Listener Questions #6

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about fundamental particles, radiation-gobbling fungi, and the physics of pinball. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 2:29Daniel Whiteson?

  What's the deal with the Higgs en masse? Can I use a rocket to weigh a bass? Could the weak force make pinball more of a delight?

• 2:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why is dark chocolate better than white?

• 2:40Daniel Whiteson?

  What are fungi eating in reactor four? Is graphite delicious in a nuclear core?

• 2:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Biology, physics, archaeology, forestry.

• 2:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And yes, even sometimes a little chemistry.

• 2:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night.

• 2:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Daniel and Kelly's answer will make it right.

• 2:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to another listener questions episode on Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.

• 3:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith, and I'm a biologist. And I'm excited that today I'm going to learn what the Higgs field is.

• 3:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I never get bored of explaining the Higgs boson.

• 3:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm also excited because we're going to like tangentially talk about Soviet history, which was like one of my weird research hobbies during the pandemic. What's your favorite Soviet history fact?

• 3:42Daniel Whiteson?

  I've been waiting for somebody to ask me that question, actually, Kelly.

• 3:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Of course you have.

• 3:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I actually have a fascinating biology Soviet history fact, which taps into a larger trend. There's a lot of great science done in the Soviet Union, and some of it was kind of disregarded by the West for political reasons. So for example, my wife works on phage therapy, this idea of using viruses that attack bacteria as a way to attack bacteria that cause disease. So instead of using a fungus like an antibiotic, you cultivate some viruses to kill the specific bugs that are attacking you. She sometimes sent samples by patients who are sort of out of other options, and she tries to evolve specific viruses to attack them. And this was something developed in the Soviet Union decades and decades ago,

• 4:31Daniel Whiteson?

  and basically ignored until recently by the West. And there's also lots of great examples of physics done in the Soviet Union, which just wasn't followed up on because it was published in Russian or because it was done by Soviets behind the Iron Curtain. So I think this is a treasure trove of Soviet science that we should dig into.

• 4:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  So Katrina is creating phage therapies to try to keep people alive? That's incredible.

• 4:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's boutique medicine, right? She gets samples from individuals and then tries to evolve the phage, which will kill the bacteria in those samples. So really like individualized medicine. I think really it is the wave of the future.

• 5:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm surprised to hear that that technology was developed so long ago because I had assumed that it required CRISPR. I thought it used to be really hard to take like samples from bacterial cells and then show it to a bacteria phage so that they would know what to attack. Does she use CRISPR? Or am I just totally not understanding how this phage therapy works?

• 5:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, a biologist asking me research questions about another biologist. I am at the edge of my knowledge here. I don't think she uses CRISPR. I think it's essentially just some kind of evolution in the lab. But maybe we should have her on to talk about phage therapy in more depth.

• 5:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, that sounds awesome. I look forward to that. We're absolutely doing it. We're going to get her on the schedule for 2025.

• 5:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Sounds good.

• 5:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  You gave me like a nice, serious Soviet fact. One day, maybe we would want to do an episode about Vavilov. He was a plant biologist and he had this amazing seed bank in the Soviet Union. And even while like Moscow was under siege, the people who worked in the bank, they thought the seed bank was so important for like bringing crops back after there was a problem that they were willing to starve to death to keep their seeds. And this was at a time where a bunch of people were starving to death and they needed the food, but they wouldn't eat the seeds. And it was just some really diligent scientists. And this was at the same time as Lyushenko was totally decimating the genetics field in the Soviet Union. And but my favorite story is a silly one.

• 6:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Tell me a silly Soviet story.

• 6:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  There was a Soviet space program called Intercosmos, where they got like Soviet bloc countries to send people to be cosmonauts. And it was meant as like a geopolitical, let's bring our friends into space thing. And one of the people that they wanted to bring, his last name was Kakhalov. It must have been Kakhalov because of the way Russians pronounce the A. Kaka is a Russian word for poop, as you might guess, that has apparently jumped cultures. And so they made him change his last name to Ivanov for the purposes of the program because they were like, no, no, we can't have Kupalov flying in space. So needless to say, the Soviets would not fly the Wiener Smiths to space. But I love stories about how the Soviet Union was willing to just lie about everything,

• 7:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  down to the stupidest details of like people's last names. So that's just one of my favorite petty examples of all the things the leaders in the Soviet Union lied about.

• 7:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I love poop-a-love, poop-a-love and crap-a-love. They sound like a comic duo.

• 7:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. Well, let's move on to more serious matters. We have some fantastic questions today from our listeners. Should we listen to the first one from Catherine?

• 7:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely. And we always love getting questions from listeners because it's not just Kelly, who's curious about the universe and Daniel, who thinks it's amazing and bonkers. We know that everybody out there has questions about the universe and we want to hear yours. Please send us your questions to [email protected]. Some of them we will choose to feature here on the podcast. And our first question comes from Catherine, who is curious about the fundamental nature of matter and the Higgs field. Here's what she asked.

• 8:03Speaker 06

  My name is Catherine and I believe that the fundamental particles we know are likely made up of something smaller. But I've been wondering, since without the Higgs field, these particles are predicted to be massless, how could they be made of smaller components? Surely this would require some amount of stored energy to keep the pieces together. But then the fundamental particles we know would have mass without the Higgs field. I'm sure that the answer is ultimately that we have no idea, but I would love to hear your thoughts on how this could work or any theories that attempt to solve this contradiction. Thank you so much. I love your show and I can't wait to hear your answer.

• 8:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, that is a deep and awesome question. And this means I'm going to get to learn about the Higgs field. We did a whole episode on what is a particle?

• 8:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you did a great job of explaining it, but I think we should definitely revisit that quickly now. So what is a particle? And what is the difference between a particle and a fundamental particle?

