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This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
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Imagine this. Inside all of us, billions of cells follow millions of instructions written in microscopic code. And when a new cell grows, it copies those instructions. But the smallest error can lead cancer to develop, Right?
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And this is the reason why there isn't a single cure for cancer. Because, you know, there are more than 200 different types. Each of them have got different distinct character, you know, different challenges, different mysteries. And that means that trying to cure cancer isn't like following a single path. It's like trying to map out an entire forest. That's right.
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And Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. I mean, their work spans more than 20 countries with over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses pushing knowledge forward to save and improve lives worldwide.
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You know, over the last 50 years, the work that this charity has done has help to double cancer survival in the uk. And you have to think about that is that is more parents at the dinner table, right? That is more friends at their birthday parties. That is more people who are living longer, better lives.
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For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restoscience this podcast.
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Is brought to you by Carvana.
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Carvana makes car selling fast and easy from start to finish. Enter your license plate or VIN and get a real offer in seconds, down to the penny. If you accept, Carvana will come pick up your car from your driveway, or you can drop it off at one of our car vending machines. Either way, you get paid instantly. It's fast, transparent, and 100% online. Car selling that saves your time. That's Carvana.
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Carvana.
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Pickup fees may apply.
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Kids, they grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps, and the next, they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small. And their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on Depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download Depop to start selling. Hello. Welcome to the rest of Science with me, Hannah Fry.
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And I am Michael Stevens.
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Question for you, Michael. What are we made of?
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We're all made of stars.
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Yeah.
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Or are we? As you can tell by my sarcastic tone, I'm not a big fan of that phrase. It gets spoken a lot. But today, I want us to really Answer the question. What are we made of?
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You don't like the explanation? That we're forged in the heart of dying intergalactic cosmic.
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Oh, so inspiring. Oh, my gosh.
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Spewed out by supernovae, explosions.
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I mean, obviously we are. We were.
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Okay, but wait, when you say obviously, why so obviously?
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Oh, well, because we're made of matter. And that matter wasn't created by our mothers in the womb ex nihilo. Okay. From nothing. It was already there, and it was rearranged into us. And before we were here, it was something else.
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Because the atoms come from elsewhere.
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The atoms came from elsewhere.
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And.
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And then you ask, well, where do the atoms come from? And they formed early in the universe, and then heavier and heavier nuclei, more and more elements were formed by stars smashing them together in their cores and then dying and exploding, and all of their guts coalesce into new stars and planets and people. So we're made of stars. Mostly.
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I guess the point is that it's very rare that new atoms get made on Earth. Would it have, like, a little atom factory where it's like, how many carbons do you want? How many oxygen do you want? These atoms only exist because of these high energy explosions that happened in intergalactic collisions.
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It depends what you mean by made.
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Go on.
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Okay, so there are a lot of radioactive isotopes of very common things like potassium and carbon that are always, like, converting and decaying into things.
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I don't think. I'm not counting decaying. I'm not counting decaying.
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I want.
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What's the opposite of decay?
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Re up K. Decay Re K or just K? You can decay. Can you just kick?
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I only want K. Yeah.
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I mean, I can't go to the store and say, oh, I need carbon. I'm looking to, you know, grow.
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Build a baby.
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Yeah. It's like, if you want carbon, go eat a potato. But that potato got the carbon from the soil, which got it from a star that died billions of years ago.
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Mm. So hang on. This all sounds completely legitimate to me. It does.
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And that's why I say mostly, we are made of stars.
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Yeah.
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I like to say that we are made by stars.
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Go on.
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First of all, the very lightest elements. Hydrogen. Okay. There's a lot of hydrogen in our bodies.
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Sure.
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It's part of H2O.
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See episode one.
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See episode one. Yeah. As the universe cooled, protons could start to hold onto electrons and. Oh, you've got hydrogen. So a lot of the hydrogen in your body wasn't made by a star. It was Just made in the very early days, even before stars existed.
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Feels a bit pedantic, but go on.
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How is that pedantic? There's an enormous amount of hydrogen in your body.
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Excuse me. Actually, you were made before stars.
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Now, okay, to be fair, that hydrogen was probably in a star before it was in.
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You.
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Sure it wasn't made? Well, okay, so you are. You're made. Yeah. All right, fine. That one I'll give you.
