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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the rest of science. This is, this is field notes.
- [00:04]
B
Oh, hi, Field notes. I'm Michael.
- [00:05]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, that bit's important.
- [00:09]
B
That's just classic Michael Hannah banter. Well, I'm here to talk about color vision. Okay. Specifically color vision in other animals. I spoke about this a while ago, but now it is real and it is on my body and it's protecting my. My bones. I'll show you.
- [00:30]
A
It's unfortunate the ed probably going to cut the bit where you, your, your top came up with your hoodie and we saw an almost nude Michael.
- [00:39]
B
Was that in frame?
- [00:41]
A
No. Fine. You're safe. Don't worry.
- [00:43]
B
Did you guys not know that about me? In order to take my shirt off, I have to get completely nude first.
- [00:49]
A
I did think when you, when the fans came off, I thought it was too much, but you know, you do you.
- [00:54]
B
It's just. It's just easier for me.
- [01:02]
A
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [01:05]
B
Our bodies are incredible machines, worrying away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.
- [01:12]
A
In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back.
- [01:21]
B
To the moon and back. That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London underground into a suitcase.
- [01:31]
A
By the age of 50, you have copied almost 6 trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes. And over time, those mistakes can accumulate and that collection of errors can lead to cancer.
- [01:46]
B
But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors. And by finding them, They've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer.
- [02:01]
A
For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience for adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur before treatment. Get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about tremphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit trempharadio.com this episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify.
- [03:49]
B
Anyway, this is the shirt. And the shirt, you'll notice right away in white letters, it says, no bones in here. And the shirt itself is a kind of orangish red color. And so humans can read this, you know, no bones in here part, but so can dogs. Dog vision is different. Dog vision is just dichromatic. They only see two, two base colors, blue and yellow. All right, so they can see, you know, brightness and, and, and darkness. But they also can only see combos of blue and yellow. That's how the world is to them. And reds and greens look the same. They just kind of look perhaps like browns. We don't know what it is like to be a dog, but we do know that dogs cannot be trained to recognize the green and the red thing or a green thing on a red thing. And so in green letters on this red shirt, we have written jk. I'm full of bones, actually. So only humans can see that. Actually, I have a skeleton inside me. As far as dogs know, I don't have any bones in here.
- [05:00]
A
Yeah, I think this is an ingenious plan, Mike. I think, I think you've thought everything through. I think you have worked it all out. I can only see one tiny flaw.
- [05:10]
B
Yeah.
- [05:11]
A
Not sure dogs can read, but beyond that. Great.
- [05:16]
B
Some of our testers brought that up. They said, well, I wore the shirt and I walked around bragging about my skeleton, and sure enough, no dogs tried to steal my bones. But it might not be because of the shirt, Michael. It might be because dogs can't read.
- [05:30]
A
You need a control group.
- [05:31]
B
And I, I think, honestly, science will never know what really happened.
- [05:36]
A
So.
- [05:36]
B
But I'd rather be safe than sorry. We call this the dog safety shirt. It's part of this season's color vision box. We've got the, the color blindness tests all over it with different numbers. That's 8. If you can't read the 8 on top of the box, then you might have colorblindness of this type. Or you might be a dog, in which case, paws off my bones, Fido. Now, I think, I think I may have mentioned the idea for this shirt already on the podcast, but now it is real and it's on my body protecting my bones. There's more, though, that I haven't shown and it's that we also made a whole sticker set. These are stickers that, that dogs cannot enjoy. So there are stickers of things that dogs would otherwise love, like cats, bones, fire hydrants, poop, squirrels, tennis balls. This. My, my daughter's already been playing with the stickers and she put a diamond ring sticker on top of this one and I can't get it off. But this is a dog sniffing another dog's butt.
- [06:37]
A
Great.
- [06:38]
B
But the colors that have been chosen so that to a dog, this, this heart shaped sticker, for example, that's red with a green bone on it, is just going to look like a brown heart. They won't be able to see the detail of the bone written on it.
- [06:52]
A
Ah, sucker.
- [06:54]
B
As I show this off, it feels like we're just teasing dogs, but I think really we're teaching about the variety of visual experience amongst life forms on Earth, which is a beautiful thing because
- [07:06]
A
there are other animals like the, the, is it the mantis shrimp, which has, if humans have on average three cones, dogs have two. The mantis should have something like 19, if I remember rightly. We don't even know what it sees. It's like the idea is that it's seeing perhaps some things that look translucent to us. It's managing to be able to distinguish between that and the sort of the water background that it's against. But I mean, the rainbow would be an entirely different experience if you're a mantis shrimp. I know you come across the idea of a tetrachromat, by the way.