• 8:57Daniel Whiteson?

  So fundamentally, we don't understand fundamental particles, right? These are ideas in our heads that we use to make predictions and do calculations. We don't know how much of it aligns with what's actually going on out there in reality, but it's pretty useful, which makes some philosophers think, okay, it probably does align with what's actually happening, but we don't know. And often we run into the limits of our knowledge and we have to like wrap something up and say, well, we don't understand this. We're just going to give it a name and move on. And that's essentially what we've done with particles. We have a good theory that describes how these things interact. We don't really know what they Are fundamentally, and we use that word fundamental to mean something very specific about particles. In the theory of particle physics, a fundamental particle is something that's just made of itself.

• 9:42Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not made of something smaller. So for example, like a chocolate cake is made of ingredients, right? It has cream and it has butter and it has sugar. It's not fundamental. It's made of other stuff which come together to make a chocolate cake. But the ingredients in that recipe are fundamental. Butter is just made of butter. But maybe it's not. If you dove into the butter, you discover, oh, actually butter is made of fat and there's protein and there's water in there. And then you dive into those and you discover, oh, actually water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. And that's made of protons and neutrons and electrons and those protons are made of quarks. And so we think the quarks and the electrons are fundamental in that they're just made of themselves. Quarks are not made of something smaller. But we don't know, right? We never really know when something is fundamental.

• 10:27Daniel Whiteson?

  We know when something is not fundamental because we've discovered it's made of smaller bits. But fundamental really means either it's just made of itself. It's actually fundamental to the universe. Or we just haven't seen inside of it yet.

• 10:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which one of those do you think quarks are? Do you think quarks are the end or you think there's more inside of quarks?

• 10:44Daniel Whiteson?

  I think there's almost certainly more inside of quarks because there are unexplained patterns to the quarks. Like zoom out for a moment and think about the periodic table, all sorts of crazy patterns there. And if you didn't know about the structure inside the atom, you'd be like, wow, why are there some things that are metal? Some things conduct electricity and some things are active. There's some crazy patterns here that we don't understand. All of those patterns exist because there are structures inside the atoms. The way the electrons fill up the orbitals, et cetera, explains all of that behavior. And so in the same way, we look at the quarks and there's a table of quarks, there's six quarks, there's all sorts of weird patterns. Like there's actually just two kinds of quarks that are duplicated three times.

• 11:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And the masses increase as you go from one generation to another. There's all sorts of unexplained patterns in the quarks. Which suggests that probably they're made of smaller stuff that's rearranged in different ways. And all those patterns emerge from that internal structure, but we haven't been able to see that structure yet. So we treat them as fundamental in our theory, but we suspect that they're not. So Catherine, I agree with you.

• 11:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice. And you know, I've always thought that the plank length is nonsense. I don't know how to get us there naturally because I don't know what the plank length is. Wouldn't you agree the Planck length is nonsense? And why?

• 12:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, there's another question, which is like, how do we know it doesn't just go on forever? Right? Like, could there just be particles within particles within particles within particles? And the answer is it could just go on forever. It could be an infinite tower of emergent stuff, and there is no ground truth, no bottom. But quantum mechanics says maybe not. Quantum mechanics says, you know, the universe is made of discrete stuff. And there are minima, like Planck's constant is a minimum amount of energy. Right? And that's very useful. Quantum fields have a minimum amount of energy in them. And so people have tried to use this argument to say, well, if the universe is quantum mechanical, is there a minimum distance, which would mean like a minimum size particle? And you can take a bunch of the constants that we know about, like gravity and speed of light

• 12:45Daniel Whiteson?

  and Planck's constant and mash them together until you get something that has units of distance, right? And say, oh, well, what is that number? And that number is a very small number. It's 10 to the minus 35 meters, which is like 10 to the minus 15 meters smaller than anything we've probed before. So like trillions of times smaller than a proton. And it's often said in popular science, like, oh, this is the scale of the universe, or this is the pixel length of the universe, or this is the smallest possible distance. It's 100% not the smallest possible distance. It's just a number that's very small that has units of distance. That doesn't mean that it's related to the universe in some way. Right? It's like saying, oh, I have two numbers.

• 13:30Daniel Whiteson?

  One has units of dollars and the other one has units of donuts. Therefore, if I divide one by the other, I can derive the price of donuts. Like, no, you can't. There's a lot more going on than just having the right units.

• 13:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  And this is why the Planck length people don't invite you to their parties.

• 13:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, there's not zero information in the Planck length. It's like the only calculation we can do right now to even guess at what the minimum distance might be in the universe to figure out if there is a bottom to this like hierarchy of particles. So it's worth doing, but it's also worth not overinterpreting as like a definitive answer. It could be off by like, you know, 10 to the 20, easily.

• 14:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, sorry, I think I've lost a little bit of the thread. So the reason we care about the Planck length is because if it were the smallest distance possible, then a fundamental particle would have to exist. You couldn't have anything smaller than that size, so it can't go forever.

• 14:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Exactly. And if there is a most fundamental particle and a shortest distance, and that distance is the Planck length, then that suggests that quarks are not fundamental because they're much, much bigger than the Planck length.

• 14:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it. All right. So what's the next thing we need to know to answer Catherine's question?

• 14:41Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So Catherine's wondering about how these particles get mass. She says, "Look, if electrons and quarks are not fundamental, do they still get mass from the Higgs field?" So the next thing we need to unpack is how things get mass, what mass is anyway, and how the Higgs field comes into that.

• 14:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  What is mass seems like a question that should be easy, but when you ask a physicist something easy, it's never easy. So what is mass, Daniel?

