Portable Muon Beams, Sodium Batteries, and the Secret to Long Life (EP. 13)

Aloha internet — Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary return with three extraordinary research stories: portable muon beams, sodium-ion batteries, and the secret to long life. Summary • Lawrence Berkeley’s compact muon beam technology and its applications in archaeology, volcanology, and security. • UC San Diego + U Chicago’s solid-state sodium battery that rivals lithium in power but not in cost. • Tongji University’s naked mole rat DNA study uncovering a genetic pathway for longer, healthier life. Show Notes Portable Muon Beam Nature News Coverage Physical Review Accelerators and Beams Paper Sodium Ion Batteries Science Daily Coverage Joule Paper (2025) Naked Mole Rats & Longevity BBC Coverage Science Journal Paper

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Aloha, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. This is From First Principles. We are back with three great research papers we're going to cover this week, starting off with a new laser plasma device that can be light enough to be used in the field. We'll be going to Egypt for this story out of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs that was published in the Physical Review Accelerators and Beams. We're gonna mew on from that story to our second story about sodium batteries. Are they finally cheaper than lithium batteries and just as powerful?

• 0:42Lester Nare?

  This is a new paper out of University of Chicago and UC San Diego that was published in the paper Juul, just Juul.

• 0:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Just Juul.

• 0:50Lester Nare?

  A Cell Press Journal. And we will wrap up with a trip down memory lane to one of my favorite cartoons of all time, which is Kim Possible, as we talk about how naked mole rats might be the key to having a long life. This is a longevity study. This is out of Tongji University in Shanghai, China, that was published in China. This is From First Principles. Let's get after it.

• 1:31Lester Nare?

  My friend.

• 1:33Krishna Choudhary?

  How's it going?

• 1:33Lester Nare?

  How are you?

• 1:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, we're done with Nobel Prize week?

• 1:36Lester Nare?

  Yes, we are back now to breaking news after several weeks of just insane

• 1:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:42Lester Nare?

  coverage.

• 1:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Our Dodgers are...

• 1:45Lester Nare?

  Oh, the Dodgers, yes.

• 1:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Back in the World Series.

• 1:49Lester Nare?

  Because we're in LA.

• 1:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Because LA. I have my Joe Kelly shirt on.

• 1:52Lester Nare?

  I was gonna say, I think we have now witnessed the greatest single performance, as every announcer has said over the last couple of days, in baseball history by Shohei Ohtani.

• 2:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Lester Nare?

  In that last game against the Brewers.

• 2:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I wouldn't really know because I'm a true Dodgers fan and LA native, so I didn't start caring until they, like, qualified or whatever for the World Series. So I honestly have no idea who they're even playing. Or anything? I don't even know if Joe Kelly is still on the roster, if that's how you say it. But anyways, now that we're in the World Series, dude, I'm a huge Dodgers fan. Like, I love the Dodgers.

• 2:33Lester Nare?

  Exactly why everyone hates Dodgers fans. Um, yeah, very excited. Uh, I think the World Series starts when our next episode will come.

• 2:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43Lester Nare?

  So we will be donned in Dodgers memorabilia on the pod. Uh, and we're going to start with, as a hard pivot.

• 2:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Hard pivot.

• 2:55Lester Nare?

  Uh, on our first story, which is about this new laser plasma device. And so the headline on this story is directional muon beam shows potential for advanced imaging technique. Uh, researchers at ATAP have developed a compact source of high energy co-limite, limited, limited? Co-limited?

• 3:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Co-limited.

• 3:16Lester Nare?

  Co-limited muons.

• 3:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Colimated, colimated, sorry.

• 3:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah, colimated muons using a laser plasma accelerator, potentially enabling advanced imaging technologies. Now, what's so interesting about this is it appears that this is going to be relevant for the field of archaeology especially.

• 3:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 3:35Lester Nare?

  Again, this is out of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. It was published in the Physical Review Accelerators and Beams. So what is the top line on, on this paper?

• 3:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the basic idea is in order to make muons, usually you need like extremely large particle accelerators. Okay? And this guy, these guys are, have done it in effectively the size of like a lab, maybe a big lab.

• 3:59Lester Nare?

  Big lab.

• 3:59Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's still not like, you know, the size of CERN or like SLAC where it's like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of meters worth of stuff to create a muon beam. And that becomes really, really relevant if you're trying to use muons to do CAT scans on very large things. For example, the pyramids or a volcano. And so that's, that's sort of the stuff we're going to get into.

• 4:22Lester Nare?

  Got it. Okay.

• 4:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, but. To, to prime this understanding, we need to first understand what is a muon. Okay, so muon is a central part of the standard model of particle physics. It is one of the fundamental particles that is kind of like a cousin, a heavy cousin to the electron. Okay. Heavy cousin. A heavy cousin. Now, one, one of the mysteries of particle physics is that particles come in three generations. Okay, there's the electron, which is a class of leptons. And then there's this thing called a muon and then the tau. You might have heard, you're smiling because. It just makes me think of Pokemon. Yeah, yeah, but well, it's, it's exactly that.

• 5:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And actually, it's, it's one of the big mysteries that is still unsolved today. Why it comes in these three generations. But in any case, that's the universe that we live in. This muon is exactly like the electron, except it's 200 times as massive as the electron. So here we've got a, a photo of the particle, all of the particles that make up the standard model. This is everything that we are made out of, not just the mass, but also all of the energy that we're made out of, the light, the photons are part of the standard model, the, the stuff that is massive, like the up and down quarks, those are the stuff that make protons and neutrons, the electron together makes atoms. So all of these things are fundamental to our universe.

• 5:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And yet, what we're most familiar with is up and down quarks and electrons, right? Those are the stuff that make atoms and then photons and obviously stuff like that. But in terms of stuff that have mass, muons are this elusive kind of particle. They're quite rare and they're rare because they're really unstable. They have a mean lifetime of about 2.2 microseconds compared to an electron, which is extremely stable, right? And they were first observed in these things called cosmic ray showers, which are the showers that come when cosmic ray hits the earth's atmosphere. A cosmic ray is a really highly energetic, massive particle. Maybe it's like a giant atomic nucleus.

• 6:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Obviously that's small, but like, you know, in terms of like, like particles, it's quite big. When, when these things come from wherever, galaxies, supernovae, whatever, and they, and they come and they hit our earth's atmosphere from high up. They release a shower of particles because they interact with a bunch of particles in the Earth's atmosphere. And part of that shower goes from kaons and pions, those things then disintegrate into muons. And then that's what we usually see. That's where we usually see muons.

• 7:07Lester Nare?

  Is this related to the, you know, when folks have the charts of the sun having these large solar bursts and then it reaches Earth's atmosphere and everyone's like, that's what's gonna kill the grid. Is that this a similar concept as these cosmic rays? Or it's a different?

• 7:25Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it don't, I mean, it's similar in the sense that it's a massive gust of charged particles from our sun that is so massive in flux that it starts messing with our electrical grid. Cosmic rays, on the other hand, are very, very sporadic. They're rare, they come from all over the, all over the cosmos, so they're not like pointed from one direction.

• 7:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:48Krishna Choudhary?

  When, when the sun releases a flare, all of those charged particles come all at the same time. And then they completely overwhelm the electrical environment of the Earth.

• 7:57Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 7:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? With cosmic rays, they're once, once upon a time, they come in and then they have these showers, right? And, and what you can do is you can have detectors all over the Earth that catch the particles that come in. And then based on the geographic layout of all of the detectors and the timing of when each detector went off, you can be like, oh, it came from that direction. Right? Because if it came from that direction, then that detector would go off first, the one that's closest to that angle, and then the one that's further would go further. So it's, it's sort of a way that we've used, muons are a way that we've used to map out cosmic rays, right? And they've been, they've been coming at us for, forever. Okay? They're ubiquitous, they're harmless, the flux is really weak.

• 8:41Krishna Choudhary?

  It's about one a minute through your fingernail.

• 8:44Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 8:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Like, right now, as, as we're sitting here, there's, there's about one muon a minute coming through our fingernail. These things don't really...

• 8:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Interact all that much because they're so heavy, they'll just like go right through. Right? So historically, it's, it's just been like something that's been nice to know about the universe that we've got this particle, right? That's the second generation.

• 9:09Lester Nare?

  It's sort of, it's not pop music. It's niche underground. When you're digging in the crates, it's, it's cool.

• 9:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's cool. And it's got, it's got some really cool like implications in fundamental physics research. Like, for example, you can make a, you can make a hydrogen atom. But instead of an electron, you can stick a muon around it because the muon also has a negative charge, right? And so, but the muon is 200 times more massive.

• 9:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 9:34Krishna Choudhary?