- [07:44]
B
Well, yes, there are humans who have, well, they have different color vision. They can see more colors than most people. Yeah.
- [07:52]
A
So because it's all comes down to the X chromosome, which is where most of your cones are, certainly your red and green cones are. Which is why being colorblind is so much more common in men than it is in women.
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B
Right.
- [08:06]
A
Women, it's about one in every 200 women is colorblind. In men, it's more like 12% or something. But yeah, the reason is that if you end up with a defective X chromosome, effectively that your cones aren't working properly. In women, you get two rolls of the dice, you have two X chromosomes, if one isn't working, you have the other one, it's fine. But in men you only get one shot because the Y chromosome doesn't have the right information on it.
- [08:31]
B
One strike and you're colorblind.
- [08:32]
A
One strike and colorblind. But because it is on the X chromosome, there is this idea that actually some women get two X chromos, they're substantially different, that they end up with a fourth, effectively a fourth coat tetrachromat.
- [08:48]
B
Now, I've heard about this, but what does that mean for their vision? What do they see that I don't?
- [08:53]
A
Well, so there's only been a really, really, really small number of women who have like, been sort of identified and tested in a scientific way. But there are some, some people. Some estimates say that actually maybe around 20% of women have this, but don't know that they have it. I mean, you can go your whole life being colourblind and not know that you are.
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B
Yeah, right.
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A
Because you. There's. It goes back to quality. You don't know how your experience relates to somebody else's. But if you are a woman who ends up arguing with other people about the color of things quite a lot, then it's possible that you're a tetrachroma. I think the idea is that you can distinguish between colors much more easily. So whereas you and I might be able to see, see a million colors, a tetrachromat might be able to see up to 100 million. So they can detect extremely subtle changes that you otherwise wouldn't be able to see. But we don't know really. It may be that they have entirely different colors altogether. There was one woman who was a tetrachromat, sort of confirmed tetrachroma, and she said that when she walks along a pebbly beach, she doesn't understand how everyone just says, oh, it's all really gray. She didn't understand it because she was like, what are you talking about? This is like being at a jeweler's shop window that you can see this, like sparkling array of, like myriad colors just shining back at you. What is everyone talking about? It's just really gray.
- [10:13]
B
Wow.
- [10:14]
A
Maybe in there there is a pebble that says, hey, humans, suckers. And it's just put there by the mantis shrimp.
- [10:22]
B
Yeah, you trichromats Will never appreciate me. The pebble. I love that. Just, it's such a good reminder that, like, we see such a small portion of the world and there's so much more there that other species see that even other individuals, humans can see.
- [10:39]
A
It's like the universe through a keyhole, you know?
- [10:41]
B
Exactly, exactly. Now here's, here's an ambiguous thing that we made. This is a coin. It's like a challenge coin sized coin. It's made of metal. And you can flip this to never lose a coin toss. The way it works is that it says heads on one side and tails on the other. And it says also says tails on the other side and heads on the other. It's an ambigram. So if I hold it like this, you can read the word heads and the editors can maybe outline the word heads there. But if I turn it upside down, we're still looking at the same side, but now it says tails.
- [11:18]
A
Nice.
- [11:19]
B
So you can flip this coin, the other person can call it in the air, you catch it, and then you just show it to them one side up or the other to have it be heads or tails. So that you can always win or always lose. You know, it's up to you. You are in control. So I love this. A little bit of word art there. And then you see the coins around the edge. It's like different frames in the animation of a spinning coin. That's a Zoetrope illusion. And so when you spin this coin, it's got a little divot in the middle so you can spin it like a top.
- [11:50]
A
It looks like the coin is moving,
- [11:52]
B
but this coin can spin on its face like that, like a spinning top. And if you spin it and you look at it through your phone's camera, it can align with the frame rate and the coins along the edge become an animated spinning coin. So this is a coin that spins a coin.
- [12:11]
A
I like that a lot. It's like the origin of cinema.
- [12:15]
B
But those, those are some of the, the little inventions that we've got here.
- [12:20]
A
Here's what I want to know, right? When you come up with all these inventions, where does it start? Are you just like the idea of doing a shirt for colorblind dogs? Where do you, what, where does that come from?