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Okay, deal.
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You're made of stars there. My knockdown point is boron and beryllium.
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Go on.
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Hydrogen to helium to lithium. But then in nucleosynthesis, the process inside stars that forms new elements, you leapfrog all the way from number three, lithium, to number six, carbon, and four and five, beryllium and boron are not made in stars.
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Well, where are they made then?
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They are made by cosmic ray spallation.
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I beg your pardon.
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So this is where I get the whole we're not made of stars. We're made by stars. Because cosmic rays often come from stars. We're not entirely sure everything that they might come from, but they are extremely high energy particles. They're not rays of like, you know, a laser or something. They're. They're little cannonballs. And they're flying through space, often from stars that supernova many, many years ago. When these hit other atoms, they can cause that atom to explode. They can cause things like neutrons to fly around, and then those things fall into other atoms. And that is how beryllium and boron get made.
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So hold on.
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Not in a star, but around a star or potentially really far away from.
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A star by a star. So, right. Right at the beginning, we said, what are you made of? Stardust? And you disagreed. And to prove that you're not a pedant, you. We've gone all the way around the houses and come back to you saying, it's not. We're not made of stars. We're made by stars.
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We're made by stars of stuff.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right, Michael. Not pedantic at all. Hang on. Right. How much boron and beryllium is there in the human body, though?
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I. I've known this my entire life. So your body contains about 35 micrograms of beryllium.
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Okay.
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And every day you drink about between 0.2 and 0.6 milligrams of boron in your drinking water. Now, earlier, I told you that boron had.
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No, you're really adding to this pedantic thing here. Like, okay, you have to say by stars but because 0.35 micrograms of beryllium.
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Is in your body, we said, what are you made of? Not what is most of you made of. I just think, here's the deal. I'm not being pedantic so much as I love that I get to have this conversation every time someone says, oh, we're made of stars. I can be like, well, boron and beryllium are technically in your body, and they're made by cosmic ray spallations. All right? I do that all the time and there's not a lot.
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This is why we love you, Michael.
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If you support me. Eat some kidney beans. Eat some avocado and kidney beans and wash it down with prune juice. Those are our highest dietary sources of. Of boron and beryllium or just chew.
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On a boron rod.
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That's what my dad always used to tell me. But guys, let's talk about the things that make us. Not just what they make us out of.
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Cosmic rays. Because actually, cosmic rays. There is a whole fascinating journey that we're gonna take you on in this episode about cosmic rays that bring us to life itself. But also, a cosmic ray helped a Super Mario speedrunner achieve the impossible. Yeah, I guess we should start off talking about what cosmic rays are. I mean, you describe them as star puke, which I think is. I mean, frankly, that's all we need, isn't it?
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It's more than puke. It's better than puke.
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It's more violent than puke.
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It's the entrails of a star in many cases.
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I mean. Cause here's the thing, okay? Space is sort of. It feels like it's all like, lots of blackness. But actually, space is extremely violent. There are, you know, dying stars that explode into supernovae. There are sort of stars that are tearing themselves apart in these explosions that are so that they can outshine actual galaxies. You also have, like, black holes smashing into one another. You've got like, actual galaxies smashing into each other. It's all sorts of stuff that is throwing debris all over the place across space.
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And that debris are the cosmic rays.
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Exactly.
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A cosmic ray is not a immaterial flash of light like a ray like from a laser gun in a movie. It's just really, really high energy, fast moving particles like protons and. And helium nuclei and stuff.
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Yeah, because a lot of the stuff, the debris that's throwing. Throwing around is gon. Planet size or moon size or, you know, just like big rocks, but tons of it. Tons of it. A lot A lot. A lot of it is the size of single atoms or single, you know, atomic particles, basically.
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That's right. And these things are not just like rare, they are flooding the universe. I mean, how many times am I being hit by a cosmic ray? Every day, even now, in this moment?
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A lot. So the calculations are that every square meter at sea level. Well, sort of at sea level. Ish. Here.
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Yeah.
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Gets 10,000 of these space bullets every second.
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Every second.
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Right. It's an enormous, enormous number. I mean, it's sort of like imagine, you imagine that the Earth is kind of sitting in a bar during a sort of western style shootout, right? There's the stuff flying everywhere and we are actually protected from a lot of it because of, because of our atmosphere, because of the magnetic field that the Earth creates. It kind of protects us from a lot of this stuff, but still that you, you know, it's this constant barrage.