  So what that means is the size of that muonic hydrogen atom is going to be way, way smaller, which means you can now start probing effects of the nucleus. Like you can start asking questions like, how big is the proton? Right? With a, with, with a normal hydrogen atom, the electron is so, the electron cloud is so big that the size of the proton doesn't really matter. But if you start shrinking the size of the hydrogen atom, this is one of the ways that in fundamental physics, people start trying to figure out what is the size of the proton? They use muonic hydrogen. So it's like, it's the twin of the electron, but it's just like big. Okay, that's like, that seems to be the only thing that is different about it.

• 10:12Lester Nare?

  It's big, big bro, big bro.

• 10:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And, and you know, it's, it's been a nice quirk up until the 1960s. Okay? In the 1960s, there was a guy, Luis Alvarez. He was a Nobel laureate. He was actually played by Alex Wolf in the Oppenheimer movie.

• 10:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, who's a very famous actor. Luis Alvarez, he was a, in the Oppenheimer movie, he was a PhD student of Lawrence, who was making the first cyclotron in Berkeley. And Alvarez was the guy who read the discovery of nuclear fission and he replicated the. The experiment and he was all excited. Well, um, when, when he got older, he started, he, he was a great experimental physicist. Okay. And he started realizing that what you could do is you could use a muon. The same way that we use X rays in medical imaging. Okay. The principle of X rays in medical imaging is you have an X ray source, you have a detector on the back, right? And then the X ray is going to penetrate through soft tissue.

• 11:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Because there's not a lot of stuff that's like there. But the denser stuff like your bone, it's not going to be able to penetrate and that's going to create a shadow. So then you can image an entire skeleton using X rays, right? Now, the same principle we can use now for very, very large things. Because the muon is kind of like an X ray in that. The, the path that it takes, how far it gets through something. Is dependent on the density of the stuff that it's going through. Okay, fundamentally, it's most of particle physics is that, okay? It's like, so it's going through and because it's this massive cousin to the electron.

• 12:01Krishna Choudhary?

  It doesn't actually interact that much with matter. And so you can go through a lot more stuff before it gets stopped. Okay, so now you can start imaging things like buildings. Or volcanoes, or in the case of Luis Alvarez, um, in 1960, in the 1960s. He image the Pyramid of Khafre in Giza, which is the second pyramid. Okay, that's the, there's three big pyramids in Giza. The second pyramid, the one that still has its cap on, that's the one that he, that he image. He actually took a muon detector to the inside of that pyramid. Put it there for like about two years and you know, the, the flux again, as I was saying from these cosmic rays are really, really small.

• 12:43Krishna Choudhary?

  So you gotta wait a really long time to get a nice statistical signal to be like, is there? And, and, and the question he was trying to answer was. Is there a cavity inside the Pyramid of Khafre? Okay, is there like a hidden chamber? We're all, we're always worried about. All the secrets. Yeah, all, all the secrets, right? We're always worried about hidden chambers. It was a negative result, actually, because he didn't find any hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khufu.

• 13:08Lester Nare?

  This is interesting. This was happening in the 60s.

• 13:10Krishna Choudhary?

  In the 60s, yes.

• 13:11Lester Nare?

  This is quite some time ago.

• 13:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Lester Nare?

  And I imagine Luis Alvarez, if he saw what they're doing at the pyramids now, I don't know if you get these videos on TikTok of DJs with these massive light shows in front of the pyramids of Giza.

• 13:25Krishna Choudhary?

  I've seen those.

• 13:26Lester Nare?

  It looks like they're mapping muons with the amount of just, you know, lasers that are going, and obviously that's not what's going on.

• 13:32Krishna Choudhary?

  No, it's like visualizing his experiment somehow. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. So he didn't find anything, right? But that sort of started this idea of we can actually do something with muons and do a kind of muon tomography. It's kind of like a CAT scan where what you can do is take a scan with muons in this direction and then a scan with muons in this direction and all these different directions, map out the shadows and then from that reconstruct the physical 3D nature of whatever is inside.

• 14:07Lester Nare?

  So this was sort of this understanding that we can use, you know, muon detectors as a means by which to do mapping of large objects or spaces.

• 14:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, large objects, right? And actually, in modern times, there's been a renaissance. There's been this program called the Scan Pyramids. In 2015, they actually used it to map out the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is the Pyramid of Khufu, I believe. That's the biggest of the three. And they actually did find a void there. They found a previously unknown void. It was at least 30 meters long above the Grand Gallery. And there you see the muons are coming in from cosmic rays. And you're basically waiting for these muons to come in. And from each direction, you can map out how many muons came in from each direction. And you can say, oh, actually, more muons came in from this middle part of the pyramid than from the outside, which means that middle part of the pyramid must have some kind of cavity or hole

• 15:00Krishna Choudhary?

  where the muons had no problem getting through. Does that make sense?

• 15:03Lester Nare?

  It does, it does.

• 15:04Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's like, there's a hole.

• 15:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:06Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a hole in there. And they actually found it. But it really, it highlighted a limitation of the approach.

• 15:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 15:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is that you gotta wait months to years

• 15:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 15:18Krishna Choudhary?

  to actually scan this stuff, because the flux from the cosmic rays is so, so low. Okay? Now, this has applications elsewhere as well, okay? It's not just like, okay, archaeology, is there a hole in the pyramids? That I can go find gold or whatever.

• 15:33Lester Nare?

  There's a lot of people who are very curious about what's underneath the pyramids.

• 15:36Krishna Choudhary?

  A lot of people care a lot about that, but I imagine the people living around volcanoes care a lot about whether there's a hole in their volcano, right? Where the magma could come out. And so they've actually used these detectors on volcanoes. Like Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, Stromboli. All three of those are in Italy. You also have Sakurajima, which is in Japan. And what they've done is using this muon tomography, they've mapped out the internal density of that volcano to see where the magma chambers are, where there's maybe less pressure. So if there's like an eruption, which way would it go? You know, because it would go to the path of least resistance through this like lower pressure part. So it reveals these like lava plugs, magma conduits.

• 16:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Again, though, there's a limitation. Because we are relying on cosmic rays.

• 16:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Which the flux is so low.

• 16:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:31Krishna Choudhary?

  You're only going to get a static image. You need a year to take this photograph. You need a year to take this CAT scan. And then once you have the year, you have a static image of where the volcano is. But it would be really nice if we had so much flux, right? That I could get like a moving picture of what is happening inside the volcano using muon tomography.

• 16:51Lester Nare?

  So until this day, what we have is we've discovered a methodology by which to map large objects, look inside of large objects, such as the pyramids or volcanoes. But two of the primary limitations have been, it takes a really long time to get a static, not motion image of these things, because the frequency by which muons pass through them is so very, very, very, very low. Right? Okay, so that's the foundation of where the story now picks up from.

• 17:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And now we pick up. With this paper, okay, this paper came out in the Physical Review Accelerators and Beams. It was a team at the Bella Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. They used the laser plasma accelerator, okay? And they did something very cool, which is they used, they used a beam, they used an apparatus that's only about a meter big to create a very, very powerful muon beam, okay? And in order to do that, they, they, they did a kind of physics that is very akin to wakeboarding. Have you ever gone wakeboarding?

• 18:03Lester Nare?

  So I've only gone once and I immediately almost got a concussion the first time I got up because I just fell and slammed my face into the water.

• 18:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is why I never go in the water. So I have never gone wakeboarding, nor will I ever go wakeboarding. But wakeboarding is a very useful analogy for the physics that's going on here. Because it's quite incredible, right? Usually, usually to make muons, you need a massive particle accelerator. And that massive particle accelerator then bombs into like something. And then that something, the interaction of the, all of the highly energetic particles with whatever target is going to create your muons. That's usually how you do it. Here, they've created an electron gun effectively that is extremely fast, very, very high-energy electron guns with a, with, with a short rifle in some sense.

• 18:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and, and what they're doing is wakeboarding the electrons, okay? So here, here's what's going on. In wakeboarding, right? What you're doing is the, the boat goes at a really high speed. And then, and then, and then you got a surfer that surfs the waves of the wake that the boat makes. Right? And, and you don't even need like a rope to tether you to the, to the boat. There's like, I think there's like a photo of Mark Zuckerberg, just like with a, with an American flag, right? You know that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so like, you know, you don't need a, you can just, the waves themselves have enough structure and energy. You can stand on top of those and then just go, right? And you can ride that energy.

• 19:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:41Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what they're doing. That's what they're making the electrons do that. So what they do is they've got these, they've got an ultra short laser pulse. Okay. And they're going to fire it into a gas. It's hydrogen doped with nitrogen. Okay. And what this.

• 19:54Lester Nare?

  I just want to say hydrogen doped with a little nitrogen is such a funny sentence.

• 19:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, I guess, it's used a lot in like chemistry for like semiconductors. Doped meaning like you're putting, you're removing some other stuff and you're putting some other stuff in. Yeah. And so what that's going to do is that that laser is going to go in and it's going to create a plasma. Because the laser is going to push out a bunch of the negative charges. And you're going to get free electrons and you're going to get these positive nuclei. Now, all of a sudden, you have a bubble of positive charge. Okay. And then if some straggly electrons get trapped in that bubble, they're going to ride that bubble. And because it's positive, positively charged, they're going to want to get the hell out of there. And so you're going to push these electrons out.

