextillion bits. I hope people can correct me on this math. You'll see how I'm just. I'm literally taking the number of bytes and multiplying it by eight to get the bits. So 190sextillion bits are stored in the cloud, but 238septillion droplets are just in clouds alone. Now, how do these numbers work? Because we're getting into some really big words. A sextillion is smaller than a septillion. Sexed means six, sept means seven.
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Well, sexed means something different if you're from my. My neck of the woods, but carry on.
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I've never heard of it. But there are more little droplets of water just in the clouds alone. I'm not even talking about raindrops. Then there are bits of information in the cloud, which is pretty incredible. And it's especially incredible when you consider the fact that we are talking about bits of information. You can't get smaller than that. And we're comparing them to droplets in a cloud. And you can make a droplet smaller. A raindrop, for example, contains septillions of molecules. So, like Mother Nature is still beating us just when it comes to water.
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A
I mean, we've got. Look, we've got nothing. Nothing on the clouds, which in turn They've got nothing on the atmosphere. You know, that does put it in perspective, doesn't it? Everyone getting all caught up about the size of data centers. It's nothing. It's nothing, you guys.
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B
It's nothing. There's more wetness in the atmosphere than there are ideas in the cloud. And by the way, the cloud is like really cluttered with crud. Some might even say crap from the Internet of things. It's just like my oven is connected to the Internet and it's, it's responsible for some of this stuff that's in the cloud, whereas the water in the clouds. I love it all. It's all pretty important.
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A
Yeah, there's, I think there's quite a lot of my old emails from, from approximately 2001 currently in the cloud. That's clogging up a lot of space and frankly, frankly, water would do a lot more good. A lot more good for everybody.
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Right, so basically bottom line is I might be off by a degree of magnitude one way or the other, or even a couple. And yet I still think it's quite undeniably true that there are more drops of water in the clouds at any given time than there is data in terms of bits in the cloud.
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A
Okay, we got a conclusion for you. All in a firm. A firm winner there. Big water. Okay, next question. I absolutely love this one. This is from Bricky Wes and the boys. Okay, here's what Bricky Wes has to say. I'm reaching out regarding an observation from construction sites in the north of England that has sparked a debate among the crew. One of the lads claims that over a 15 year career across various regional sites, the high frequency of blue eyed workers has been a consistent pattern rather than an anomaly. On our current scaffolding project, we have six Brickies and five out of the six have blue eyes. Are we looking at a genuine demographic trend within UK trades or just a fascinating trick of geography and human psychology? Okay, I'm going to tell you, I like this question so much that I think next time I, I teach hypothesis testings to my students, I'm going to use this example because it's absolutely brilliant. Okay, Right. So obviously I've done, I've run the numbers on this, Wes, for you. One thing to say first off is how common are blue eyes? So around the world it's not that common at all. Actually. Brown eyes dominate. So 70 to 80% of people around the world have brown eyes. Blue eyes only about 10%. However in the UK it's much higher. So there's Lots and lots of data on this, especially from DNA studies that say that roughly 48% of the UK population overall have blue eyes. Me being one. Yours. Are yours quite blue as well? Yours is sort of greeny.
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Yeah, my eyes are pretty blue.
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A
Yeah, they are very blue in the right light. Is this Mayfield? We should both be brickies. Maybe that's the big conclusion that we can make from this.
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B
I know. I'm starting to think, how do you describe your eyes?
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Mine?
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Yeah, blue. Can you get really close the bluey?
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Green.
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You're much more blue. Green. I am very blue. Gray.