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And we don't feel it at all. No, mostly they pass right through us, I'm sure.
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Well, okay, so it depends, right? These protons are like heading straight towards Earth. And of course, there's a lot of atmosphere between, between us and sort of outer space. You know, just by chance, at some point, this proton is going to smash into a particle that gets directly in its way. And at that moment, they don't just bounce off each other. Right. You can't just think of them as sort of like normal bullets. Okay. You end up with this fireworks display of loads of different types of subatomic particles. So you get quarks, you get gluons, and they go on to sort of combine and then split into all these other particles. You get mesons, you get muons, you get neutrinos, you get photons, a little flash of light, you get hadrons. And loads of these just decay away almost instantly. Apart from muons, which are sort of like. It's kind of like a heavy electron. And those survive just long enough to hit down at sea level to come down to Earth.
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But they shouldn't.
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But they shouldn't. Yeah, they shouldn't.
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They decay so quickly that even at the speeds they travel, they shouldn't reach the surface of the Earth. And yet we detect them. They're being created as shrapnel from cosmic ray collisions in the atmosphere. And we detect them down here on the surface. And yet that became some of the earliest evidence that Einstein was right, that the faster you go, the slower time passes for you. These particles were decaying exactly when they should. It's just that time was running so slowly for them compared to our time, that their brief lives allowed them to travel all the way to Earth's surface.
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Exactly. So these things, they decay extremely quickly. They last for 2.2 microseconds, right? I mean, less than a blink of an eye. But even if they were traveling at the speed of light, 2.2 microseconds only lets them travel about 660 meters. Really not far at all. And yet the atmosphere is like 15,000 meters thick, 15 kilometers up in the sky. So if classical physics were right, you would never find any muons down at the ground from cosmic rays. And yet, exactly as you say, you, you measure them and there are thousands per square meter. Wow.
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So we live constantly in a shower of cosmic rays and the residue of cosmic ray spallation. That stuff's called spall, which is what you basically call shrapnel when it's not a weapon. It's just stuff that flies out. Some of which are these time traveling particles or time dilating particles.
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You can see them there, can't you? You can make like cloud chambers to detect them.
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Yep, yep.
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Didn't you make one of those when you were a kid?
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I did. My mother somehow allowed me to get a bubble chamber from this catalog. And it came with the chamber, but it also came with a needle tipped with radioactive lead. And she made me keep that in the garage. I don't know how she approved all of this.
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Sorry, your mother, who didn't let you say crap or damn until I was.
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In my 30s, allowed you to get.
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A radioactive lead needle?
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First of all, I still can't say damn.
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Okay, sorry.
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I am allowed to now say crap and piss.
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Woo.
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Piss seems a lot worse than damn, I gotta tell ya. But anyway, I don't think she fully understood what it was. And then when it came in this special test tube with radioactive warnings all over it, she was like, oh. And then I told her, oh. So I also need you to take me to the store to get some dry ice and the highest proof alcohol you can buy.
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Because. Hold on, we should explain what these things are. You basically get, I mean, imagine sort of an unused aquarium that you might house a fish in, right? Sort of, that kind of thing. And then you create a layer of alcohol vapor. You sort of really, really chill it, using dry ice to create this, this.
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Layer of alcohol, a super critical layer that's just ready to condense. It just needs the littlest provocation. And it can get that from cosmic rays. A little muon, a little muon flies through and then you see a trail like a contrail, almost a contrail from an airplane basically. You see that and it's this quick streak of slightly whiter, a very thin like spider silk. And that is radiation from above.
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A
Hold on, what was this radioactive needle for?
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B
Oh well, you needed a source of radiation because background radiation is not enough to get cool results. In the bubble chamber that I bought it was a very simple one. But you could stick this needle through a little hole in the chamber and then you would see it looks like whispers of hair constantly coming off of the needle. It was lead. It was a lead isotope that was radioactive.
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A
Where is it now? I don't know, Just out there giving someone else cancer.
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I should ask her what happened to it because it sat in the garage. But she sold that house years ago, so it could still be in that garage.
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A
Maybe we should go and check in on the people who.
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Maybe she ate it. I'll give her a call after we record.