• 15:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so again, mass is not something we really understand. It's something we observe and describe. Like, we see that stuff has inertia. When you push on a rock, it's hard to speed it up. You want to push on a more massive rock, it's even harder. So things that have more mass have more inertia. You have to provide a larger force to get the same acceleration. That's what F equals m a, right? m being mass. So it's a relationship between the force you have to apply and the acceleration you get. That's inertia, right? And that's something we see in the world, and we don't really understand why there is inertia, right? Why things have it. But it seems to be sort of connected to how much internal stored energy there is in something.

• 15:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  So like, when I put a fish in a spring scale, let's make this easy so a biologist could understand it, and the spring scale pulls down, you're saying that's because it has more inertia as it goes down?

• 15:57Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's gravitational mass, right? You're talking about the force of gravity. There's inertial mass, which is how hard is it to accelerate things? And then there's gravitational mass, which is how hard does gravity pull on things? Right? And in Newton's conception, those two are actually the same number by some magic coincidence of the universe. Though in Einstein's view, there is no gravitational mass because there is no gravitational force. There's just inertia. So I think the easiest way to think about it is to avoid gravity because gravity is a whole other complex that we don't understand. And just think about like a fish in space. All right, fish is floating in space. You want to speed this fish up. What do you have to do? You have to put a rocket on it and that rocket needs to push on the fish.

• 16:41Daniel Whiteson?

  And the more mass of the fish, the stronger the rocket has to be to speed it up to some certain velocity.

• 16:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  It would be really hard to get grants if I had to pay to do that, to get their mass. Okay, that makes sense, though. Let's keep going.

• 16:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the weird thing about mass is where does it come from? And one interesting clue is that you can make things more massive by adding energy to them. So for example, take a box that's filled with mirrors. Okay, and it has some mass. Now shoot a bunch of photons into that box so they bounce around inside the box. They're like trapped inside the box, right? The weird thing that happens when you do that is that the box gets more massive. Like you have added photons to this box, which have no mass, right? But the box now is more massive. Why is that? The answer is that mass is a measure of how much energy is stored inside of something. And you've captured photons inside this box. You've stored their energy inside the box.

• 17:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And so now it has more inertia because inertia really is a measurement of internal stored energy. Again, we don't understand that. We don't know why does the universe require a larger force for things with more internal stored energy? We don't know. But that's what mass is. That just blow your mind?

• 17:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, I am having my like, can we take a 15 minute break so I can think about that moment? Sorry, that's what will keep me up tonight. Is there a fish analogy? Is it like the more mass, the more energy, it's like the more fat that they have that gets burned? Or am I just extrapolating this too far?

• 18:06Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you put that fish out in the sun to absorb energy, it gets more massive. Every time you go suntanning, you get heavier. You are absorbing energy and E equals mc squared. You get the energy from those photons and turn it into mass. And you think of mass as stuff, but it's not. It's internal stored energy. You don't need stuff to have mass. So you absorb those photons, they go into your atoms. Those atoms now vibrate more or wiggle more or move more. They have more energy there inside you. You have gained mass. And this is actually where Einstein got E equals mc squared from. He thought about rocks and photons and rocks absorbing photons and how they gain mass.

• 18:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when I hear about stored energy, I think about fat. And so would it count to say that a fish has more of that energy? Because like those photons fed a plant, the fish ate the plant and then put that on his mass. Is that still mass?

• 19:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. Fat has stored energy and it has mass, but so do batteries. Batteries get heavier when you charge them because they have more energy in them and they become more massive. It's a tiny amount, but like your Tesla has more mass when it's fully charged. It's difficult to measure because mass is incredibly energy dense. So a huge amount of energy means a small change in your mass.

• 19:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Okay. So I think I understand that because we've talked about it in terms of fish. And that's what I need. How does the Higgs field fit in?

• 19:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. So how do you get mass? Well, one way is to have internal stored energy. But what if you're a fundamental particle? What if you're an electron, right? You can't like put photons inside the electron. So how does an electron or cork get mass? The way it gets mass is it interacts with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is this quantum field that fills space. And almost every particle interacts with the Higgs field. And so as it's flying through space, it's interacting with the Higgs field. And the picture to have in your mind is an electron is some sort of ripple in a quantum field itself, right? Because it's an electron field that fills the universe. And there's a Higgs field that fills the universe and they're on top of each other. And they interact, so they affect each other. You know, like. If you are walking across a snowy field, right?

• 20:19Daniel Whiteson?

  You can't walk across that field without leaving footprints in the snow. The electron, when it's flying through the universe, the ripple in the electron field also makes ripples in the Higgs field because the two interact. That's what it means for two particles to interact. It means their fields like slosh back and forth with energy. And so what we see when we measure an electron is not actually just a pure electron. This is what Catherine meant when she said that without the Higgs field, particles would be massless. If there was no Higgs field there, we would see just a pure electron ripple and it would have no mass. What we see is this complicated buzzing of the electron and Higgs field interacting constantly. It's not actually a pure electron we see orbiting atoms.

• 20:58Daniel Whiteson?

  It's this weird electron Higgs field buzz of energy sloshing back and forth between the two. So that's internal stored energy. This weird thing we call an electron, which is actually a composite of electrons and Higgs fields sloshing back and forth, has internal stored energy and that's where the electron's mass comes from.

• 21:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Man, every once in a while I have these like, gosh, it's incredible. We figured any of this out moments. So that's where I am right now. Okay. And when did we figure out the Higgs field? The Higgs boson was recent. Was the Higgs field much earlier?

• 21:30Daniel Whiteson?