• 20:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're gonna, they're going to be accelerated by these powerful electric fields. And you can get somewhere like several billion electron volts, like giga electron volts, in a 30 centimeter plasma channel.

• 20:54Lester Nare?

  That's crazy.

• 20:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And versus like, usually that takes hundreds of meters of traditional accelerators. Like Slack does this and Slack requires like a massive thing that goes under the freeway. And, you know, so this is, this is really cool that they're able to do this.

• 21:09Lester Nare?

  So the part of the insight here is this miniaturization of being able to create these, these, these electron beam, these particle beams at like a very, very small scale, but still retaining.

• 21:24Krishna Choudhary?

  The energy.

• 21:25Lester Nare?

  The energy level.

• 21:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 21:27Lester Nare?

  Which is obviously meaningful because that means you can have smaller seller, smaller footprint of the accelerator.

• 21:34Krishna Choudhary?

  That's, that's the key. That's the key. And this, this is, this is a new technology, relatively new technology, laser plasma accelerators.

• 21:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 21:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And they're still sort of coming into, coming into their being. They're still quite big, but the fact that, you know, we're getting to these high energies.

• 21:49Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's not like hundreds of meters is is a very promising step. Okay, so that's the first step. You got now an electron beam. Okay, a massive, really highly energetic electron beam. Now, what you're gonna do is you're gonna dump that beam into a giant block of lead, steel and concrete. Okay. And what that's gonna do is the electrons are then gonna interact with these heavy nuclei. Lead is a very heavy nucleus, right? And as it interacts, the electrons are gonna slow down and they're gonna slow down creating radiation. Because remember, we've talked about this a lot. If an if a charged particle accelerates or deaccelerates, it's gonna release energy. Yes. Right?

• 22:34Krishna Choudhary?

  The only time somehow that it doesn't do this is in the confines of an atom. Right? Because that's when Stuff gets weird. Yeah, all the all the rules are off. But if it's a free electron and it's moving and it starts accelerating or deaccelerating or changing direction, it's gonna create this things called Bremsstrahlung. It's a German word for breaking radiation. Okay? So all of that energy of the electron is going into high energy photons. These are gamma rays. And now those high energy photons will interact with the atomic nuclei to create pairs of particles. Pair production is something that happens when you got a bunch of energy in one spot and that energy spontaneously splits into two particles.

• 23:17Krishna Choudhary?

  One that is the matter part, one is that is the antimatter part. You get the matter antimatter pair. And if the if the physics is right, then you're gonna get a bunch of antimatter, matter antimatter pairs that are exactly muons and antimuons. Okay? If you tune the energy such that the energy is exactly E divided by C squared, the mass, remember E equals mc squared, right? So if the energy is exactly equal to the mass of two of two muons, one muon and one antimuon, then the energy is gonna dump into muons and antimuons. That field is gonna take over and you're gonna get a muon and antimuon. And so what this ends up being is you get a collimated, collimated meaning it's all in one direction. That's that's where that word from the headline came from. Yes.

• 24:02Krishna Choudhary?

  All in one direction, it's directional and it's a muon beam. Yes. Okay? Yes. So now we've got a muon beam. Very cool.

• 24:09Lester Nare?

  Right, right. From, from, starting from this electron beam.

• 24:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Lester Nare?

  That now we put through this lead, steel, concrete substrate.

• 24:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Lester Nare?

  And it created, had this pair production that has now resulted in this, you know, matter.

• 24:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Matter, antimatter muon.

• 24:27Lester Nare?

  Muon pair.

• 24:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly.

• 24:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 24:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So now we got a muon beam all of a sudden.

• 24:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 24:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, okay, you say it's a muon beam. How do you know it's a muon beam? Cause everyone else is gonna be like, how do you know it's a muon beam? How do you know it's not some other random particle? How do you know it's just another, not just another electron, right? So now you gotta do the work of actually showing that it is a muon beam. So the detection system looks like this. This is the measurement room. We've got the laser coming in from the left. Then the laser creates this electron beam. The electron beam gets bombarded into this about three meters worth of lead, steel and concrete. And on the other side is your detector. And that detector is what's gonna catch the strays, catch these muon strays that are coming in. Okay?

• 25:16Krishna Choudhary?

  How do we make sure that this, the, the, the particles that are coming out are muons?

• 25:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 25:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? I, I thought this was really cool because this is like a very simple test. Okay, here's what they did. They said, okay, well, we know from all of the years of work on muons.

• 25:34Lester Nare?

  Cause we've been doing this since the 60s.

• 25:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we know about muons for a while, right? And we know that their decay, their, their half-life is 2.2 microseconds, right? So if we can characterize the half-life of these particles that are coming out, and it's exactly 2.2 microseconds, then we're good to go. And that's exactly what they did. They collected data from 760 laser shots over two hours. So that's about five per minute. And then what they did was they, they triggered on the giant amount of electrons that would come out. And then they would look for a second signal, which is from when the muon would decay. Okay, cause the electrons are coming out first and then the muon would decay. And it would fit this exact exponential. They did a histogram. They fit an exponential to that histogram.

• 26:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And the exponential decay curve had a time constant that was exactly 2.24 microseconds.

• 26:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So it's like a telltale sign.

• 26:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Krishna Choudhary?

  You can't ignore the like, cause this, this, this exponential decays thing. That's something that you learn about in undergrad physics, right?

• 26:33Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 26:33Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like the, at the end of the day, like it just took like a nice undergrad graph.

• 26:38Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 26:38Krishna Choudhary?

  To be like, yeah, that's a muon.

• 26:39Lester Nare?

  And, and so what's so interesting is it's not with a lot of these stories, you not only have to create the new thing, right? In this case, how can we do muon generation? At a smaller scale than like several building size accelerator.

• 26:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:56Lester Nare?

  But then everyone's going to say, well, how do you know you generated muons?

• 26:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Lester Nare?

  And so you also need to have a detection system on the tail end to validate. Your generator.

• 27:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And not just detection, but like, how do you analyze that data to make sure that like, you can convince everybody out there.

• 27:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 27:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Who's trying to say you didn't do it, right? Cause the, there's so many people that are, that are trying to do this, right? And everyone wants to get there first. So you've got to really check your, check, check your work.

• 27:24Krishna Choudhary?

  So that was really cool, right? So now they, they, they finally found, um, they finally made this muon source. Right? And now this gets over that cosmic ray limitation because now instead of a drizzle.

• 27:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 27:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 27:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 27:39Krishna Choudhary?

  If, if I could now make this such that I can point it somewhere. I, I, I don't have this drizzle of cosmic rays. Now I can just have a fire hose that's like aimed at whatever thing I wanna, I wanna look at.

• 27:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 27:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and the natural, natural muon flux, flux is something like, as I was saying, it's like one, one particle per square centimeter per minute, right? That's one particle through my fingernail per minute. This thing is going to be 40 times as much. Okay? And this is the LPA source. That, that's, that's what it looks like. It's, it's just kind of a tabletop looking experiments. I mean, obviously there's a bunch of stuff in the building that is supporting this tabletop experiment. So it's not, it's not so trivial to put this in the back of a truck or something like that. But at the end of the day, it's from this, um, laser plasma source.

• 28:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and even at one hertz, it's, it's going to be 40 times the particle delivery rate of cosmic rays, right? And it's an order of magnitude reduction in exposure time. Now you can start doing the same kind of. Um, you want tomography of your pyramid or whatever, but instead of taking like years, it's gonna take maybe a few days.

• 28:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 28:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 28:53Lester Nare?

  Which is like, if for anyone who's trying to do any of these aspects of archaeology, geology, these things where you wanna look at these massive structures.

• 29:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:03Lester Nare?

  Uh, that time decrease, that time efficiency is, I mean incredibly meaningful. It reminds me very much of like the time efficiency of having like the, uh, the Vera Rubin sky observatory.

• 29:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 29:15Lester Nare?

  It's the same kinda thing where it's like you're having more frequent, high-quality data that's just becoming available because of this fundamental understanding.

• 29:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:23Lester Nare?

  Um.

• 29:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's only the beginning, right?

• 29:25Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Because like, like these, these lasers now, they're gonna get much, much better.

• 29:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right now, these guys are doing, like, the top, this thing can shoot the electron beam at is about one hertz, right? But we could be getting to kilohertz, which is thousands of shots a second, right? And then that's gonna, that's another three orders of magnitude above what we already have. And so now you can start doing, okay, instead of a few days, now you got a few minutes.

• 29:50Lester Nare?

  Minutes.

• 29:50Krishna Choudhary?

  We can, we can, and then now that's, that becomes really crucial. Suppose we think a volcanic eruption is happening.

• 29:55Lester Nare?

  Exactly.

• 29:56Krishna Choudhary?

  We can go there and we can monitor the volcano every minute and look at the internal dynamics, right?