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But yeah, if she suddenly gets extra senses, can like climb buildings, she can thank me, shoot spiderwebs out of her arms. You know, that's how you detect muons, right, Using cloud chambers. You can also do it where you get great big tanks of water and look for little flashes of UV light. You can also do this on the atmosphere where you kind of have loads and loads of mirrors and just wait for, wait for that head on collision of a cosmic ray and some sort of particle in the atmosphere. And when you do that, based on the intensity of the light, you can tell how much energy that space bullet had. Right, that sort of piece of shrapnel hat and loads of them, most of them have low energy, right. Sort of 10 to 80% the speed of light. Well, you know the slow guys.
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Yeah, so slow, not really bothering.
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And solar flares and you know, big ejections from the sun, they'll spit out these sort of protons that, I mean they make life quite interesting for astronauts, to be fair.
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B
In what way?
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Oh, because if you are orbiting the Earth, if you're like in the International Space Station, so you're outside of the protective layer of Earth, these cosmic rays are coming in and not hitting other particles before they decay and, and reach you. Astronauts when they're on the ISS report seeing flashes of light. The cosmic ray interacts with the neurons in their brain and make them think they're seeing things that are not there or tasting things that are not there.
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No kidding.
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Like flashes of metallic taste just like this sort of interruption.
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Ah, yeah. So that would be a concern for Long distance space travelers. If you want to go all the way to Mars, you're really leaving the protection of Earth and you're going to be hit by cosmic rays directly a lot.
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A
But these are just, these are the low energy energy ones that we're talking about. So every now and then you get a medium energy 1 99.9 speed of light. Right. That those are coming from supernovae, they're coming from pulsars, that kind of thing. But then in 1991 in Utah, they had all of these mirrors in the sky, pointing the sky, doing this big experiment looking for cosmic rays, trying to catch this very faint flash of ultraviolet light that, that happens when, when they slam into the atmosphere. And they found one, they recorded one that was traveling at 99.9999. I mean, I can carry on going. It's 21 nines, right? 21% the speed of light. Yeah. 9. 99.9999. 21 of them. 5%.
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B
Are you describing the oh my God particle?
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I am describing. This is what it became known as.
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It wasn't going the speed of light. But to put it in perspective, at the speed it was traveling, if it entered a race with a beam of light after a quarter million years, the light would only be 1cm ahead of it. What it's basically moving at light speed and it hit Earth and we detected it and we called it the oh my God particle. Most of them aren't that fast.
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A
No, but I mean, this one, the amount of energy that this has to get a particle to be traveling at that sort of a speed. This one, it basically had the same energy as a baseball traveling at 100 kilometers per hour.
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B
Right.
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But it was in a single particle.
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In a single subatomic particle, and this is it.
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No one still has any idea what kind of violent collision would produce that kind of space shrapnel. I mean, it's a real genuine mystery. And it's not the only one. They've seen other particles with similar, similar amounts of energy.
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B
Do they know the general region the oh my God particle came from in the sky?
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A
I don't think they do. Not from a single particle. You can only really, you can tell when there's a lot that come from a particular direction. But also remember, I mean, these things might be traveling close to the speed of, but they've probably been traveling for billions of years.
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Like what you are seeing in our time. In their time, it's no time's past, almost. Sure.
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But in our time, it's billions of years. And you know, quite often these things are. They're sort of like the ghostly remnants of ancient, ancient star collisions older than the sun, you know, and these bullets, like, passing through you all the time.
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B
Imagine being that particle you formed in the early days of the universe and then you traveled and you watched in very fast motion the universe age and you traveled a long distance and eventually you wound up on the one planet that could detect you and talk about you on a podcast.
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What a life, what a life, what a life.
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B
I know more about the third most powerful cosmic ray detected, the Amaterasu particle. This one was detected just in 2021. It had the energy of a brick being dropped from your waist onto the ground in a single particle. In a single particle. But what's cool is that we tracked where it came from, and it came from the local void, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a nearby area. Well, nearby. It's. It's far out from our galaxy and all the galaxies around us where there's just nothing. There's nothing there. And yet it's pitching these cannonballs at us. Or one cannonball. We don't know where it came from. It could be just a property of space itself is the creation of these particles.