  The Higgs field has been an idea for about 50 years, but it wasn't until 2012, we proved that it exists by seeing the Higgs boson, the particle, which is the ripple in the Higgs field for which the Nobel Prize was given to Higgs and a couple of other folks. So now I think we're set up to actually answer Catherine's question because she's saying, all right, if you're a fundamental particle, you get mass from the Higgs field. If you're not a fundamental particle, like you're a box of mirrors, you get mass by like having stuff inside you. For example, a proton is filled with quarks and most of the proton's mass doesn't come from the mass of the quarks. It comes from their energy. It's more like the box of mirrors than like the electron. And so she's saying, well, if quarks and electrons are not fundamental particles,

• 22:14Daniel Whiteson?

  does that mean they don't get their mass from the Higgs field? But they get their mass from some internal stored energy. And she's absolutely right. If electrons are made of smaller bits, then the story I told you is not the most accurate story. It would mean that those little bits inside the electrons, maybe they get their mass directly from the Higgs field. And some of the mass of the electron comes from the interaction of those little components, the ingredients of the electron and not directly from the electron and the Higgs field itself. But that's also just kind of how you tell the story, right? Like, science works on many layers and you can tell the story at the level of the electron and you can dive deeper and then tell the story at the level of like the bits inside the electron.

• 22:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Science is always an approximate description that's brushing some details under the rug. So even if we discover the electron is actually made of other stuff, it's still a reasonable approximation to think of the electron as a thing and talk about its effective interaction with the Higgs field, even if there are details being hidden inside that. We're always hiding some details when we do science because otherwise we couldn't get anything done.

• 23:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man. I was reading about molecular biology the other day and I feel you on that.

• 23:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So we sent this answer to Catherine, but unfortunately didn't hear back from her in time. So instead, we found an enthusiastic volunteer on our Discord server. Thank you very much, Damian, who listened and reacted and told us if we answered the question or if we should have spent more time talking about space fish.

• 23:40Speaker 07

  What I'm hearing is, is that if you put a photon in a box, a massless fundamental particle in a box, it will contribute to the overall mass of the box. And I'm with Kelly on that. I need 15 minutes. But if I just accept that on faith for a minute and turn my attention to the electron, which I'm hearing could be a box with sub electron particles in it and photons as well. And the question, I think, the conundrum, the paradox, is if it is such a box, okay,

• 24:23Speaker 07

  the, the sub electron particles in there will be pulling their mass from the Higgs field, but will the gluons be doing that? And I think we've got a Schrödinger's cat kind of situation here is the way I'm picturing it. If there's no way to check one way or another, can't we just deem that those gluons are pulling mass from the Higgs field?

• 24:50Daniel Whiteson?

  So Damian is right on the money here. There actually is a way to check to see if the Higgs is giving the electron all of its mass or not. And that's the subject of an upcoming episode dedicated to that specific topic. So stay tuned.

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• 26:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Next up, we have a question about fungal species that are just thriving in the presence of radiation in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And this is a question that we got from our Discord channel from Tamara, and let's hear the question.

• 27:02Speaker 10

  Can you tell us about the fungi living in the Chernobyl reactor that seems to be able to eat hazardous radiation? Thank you.

• 27:11Daniel Whiteson?

  So I know this is going to be fun because we're talking about fungi and you're a fungi-er, right?

• 27:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Aw, that's such a unique joke.

• 27:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Nobody's ever made that one before. No, so tell us what the context is here. What is this stuff that Tamara is talking about?

• 27:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  So in 1986, there was a planned test of reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And the planned test was supposed to be something like, well, when you drop the power really low or turn it off, let's test this system for bringing it back online. And they turned it off and it didn't come back online. And instead, there was an explosion and a fire and the Soviet Union handled it horribly. They didn't give people the heads up. And so there was this like cloud of nuclear waste that was just kind of like moving into other countries and it was not good.

• 27:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Lots of Ukrainians got cancer. It's really a sad story.

• 28:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's a horrible story. And another story about how the Soviet Union didn't want to admit mistakes and stuff like that. Today, the Chernobyl exclusion zone is an area around that power plant that is still radioactive and it's less radioactive than it was initially. I found one estimate that the radiation levels are three to five orders of magnitude above normal background level, but that's still lower than it was initially. And there are still like, I was watching videos of birds and spiders there. And so there's still animals that live in that area, although like there's some evidence maybe that the spider webs are kind of like wonky because the radioactive spiders kind of don't do it right anymore. No doubt that's going to be the setup for a great movie in the future.

• 28:46Daniel Whiteson?

  And what's the microphysics here? Like, we had radiation emitted from the explosion. We had radioactive materials that were dispersed sort of in clouds of smoke and debris. And there's still like radioactive particles that are just like sitting on the ground and in the soil emitting radiation constantly?

• 29:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so when the explosion happened, steam sort of came up and it brought the nuclear materials up and a lot of it went airborne and most of it landed close to the power plant, but some of it ended up quite far distances away. And then the reactor where it happened just kind of got like covered in cement, but inside of it, there's still all of that radioactive material and that's super radioactive.

• 29:24Daniel Whiteson?

  And I guess one of the tricky things about nuclear power is that this stuff has a very long half-life and so it's going to be radioactive for a long time. How long until people can live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone?

• 29:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know that they already let people come in to do experiments. So I like watched a New York Times video of a scientist who was in there like taking pictures of the spider webs and comparing spider web shapes in the exclusion zone versus clean areas. Really depends on where you are and how much nuclear waste fell in that area. But for some areas, it might be hundreds of years, up to thousands of years. And in one area, maybe even as much as 20,000 years.

• 29:59Daniel Whiteson?

  That blows my mind. You know, human civilization is like thousands of years old to imagine that we've created a disaster, which is going to last for 20,000 years. Oh, my gosh.