• 30:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And be like, okay, we need to evacuate now, or maybe we got a few more weeks.

• 30:04Lester Nare?

  That's actually a really, uh, practical, uh, real-world use case for this, you know, basically as close to real-time detection system that you can imagine extrapolating this, if you increase that source, uh, from one hertz up, and then you can also miniaturize the rest of the supporting infrastructure to some sufficiently small thing, which can be, it could be multiple 18-wheeler trucks.

• 30:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Lester Nare?

  That's still.

• 30:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:31Lester Nare?

  Crazy.

• 30:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Lester Nare?

  Right?

• 30:32Krishna Choudhary?

  It could be like multiple 18-wheeler trucks that you don't like, you put it somewhere and then you assemble together.

• 30:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, that's still crazy.

• 30:38Lester Nare?

  That's so crazy.

• 30:39Krishna Choudhary?

  That was not possible. You couldn't do that with a massive detector. Now you could possibly do that in the next few years if, if things progress the way that they are, right? There's, there's, there's a lot of cool applications that I was reading about.

• 30:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:53Krishna Choudhary?

  That weren't completely obvious to me.

• 30:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 30:56Krishna Choudhary?

  But the ones I read them, it was like, oh, that's cool.

• 30:58Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 30:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's cool. So one of them is obviously like archaeology reimagined, right? You can, you can now do targeted excavation.

• 31:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:05Krishna Choudhary?

  You can like point your muon beam at specific spots. And when you're excavating, you don't want to do like a brute force approach and just excavate everything. You've got limited time. You don't want to disturb the excavation in some sense. So you can like target and try to get to whatever cavity that you're trying to go to. Um, you can also do like, you can also start imaging smaller objects. Like sarcophagi or like statues, things like that. Um, you just stick that right in front of your muon detector. Um, real time volcanology is something that we talked about. You can do near real time observation of density changes, like magma movement, gas pressure, lava plugs.

• 31:42Lester Nare?

  For the like, uh, Yellowstone supervolcano that always comes up. I mean, it'll be huge for that.

• 31:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Lester Nare?

  Uh, because you can, you, we would be able to know.

• 31:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we'd be able to know and that'd be really nice.

• 31:53Lester Nare?

  That'd be really nice.

• 31:54Krishna Choudhary?

  That'd be really nice to know. Um, there's also national security.

• 31:58Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 31:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And infrastructure, something I thought you would like.

• 32:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Krishna Choudhary?

  So the, the speed of the, this muon tomography would be such that now we can scan cargo at the ports. Without opening the box.

• 32:08Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 32:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because you can't do that with x-rays. The, the metal is too thick.

• 32:12Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 32:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But you could just stick a muon thing and then it's gonna, so routine inspection of these shipping containers can happen in minutes now. You don't, you know?

• 32:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Krishna Choudhary?

  So then you don't have to trust the shipping manifest. You can literally be like, okay, is there something there? If there's any nuclear spuggling that's going on, nuclear waste and nuclear like rods and things like that are very dense.

• 32:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:34Krishna Choudhary?

  They're going to interact with muons in very weird ways because that's just nuclear physics. Right? So now all of a sudden you can have like safeguards and waste management, things like that. Um, the other thing that was cool was, uh, uh, civil engineering, right? Because like our. Our, uh, our infrastructure, let's face it, is, is quite old and, um, needs repair.

• 32:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And, you know, you could, you could take these muon beams to bridges and dams and buildings, and they could reveal hidden cracks, water infiltration.

• 33:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Catastrophic, catastrophic failure.

• 33:09Lester Nare?

  This, I, I.

• 33:10Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so it's, it's a whole new mode of, you know, it's, it's like we've unlocked a new type of light.

• 33:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:17Krishna Choudhary?

  In some sense, right? We've unlocked a new type of imaging.

• 33:19Lester Nare?

  Right. No, no, exactly. We, we, what's so interesting about this, I mean, the, the nat, the nat sec implications got my, my gear straying.

• 33:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Lester Nare?

  It becomes very difficult to basically smuggle a dirty bomb anywhere.

• 33:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:31Lester Nare?

  Um, particularly, you can put these on any number of source platforms. But the civil engineering one, I think, is so, particularly for where, you know, this is true globally, but especially in the U.S., where we have now legacy infrastructure that is beginning to, you know, I mean, the four or five has been shut down to one lane.

• 33:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Lester Nare?

  Multiple weeks in a row.

• 33:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's been the bane of my existence, dude.

• 33:53Lester Nare?

  And like deciding how, like what, uh, civil engineering projects are most pressing.

• 34:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:00Lester Nare?

  By having an actual data set.

• 34:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Lester Nare?

  That is not necessarily just time or, you know, citizen complaints.

• 34:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Lester Nare?

  But has like a data set, but, and again, this, there might be other things.

• 34:12Krishna Choudhary?

  We can like X, dude, we can X-ray concrete.

• 34:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 34:15Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 34:16Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Like that, that's what it is. We can now X-ray concrete and stone.

• 34:21Lester Nare?

  I, I can ima, I mean, imagine putting this on a, this is getting a little ahead of the skis here, but you could have some sort of drone platform that you can then have and then do surveys local, you know? Just in terms of being able to distribute this to like lower cost use cases. I mean, muography in that, in that context would have huge impacts.

• 34:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. The, the only problem I'm thinking with the drone stuff is like, cause you need a detector.

• 34:47Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Like with drones, it's really nice with radar because light bounces back. Muons don't bounce back.

• 34:52Lester Nare?

  You need, you need that thing on the other side.

• 34:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 34:54Lester Nare?

  To be able to.

• 34:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's like even in X-rays, right? Like they're always like, they put like a thingy.

• 34:59Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 34:59Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, when they do the X-ray.

• 35:00Lester Nare?

  No, that's fair. Yeah. No, that's, that's a very important distinction. Does not negate any of the actual benefits that we just talked about.

• 35:08Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 35:08Lester Nare?

  Which are meaningful. Um, and so it, you know, I guess the, the, the key, the key advancements here that are sort of. That are the next steps are higher energy beams, miniaturization.

• 35:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:22Lester Nare?

  Those are the two key.

• 35:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 35:23Lester Nare?

  Areas for improvement.

• 35:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, those, those are the two key areas and like the fact that this part has been solved, which is like making muons with a high energy electron beam. That part's been solved now. The, the problem is miniaturization of it and making it higher power, right? Like making the, the hertz faster, the, the repetitive nature of that laser faster. Right now, the laser like shoots and then it's got to recharge and then shoot again. Right. But if you can make it rapid fire.

• 35:55Lester Nare?

  If you make it semi-automatic.

• 35:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep, exactly.

• 35:57Lester Nare?

  It becomes very interesting. Fascinating.

• 35:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Very cool.

• 36:00Lester Nare?

  Um, I don't wanna.

• 36:01Krishna Choudhary?

  That was a cool one.

• 36:02Lester Nare?

  I, that's a really cool one. I don't wanna muon from that story too soon. I know that's a double of the same joke. However, we're gonna move to our next story that's coming out of University of Chicago and UC San Diego. Uh, about, uh, sodium batteries that are finally catching up. And they're cheaper than lithium and just as powerful. And this is out of jewel. And we all, because we all have devices.

• 36:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Lester Nare?

  We're all very familiar with the limitations of battery technology.

• 36:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 36:34Lester Nare?

  And everyone talks about innovation and things are getting better. But one of the jokes everyone always says is, well, why can't my iPhone or my Samsung Galaxy blah, blah, blah? Last a week?

• 36:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:45Lester Nare?

  Why is it only 20 hours?

• 36:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Lester Nare?

  Um, and so what is the top line for? I didn't even know that sodium batteries were like a competitive, a competing platform to lithium.

• 36:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Lester Nare?

  Um.

• 36:57Krishna Choudhary?

  They're not.

• 36:58Lester Nare?

  Okay, they're not.

• 36:59Krishna Choudhary?

  We don't have enough fundamental science.

• 37:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Krishna Choudhary?

  To do it. This is in that line.

• 37:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is, this is getting there.

• 37:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:07Krishna Choudhary?

  This is trying to get us there.

• 37:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:09Krishna Choudhary?

  The idea is that we want to, this is from University of Chicago and UC San Diego. They're trying to create, um, a sodium-based battery.

• 37:17Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Because that is just gonna be way chiller.

• 37:20Lester Nare?

  Way chiller.

• 37:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Than lithium-based battery. Okay?

• 37:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Lithium has all sorts of problems. We're gonna get into it. Before we get into it, let's talk about batteries.

• 37:28Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:29Krishna Choudhary?

  In general, how does a battery work? Okay, so a battery basically provides a electromotive force. Okay, it is, um, converting chemical energy into electrical energy. It's highly efficient compared to like, you know, converting like, like a generator, which. Or a turbine which converts mechanical energy into heat, which then becomes electrical energy and so on and so forth. So, so batteries function by converting that stored chemical energy into electrical energy, right? And the way they work is they've got two electrodes, okay? They've got one part, which is called the anode, and that's the part that releases electrons.