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A
That's incredible. Yeah, because also, I mean, think about how small Earth is. This thing could be. There could be something going on in the deep void that we don't know about. This spewing out all of these in all sorts of different directions. And we're just so happen to have been looking in the right place at one moment where one just so happened to be passing.
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B
I'm sure even more powerful particles have hit Earth, but we're not always looking. Now we've only been talking about particles that scientists have detected with experiments watching for them. But I think that we've also been affected by massive cosmic ray high energy particles doing really interesting things when we weren't even expecting them. For example, in 2016, there was this woman named Mary Mo, great name, by the way. She was on a flight to Amsterdam and she had a pacemaker. And suddenly in the middle of the flight, her heart just starts beating like crazy. Like she can see it beating, and the rhythm is all off. They do this whole emergency ambulance pickup. When they land at the hospital, they determined that the pacemaker had entered its backup processing mode, where it has like a default rate and impulse strength. It was not what was prescribed for her. Why did that happen? The leading explanation is that a single bit in the computer of that pacemaker was flipped. Okay. The memory and the language of a computer is stored in these electrically charged bits. And a charged particle that results from a cosmic ray collision in our atmosphere can, can, can interfere with these bits and flip them. They can only be one of two things. On or off, one or zero. You flip one of them, that might have been enough to cause the pacemaker to go problem. Resort back to default processing mode, and that's probably what happened.
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Change a 1 to a 0, and these are potentially the consequences of it.
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B
So so far we've been talking about cosmic ray particles that have been detected by scientists using experiments that were watching for them. But we have evidence of high energy cosmic rays doing really interesting things when we weren't even expecting them.
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A
Actually, when you consider how much electronic equipment there is, I mean, in the sky, in planes, for example, the fact that this can happen, the fact that a cosmic ray can interact with electronic equipment, change a 1 to a 0 or 0 to a 1, sometimes it can have these really catastrophic consequences. So Mary's pace breaker being one, there was also, there was a, a Qantas flight, this is in 2008, and the plane is kind of going in the sky all happy, and then twice in 10 minutes it does a nose dive, right? Lots of people end up getting injured on board. Just really sharp turn. And when they did this investigation, they found that there was this erroneous computer data going on in the onboard systems that misrepresented the angle at which the aircraft was flying. So you can imagine actually a 1 to a 0 or 0 to 1 in that situation would make a huge difference. If you're at like, there's quite a big difference between 5 degree angle and 15 degrees, you know, or minus 15 degrees or whatever it might be. A lot of people, the, the explanation that people think is that it was cosmic radiation, that a particle from outer space from some intergalactic collision billions of years ago, traveled across the galaxies and interacted with that computer a precisely the right moment, precisely the right, in order to confuse the onboard systems.
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B
Not frightening at all.
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A
Not frightening at all.
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B
It's not just planes that are affected, though. And after the break, I want to talk about how it could be affecting your gaming the most serious pacemakers, crashing airplanes.
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This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk. In the uk, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. Tell you what, though, I've already had it. So between us, we're fine now.
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B
I'm safe.
- [24:52]
A
That's not how statistics works. Shoot the Question is, could science stop cancer before it begins in over the.
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B
Past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK and that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by hpv, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible.
- [25:16]
A
Indeed it did by vaccine and it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s.
- [25:29]
B
And knowing about HPV improves screening and that's, you know, vital for diagnosing cervical cancer early.
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A
I mean we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the uk. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never, never have to deal with.
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B
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org Restiscience.
- [25:57]
A
Ford BlueCruise Hands Free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in blue cruise enabled vehicles like the F150 Explorer and Mustang Mach E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply, does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details. Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you. All right before the break we were terrifying everybody ever whoever wants to get in a plane again. Again. What we should add is that there are now systems in place error correcting codes that account for this. You don't really have computer systems in a, in an airplane anymore that are just solely responsible for the angle of.
- [27:20]
B
Should I nose dive or not?
- [27:22]
A
Yeah, yes, exactly. That's sort of. We've moved on a little bit from there, you'll kind of say. But before we get on to the gaming story, which is extremely serious, I do want to add in the fact that those examples. So the Qantas flight and Mary Mo happened at high altitudes. I think it's probably not a coincidence because of course you are more likely to interact with these particles the higher up you go. And actually this is the, the, the reason why we know that these things exist in, in the first place. So okay, back in 1900 or so, this is a point. People knew about atoms, they knew about radiation, they knew how to detect it. But everyone thought that the radiation that they were detecting, this sort of background level was, was probably coming from the sun.