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A
There he is. That's our cover photo right there. Okay, so this, this variation, though 48% across the UK is slightly different in different regions. So when you go further north, the concentration increases. So it's around about 50% when you're further up north. Okay. Now if you've got a hypothesis that, like this, that there is something fishy going on with blue eyed brickies, then there is like a formal way that you can test this. So what you can do is you can say, okay, what we're gonna assume, we're gonna assume that there's nothing suspicious going on. We're gonna assume that there's no magical connection between blue eyes and brickiness. And then that's gonna be our hypothesis and we're gonna test the alternative. We're gonna like, see, we're gonna follow that logic through and see if it breaks at some point. Okay. See if that, that logic ends up breaking. Because the evidence here is that five out of six brickies are blue eyes. And, and we're gonna say what are the chances of seeing this or a more extreme result? Okay, so if it was like, if you were just kind of like randomly walking into different construction sites, what are the chances that you would see at least five, if not six of the brickies having blue eyes, given that the background rate is 50%. Okay, so I've worked it out. Basically, the chance of having exactly five is about 9.4%. The chance of getting six is one and a half percent. So in total, the chance of getting this or a more extreme result is about 10.9%. Okay. There's been a lot of numbers in this episode, but if you are following the rules of, of scientific hypothesis testing, 10%, 10% chance of seeing this effect is not enough to be statistically significant means that if you went round to 10 different construction sites, you would expect this result in, in at least one of them. It's like, it's unusual, but it's not crazy. It's not scientifically crazy. So I also reckon your. Your mate, who has noticed this over a 15 year period, it's possible that there's a little bit of confirmation bias going on here. It's possible that he's noticed the trend once and then only noticed it when it appears really strongly. That could be the case. It could be that he is selectively remembering the blue eyed lads just because of confirmation bias. Or, and I will allow room for this possibility, it could be that you are onto the greatest physiological discovery in the history of UK construction. Okay. And the science demands rigor, Wes. So in between all your trial work, if you could just fire up Microsoft Excel for me, collect some data, and come back to me when you've got a sample of at least 400 northern brickies. That's. That's what I'm looking for, is that
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how many will need to be able to find a significant difference?
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A
I mean, yeah, I reckon that's, that's. That's about what we're talking. Yeah.
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B
Wow. Hold on.
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A
Michael, you look confused every time I use the word bricky. Is this not an American? Worse.
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B
I don't look confused. I think I figured it out. A bricky is a person who is a bricklayer by trade.
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A
What about. What about a chippy?
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B
A chippy is a person who fries up french fries as a living.
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A
It's a carpenter.
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B
A carpenter is called a chippy. Wow. I see. I hadn't heard that.
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A
A sparky.
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B
A sparky works on cars. No, electrician. I was thinking spark plugs.
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A
It never even occurred to me that that was British slang. It's a lovely phrase though, isn't it?
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B
Well, every time you said it, I thought, oh, I should probably ask for Clarific. But then I thought, no, I'm gonna act like, oh yeah, he knows too. Honorary Brit.
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A
Yeah, sometimes. Actually, I've got to be honest, sometimes I spend hours watching bricklaying videos on YouTube. That and plastering. I find it so relaxing. I mean, I imagine it's not relaxing to do as a job, especially when you're having to lug the bricks around.
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B
It's such a. A combination of everything. Like, it's. It's labor, it's craft. But then you watch some of these videos and you're like, this is an art form too, man. Wow.
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A
Very much so. There you go, birds. Thank you.
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B
We're gonna talk about some artistic things and some labor. After the break, I'm gonna show off some of our latest inventions from the Curiosity Box. And my mind.
- [26:10]
A
Tips Reales Rapido Videos Cortos Gente Real Sin Filtros Descarta TikTok Aurora
- [26:18]
B
no one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hanks has a line out the door.
- [26:40]
A
Hank makes the pizza, Co pilot handles the spreadsheets.
- [26:44]
B
Learn more@m365copilot.com Work Eczema is unpredictable, but
- [26:50]
A
you can flare less with Epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking Eglis achieved itch relief and clear are almost clear skin at 16 weeks and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [27:07]
B
HempGlass Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglis. Before starting ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.
- [27:41]
A
Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit ebgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. Okay, the time has come. We are we're gonna take down the periodic table in its original form and Mendev is going to be crying in his grave. Michael, over to you.
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B
Well look, I love Mendeleev, right? Like on a deep level, but at the same time I don't get it. Like why do we have the lanthanides and the actinides like pulled out into their own little block?