• 38:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Those electrons then go through the circuit to the cathode, which is the other part of the battery. That's why, you know, when you have the Duracell, right? You've got one part that's positive and one part that's negative. You connect that to wires, you light up the light bulb. What's happening is there's some chemical reaction that's going on inside of that battery that is pushing electrons one way and sucking electrons the other way. And because the electrons have to go through the circuit in order to complete that path, they, they have no choice but to go through whatever load you're trying to put on it. In, in some cases, it's a light bulb. And so they go through the light bulb, they, they expend some power and then they go back. Okay. And that's effectively what a battery does.

• 38:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, the main, the, the main question is, why doesn't the electron just go through the battery? Why does it have to go through all the way around the circuit? Why can't it just go through the battery to the, to the cathode, right? From the anode to the cathode. And that's where the electrolyte comes in, okay? There's something inside the battery that is preventing electrons from going through. It only lets positive ions go through, okay? So at the anode side, and thi- this happens during discharging, okay? So in discharging, the battery's providing power, okay? The anode, which is the, the positive terminal, um, sorry, the anode is the negative terminal. The negative terminal releases electrons that go through the circuit.

• 39:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And the positive ions go through the electrolyte to the cathode, okay? And they, and that electrolyte blocks electrons. So the electrons have no, um, choice but to go through the circuit. Okay, that's the key. And then what you want to do is you want to be able to charge it again, right? And so when we charge it, we're just reversing this entire process. So now, The cathode releases electrons, the positive side releases, because what the power, the external power that you just supplied does is it's reversing this chemical reaction. So now the electrons travel the other way and the positive ions travel the other way. And then you're resetting this, you know, scale. Yes.

• 40:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Where now all of the, all of the chemical energy is back into the system. It's like a seesaw. Yes, it's exactly like a seesaw where you, you, you had chemical energy and that became electrical energy and now you're providing work back to convert from electrical energy back to chemical energy, right? And to do this, lithium has basically won the race so far. It's the Usain Bolt of. Yes, lithium ions are the Usain Bolt because they are fast. Why are they fast? Well, they're super light, right? They, it's number three on the periodic table. That means that the nuclei are only six atomic units big, three electrons, three,

• 41:03Krishna Choudhary?

  sorry, three protons, three electrons, actually sometimes four, but in any case, very small. It's the lightest metal and because it's the lightest metal and it has the, it only has three electrons, right? So the, the inner two electrons are in the stable, nice shell, right? The inner shell, the helium shell and that outer electron is just ready to go. Get the hell out of there, right? And so it's super willing to be negative. It's super willing to be an ion. It's also, it's got this high gravimetric energy density, which basically because it's low mass, right? The, the lower the mass, but you still have one charge. Yes. So very high density in that sense, high electrochemical potential, which means

• 41:48Krishna Choudhary?

  that you can reach high voltage and high energy density, right? Yes. So all of these things make it a really good ion for batteries because it, it has no problem moving around in the electrolyte, right? And then just donating that electron to go into the circuit. That makes sense. Makes sense, right? Yes.

• 42:07Krishna Choudhary?

  The problem is, uh, it is super scarce. Okay. In the universe, it's super scarce. And since the price has been up like 700% since 2021, um, it's only like point 0017% of the earth's crust. Um, it's in concentrated deposits and like the lithium triangle. I forget what are the actual countries. I think it's like Chile, Bolivia, um, in South America. That's one, that's the big lithium triangle. And then also Australia has a bunch of lithium.

• 42:38Lester Nare?

  We just, we just, it's funny in Zimbabwe, which we talked about is where my family is from. We just actually discovered like the fourth largest lithium deposit on earth. And it's now created interesting geopolitical implications because of what you're talking about, because of that scarcity and its importance for all of the battery powered things, which is basically everything. Uh, it's a little complicated.

• 43:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Here comes colonialism, part two disguised as capitalism. But, um, but yeah, so obviously it's like, it's got problems, right? And, and there's two ways to mine lithium, which I'm sure Zimbabwe is going to learn soon.

• 43:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 43:17Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, one of them is hard rock mining. This is super energy intensive, open pits, land degradation, looks, looks really bad and 15 tons of CO2 per ton of lithium.

• 43:28Lester Nare?

  This is what the Chinese are already out there doing.

• 43:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, already. Okay. Great. Yeah. And then, and then there's brine extraction, which is like brine is like the, the stuff you, you get in these saltwater lakes high up. There were all of the minerals from the mountains come in and then you basically mix it with water and you evaporate it. Okay. And this is, it requires 500, 500,000 liters of water per ton of lithium, depletes the water, contaminates the soil, contaminates the groundwater. Everyone hates it. So lithium kind of sucks.

• 43:58Lester Nare?

  It, it accomplishes the job, but no one likes working with it.

• 44:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, it's really good at its job. I get that. Okay. Like it's, it's light. It's number three on the periodic table. It's like theoretically the best thing because like you wouldn't use hydrogen. Hydrogen is its own thing, but lithium is the lightest metal, right? So it makes sense, but, but there's problems, right? So why would we want to use sodium? Well, I just told you, right? Lithium sucks. Sodium is the hair apparent, right? It's right below lithium on the periodic table. So lithium is number three. Sodium is number nine.

• 44:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Nine or 11, wait, one, two, plus six.

• 44:43Krishna Choudhary?

  No, it's number 11. It's number 11. Anyways, it's way bigger than lithium, which is at number three. Yes. Okay, um, but it's right below the lithium on the periodic table. And if you remember from your high school chemistry, everything that's in the same column on the periodic table has very similar chemical properties. So all of the stuff that we were doing with lithium, we could just do it with sodium, right? Yes. Because it's the same same. Yes. Just bigger. Bigger. Right? Obviously, there's gonna be problems with it being bigger, but the, the, the good things about sodium outweigh the bad. Okay, it's the sixth most common element. It's a thousand

• 45:25Krishna Choudhary?

  times more abundant than lithium. It's ba- like, it's in salt, right? NaCl. Yes. Sodium chloride is salt. You can extract it from rock salt. You can extract it out of the ocean. Sodium carbonate is like super cheap compared to lithium carbonate. Um, the, the only problem is it's big. Okay, it's, it's like way bigger. It's significantly larger. It's like, um, 0.3 angstroms greater atomic radius, which, and it's got three times the mass, right? And what that does is it's gonna cause problems if we just substitute the sodium instead of lithium into our already existing technology. You can't just hot swap. Yeah, you can't just hot swap it because this thing is bigger and it's heavier, right? Lithium right now, what's, what it does is, the way that we use lithium is, we've got, um,

• 46:11Krishna Choudhary?

  we've got the, the anode and the cathode. The, the anode is made out of something called graphite. Yes. Which is, which is, um, a carbon compound. It's the stuff that you're finding in lead. And the ca- the graphite is actually what like holds your lithium ions. I think photo number eight shows that. You've got on the left, just layers and layers of graphite that hold your lithium ions. And then when the lithium donates an electron into the circuit, it moves into the cathode, which is this lithium MO2 layer, right? If I just, if I just do a hotspot from lithium to sodium, that sodium is going to cause mechanical stress on the electrodes because it's bigger.

• 46:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 46:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Like those layers of graphite are now going to start

• 46:59Lester Nare?

  Being a little bendy.

• 46:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Being a little bendy and they're going to break. And that's going to create rapid degradation, a short cycle life, right? You're not going to be able to recharge it as many times as you want.

• 47:09Lester Nare?

  Ah, so like, like life cycle, long-term lifespan.

• 47:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:13Lester Nare?

  Also becomes.

• 47:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, because every time you're charging and recharging and charging and recharging, that layer of graphite is getting populated with lithium. And then the lithium goes away and then it gets populated with lithium and the lithium goes away. And just like any other thing, like the movement of stuff in and out of your, the pages of your book, right, is going to, is going to cause degradation. So that's one problem. The other problem is inherently, there's going to be a lower energy density, right? Because this thing is bigger.

• 47:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 47:42Krishna Choudhary?

  So for three times the mass.

• 47:45Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 47:46Krishna Choudhary?

  I have the same amount of charge.

• 47:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Obviously, the energy density is going to be lower, right?

• 47:52Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 47:52Krishna Choudhary?

  It's going to be a heavier battery if I want the same kind of charge. And the theoretical energy density is at least 30% lower in comparable lithium systems. It's also, kinetically, it's very sluggish. The larger nuclei means that the sodium is going to move slower in the, in the battery itself, right? The, the, the power that you're getting out of a battery is limited by how fast the lithium can go from, from one end to the other, right? But if you've got a larger thingy, then that thing's going to move slower. And so my total power output is going to be lower, right? There are all of these, all of these problems. So despite its abundance, because it's heavier,

• 48:34Krishna Choudhary?

  it makes it less energy dense, which means you have to have a bigger battery.