- [28:04]
B
Sure.
- [28:04]
A
The sun was spitting out of this stuff. And then there was a guy called Victor Hess, 1912. This is. He was like, I've. I know exactly how to test this. I know exactly know how to work out whether this is coming from the sun. Why don't I get into a balloon filled with hydrogen, go up into the sky and measure how much radiation there is up there. And by the way, why don't I do this during a solar eclipse?
- [28:28]
B
Perfect.
- [28:29]
A
Yeah. Because then when it's dark and I'm in my, you know, 5km high in my frankly explosive, explosive balloon with just a little dangly basket and some Victorian woolly gloves on, that's the point at which I'll be able to know whether it really is coming from the sun or not.
- [28:46]
B
And what did he find?
- [28:47]
A
I mean, not only did the radiation not decrease during the eclipse, but it increased the higher up he got. So he had these two little gold leaf that will flutter. You put a little charge through them and they, they kind of get attracted to each other when there's radiation. So they flutter in the presence of radiation. And he measured that. Actually, the higher up you go, the more these things start fluttering. And the solar eclipse made basically no difference whatsoever.
- [29:11]
B
Right, so it wasn't the sun, wasn't the source.
- [29:13]
A
Exactly. So that was the, the conclusion that he, he made was that the only way that it could be happening is, is that it's, it's from deeper in space that these things, that these things are coming from.
- [29:22]
B
And when was this?
- [29:23]
A
1912. Nice work. Pre health and safety. He did get a Nobel Prize for it, to be fair.
- [29:30]
B
It kind of makes it worth it.
- [29:31]
A
Do you think so?
- [29:32]
B
I would do it like in a hydrogen balloon for the views.
- [29:38]
A
Everything's content, baby. Go on, tell us about cosmic rays and gaming.
- [29:43]
B
Well, okay, look, in 2013, a speedrunner who. I'll explain. Speedrunning is my favorite kind of gaming content to watch. It involves completing tasks or completing entire games in video games as quickly as possible. Finding ways to optimize your strategy, whether it be the decisions you make or even the moves that you make to break the record and finish the level or the game or whatever the challenge is as quickly as possible.
- [30:12]
A
And people do this with quite retro games a lot, right?
- [30:14]
B
Yeah, retro games are particularly great because I Mean, we're all familiar with them. And you can really, like, look at the program and say, ah. The hitbox on that enemy is actually an octagonal shape, so you could clip through the corner of the octagon and avoid taking the enemy on at all.
- [30:32]
A
Yeah, I remember seeing one where somebody worked out that you could shoot a target through a window rather than going in the building and thus save two seconds, and then the record fell and so on.
- [30:40]
B
Exactly. And I love it because these are people who are experimenting with and mastering not the universe we live in, but a simulated one and the detail that they get into and just understanding it, it's such a human thing.
- [30:54]
A
I mean, I sort of think that brain power could be used on something more effective. But anyway, go on.
- [30:58]
B
I disagree. I think this is what life is, and I think that Dotateabag would agree with me.
- [31:05]
A
Go on.
- [31:05]
B
In 2013, Dota Teabag was playing a level on Super Mario 64 called tick tock Clock. There was a technique that had been discovered where you could move through the air or across the level a lot faster only under certain conditions. And at this particular moment, his character moved where it shouldn't have, shaving, you know, milliseconds off of his time.
- [31:30]
A
Teleported, basically.
- [31:32]
B
Teleported, which was a thing that they knew how to do in the game, but not where he did it. And so it became this big mystery, why did it happen there? But no one could recreate it. Everyone said this is a new piece of physics in the Super Mario 64 universe, that this something special happens here, but no one could recreate it. They used the original console, they used emulators. They couldn't make it happen. And so the only explanation is that a cosmic ray, or some spallation from a cosmic ray collision in the atmosphere hit his machine, flipped a bit, and sure enough, they found exactly which bit you can flip to make Mario do that exact move.
- [32:11]
A
No.
- [32:12]
B
Once in a lifetime. Once in a species existence phenomenon happened.