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A
Hold on a Second. Right. My chemistry knowledge is. I'm gonna be honest with you, limited. The original periodic table. Right. What's the argument in favor of it first?
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B
Well, I can only tell you so much because I'm really here to talk about the shape in general. But also, I'll tell you this. I love Mendeleev, okay? He's got an element named after him, all right? However, take a look at the periodic table, or if you have it in your mind, you can kind of think like. Or if you're watching, we'll put one up on the screen. It's cool in that the thing is a list of every possible element, all right? Arranged in a table that you can read from right to left, top to bottom. And as you read, you're reading the name of an element that is different because it's got one more proton in its nucleus. The vertical columns tell us something about the physical properties of. Of the chemical element. So we've got hydrogen over in this column with lithium, sodium, potassium, and so on. Helium winds up getting put all the way over to the right so that it lines up with all the other noble gases. Helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and so on.
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A
But then, of course, if you go down those columns, I mean, the alkaline, the first column, it's like they're all going to react with water, you know, lithium, potassium, and so on. And on the right hand side, they're all really in it.
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B
And that's why it's called the periodic table. Because as you start filling in the table, you periodically see certain characteristics repeat, okay? You do, you know, potassium, and you're like, oh, wow. Potassium behaves in a certain way chemically. And then calcium is different in scandium. And you go all the way across to krypton, and you go back down to rubidium. And you're like, hey, this is kind of like potassium. So we'll start again right underneath. It's. It's pretty neat. But if you keep going, you get yourself up to 55, 56, 57. Element 57 is lanthanum. And then you move one step to the right and you're on hafnium, which is element 72. We jump from 57 to 72. So 58 to 71 are like a little satellite table, the kids table. They don't get to be part of it. I should be clear that sometimes people do put them in and they just make the periodic table much longer. But we rarely see that version in chemistry classrooms or in books or on T shirts. Or any posters, anything. Usually the lanthanides are put down below, and that's what we call elements 58 to 71.
- [31:00]
A
What are the lanthanides like? What do they do?
- [31:03]
B
Well, they just are boring. I. Look, I. I don't know. But I do know that I read my daughter Theodore Gray's entire elements book, and when you hit the lanthanides and the actinides, you're just like, slogging through. You're like, okay. And yet again, we have a silvery metallic element that is useful in optics sometimes, but not really ever. It's kind of like America has the era of forgettable presidents. This is the. This. This kids table is the era of forgettable elements. You're like, okay, so we've got europium, gandolinium, terbium, dysprosium. They're the elements that no one ever names when they try to name all the elements they can think of.
- [31:47]
A
What about the actinides? They're more interesting.
- [31:49]
B
That's right. The actinides are. They're still separate because if you keep them in the. Like, the pattern of the table above gets kind of thrown off. But you're right, it contains some really big stars. I would say thorium. Ever heard of uranium, plutonium, americium? Right. We've got them in our smoke detectors. But still, to keep the table nice and tight, they've been removed because they kind of break the. The periodicity that you've got in everything from the 50s and down, meaning back down to hydrogen, so we don't have to organize elements in this way. And back in the swinging 60s, Otto Theodore Binfi came up with a beautiful arrangement which. Where the heck did I put this thing?
- [32:33]
A
The thing that I really like about this is that you've got the kids table. Or actually, it's just the boring party guest table where they're all sat there looking the same, not doing anything. And then in amongst them, you've got the stuff that you need for an atomic bomb.
- [32:48]
B
I know.
- [32:50]
A
I'll be honest. I want to sit at that table. I think that table sounds way more fun than being over there with boring lithium and potassium.