- [12:32]
B
Well, we always wanted to do something around color vision. Like the, the, the whole, the whole box is always this team effort and people will have an idea and then we all piggyback off of it and add to it. And so I think for this shirt, it began with, we want to do something with color vision. Maybe make goggles that allow you to see the world as a dog would, for example. And we still might do that. I'd love to make a book, actually, that comes with pages that you can look through to see the world as a cat, as a dog, as we couldn't really do a mantis shrimp because you'd have to add colors. But maybe we'll figure out a way to do that. And then somehow it turned into a shirt that. Oh, you know what? We had the idea to do a shirt that only your phone could see, because, you know, phones also see more colors than humans do. This is a great experiment to do at home. Just open up your camera app and point it at the front of a TV remote control and start pushing buttons. To the human eye. The light on the remote will just look blank, but through your camera, you'll see, like a bluish light flickering because the camera receives the infrared radiation and then it converts it into a color humans can see on the screen. So you can see lights that you couldn't otherwise see through your phone. We wanted to make a shirt that worked in the same way where until someone took a photo of it, they couldn't see what was on the shirt. And we couldn't actually get it to work with the. The like, shirt printing technology that exists today. So we said, how about instead of phones, we focus on, like an animal? How about dogs? They famously have limited color vision compared to a human. And then I was the one who said, all right, here's the deal. It's going to be about bones. It's going to be about keeping you safe from a dog that wants your bones.
- [14:25]
A
I want to be in one of those meetings one day. Okay. I want to just be a fly on the wall and enjoy it.
- [14:29]
B
You should come by. We just had one this morning. We're talking about. Here's something. I'll have to send you a set. We're making a bunch of charms. They can be like keychains or just like charms for a charm bracelet that are based on SI standard units.
- [14:45]
A
Amazing.
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B
So we're giving you a pendulum that has a period of exactly like a tenth of a second. We're giving you a little vial that contains exactly one kilocalorie of sugar. So you know what that looks like a 10 gram weight and a square with a smaller square cut inside of it. That is exactly a square inch and a square centimeter. So you'll always have those to reference. And the plan is to do the full line of of. Of scientific unit charms. So we'll also have a light that produces either one lumen or how, you know, some.
- [15:23]
A
Some exact measurement.
- [15:24]
B
Yeah, Standard amount. And what else is there? There's. Oh, we'll give you an ohm. Resistor keychain.
- [15:32]
A
I like this a lot. Will it also look good, Michael? Because if it will, I'll wear it.
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B
They're made of steel, so they're, they're hard wearing and they, they're, they're stainless, so they're going to look beautiful. I think it's all really well designed. I'd show you photos, but that's all confidential.
- [15:48]
A
But then you'd have to kill us. Then you'd have to kill us. Okay. Should we go to a break? Let's go to a break and when we come back, we'll be answering some of your questions. Perfect.
- [15:56]
B
See you then.
- [16:09]
A
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk. What if your immune system could learn to recognize cancer cells?
- [16:16]
B
That's immunotherapy. One type is CAR T cell therapy. T cells are your body's watchmen. And doctors can now extract these and reprogram them to. To spot cancer.
- [16:26]
A
They've started showing this real promise in treating cancers of the blood like leukemia. Because unlike most cancers, blood cancer cells, they float around separately. And that makes it easier for CAR T cells to seek them out and destroy them.
- [16:39]
B
And now Cancer Research UK funded scientists are designing CAR T cells that can tackle solid tumors too, making them tougher so they can survive a more crowded and hostile cancer environment.
- [16:51]
A
Now, these approaches are experimental, but they do start to show where treatment might go next. And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the uk. I mean, this shows you how far research can take us.
- [17:05]
B
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience so good, so good, so good.
- [17:18]
A
New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom rack stores. Now get ready to save big with up to 60% off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.
- [17:43]
B
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally, break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses. Setup required. Compatibility and availability. Various 18. Okay, we are back. Back to get into some of your questions. Remember, you can always submit your own by emailing them to us at. The rest is science. Goal hanger.com. who knows? We might answer it right here on the show.
- [18:28]
A
We certainly might. You know what? While you were talking, I realized on the camera, my skin color on my arm is exactly the same as the top that I'm wearing.
- [18:36]
B
It just looks like you're naked and sunburned.
- [18:38]
A
Naked and sunburned simultaneously.
- [18:41]
B
Very oddly. Just on the shoulders.
- [18:43]
A
Exactly. Just this really glittery sunburn. On this particular occasion, I need to. Noted. Need to put on some fake tan if I'm wearing this top. You know how silly people are. If you don't say anything, they don't do anything. But if you say, guys, can you subscribe to our channel? Suddenly, there's a massive influx of subscribers.