• 30:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's the red zone in France where tons of ordinances from World War II, I think, are there. And you're also not allowed to go there either. And that will be off limits for a really long time, maybe forever.

• 30:20Daniel Whiteson?

  But as sad as that is, it also gives us an interesting window into what happens to life in these crazy, high radiation environments. Right? Like, what's going on? Like, life is happening, as you were saying. There are birds and spiders and microbes.

• 30:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so one of the observations that have really excited people is that over 200 species of fungi have been found growing.

• 30:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Is it fungi or fungi? I have to ask.

• 30:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know. I alternate.

• 30:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. You also don't have a strong opinion on gif or jif, I'm imagining?

• 30:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nah, I know what you're saying.

• 30:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Kelly has better things to worry about, folks.

• 30:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I don't lose too much sleep over stuff like that. So there's over 200 species of mushroomy things found near Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. And there are also a bunch of species that are found inside of the main reactor that had the explosion, which is super radioactive. And this wasn't a complete surprise because in the like 1960s, which was 25 plus years before this explosion, there had been some fungal species that were found growing in water that had been used to cool nuclear reactors. So we know that some species of fungus can grow in areas where there's radioactivity. But what surprised us in this case was that the fungus appeared to be actually growing towards the most radioactive areas as opposed to just like happening to be there. They seemed to be attracted to it.

• 31:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it looked like they were maybe breaking down and consuming part of the radioactive graphite that was in there. So graphite is sometimes used in nuclear power plants to moderate reactions. It slows the neutrons down. It also reflects neutrons in some cases. And so it's pretty common to find it in nuclear power plants. So they seem to be breaking some of that down. So then the question was, Why?

• 32:03Daniel Whiteson?

  So I've seen some popular science articles that suggest that these things are like eating the radiation, not just that they're surviving, but that they're like, ooh, yay, gamma rays have a lot of energy, let's gobble them as some sort of like crazy version of photosynthesis.

• 32:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so I guess the question then is, would you say that plants are eating sunlight?

• 32:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I would as a non-biologist. I mean, photosynthesis is converting the energy of those photons into local sugars, right? So that's seems like eating.

• 32:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Okay. So there are some scientists who are arguing that they think something like that is happening. And so here's their argument. So the fungus is black. And part of why it's black is because it's producing melanin. And melanos is Greek for black. And we have some melanin in our skin. It protects us from UV radiation. And so these fungus make it too. And they make it super thick when they live in high radiation environments. And so the first thing that we think that does is just act as a physical shield to protect them from the radiation.

• 32:56Daniel Whiteson?

  What is it that they need protection from, right? My mental image is essentially like tiny bullets, high energy particles shooting into them, breaking up their DNA, disrupting all sorts of stuff, right? Is that what they need shielding from? That these things are super high energy and will just like tear through them?

• 33:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. Those fungi are made out of DNA, just like the rest of us. And so they also have to worry about having their DNA broken into pieces or mutations being induced in their genetic code. And so they need protection from the radiation for that reason. Yes.

• 33:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And remember that nuclear waste emits lots of different kinds of radiation. You have gamma rays, which are just very, very high energy photons. And the physics of photons and transparency is really interesting. Like photons can fly through your body if they have enough energy. You don't think of yourself as transparent, because you can't see through yourself. But that's just in the visible light spectrum. In other spectra, like X-ray spectra, that's just photons, ultraviolet, you're mostly transparent. And so those photons can go right through your body. But if they do interact with something and deposit energy, that can be bad. And the other radioactive elements in nuclear waste can also emit things like neutrons, which are bad, or alpha particles, which are little helium nuclei. All this kind of stuff can be pretty bad if it hits your cells. Some of it will be deflected

• 34:07Daniel Whiteson?

  just by your skin, but a lot of it is pretty penetrating and pretty dangerous. All right. So it sounds like melanin is like a radiation shield. That's pretty awesome. Does that mean the people who have a stronger tan can go deeper into the exclusion zone?

• 34:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  I wouldn't recommend it.

• 34:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe it would take them a little longer to get cancer, but I'd avoid it. There was a group of researchers that looked at melanin and they found that the melanin was doing something different with like electron transfer than they had expected. And so they put these fungal species, because it's more than one species, in an environment where there was like very little food and they gave them access to this radiation and they were still growing fine. Like, I mean, sometimes this fungus, when it was exposed to radiation, was growing better than when it wasn't exposed to radiation. And so they were saying like, okay, they've got the same amount of food, but they grow better when you expose them to radiation. Is this fungus using radiation the same way plants use the

• 35:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  sun for energy? And that's kind of where we are with it right now. Like, there's some people who are like, this could be something like photosynthesis that we need to study and try to explain. But at the moment, I couldn't find any more updates. I think that's all we've got. Like, this is something worth looking into, but we don't know anymore.

• 35:27Daniel Whiteson?

  But there's some hints there, right? There's some evidence that suggests it might be. It's not just that they're being protected from the radiation, they might actually be taking advantage of it. That's amazing.

• 35:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  One of the scientists wanted to emphasize that if you give fungus the choice, it would always prefer to not be growing in the presence of extreme radiation. But if you put it in this horrible environment, it finds a way to thrive.

• 35:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. But didn't we hear earlier that it seemed to be growing towards the sources of radiation? If it grows better without the radiation, wouldn't you find it more often further from the radiation?

• 35:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think there's a lot of other food for the fungus in reactor for. And so I think it's growing towards the radiation because there's not other decaying plant material that it could be eating, for example.

• 36:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm. And does this help us understand something about the origin of life? The history of life on Earth? Have we always had the same amount of radiation as we've been evolving?