- [32:56]
B
Yeah, you're right. The periodic table is kind of like you've done a seating chart for a wedding and you've had to put, like, all the people you barely know at the same table as all the really violent people. And you feel bad, but you're watching
- [33:10]
A
them from the front being like, hey,
- [33:12]
B
hey, how's it going down there? You guys are so important to us. Don't sit next to us, though. All right, so. So in the swinging 60s, Otto Theodore Binfi comes up with this arrangement that is not only more psychedelically fun, but also doesn't require a separate table. And it's this one right here, known as the periodic snail, that's got all the elements, but they begin in the middle here. They're swirling around, swirling around like a snail shell. The elements increase from. In number of protons. We go from hydrogen to helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen and so on. But then after going around enough times, it breaks off into this little. I don't know what we should call
- [33:57]
A
that, like a little detour, almost a
- [33:59]
B
little detour that breaks off the spiral and comes straight out and makes a rectangle. And that is the lanthanides. And then beyond them, the actinides. We come back and we start spinning around in this purple area on the pin, which is the transition metals. These are all those metals in the middle, in between the two larger columns on the table. And the transition metals are pretty well known. We've got copper, nickel, chromium, titanium, gold. Right. Silver. They're all in here. But then this spiral arrangement still preserves a lot of the chemical properties in columns. I mean, in fact, it does in the same way that the Mendeleyevs does, because we've got the. See, it's hard for me to see. I'll turn it and look at it. We've got all the noble gases in a line. So here they are. Okay, I'm pointing to them. Helium, neon, argon and so on. We've got the alkaline metals, the alkaline earth metals. They're all still lined up in the same way, but you just wind up taking these detours for the transition metals and the lanthanides and the actinides. And then there's even a little third leg coming off of the spiral for the still sort of undiscovered super actinides, which we believe should exist out beyond the elements we currently have been able to find or manufacture.
- [35:17]
A
These are the ones that be bigger than the. Bigger than uranium, plutonium, et cetera.
- [35:21]
B
Exactly. The stuff way beyond there. I think this particular one I'm holding, it goes all the way up to organison element 118.
- [35:31]
A
That's a big boy.
- [35:32]
B
That's a big boy. I mean, we're past livermorium, we're past moscovium. But there's the last one OG wow. There the end. But you can keep going. I guess you could fill this in. As we discover more.
- [35:44]
A
These are ones that haven't been found in a stable form at all. They're just, like, theorized to exist theoretically.
- [35:51]
B
You can just keep adding a proton to a nucleus and make a new element again and again, again and again.
- [35:56]
A
V. Sam.
- [35:57]
B
V. Sam. Sure, I'll take it. As we've said in previous episodes, though, I really want a John Quincyum. Not because I love John Quincy Adams, the very early president in American history, but because the letters J and Q are just not used in the periodic table in English still. But John Quincyum Ban. It's a person's name, and you'd knock both of those letters out at once. So, anyway, I love. I love talking about the periodic table and how to organize stuff and taxonomies, you know, so we made this. The thing I've been holding up is a pin with a little magnetic clasp on the back. See, I've turned it around, and I'm pulling off a little metal bar that has magnets in it. So you can put this on your shirt, put the magnet bar underneath, and wear it like a pin without having to stick holes through your shirt, which a lot of big pins would normally do. See, look at me now. I'm fashionable. I've got the periodic snail on my shirt, my backpack, wherever, and I'm feeling good now.
- [37:02]
A
You'll get invited to parties, Michael.