- [19:00]
B
Yeah, but that's because we are influencers, Hannah. If we tell people to subscribe, they do it just like lemmings. Though lemmings don't actually exhibit lemming behavior.
- [19:10]
A
No, that's true. They were driven off the cliff by Disney producers, weren't they?
- [19:14]
B
Yeah. Anyway, the point is, you should subscribe.
- [19:18]
A
Yeah, we hate saying that. We hate it because it's such a cliche, but unfortunately, it works. So until every last one of you has done your duty and clicked that like and subscribe button, we will continue forcing that narrative down your throats.
- [19:33]
B
Just a brief object that has nothing to do with science at all. It is purely a plug for my best friend's book. So this. This woman, her name's Anna McCauley. She was my best friend through school. She was like the smartest kid in the school. So I felt very jealous and competitive with her. But we became very close friends. She was the best man at my wedding. And she's written a book. And the book is a perfect marriage of, like, UK and America, just like us. It's called Abby Off Sides. It's about an American who moves to England, starts working for a football team in Liverpool, and one of the characters in this book is based on me.
- [20:19]
A
Oh, but you're not saying which.
- [20:22]
B
What bigger honor could there be? I will say this. First of all, it's really. It's really a whole mind trip to read a book where, you know, there's a Character based on you. It's. It changes the whole experience.
- [20:35]
A
Wait, is it, is it the dashingly good looking romantic lead?
- [20:39]
B
No, it isn't. However, she did write the character to be a much better friend to the main character in this book than I have ever been to her. It's just. It actually almost made me feel bad. I'm like, oh, gee. Also, the character that I'm based on has hair, like thick, curly hair. And I'm like, okay.
- [20:58]
A
I mean, so do you if you do a hand, a handstand.
- [21:01]
B
That's true. Look at that. Upside down. I am a hirsute man. Anyway, Abby offsides. Not available here in New Zealand until October. So luckily I've got my advanced readers copy. I read this, you know, a year ago.
- [21:15]
A
Okay, first question. Let's get back to it, shall we?
- [21:17]
B
Okay, this comes from Dan Pelveco, who asks, I was curious to know if there is any way that we could use DNA and RNA to encode data like a hard drive. Is there anyone working on this?
- [21:31]
A
They're not just working on it, Dan. There's this whole race going on about it. So at the moment I'm filming this series and one entire episode of this series is going to be about exactly this, exactly this question. So maybe what I should do is give you an update after we've gone off to film it. But yeah, this is like we're at this point where semiconductors are reaching the kind of limits of Moore's Law. It's unbelievably expensive to sort of transcribe data through this digital process, but it also just takes up physically a hell of a lot of space. So this time next week, I'm going to be in a mountain in Pittsburgh which is, has been converted into a sort of safe data storage facility. The idea that, you know, if there's attacks or like fires or whatever, it might be out out there in the world, inside the mountain, the data will be safe and kind of can stay there for a really long time. But nothing has got anything on DNA. You know, like we've dug up woolly mammoths from the, from the permafrost in Siberia and then managed to extract DNA from them that's been there for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, since before humans even existed. So this is like the only data source that we know for sure can be frozen in time and still be completely robust, you know, hundreds of thousands of years later. So there are people who are doing exactly this. Can I ask a question, please? Go ahead.
- [22:58]
B
Okay, so when you and Dan talk about encoding information in or as DNA or rna. What does that mean? Does that mean using their actual amino acids to store data, using the A,
- [23:15]
A
T, G and C? Yeah, exactly.
- [23:17]
B
Okay, so. And that's what makes it DNA, because obviously if you encoded the text of Moby Dick, it wouldn't be DNA in the sense of like, oh, this is instructions for a living organism. It would be using the language of DNA to form a long molecule that could be read to give us back Moby Dick.
- [23:41]
A
Exactly right. So you couldn't sort of pop it into a cell or pop it into an egg and then suddenly Moby Dick be born, but you could pop it
- [23:50]
B
into a special reader.
- [23:52]
A
You could pop it into a special reader, like.
- [23:54]
B
Like an electronic computerized reader that would then be like, oh, I've analyzed this DNA molecule and here's Call me Ishmael. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- [24:02]
A
Exactly right. And if you think about it, this is one of the big advantages of it, apart from the fact that we know that it's sort of. That it's stable over incredibly long periods of time. We also, in DNA, you have four bases, right? 80 and C and G, whereas in binary, you've only got 2, 0 and 1.