• 48:39Lester Nare?

  Battery to do the same level of output. It's gonna be slower. So you're gonna actually get less ultimate power out of it as well because it's slower. It's not just that it's heavier, it's also slower. And all of this means that like the efficiency of a similarly sized sodium battery system.

• 48:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Lester Nare?

  As compared to a lithium ion system is just gonna be inefficient.

• 49:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 49:02Lester Nare?

  And we've gotten used to our iPhones being a certain size.

• 49:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And so, and so the, all of these problems are persisting, right? That doesn't mean that sodium could still not be valuable.

• 49:12Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 49:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because, fine, maybe not for the iPhone.

• 49:16Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 49:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, but battery has a lot more usage than just our electronics. For example, if you've thought about stationary battery power, right? If you've got like a giant electrical grid and you wanna store a bunch of, a bunch of power for when the electrical grid goes bad, or if you're trying to do renewables, right? And you, and you have a giant solar panel array, but now it's like cloudy, you wanna be able to store all of the,

• 49:45Krishna Choudhary?

  all of the sunlight from when it was actually sunny to then use when it's cloudy, right? All of these stationary stor- storage parts, it doesn't really matter. If it's bigger.

• 49:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 49:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? If it's cheaper.

• 49:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what matters.

• 50:00Lester Nare?

  That's actually a really good point. Yeah.

• 50:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And that's, that's what, that's why people are excited about sodium.

• 50:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It could be, it could pave the way for, um, like, a truly green future. Where, you know, we don't need to, we don't need to rely on these like fossil fuels and coal and things like that. We could be a completely green economy and we just store like power from wind or from solar, power from all other things for whenever there's a rainy day, right? If we can make that really cheap.

• 50:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Then we've solved that problem of like allocating those resources from when the energy was coming in to when the energy is actually needed.

• 50:39Lester Nare?

  Because one of the biggest limiting factors right now is that battery storage for its level of capacity and efficiency is just way too expensive.

• 50:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 50:47Lester Nare?

  To distribute.

• 50:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And like not as good.

• 50:49Lester Nare?

  And not as good.

• 50:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Lester Nare?

  But, but, that's, yeah.

• 50:52Krishna Choudhary?

  We might be getting there with this kinda stuff, right? And so this is where the paper comes in. This is a paper in JUUL by Jin An Sam Oh and Professor Ying Shirley Meng's team. This is out of China. Oh, no, no, no, no. This is what am I saying? This is I'm confusing the next. Oh, our next story. Our next story. This is out of UC San Diego and University of Chicago. They created a novel solid-state electrolyte with unprecedented performance. Okay? And this is solid-state electrolyte that can shuttle silicon. Okay? So what they did was in the lab, they created a battery out of a crystalline phase of sodium, boron, and hydrogen. Okay?

• 51:34Krishna Choudhary?

  It's referred to as ONBH, orthorhombic crystal. It's got orthorhombic crystal symmetry. So it's the solid-state compound. And it's got these cage-like anions that have this really nice crystal symmetry. And the way that they created this was very cool because what they did was they combined two substances. There was a boron and hydrogen, BH4. And then there was a sodium, boron, and hydrogen, which was two sodiums, a bunch of borons, a bunch of hydrogens. The two of them together create this sort of metastable compound.

• 52:15Krishna Choudhary?

  A metastable compound means it's got like this phase that is stable, but only so-so. You kick it in some direction, you like heat it up, you like do something to it. It goes off and it does something else, right? And so you want to like, it's like really like finicky, okay? And you want to sort of freeze it in this nice active state without getting to the inactive state, right? So what they use something called quenching, which it's kind of like, you know, if you've ever, like in the top ramen restaurants, when they try to make soft-boiled eggs. Yes. You want to stop the cooking. Yes. At the exact moment. So you put it in ice. Yes.

• 52:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? You boil it, boil the egg for like six minutes, and then you put it in ice to stop the cooking. That's what they did here. They got their substance. They heated it up, and then they quenched it very quickly. And it stayed in that stable sort of high energy situation. And that was really

• 53:17Lester Nare?

  Even though they cooled down.

• 53:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Even though they had cooled down to to room temperature. They had done it fast enough, right? That like the the the physics of it had sort of stayed. Where they wanted it to stay.

• 53:29Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 53:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Lester Nare?

  That's that's really, which is like, just like talk to the egg. Exactly, we just talked about.

• 53:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's and it's something that we talked about during the Nobel Prize chemistry stuff. It's like chemistry is a lot like cooking and baking.

• 53:40Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Those are the techniques that you use, right? But you gotta be very good at it, right? And that's the magic. That's the magic of of chemistry.

• 53:49Krishna Choudhary?

  So this this this new compound was very nice because, you know, one of the problems I was talking about was how sodium is bigger.

• 53:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:58Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's got a hard time going through the electrolyte from one cat, one electrode to the other, right?

• 54:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 54:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and the faster that we can make this thing happen, the the more power we can get out of our battery and the more energy efficient we can make our battery. Well, this particular electrolyte, it's a solid state electrolyte. What it did was the it's got this paddle wheel effect. Okay, what's happening is the the large, um, the large crystals of boron and hydrogen. They can actually start spinning in their state and that spin shuttles sodium.

• 54:35Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Kind of like a paddle wheel.

• 54:38Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's really cool. So you create these super highways for ion hopping, right? The other thing that's cool about this is there's a really high density of unoccupied sites. So you have this like very nice highway where the sodium can go. And then you have the spinning effect on all of the stuff around you. That is creating a kind of momentum push that is like jiggling all these these sodium atoms to go through, right? And and and now you can you can have this super ionic conductivity, the entire population of actively conducting, conducting, um, sodium ions.

• 55:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:14Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the these, the the substrate itself sort of shakes loose any ions that got like stuck somewhere.

• 55:22Lester Nare?

  Somewhere, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it it's it's creating some lubrication for this flow.

• 55:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly, exactly. Yeah, and um, and it's it's really cool because now you've got, um. You've got a way to move forward, right? With sodium

• 55:36Lester Nare?

  Batteries.

• 55:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Sodium batteries, right? The other cool thing that I thought was very cool is this thing can handle low temperatures.

• 55:46Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 55:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. One of the problems that I think you've heard about probably, right?

• 55:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Tesla's.

• 55:53Lester Nare?

  It's hard to drive a Tesla in Canada.

• 55:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Lester Nare?

  In the winter.

• 55:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because the lithium ion batteries just like totally fail.

• 55:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 56:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because at that low temperature, there's not enough motility.

• 56:03Lester Nare?

  It's true for all electric vehicles, not just Tesla.

• 56:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, yes. Please don't sue us. But, you know, they're like, at low temperatures, these lithium ion batteries are not performing that well. Well, as a combination of this solid state chemistry that's happening and like these spinning thingies.

• 56:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 56:22Krishna Choudhary?

  The motility of the sodium ions, this thing can actually have pretty good performance at zero degrees Celsius.

• 56:29Lester Nare?

  That's, that's really interesting. So despite its negative aspects, because the size of sodium as compared to lithium.

• 56:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Lester Nare?

  Which creates a lower energy density and slower movement through the circuit. At low temperatures, there's, with this sort of new lubricant, that's the electrolyte that's facilitating the movement. The sodium battery can actually perform more efficient.

• 56:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Lester Nare?

  At lower temperatures as compared to lithium.

• 57:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Then the, then the current lithium ion batteries.

• 57:03Lester Nare?

  That's very interesting.

• 57:03Krishna Choudhary?

  So this is, this is already like actually, and so now it becomes suitable for like EVs in cold climates.

• 57:09Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:09Krishna Choudhary?

  If you want grid storage.

• 57:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Without a lot of like thermal management.

• 57:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, you know, I'm sure Scandinavia and Norway.

• 57:16Lester Nare?

  Would love something.

• 57:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Would love something like this, right? Where it's like they're frozen like half the year or whatever.

• 57:21Lester Nare?

  Wherever they put the seed bank where they have all the seeds and it's buried below the ice. You know, you can imagine a huge sodium battery store.

• 57:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, that like powers that and like make sure that that's okay.

• 57:31Lester Nare?

  Or the neutrino detector in Antarctica.

• 57:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Ice cube.

• 57:36Lester Nare?

  Ice cube.

• 57:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, we're, we're, we're far away from building like a full battery.

• 57:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:43Krishna Choudhary?

  But the architecture is there.

• 57:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And they actually did make a battery. It's not like commercially viable, but you know, it's like in their, in their thingy. And like, and that's the Tesla's on Fox News.

• 58:00Krishna Choudhary?

  They got stranded.

• 58:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is so, it's so funny. I remember I've had an electric car for a while. I remember like, oh, you can't drive in the cold weather.

• 58:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Well, in LA, it's not that bad.

• 58:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in LA, in California, it's like, pretty nice.

• 58:13Lester Nare?

  Pretty nice.