• 36:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought that maybe you'd ask that. And so I learned a lot that I hadn't known before. So for example, I didn't realize that there have been times in the past where the planet was exposed to a lot more radiation than it is now. So some of the ideas that these fungus might have picked up this melanization trick at various points in the past, like during the early Cretaceous, when the Earth lost its cosmic radiation shield. Do you know why that happened, Daniel?

• 36:40Daniel Whiteson?

  No, did we just like leave it on the counter and forget where we put it?

• 36:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or, you know, somebody switched it off and forgot to put it back on again when they left for the night?

• 36:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I told you kids every time. It's very important.

• 36:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. It's when the earth crossed magnetic zero.

• 36:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 36:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does this have to do with earth switching its magnetic fields? We need a geologist. We gotta bring Callan back.

• 37:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, the earth's magnetic field definitely isn't static. Like the poles flip and it's kind of chaotic. It's not regular like the way it is in the sun. And so there definitely also could have been points when the magnetic field is like pointed in a different way. And so we get lots more radiation in one particular location because like at the north pole, you're not as protected as you are at the equator. Or it could be that the magnetic field is just like resetting. Magnetic zero definitely makes it sound like the magnetic field was off for a minute. Yeah.

• 37:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so wait, if it goes off for a minute, you lose your galactic cosmic radiation shielding? That sounds catastrophic. I don't want that to happen during my lifetime or my children's. And also, as you mentioned, places like Antarctica have much higher radiation. So, you know, fungi are very melanized down there. So one of the most interesting things that I came across while researching this section was the various proposals for how you could use this observation in ways that are beneficial to people. So one of the suggestions was that you could maybe use melanin and put it in particular places to try to protect patients who are undergoing radiation therapy for things like cancer. And that that could maybe protect like the area that's not supposed to get the radiation from it. Sort of like a lead blanket. I don't know if this would be a harder way of accomplishing the same thing,

• 38:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  but it was sort of an interesting idea. Fungi or fungi are sometimes suggested as bio remediation tools. There's a couple of different ways this could work. But I think the idea in this case would be that the fungus grow in an area where there's radioactivity. They sort of accumulate it into their own tissues. And, you know, especially if it's like in the soil, because they've accumulated into their tissues, you can go and harvest the fungus and it's easier to harvest the fungus than to get the radiation out of the soil. There's other kinds of bio remediation where essentially the like pollutants, and in this case would be radioactive waste, gets broken down into something that's no longer dangerous. I don't necessarily know that that's what the fungus are doing in this case.

• 38:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I didn't find any evidence that in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, folks are actively.

• 39:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Using fungus to try to make this area habitable sooner.

• 39:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. Wow. Fascinating.

• 39:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then the final interesting suggestion I saw was that you could use these fungi as a living radiation shield in space while also growing biomass. And here's why I think that might not be a great idea. So first of all, as someone who has worked with living organisms, they're always dying when you don't want them to die. And I feel like you really don't want your radiation shields to accidentally die. But also, a bunch of these fungus species that you find growing in reactor four are species that are all over the place. And most of the time, they don't cause any problems. But every once in a while, they get inside of our bodies in a way that can be catastrophic. So when they infect us, we're dead ends. They don't get to infect anything else after that. But

• 39:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  they still manage to get inside of us and our immune systems are not good at fighting them in a lot of cases. And so I found examples where one of the most common fungal species that you would find in that reactor is also associated with meningitis, which is like an inflammation of the layers around your brain. And then cerebral abscesses, which are just like an inflammation that's filled with pus in your brain. And then also lung infections. And so you have to be careful when you use biological stuff, both because it's hard to keep alive. And two, you know, it's got like a mind of its own, man, you got to make sure it doesn't infect the humans. And just maybe one more reason why you need to make sure you have access to medical care when you're in space.

• 40:33Daniel Whiteson?

  This is going to be a long warning label on this stuff.

• 40:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah. All right. So, Tamara, did we answer your question? I hope we did. But if not, let me know what else you'd like to know.

• 40:43Speaker 10

  You did a great job introducing the topic. This is such a fascinating discovery because it can have so many ramifications. One can only scratch the surface. I hope they are exploring the idea of using fungi to clean up radioactive sites. I have also read of bacteria that will eat chemical spills and toxic sites. It would be a great direction for young research biologists to explore. Thank you.

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• 42:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so now we have a fantastic question from David and his daughter Katie. I love this question so much. Let's listen to it now.

• 43:07Speaker 13

  My name is David Naylor and I'm here with my daughter Katie to ask you a question today about a game we both love to play, namely pinball. So as you may know, the game started out with just the force of gravity, where a ball would fall down a hole and it would just randomly move through positions in the board. But it rapidly grew in complexity when the forces of electricity and magnetism were added to introduce things like flippers, sound effects, ball locks, and of course, the all-important storage of high scores. So Katie, what's our question today?

• 43:40Speaker 14

  Our question today is what innovations could theoretically be added to the game using additional forces of nature? Is there something we could add with, say, the strong or weak forces? I'd love to hear your ideas.

• 43:55Speaker 13

  Well, hey, keep up the great work, guys. And if you ever come out with your own pinball machine, Katie and I would definitely love to play it.

• 44:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, Daniel, so did you play pinball a ton when you were young?

• 44:06Daniel Whiteson?

  I did, actually. But I actually played simulated pinball more than physical pinball. We had like a pinball game designer on our PC at home in the 90s and you could like build your own pinball game and then play it. So I had a lot of fun like designing crazy pinball scenarios, more than playing them, actually.

• 44:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I spent a lot of my childhood in New Jersey and we used to go to the boardwalk. And the boardwalk in Atlantic City had a bunch of video game places and pinball machines and I really loved pinball. I thought I was great at it.

• 44:35Daniel Whiteson?