- [24:21]
B
Right?
- [24:22]
A
So it's also incredibly articulate. Basically, you can. You can. It's extremely, extremely capable of compressing data really, really, really efficiently. And you are also. You're down at the size of molecules, right? So like, one bit becomes minuscule.
- [24:38]
B
Even physically, it's very compressed because you're writing with molecules, large molecules, you know, but still molecules. And I know DNA can be lost pretty easily, but it's, It's. It's stable. Like you said, we can pull them out of woolly mammoths, but I guess it'd be more stable than like, okay, let's etch some little markings on a little wafer and hope it doesn't get scratched.
- [25:03]
A
Right.
- [25:03]
B
These molecules kind of preserve themselves by their own intermolecular forces.
- [25:09]
A
Quite literally, that. You're exactly right. I mean, if you think about. So I know we've spoken. Spoken about this before, but the Human Genome Project, which is trying to take human DNA and then transcribe it into a string of those letters, A, T, C, G and so on. The Human Genome Project, I went to go and see it the other day as part of this program that I'm filming at the Sanger Institute, they have it printed out as a series of books. I cannot tell you. It is absurd. When you see just human DNA written out, it Is like. I think it's 112 books. And these books are meaty tombs. And you think, you think, oh, tome. Sorry, I never get that word right.
- [25:51]
B
A meaty tomb. That sounds like a good movie.
- [25:56]
A
But you open them up expecting the writing to at least be big. And it's not. It's minuscule. We are talking many, many, many, many, many thousands of pages across many hundreds of books. Right. It's insane. Insane. And all of this is squished in and is copied in every single one of your cells, which are just. I mean, it's so tiny, right? Like, it's so articulate DNA. There's this one estimate that basically if you took everything that humans have ever created and then you tried to re encode it using DNA instead of. Instead of sort of traditional methods, then they would basically fit in the back of two vans, backs of two mans.
- [26:36]
B
Wow.
- [26:37]
A
Everything that's ever been written by humans, I mean, you go to like, you go to a data mountain like the one in Pittsburgh, you put it in DNA, and it's basically just like a little fridge, you know, like a little, tiny, little, little fridge. Like, you need nothing. It's almost nothing.
- [26:52]
B
Would this be smaller than electronic storage as it exists today? Like, how much physical space does a billion bit take up on a hard drive?
- [27:04]
A
Do you know what? I don't know.
- [27:05]
B
Yeah, I don't know either, because the
- [27:07]
A
problem is that one bit, I mean, the bits, you had to have, like, transistors, right? So, like, even though transistors are small, we're still talking many orders of magnitude larger than DNA.
- [27:17]
B
Yeah. If I had an entire encyclopedia encoded into a strand of DNA, that DNA could be put into a little envelope kind of thing, and I could inject it into my body and I could have the Encyclopedia Britannica in my body as a virus.
- [27:39]
A
You could. I mean, you would. You would really hope that there wasn't some sort of weird fluke that actually. Ebola actually just so happens to be the exact same strands of. As my life story, as my story was Moby Dick. Right. You know what a fluke that would be? That when you translate Moby Dick into amino acids, it just reads like Ebola. That would be bad anyway, the way that people do this. Yeah. So the only problem about this is if you're accessing the data, so one of the real advantages of electronic storage is that you can read it and write it extremely quickly. Right. And even when you have it, once you have it written, reading it again is really quick. Whereas if you're storing something as biological material, you're going to need to pass it back through a sort of electronic process in order to read it. So one of the ways that people do this is they go for like, quite a retro approach. They basically put it on a cassette tape, which I really like. They sort of like, you know, play out the DNA on this long strand and then have this tape sort of winding around so that then can be read through a machine really easily. They sort of coat it with this kind of crystal armor so that just to stop the DNA bonds from breaking down. But yeah, there are. I mean, this is like, there's a big rush in this at the moment. This is. If you want data that will exist forever, then this is the way to go. Okay, next question. We've got one here from Simon Garner. He says, I was recently thinking about free will and decided if scientists discovered definitive evidence that it wasn't real, I wouldn't want to know. That made me want to ask you, as two people who've dedicated their lives to the acquiring and relaying of information, is there anything you wouldn't want to know? Even if we had the scientific knowledge and it was accessible to you, is there anything you would ask to not be told?