• 58:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but um, in the, in terms of the battery that they made, so they made this thing with the solid electrolyte, and they used tin, tin alloy for the anode, and they used a sodium chromium oxygen composite for the cathode. It retained eighty percent of its initial capacity after a hundred cycles. Pretty good.

• 58:38Lester Nare?

  It's pretty good.

• 58:38Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not commercial grade, right? Commercial grade goes to like thousands of cycles.

• 58:41Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 58:42Krishna Choudhary?

  But um, an average coulombic efficiency of ninety nine point eight to ninety nine point nine, which means it's a stable system. There's not that many side reactions going on. The sodium isn't going off and doing something else. It's really getting recycled every time. You know, um, and there's a lot of broader implications to this kind of stuff because, you know, one could imagine you can like totally start reshaping the grid.

• 59:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 59:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Around a capability like this, right? If you have the, if you have a way to create a battery that's a hundred times cheaper than lithium, right? And it's going to be crucial for gigawatt hour scale batteries, right? And it's all solid state. There's no flammable liquids, so it's inherently safer if you want to make building sized versions of this.

• 59:31Lester Nare?

  Don't let the AI overlords get a handle on this.

• 59:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:35Lester Nare?

  I mean, that's a big aspect we've talked about with AI, the power generation issue, and it's not only the generation, but also storage as it relates to that. It's both problem sets.

• 59:45Krishna Choudhary?

  It's both problem sets, and now we can make it cheaper. So I wonder, right? Like, is this, is this maybe gonna, gonna make that better? Is it gonna make it worse? I'm not sure.

• 59:55Lester Nare?

  It would be interesting to, it would be interesting to see if there's capital that starts to move, because I know that new battery technology is a buzzword that constantly gets brought up in venture capital, you know, meet cutes and all this stuff. And so when you, when you have like signal, this is signal, does that create now? Sort of this riser of a couple of these hardware upstarts that are trying to take this, take the funnel of VC cash money and try to operationalize it more quickly. I'm not saying that that's feasible.

• 1:00:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Lester Nare?

  But we've seen it in other areas that are interesting where once someone has sort of identified that there's some minimum viability.

• 1:00:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Lester Nare?

  Because of the importance of power to what is viewed as this great power battle on AI. You're seeing private capital move earlier in the cycle of research.

• 1:00:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:00:47Lester Nare?

  To insert themselves in order both to accelerate it and control it earlier in that process.

• 1:00:51Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the grad student who's the first author in this gets hired by Tesla or Rivian or someone.

• 1:00:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:00:56Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, I'm gonna be honest. I mean, we know people who did exactly that, okay? You know who you are if you're listening to this. So the other, you know, as you were saying, like, in terms of like, now that something like this is possible, people like moving towards that, that capability, even in electric mobility, right? In electric vehicles, this isn't just because it's like a little bit, it's, yeah, okay, it's not as energy efficient as lithium because it can never can be. Lithium is just the gold standard. It's got three instead of 11 thingies. You can still, the fact that it's gonna be cheaper to make these kinds of batteries is gonna be huge for places in the developing world, right?

• 1:01:41Krishna Choudhary?

  If it's cheaper, that's what matters over there, right? People don't care, they don't really care about the environment. They're trying to get from A to B.

• 1:01:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, they want a car, right? Totally, I can totally understand. I've been there. So it's like, if you have this lower upfront cost, that could accelerate adoption.

• 1:01:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:58Krishna Choudhary?

  You could also have these things called hybrid battery packs, right? Where it's like, you can combine the lithium ion and the sodium ion, right? So if it's like super cold, you can have your sodium ion battery turn up.

• 1:02:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:02:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Heat up the car and then the lithium ion battery like comes up. So, so it's not like moot, right? There's, there's, there's a lot of.

• 1:02:20Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a lot of good points here.

• 1:02:22Lester Nare?

  The hybrid battery pack was my initial thought, and I totally agree with you on the, you know, whether you want to call it short range EV, urban EVs, but for, I can imagine, right, like, you know, where my grandmother is now, in, you know, in Yangan Zim, you know, having things that are lower cost, the cycle issue is not relevant, right? If it can do the job that it's needed to do efficiently and, you know, and as reasonable size scale, it will have huge implications for a variety of developing economies, which don't have the luxury of the, we'll be having to worry about the environment.

• 1:03:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Lester Nare?

  We didn't have to worry about the environment during our industrial revolution.

• 1:03:05Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:03:05Lester Nare?

  Why does everyone else need to?

• 1:03:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:07Lester Nare?

  X, Y, and Z. And so, very interesting.

• 1:03:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And then there's obviously the geopolitical aspect to it, right? Which is like China's making all the batteries, the extraction of lithium comes from very few countries that might turn sour on us. So if we can make it out of sodium, that'd be, that'd be pretty nice.

• 1:03:27Lester Nare?

  That'd be pretty nice. I already know we've lost the battle in Zim, and that's unfortunate because I was begging, begging the US ambassadors of Zimbabwe to pay attention about what was happening there. And

• 1:03:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Lester Nare?

  we needed that anyway.

• 1:03:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Lester Nare?

  Um, very, very interesting. And so, so scaling this to like giga factory level, like it's, there's a path?

• 1:03:51Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a path.

• 1:03:52Lester Nare?

  There's a

• 1:03:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:03:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, I mean, you got to optimize the entire cell design for cost and manufacturability and all this other kind of stuff. But it's, and it's not going to be like sodium or lithium. It's like sodium and lithium.

• 1:04:04Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's going to be both.

• 1:04:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Krishna Choudhary?

  But, um, the global energy demand is 100% going to exceed

• 1:04:13Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:14Krishna Choudhary?

  the amount of lithium we have on planet Earth, right? Even if we took out every bit of lithium, as developing countries become developed, right, as the billions of people want more and more power, as they rightfully should, right? Like if we live like this in America, everybody else wants to live like this too. They want ACs, they want, they want cars, they want mobile phones, blah, blah, blah. So, so having the sodium ion as a, as a battery pack is a critical

• 1:04:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Step.

• 1:04:47Lester Nare?

  It makes total, I mean, this is, you can't, you can't have infinite growth in a finite system.

• 1:04:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:53Lester Nare?

  And it's sort of trying to continue to address that, like, you know, look, I am not anti-capitalism, but like, you literally can't have infinite growth in a finite system. So like, what's the plan?

• 1:05:01Krishna Choudhary?

  What's the plan here? Yeah, yeah. And innovation seems to be the one thing. I mean, obviously, I think, I think we're also gonna get to a point where we're gonna seriously start thinking about sustainability. And again, sodium, sodium battery is, is a path towards that, right? If we could be completely reliant on renewable resources, which are transient, that seems to be one of the biggest problems, transient and they're far away. Well, if we have really nice batteries that can like, you know, store stuff around everywhere, it'd be pretty nice.

• 1:05:32Lester Nare?

  And there's clearly the landmass. I mean, you could create, you could take the, you know, massive swaths of California, make the massive battery facilities, sodium battery facilities, power the whole US, North America, just with a, not, it's like, you don't, we don't need to disrupt normal human living and.

• 1:05:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just stick it in the middle of nowhere.

• 1:05:52Lester Nare?

  And then just pipe it.

• 1:05:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Or again, because it's so cheap, you can create the cheap thing that you can have at home and you.

• 1:05:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:57Krishna Choudhary?

  It's disposable.

• 1:05:58Lester Nare?

  Piping it is hard because we, we lose a lot of power.

• 1:06:01Krishna Choudhary?

  On the pipe.

• 1:06:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Krishna Choudhary?

  But you just have a bunch, you know?

• 1:06:03Lester Nare?

  Everywhere.

• 1:06:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Everywhere.

• 1:06:04Lester Nare?

  Because it's so cheap.

• 1:06:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Lester Nare?

  So it doesn't, doesn't matter. This is a great moment, after we've talked about batteries and all the fundamental science that powers them, talk about our sponsor, Standard Model.

• 1:06:18Krishna Choudhary?

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• 1:06:20Lester Nare?

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• 1:06:32Krishna Choudhary?

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• 1:07:11Krishna Choudhary?

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• 1:07:51Lester Nare?

  If you're looking to support the show, check out Standard Model and as we get increased demand, we can make it more available in your local grocery and other retail stores. And again, the support for the pod has been incredible. We're going to continue with our core format, which is again, looking at and talking about core science and research stories from First Principles, which brings us to our last story of the day. Which is about a naked mole rat aging research. Now, for those of you who may not know, Kim Possible, the Disney Channel cartoon.

• 1:08:33Krishna Choudhary?

  I used to love that show.

• 1:08:34Lester Nare?

  It's one of my favorite cartoons of all time.

• 1:08:36Krishna Choudhary?

  We used to get that in India, too.

• 1:08:37Lester Nare?

  That's how good, that's how good it was.

• 1:08:39Krishna Choudhary?

  That's how good it was.

• 1:08:39Lester Nare?