- [37:04]
B
Finally. So this is. This is like one of my other jobs. And I love this. I love being like, look, I want to celebrate other periodic tables, alternatives to Mendeleev's arrangement. I'm not against Mendeleyevsky, obviously, but I just think that if you play around and you show people the different ways we can organize elements, the more I. And they get to think about why we organize them, what makes them different, and what's beyond what we've already found. So this is in the new Curiosity Box. We have subscribers who, like, every season, four times a year, get this giant box. Like, this is the new one, full of all the wacky stuff we've invented because of their support. So the box, by the way, that I'm holding up, is. Is. I don't know, it's like a big shoebox size, but it's covered in. In black and white lines, which, if you're a World War I history buff, is Dazzle Camouflage. Dazzle Camouflage. It makes it very hard to see what the shape and velocity of the box is with your eyes alone. Radar can beat this. But if you don't have radar, it can be hard to know how something's moving and where its corners and edges are if it's covered in this, like, zebra stripe pattern. So we just decided there's literally. There's never a theme to the box. It's like, whatever we happen to have ready in time. So we're like, all right, dazzle. Paint box, periodic table, pin. Fine. And you know what else? How about a stuffed animal? I've shown this to Hannah before, so she doesn't have to act, like, really shocked and surprised. But we're all probably pretty familiar with the old rabbit duck optical illusion. It's unknown who came up with this first, but it's first, like. Like, known publication was in, like, 1899, like, turn of the two centuries ago. And it's a drawing of, like, a duck, but maybe also a rabbit. It depends on how you look at it. The. The two ears of the rabbit could just as well be the two halves of the bill of a duck. And so it's an ambiguous illusion that shows a lot about how our brain works and how taking different perspectives means we interpret things differently. Well, we created a stuffed animal version of that illusion. Here's a bunny rabbit. Right. Or is it a duck? Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. And it's cute and cuddly, and kids love that it can be both. And us illusion nerds love that we can finally sleep with optical illusions.
- [39:32]
A
Amazing.
- [39:32]
B
The bunny rabbit's tail becomes the webbed feet of the duck. Right. And this. This began as us trying to figure out how to do a rubber ducky for the bathtub. And I said, here's what we should do. It should be that rabbit duck illusion, but as a bath toy. Problem is, we couldn't figure out how to make it float in both orientations.
- [39:57]
A
Oh.
- [39:58]
B
But we could figure out how to make it stand up in both orientations as a stuffed animal.
- [40:03]
A
Oh, that's a shame. Did you try putting, like, a movable weight in it?
- [40:08]
B
No, we didn't. And it's mainly because that might work, but at a certain point, we have to just make a decision. And it was like, look, let's just do stuffed animal. I feel like maybe a stuffed animal would be more popular than a bath toy. But I can show you back on my wall, I've got one of the prototypes for a smaller, solid rabbit duck.
- [40:27]
A
Go on, grab it, grab it, grab it.
- [40:29]
B
So here is, like, a prototype, a 3D printed prototype of the rabbit as a duck as well.
- [40:35]
A
Oh, wow. That works so well.
- [40:37]
B
This works. Yeah, it works really well.
- [40:39]
A
Amazing. I Can see how that might be very difficult to make it float in that orientation.
- [40:43]
B
It's hard to get it to float in this very vertical rabbit position. But you're right. What if there was just like a giant glob of mercury in it?
- [40:53]
A
I think that's absolutely perfect for a child's bath toy.
- [40:57]
B
And you move it this way. Now it's really weighted here. It's really weighted here as a duck. But yeah, you can see how we. This took us quite a while to prototype and then, you know, find a factory that could make a stuffed animal version to our specifications. But I'm very proud of it.
- [41:16]
A
I'm not surprised. It's very fun.
- [41:17]
B
Yeah. And you know, this T shirt is also in the box. We always come up with apparel. And so this one is. It's our take on a spring. Spring break T shirt seen. It's not Senor Frogs, it's Senior Inks Woo Party time. And it's got a recipe on it for party punch, which on a lot of these shirts it's like a margarita recipe. But this is actually a recipe for how to take uranium ore and process it into yellow cake. And that's only half the recipe. The other half tells you how to then enrich that uranium.
- [41:48]
A
You haven't included that half?
- [41:49]
B
No, we've included that half because there's like no risk. Enriching uranium is not something that a hobbyist can just do at home because their shirt told them how to. You need access to centrifuges that only state governments have the information about and the, like, the money to build and the experts to run. And today they don't even really use centrifuges. They use lasers. And this is the old fashioned recipe. But I just love making things that force people to go, oh, what's that shirt? And you're like, oh, yeah, it's got this recipe for party punch. And then they read it and they go, wait, that's not a cocktail.
- [42:25]
A
Well, it sort of is a cocktail in a way. It's just. It's just a kind of more atomically potent cocktail.