- [29:35]
B
Man, I find it really hard to answer. If, if we proved that everything was determined and everything could, given enough, you know, calculating could be predicted, it still wouldn't feel that way. I mean, we evolved to feel like causal agents. And so you could probably just never convince everybody that, like, they had no free will or no choice in, in, in their decisions. But if I could, you know, know anything, what would I not want to know? It was hard. I. For me, I'd say probably I don't want to know the inner thoughts of everyone that knows me.
- [30:20]
A
Don't you feel that it's been like being on the Internet is version of that? Both.
- [30:25]
B
Yeah, we already have, we already have a version of that. That does enough. But in terms of future events, I don't know, I feel like it would be, it would be really hard to believe that if someone told me, okay, you're going to die in this way on this date, that I would, I would feel like, yeah, but I could avoid that now. And yet in this thought experiment, determinism is the case. We don't have free will and I couldn't escape it. That would be a real trip to find out, like, no, this is going to happen in this way no matter what you do. It'd be hard to accept.
- [31:03]
A
I'm the same I'm the same as you. I think anything bad in the future, I'm okay with not knowing. I don't want to know when, When I'm gonna die. I don't wanna know when my family are gonna die. I don't wanna know if there's an apocalypse around the corner. I don't wanna know. I'm okay with it. I'd rather not know. I mean, I think the only reason why knowledge would be comforting would be if you. If the knowledge itself allowed you to change things.
- [31:32]
B
Yeah. In which case we could already do that. Like a. A person could pretend to be a mystic psychic and tell you what's going to happen in order to encourage you to act differently than you are now.
- [31:44]
A
But you're right, we already do know this. Right? Don't smoke, don't drink too much, go for exercise. But we already know the thing. Be kind to people, Enjoy every day. Like we already know all of the things.
- [31:55]
B
Things we already know that, but we don't really live like we know it. I think we may have mentioned this before, but it's a real trip to keep in mind that we have so many movies about time travel and going back in time to change the way things are. But we rarely in our lives sit and think about like, whoa, I am already a time traveler. Meaning right now will be the past at some point. And so the decisions I make now will radically alter the future. I already have the power to change what's going to happen. I'm going to take advantage of it. Greg Egan wrote a short story called the Hundred Light Year Diary that is about the discovery of a galaxy where I think time runs the other way. And they're able to align some telescopes in such a way that they can see. See the future.
- [32:50]
A
Right.
- [32:51]
B
I have. I'll have to reread this story to see how they do it. It's. It's incredibly hard sci fi, really amazing. But then what happens is people wind up receiving through these telescopes, diaries from their future selves. And their future selves will write about what happened each day. And the future selves have to make these decisions. About how many details do I tell them? Like you're going to be in a car accident. I'm going to leave out how much it hurts, but I will let you know that it will happen. And then people live their whole lives knowing that, oh yeah, tomorrow is the day that I'm going to be in this car accident. And they all the psychology behind how people live in a society where they already know the main landmarks of their life is really, it's. I mean, I almost don't have much to say about it because I need to just kind of lay in bed and think about it more. But it was a real incredible read because it worked. It worked.
- [33:44]
A
That's so interesting. What made me think about that as you were talking is that idea of talking to people about what lays ahead in their future and leaving out the most painful details deliberately. Because I actually think that we do that to each other.
- [33:59]
B
Yeah.
- [33:59]
A
You know, I was thinking here about with childbirth, for example. I mean, people say, you know, childbirth's painful, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think that. And I sort of don't want to say it out loud, but I think. I think that something happens when couples have their first baby, and almost every single time that couple is like, something definitely went wrong because that was so bad. Like, that was so bad. And it's sort of only when you're on the other side of it, you're like, no, it really, really is that bad. We just didn't tell you. We just didn't tell you. Or maybe you just didn't hear. Maybe you just didn't hear, or. I think also having young children is a similar thing. You know, I think if anybody really told you how much sleep you lose, I think people sort of. They kind of dance around it a little bit, but then don't actually say it, you know?
- [34:56]
B
Yeah, well, right. I mean, it's. It's hard to make it clear like, oh, you're going to. You're not going to sleep much. Going to be stressful in brand new ways. It's hard to really conceive of what that means. But at the same time, there is growth that comes from that. Like, I have learned things about myself and my childhood that I never would have learned or thought of if I had not been a parent. I think I've said this before, but having a kid is like a big psychedelic experience. It can go really wrong, but it can also go really right, and you can really, like, reach a higher plane. It's up to you. It's all about the set and setting.