  It's cool because it uses the laws of physics, right? It's like you're playing a real game with a real ball. It's not just like made up zappers and blasters.

• 44:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's exactly what I was thinking when I was eight and I was playing it. This is cool because of the laws of physics.

• 44:47Daniel Whiteson?

  You really got me there. I literally thought you were agreeing with me for a minute. Hold on a second. I think this is some sort of joke.

• 44:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, gotcha. Okay.

• 44:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you didn't realize why it was cool. You just thought it was cool. And now that you're older and more mature, you're appreciating how physics rules the world.

• 45:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's so true. Yeah.

• 45:09Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. I'm gonna pretend that one was sincere. But that's sort of the heart of David and Katie's question, right? They're talking about how playing pinball requires you to understand something about the laws of physics, how like when you hit a ball against the paddle, it'll bounce off. And the reason is that there's physics there and the ball will roll down the slanted slope of the pinball machine because of gravity.

• 45:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. All right. So let's start by talking about what's happening in a pinball game by describing the electromagnetic forces.

• 45:38Daniel Whiteson?

  So the current laws of physics that are mostly used to control what happens in the pinball game is of course, gravity, because the ball rolls down, but much more subtly and more importantly, are electromagnetic forces. And you might be thinking, what? The pinball isn't charged. It's not like we're shooting photons. It's not laser beams in the pinball game, not the ones I played at least.

• 45:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wrong game, Daniel.

• 46:00Daniel Whiteson?

  But electromagnetic forces actually do control most of what happens in the pinball game and most of what happens in the world. Like, the whole world is built out of electromagnetic lattices, these like meshes of atoms that are bound together by electromagnetic forces. You know, the electron is bound to the atom. That's an electromagnetic interaction because the electron is charged and the protons are charged. The bonds between them are electromagnetic. How do you put atoms together to make more complex stuff? Those are ionic and compound bonds. And I know I'm talking chemistry here, but chemistry is built on electromagnetism, right? It's the charges of those electrons that allow them to connect the atoms together. And zooming out, like, the whole world is built the same way. The chair that you're

• 46:42Daniel Whiteson?

  sitting in right now is like a mesh of matter and radiation. It's the forces that hold those little bits of matter together that weave it into something that makes it feel solid. The solidity of our world is an illusion. It's just a zoomed out view of electromagnetic forces woven together to create these volumes.

• 47:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so one, the more I learn about physics, the more I feel like there's a lot of chemistry going on. And maybe I was tricked when you were like, we're just gonna talk about physics, but that's okay.

• 47:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Chemistry is just zoomed out physics, really.

• 47:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So you say your chair is an illusion, but it's holding me up. It's a pretty good illusion.

• 47:21Daniel Whiteson?

  In the same way that we were talking earlier, like, is an electron just an electron? Is it made of smaller bits? Well, sometimes it's useful to think of it as an electron. Sometimes it might be useful to talk about the smaller bits. Your chair, it's not useful to think about the tiny atoms that make it up. You think of it as a chair. And that's the way we do science. Sometimes we zoom in and talk about the constituents. Sometimes we ignore those details. And the chair is a great example. You don't really care about the electrons in the chair. But for the purposes of this question, you should know that electrons are doing all the dirty work.

• 47:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so you've got the ball, the paddles, you know, it's probably got some like 90s era movie theme on the screen. You know, I hope maybe it's Terminator themed or something. And all of that is based on electromagnetic forces.

• 48:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And so their question is like, what can we do to make pinball more interesting by adding other quantum forces to it? So I had fun being a little creative, trying to imagine how you would design a pinball game using the other forces. And the other forces we have in our quiver are the weak force and the strong force, right? Because we're already used gravity and electromagnetism. The only other forces we know about are the weak and the strong force, but both of them could provide some interesting twist on pinball.

• 48:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So I'm guessing it's going to be harder to figure out a way to incorporate the weak force because I bet it's weak. So what did you come up with?

• 48:43Daniel Whiteson?

  The weak force is unfortunately weak, right? And when we say weak, we mean like very, very, very, very weak. Particles that only feel the weak force, like neutrinos, they pass right through us without even interacting. Like, the whole world is transparent to neutrinos. It's so transparent that you can be on the other side of the earth and still see neutrinos from the sun passing through the entire planet. Like, there is no nighttime in neutrinos because neutrinos pass right through the earth. So imagine, for example, you made paddles out of neutrinos or a pinball out of neutrinos, they would pass right through each other. Like, it'd just be like ghosts. So it wouldn't be a lot of fun to play. You'd like have to hit that ball like 10 to the 30 times to change its directions.

• 49:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it'd be like playing with my brother. He'd be like, no, you didn't see it, but I just won the game. And you'd be like, no, you lost, man.

• 49:35Daniel Whiteson?

  But there are other ways we can use a weak force to maybe change the way the game is played, because the weak force also is involved in radioactive decay, like we were talking about a moment ago about Chernobyl. What happens inside like a heavy nucleus is sometimes a neutron flips into a proton and also emits an electron and a neutrino, and he uses the weak force to do that. That whole process only happens because of the weak force. And one of the reasons that these nasty radioactive elements are so long-lived is that the weak force is pretty weak. It can't do it all the time. But the cool thing is that these things really are random. Like, you have Atom of uranium and you know it's half-life, that doesn't mean it's going to take exactly that half-life and then decay. It means it's a distribution and that's like a typical time.

• 50:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you could imagine turning this into a game, like you have a blob of decaying elements. And every time one of them decays, you get like a shower of bonus pinballs, or maybe it opens traps, or it just changes something about the game in a random way. That's affected by the weak force.

• 50:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so one, I think adding radioactive material to pinball games probably doesn't make it any less safe to be in New Jersey.