- [32:18]
A
Once in a lifetime. But then, if you think about the number of people that are playing Mario, the number of, you know, cosmic rays that are hitting the atmosphere, the number of bits that could be flipped that could result in something extraordinary happening. Actually, maybe not so unlikely.
- [32:37]
B
Yeah, right. Exactly. How many things can be explained by cosmic rays that aren't being explained by them yet? It could even be that human evolution was affected by cosmic rays. Right. They're ionizing. They can affect our DNA.
- [32:51]
A
Right.
- [32:51]
B
Who's to say that in the course of our species history, we didn't get a Little helpful mutation from a cosmic ray.
- [32:59]
A
So then we are made by stars.
- [33:02]
B
By stars, not of cosmic rays may have played a role in our evolution. They play a role in our daily lives and messing it up. But they also certainly play a role in death and what it means to be dead and how we change when we're dead.
- [33:21]
A
Go on.
- [33:22]
B
Picture this. You are an atom of nitrogen floating around in the atmosphere. You get hit by a cosmic ray. I know, not as binary. That actually really hurt my hand. And it wasn't even true. You don't get hit by a cosmic ray. You get hit by ball from a cosmic ray collision. So some of the things these cosmic rays make are free neutrons, and they're just flying around. If one of them knocks into you, you're a little nitrogen atom. You've got seven protons, seven neutrons. It flies in. Now you've got eight neutrons. You become unstable and you kick out a proton. Oh, now you're a whole new element.
- [33:56]
A
You're carbon. Now.
- [33:57]
B
You're carbon. Now with six protons, but eight neutrons, you're fat.
- [34:02]
A
Carbon.
- [34:03]
B
Carbon 14. Unstable radioactive carbon 14. This is happening in the atmosphere all.
- [34:09]
A
The time because normally carbon only has 12, right? Like, that's the kind of. If you make carbon in the traditional boring way, you've got an atomic weight.
- [34:17]
B
Of 12, and it is the most common kind of carbon. But this radiocarbon, this carbon 14, it decays. It eventually turns back into nitrogen 14. Its half life is about 6,000 years. But as long as you're alive, you are consuming more and more of this radio. Consume everything.
- [34:35]
A
And more of it's being made all the time.
- [34:36]
B
More of it's being made all the time. You're breathing it in, you're drinking it, you're eating it. But when you die, you stop communing with the universe. You stop taking in new carbon 14. And the carbon 14 that's in you continues to decay. So we can look at something that used to be alive, and we can look at how much carbon 14 it still has in it, versus how much it should have had. And we can tell how long it's been dead. We can tell how old it is.
- [35:02]
A
That is extraordinary. Yeah, I did not know that's how it works. That's how it works, because that moment you die, you essentially become sealed off from the rest of everything. Any new atoms no longer become part of you. Yeah.
- [35:18]
B
And we can see the atoms. At least the carbon 14 atoms age in your remains. So cosmic rays play a role in making us they play a role in our lives after we're dead. They mess with our video games and our flights. But like, what don't they affect?
- [35:36]
A
So can we say we're made by cosmic rays instead?
- [35:39]
B
We should.
- [35:40]
A
Okay, deal. Well.
- [35:44]
B
We'Re not only made by cosmic rays.
- [35:45]
A
Okay, but hold on, hold on a second then. Yeah, because, okay, cosmic rays, I know applies to like single atoms that are floating around. Okay, but like star puke more generally. Right? That's a kind of umbrella term which includes lumps of matter and cosmic rays. So can we say we're star puke?
- [36:04]
B
We can and should.
- [36:07]
A
Michael, we'll hunt you down if you don't answer with star puke whenever next asks that question.
- [36:12]
B
You are a bunch of a star puke. Just our stars just ralphed you into existence like a hairball. And I'm glad you're here. Please reach out, email us@therealScienceolehanger.com puke your questions our way.
- [36:31]
A
You can also check out our newsletter. It's full of stuff like this. The rest is.com science.
- [36:38]
B
See you next time. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info. And more places that could expose you more to identity theft. But Lifelock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our US based restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply. There's fishing and then there's fishing. Out here, you're after dinner. Online hackers are after your data. They'll bait you with fake emails, lookalike sites, anything to lure you in. But with Cisco Duo's end to end fishing resistant access control. Every login, every device, every user stays protected. Looks like no one's biting today. Cisco Duo fishing season is over. Learn more at duo. Com.