- [42:33]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, yellow cake is not like more radioactive than the uranium ore that came out of the ground. You haven't enriched it at all. It's still, you know, 99.3% uranium. 238 like, but it's easier to transport because it weighs less. It is more concentrated in the sense that the rock contains dozen of elements, but the yellow cake only contains two. Uranium and oxygen. And of course, once you've got the yellow cake, you can more easily start enriching the uranium. And I, you know the process again, it feels weird to share how it's done, but no one can really do this. I think you shoot the yellow cake with fluorine gas, which is really reactive, okay. And it rips the uranium off and probably burns the oxygen. And then you're left with uranium hexafluoride. And that's a gas that you can spin in a, in a centrifuge. And then you can separate the different uranium atoms by their weight because some of them are lighter than others and some are heavier because of how many neutrons are in them. And you want to then pick out just the most unstable radioactive uranium. 235 ones. Now it's enriched and what's left is called depleted uranium.
- [43:51]
A
And this is the point when the American government are on to you.
- [43:55]
B
Exactly, exactly. Any kind of enrichment is against the law in the United States. Even though you only need to enrich to like 3% uranium 235 to. To have something for a nuclear power plant. You need to go higher for nuclear submarine or, or battleship engines, not battleship aircraft carriers, but you need to go up even higher to get into the weapons grade area. And it doesn't matter because any amount of enrichment, you're breaking the law. So, you know, don't even try. However, it exists as an idea and knowledge is power and knowledge allows us to be wiser. So you can wear the shirt in case you ever forget and you're like, oh, shoot, exactly how much hydrogen peroxide do I need to use? What. What's the target ph for precipitating out Y. Okay, now you know. Now you know.
- [44:47]
A
Now you know. Now you know.
- [44:50]
B
Yeah, basically. So that's a taste of the kinds of things that I get to do. And I love it. I love it. And I love that there are so many people out there who also find this kind of stuff exciting because I don't think anyone else was going to make a periodic snail pen or a shirt that shows you how to process uranium ore. I couldn't find one.
- [45:07]
A
No. I think you really definitely identified a gap in the market, Michael. And goodness knows the market is glad you exist. I quite want one. Where's mine? I want one in the post.
- [45:16]
B
Well, yeah, you know what, I'll sign you up. I'll just get you, I'll get you a subscription. Send me where you want me to send it and we'll get you on every season. Why not? I mean, you do wind up with like a lot of shirts. You know, after five years, you're like, dang, I've got 20 shirts. So that's the only kind of shirt I wear.
- [45:34]
A
There's no need to ever buy clothes anymore. That's. I'm here for it.
- [45:38]
B
That's what I say. We did do a Mobius scarf last season instead of a shirt, which was a scarf that had that twist so you could unzip the scarf and it didn't become two scarves, it became one larger scarf.
- [45:50]
A
Amazing. Okay, well, that, that I think concludes our podcast expedition for today into the, a little, a little dip into the designer mind of, of Michael Stevens. If you have any questions that you would like us to answer or anything else that you want us to send in, any suggestions for other borderline illegal recipes that Michael can have printed onto shirts, then you can send them into us. The rest is scienceoalhanger.com and you can
- [46:15]
B
join our newsletter at thereestis.com science we
- [46:19]
A
are going to be back next Wednesday, Thursday, depending on what country you live in, with another edition of Field Notes and on Monday, Tuesday with our normal episode.
- [46:31]
B
We'll see you then.
- [46:32]
A
We need to simplify that message, I think somehow, don't we?
- [46:35]
B
I think so. I think we just say like, next time. I don't know.
- [46:37]
A
Next time. Time. Next time. Yeah, good idea.
- [46:39]
B
See you later. Specifically, when it's up to you. Right. You're free to make yellow cake. You're free to listen to us on Friday if you want.
- [46:48]
A
The point of podcasting, isn't it really, ultimately, yeah. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm
- [47:16]
B
you'll tour our campus, see live demos,
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A
meet instructors and learn about our associate degree in nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at the end. Carrington Edu events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci.
- [47:36]
B
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A
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