• 50:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Only the strong survive. That's what they say.

• 50:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. But you know, when you play, every time you get it into one of the holes in the pinball game, there's usually like some random, like, how many points are you going to get? So this seems like a good way to make those decisions.

• 50:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, because those things are not really random. They're deterministic, right? Gravity and electromagnetism at the scale we use it is all completely predictable. Even when the computer generates random numbers, that's not truly random. It's pseudo-random. It's just like a long sequence that's difficult to predict. So this could be like a way to add true randomness to your pinball game.

• 51:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  So do random number generators online make physicists really angry because they're not truly random? Or physicists like it's close enough, like the way fungi, fungi, whatever? Do you feel the same?

• 51:29Daniel Whiteson?

  If you're really serious about your random numbers, you can actually get true random numbers from cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are another example of the weak force. And you build a cosmic ray detector, it can provide truly random numbers. So if you're really serious about it, you can find sources of cosmic ray random numbers online.

• 51:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank goodness. All right. So we established that would probably be easier to figure out a role for the strong force, but let's do it. How are you going to incorporate the strong force?

• 51:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Strong force is very, very strong. In fact, it's so strong that it's hard to use because anytime something has a strong force charge, which we call a color, which is like an analogy to the electromagnetic charge of plus and minus. Anytime something has a strong force charge, it overwhelms everything else and it neutralizes itself. The way that, for example, if a cloud is positively charged and the ground is negatively charged, you'll get a bolt of lightning. Because it wants to neutralize that imbalance. And the strong force is even more powerful. So basically, everything we experience in the world is neutral in the strong force for that reason. So the strong force holds the nucleus together. Protons and neutrons are built from quarks using the strong force, but they themselves are neutral in the strong force.

• 52:40Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's the strongest force we know about. It's the reason we have fusion in the sun, for example. It's very powerful.

• 52:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, well, so now it's hard for me to imagine that you're going to be able to turn that into an improvement in the pinball game, a game which I'll say is already perfected. That and skee ball. Those are two really fantastic games. But all right, what is your idea?

• 52:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I have two ideas here. One is if you could manage to strong charge the ball to give them quantum colors. And then imagine playing with two balls. Sometimes you have like a bonus ball. And if they're strongly charged, then when they get further apart, you would pop new balls out of the vacuum to balance that strong charge, to neutralize it, basically like a lightning strike with a strong charge. But in this case, that energy gets converted to mass. This is what happens if you have two quarks, for example, that have the strong charge. We produce them at the Large Hadron Collider, and they're flying apart. There's so much energy in the bond between them that it gets converted to new quarks, new mass. So now imagine you have two pinballs on the board that have strong charge, and then you get a shower of new pinballs, just like filling the game momentarily.

• 53:44Daniel Whiteson?

  I think that would be pretty cool.

• 53:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  That sounds super fun. Also, it's hadron? I've been saying hadrod.

• 53:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Mmm, fungi, fungi, gif, gif, hadron, hadron, who knows? Let's call the whole thing off.

• 53:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. I think you have one more idea.

• 53:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Another idea is, hey, the strong force is very powerful. What if we could use the energy? Like, imagine mastering fusion, right? Somehow figure that out. That's energy from the strong force. And then use that to turn pinball into a three dimensional game, like levitate the balls somehow. So you have like 3D pinball instead of just 2D pinball. Fusion powered levitating pinballs.

• 54:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  And is the fusion just because you need extra power to levitate the pinballs? Or why would fusion in particular be levitating the pinballs? Why can't we do that with fossil fuels?

• 54:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh, yeah, coal powered 3D pinball. We should get on that. How come nobody's invented that? I don't know. Billion dollar idea.

• 54:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Totally worth the consequences of global climate change to be able to play pinball in 3D.

• 54:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, these ideas sound like a ton of fun and I wish that I was back in Atlantic City, although I'm not sure what it's like 20, 30 years hence. But all right, let's see if David and Katie are interested in playing the games you came up with.

• 54:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And if they want to invest in our coal-powered 3D pinball idea.

• 54:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 13

  Hey, that was really awesome. I didn't even think of those ideas and I absolutely love it. Thank you so much for that. I know myself, I was very encouraged to get into my field of work, which is IT-related because of interest in gaming. And I think it's a really fun way to connect young people like my daughter, for example, getting them into STEM and science-related work by getting them to think about how all this stuff works under the hood and all the cool new things that you could do with that kind of understanding to make the things we enjoy in life that much more engaging. So with that said, Katie, did you have anything else you'd like to say?

• 55:33Speaker 14

  Thank you for taking my question. If you come out with a pinball machine, I would really love to play it.

• 55:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, thanks very much for those questions and thank you for listening and thanks everybody out there for powering science with their personal curiosity.

• 55:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I absolutely love that I got to read about black fungi in Chernobyl. So please consider sending us questions at [email protected] or join us on our Discord channel.

• 56:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that how you say it in New Jersey?

• 56:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 56:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Discord.

• 56:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Discord. Yeah. I had to take speech classes after I moved out, but join us on our Discord channel. See you next week.

• 56:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 56:26Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 56:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 56:39Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 56:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 56:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rally so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 57:29Speaker 09

  Football Sundays are at my house this year, so I've been making a Total Wine & More run before every kickoff. Cold beer for the group is a given, but this time of year, I like to bring in some fall flavors. A bottle of maple whiskey and a salted caramel whiskey that even my friends who don't drink whiskey end up trying. I get everything I need at the lowest prices at Total Wine. Discover your new favorite fall flavors at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Must be 21.

• 57:55Speaker 15

  This is Jason Tipp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Tipp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multisensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park, when the vehicle is off, or if any doors open. Do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 58:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.