- [35:38]
A
Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's not just about new births. So I think it's also about death. I think that. I think that people, maybe deliberately, or maybe because it's just too painful, hold back on some of the details of what it's like to be close to somebody as they're dying, you know what it's really like. And I think that partly it's because maybe other people aren't ready to hear it. But I. But I also wonder whether it's a bit like your Egan idea of, like, actually, you just don't need to know. You just don't need to know. You don't need to know unless you have to. Unless. Unless you're unfortunate enough to go through it.
- [36:12]
B
I wonder if it's also just really hard to articulate some of these really difficult things. Like we just don't have the ability to communicate the kinds of pain. It's not that we're shielding other people from it. We just can't even ourselves really grasp what was so difficult and why. So we just say, yeah, it was bad, but, like, it's okay.
- [36:39]
A
Or maybe it's also that actually the people listening are not in a position to really hear it.
- [36:46]
B
Right.
- [36:46]
A
Like, to really understand it. So. So, for example, I did this program. Did this program recently, and I spoke to a person who'd previously been on the program, and they said, it's really, really fun, but it's also really, really hard. And I was like, yeah, yeah. And then I went on, and then I spoke to her afterwards, and I was like, you didn't tell me. It was really hard. She was like, I did. She did. I did. I just didn't. I just didn't hear it.
- [37:19]
B
Yeah. The ways we take and give advice and what we hear and don't hear in it and. And say and don't say in it, I think is. Would be a really rich place to investigate because you're right. Advice never really prepares you completely for anything. And then afterwards, you are incapable of producing the advice that you should like. It just kind of has to be experienced so many things.
- [37:46]
A
Yeah. Like, you do transition. You change. You are trying traveling yourself. Right. You. You become a different person as you have these different experiences. Yeah, that one got very deep, didn't it? Anyway, so shall we move on?
- [38:01]
B
Yeah. All right, look. Olive Ridley asked this question. I've been having a think about dragons. Could it ever be biologically possible for an animal to anatomically produce fire? I think bombardier beetles are on the right track.
- [38:17]
A
Okay, so bombardier beetles. Right. I've been watching videos of them today. I hadn't actually come across them before, but, like, they're incredible, these things. So other animals will try and eat them, and then they quickly learn because what they do is when they're sort of attacked or they're disturbed, they turn around and. And then they have essentially an internal chemical explosion in their abdomen. And then they Expel this jet of boiling like acid towards their attackers. I've seen a couple of videos of a mongoose getting this, this stuff sprayed. In its eyes, the mongoose did not, did not appear happy.
- [38:56]
B
And it's actually boiling hot.
- [38:58]
A
Yes, it's like superheated.
- [39:00]
B
So the heat comes from the chemical reaction. Obviously the animal isn't, doesn't have a little oven inside of it.
- [39:06]
A
No, exactly. What, it's, it's, it's hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide. Right. Which is this. And those who are actually quite common as a defensive agent amongst insects, but what they're doing is because they are combining, they're like, they're creating this chemical at the exact moment of use. They're kind of mixing these two chemical precursors in this protective chamber in their hindquarters. And then as they combine, they can get it sort of gives us this intense heat and they expel it exactly that moment. And they've got this little passageway basically between the two internal chambers that opens and closes when they want to like spurt it outwards. So, okay, that's like, that's pretty good. But it's not actually ignited. It's pretty good, but it's, it's not actually on fire. There is this paleontologist called Philip J. Center who's trying to work out what are the different options for fire breathing creatures and, and why haven't we got one? And there's like a few different ways that you could do it. One is that if you, I mean, methane is already produced by a number of animals, us included. Cows also, notably, you know, cattle and sheep in particular. They, they, they belch, you know, dozens of little methane burps every hour. So all you got to do is ignite it.
- [40:26]
B
But igniting the methane is the question,
- [40:29]
A
which wouldn't even be that hard. There are animals that produce electricity, you know, that would be. Getting the spark wouldn't be hard.
- [40:35]
B
True.
- [40:36]
A
The problem is that the methane cloud would probably envelop the animal's own head. So that. Not so good. Also, by the way, there is actually some evidence of this genuinely happening in humans where someone belches while they've got a cigarette and then they burn themselves, really.
- [40:56]
B
So there's enough methane in the belch that the cigarette lights it.
- [41:02]
A
I think in particular, there's something going on already which is allowing them to produce a more flammable burp. So that's, you know, burping is not, it's just not gonna work. It's not gonna work. Right. You're gonna burn yourself first. Oh. There's also the idea that you could create a gas cloud. So rather than just like, burping, you could sort of create a little cloud like a nostril. There are these chemicals called polyphoric molecules, which do burst into flame as soon as they come into contact with air. So that might work, but again, unfortunately, it just detonates too close. Even if it comes out of a very narrow hole, like a nostril. Right. It detonates right next to the tube opening. So it would just like. Yeah, burn your nostril if you're a dragon. And then there's also hypergolic pairs, which is where you get two chemicals that ignite spontaneously on contact. This is, like, very close to what the bombardier beetle is doing. But unfortunately, these things, I mean, the temperatures are incredibly high, and it creates this scalding liquid rather than a flame. So. So there's no spark, there's no ignition. Sort of, you know, doesn't really work. So, unfortunately, every fire mechanism that's been proposed doesn't really work in a real animal because you can't do it without cooking your own face.
- [42:26]
B
Right. I mean, there are hypergolic mixtures that will ignite, but I'm sure they're, like, super toxic to a living thing. You're right. I think the bombardier beetle is there, but the methane thing sounds like the best bet if you could. The problem is creating enough methane to get, like, a nice flame. And you'd have to shoot it out at a lot of. At a high pressure.
- [42:47]
A
Right. Definitely.
- [42:48]
B
The animal would have to evolve to have, like, compressed liquid methane in its body that it could then expel.
- [42:55]
A
Yeah.
- [42:56]
B
And. And then it would have to do, like, an electric eel little spark thing to ignite it.
- [43:02]
A
It's not beyond the realms of possibility. I mean, if it produced the same amount of methane as a cow, but just happened to be the size of a beetle, that would work.
- [43:10]
B
Okay, there's enough.
- [43:11]
A
There's enough pressure there.
- [43:13]
B
Maybe it's not enough of a deterrent. Like, it'd be better to just evolve fast legs to run away from a threat.
- [43:22]
A
Or wings.
- [43:23]
B
Or wings, than to breathe fire at it.
- [43:25]
A
It's a shame.
- [43:27]
B
I would almost think that fire breathing would be more advantageous to a creature for other, like, practical reasons. Not attack and defense, but just to create warmth. Like, humans had to have opposable thumbs and the ability to get flint and. And create fire and then feed the fire and collect what's needed for its fuel.
- [43:49]
A
The problem with fire is it doesn't really discriminate, does it? You know, once it's out there.
- [43:52]
B
Right.
- [43:52]
A
Sort of. You're sort of. It's a bit like when there's people who suggest that smallpox could be released by a bad actor in order to gain some sort of military advantage. Like, yes, sure, but smallpox doesn't. Smallpox doesn't discriminate between you and your enemies, you know.
- [44:11]
B
Right.
- [44:12]
A
And fire doesn't either. And I think that unless these dragons are also fireproof, I agree that it's not a good defense mechanism.
- [44:21]
B
It's too dangerous to burn down your
- [44:23]
A
own home to scare away a burglar.
- [44:26]
B
Because I was just imagining if, if some like dinosaur had evolved the ability to start a fire and then they could have started cooking their food and consuming more calories and their brains got bigger and like they became the intelligent species on our planet. Problem is, it'd be a big risk. You know, a dinosaur gets stampeded and it explodes. Whereas the way humans controlled fire protected us from that risk. We weren't walking flammable creatures. We had to decide deliberately we're going to do a fire here. And that's maybe a better way to do it.
- [45:07]
A
I think overall it probably is. So, yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, apologies, Olive. No fire breathing dragons for us this time. Okay, I think that brings us to the end, as ever. Please do send us in your questions to therestis scienceolehanger.com you can also leave us comments under this video or go to our subreddit, which I only recently found out about. R. Thereestiscience. We read all of the things that you send us and if you're lucky enough, if your question is good enough, if we think you're kind of cool enough, then maybe we'll answer it here.
- [45:41]
B
Yeah, see you over there. I mean, I hope so. The side note, I can't use my Reddit account anymore because I set it up using my old Google email address when I worked at Google. I no longer have access to that and now Reddit is saying I have to like, change the password, but I can't get any of their emails. So Michael Stevens on Reddit is just like, I can't do anything. So, president of Reddit, if you listen to the podcast, I'd appreciate that, but I'll make a new account if I have to because. Because I want to see you guys over there on our subreddit and yeah, email in your questions if you prefer. We love hearing from you. And until next time, see you later.
- [46:19]
A
Bye bye.
- [46:31]
B
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A
That's it.
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B
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A
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