  It's global. Not only is it one of my personal favorites, so when you sent me the show notes, I was like, oh, we're going to talk about Rufus. The doo doo doo doo ringtone to Call Me, Beat Me, Kim Possible is my literal SMS ringtone. Currently, right now on my iPhone 16 Pro Max.

• 1:08:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, that's how much triggered like so many childhood memories when you did that. So you know that that's so Raven when like the camera goes into her eye? That's what just happened.

• 1:09:09Lester Nare?

  Same, same exact thing. So this, this is a longevity story ultimately. That we're going to talk about now. This story, as we've talked about in previous episodes, is out of Tongji University in Shanghai, China. The headline was naked mole rats DNA could hold the key to long life.

• 1:09:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Lester Nare?

  And it was published in Science. And so what's the top line here about the con, the connection between this naked mole rat and now understanding longevity generally?

• 1:09:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. I mean, longevity is something that we've been after for a very long time. And it turns out the naked mole rats DNA could hold a secret to how to live longer. Okay?

• 1:09:49Lester Nare?

  I told you, I told you guys.

• 1:09:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude. Naked mole rats are incredible animals. And we're going to get right into it. Okay? So um, there's a grand challenge when it comes to aging, right? And the quest for living longer. There's, there's two main theories when it comes to aging. There's the programmed theory, which means that aging is a deliberate genetically determined mechanism that makes us die, right? It's programmed into our genes such that the, the hormones kick in at a certain age. There's some internal clock that kicks in. And that sort of, it's, it's part of evolution. It's, it's, it's a way to make sure that no one's living too long. Okay?

• 1:10:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Then there's um, damage or error theories, which suggests that aging is actually just a cumulative result of environmental insults and imperfect repair. And if we were to somehow take care of those environmental factors and get rid of that imperfection in the repair of our body, then we will be able to live longer, right? And the naked mole rat discovery that we're talking about here supports the idea that longevity is actually might be an evolved trait of superior damage control. It's, it's. Not a programmed thing. And actually, if we could do this damage control, there could be a way for us to live a lot longer than we are right now.

• 1:11:14Lester Nare?

  Don't tell, don't tell Peter Thiel.

• 1:11:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. So, okay, there's, there's a few hallmarks of aging that I want to talk about. This one is telomere attrition. Okay, telomeres are the protective DNA caps at the end of our chromosomes. There are a bunch of repetitive DNA that's basically nonsense. It's just there as a cap to make sure that the inner part of our chromosome gets replicated, right? Every single time there's cell division, those telomeres get shorter and shorter and shorter. Okay, because the way DNA replication works is you have DNA polymerase that goes down and then, and then replicates. Right. But the binding and unbinding of that DNA polymerase is a stochastic process. It's happening just based on some probability.

• 1:12:00Krishna Choudhary?

  And so the probability that goes all the way to the end is low, right? And that's why you have a bunch of nonsense telomeric DNA at the very end. It's just a bunch of AT, AT, AT, sometimes GC. I guess GC is on the other side. You get what I'm saying, right? It's just like, it's a bunch of repetitive DNA that doesn't actually code for protein. It's just there to make sure that I get everything in the middle.

• 1:12:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:12:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So it's, it's these caps at the very end. Now, short telomeres leads to cellular senescence, which is like the cell goes into a kind of coma like state. And it can lead to apoptosis, which is when the, the cell programs its own death. Okay. And it's been shown that it's a key contributor to organismal aging. So the telomeric DNA getting shorter and shorter correlates to the organism at large getting more and more aged.

• 1:12:51Lester Nare?

  Which, which sort of makes sense, like your buffers that are protecting this replication process are disappearing over time.

• 1:12:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And so, and yeah, and like, maybe you're losing genes on, on the ends, you know? And things like that. Yeah, there's, there's some mechanistic view there, right?

• 1:13:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:13:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, there's another one. There's deregulated nutrient sensing. So this comes from the mTOR pathway, which is for mammalian target of repamycin. So this is something that controls. Cell growth and metabolism and sustained activation of this pathway is linked to accelerated aging. And you can inhibit it with a drug called repamycin. And this you might have, you might have heard about. It's like this like de-aging drug unlocking the secrets of youth. People are taking this repamycin. Well, it's, it's literally targeting this pathway called mammalian target of repamycin, mTOR. Because it's literally named after the drug, because a lot of times in biology, you like, you like, find the thing that is affecting it. And then that's a good way to, to say the name of, you know.

• 1:13:50Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so if you inhibit this pathway with repamycin, it can lead to extended lifespan in various organisms.

• 1:13:58Lester Nare?

  Interesting. So there's, there's two separate things here. There's preventing the telomeres from, from being.

• 1:14:04Krishna Choudhary?

  From getting shorter. That's something that we might want to do.

• 1:14:06Lester Nare?

  So that's one piece. And then the other piece is there's this mTOR that accelerates aging. So if you inhibit it. Then, you know, you don't have this accelerated aging.

• 1:14:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, exactly. And then the third, there's a third one that I want to get into, which is the role of sirtuins. They're kind of like the guardians of the genome. Yeah, exactly. I love that name. They're, they're a family of seven mammalian proteins. They're found in mammals. They go cert one to seven and they regulate cellular health. And what they do is they regulate the histone complexes around DNA. Histones are these proteins that wrap the DNA around themselves to create the chromosomes. You must have seen the chromosomes in these cells, which are these like bulky little things. Most of what you're seeing are actually these histone proteins. The DNA is the tiny little thread that you wouldn't actually see. But it's wrapped around these histones, right?

• 1:15:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And the sirtuins are the ones that regulate these histones. Okay? Now, the, the, the activity of these sirtuins gets increased during caloric restriction. Which has been shown to be something that can lead to less aging, right? If you like, I mean, people go weigh ham with this and go with the intermittent fasting. Where they're like, you know, they're like, like not eating for like two days or whatever. Now, that it's, it's iffy there.

• 1:15:30Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:15:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Don't do too much of a good thing. But caloric restriction has definitely been shown to cause very good. Good things in terms of like de-aging.

• 1:15:40Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:15:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. So, so.

• 1:15:43Krishna Choudhary?

  One of the key threads in all of these is that it has to do with the genome.

• 1:15:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:15:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:15:51Lester Nare?

  Like aging, all these factors are correlated to

• 1:15:54Krishna Choudhary?

  To the genome.

• 1:15:55Lester Nare?

  The genome. So if we want to talk about aging, we have to talk about the genome.

• 1:15:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, if we want to talk about aging, we want to talk about the genome. Specifically, we want to talk about genomic instability. Right? The idea is, the more stable your genome is, all three of these things that I just talked about are basically making the genome more stable. The more stable your genome is, the, the, the less aging you do. Right? Genomic instability is the most fundamental driver for aging, it seems. Right? And what, what we want to do is, we want to prevent DNA damage. And if there is DNA damage, we want to repair it. Okay? The worst kind of DNA damage is something called a double stranded break. That's, DNA is a double strand. It's got two, um, two strands interlocked in a ladder. If you break one, it's fine, because you can use the other part to sort of repair it.

• 1:16:44Krishna Choudhary?

  But if you break both, then you've effectively split the chromosome in two. Right? So that's really bad.

• 1:16:51Lester Nare?

  Yes. Um, not great.

• 1:16:53Krishna Choudhary?

  It's the most catastrophic way of doing things. Right? And accumulation of these unrepaired, um, double stranded breaks can cause cellular senescence. It can cause apoptosis. Too much of this in your body and you're aging a lot. Okay? So the efficiency and fidelity of this double stranded break determines your resistance to aging. And usually what happens is, if you get a double stranded break, remember you have two copies, right? In your cell of the chromosomes, especially in the S, like during cell division, the, the, the cell makes two different copies. Right? So during the S phase of, of, um, of your cell cycle, there's going to be two copies. You can use that other copy.

• 1:17:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:17:30Krishna Choudhary?

  To, to be like, ah, crap, where does this fit?

• 1:17:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:17:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And did I miss anything? Because if the, if the two broke.

• 1:17:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:17:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And some of the DNA fell off, I don't want to just like attach it and then like delete an entire gene.

• 1:17:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:17:43Krishna Choudhary?

  So I can get the copy from my sister chromatid, like the copy of it.

• 1:17:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:17:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, uh, I shouldn't say sister chromatid, because that's the other pair. But you, from your homologous chromosome, which is the exact copy.

• 1:17:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:17:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Bring it over. Compare the two strands and then be like, oh, I'm missing an A here, a T here.

• 1:18:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:18:00Krishna Choudhary?

  A G here. Put it all together and then I, I can repair my double stranded.

• 1:18:05Lester Nare?

  It's like that movie with Ewan McGregor, The Island, where every human had a copy clone that was on this island. And so when you got injured as real human billionaire, they would take your copy that was on this island. And then they would take the parts they needed from the copy and then give you like an organ transplant or all this other stuff. So it was like a perfect copy of you, but the copies had no idea that they were copies. A whole nother story.

• 1:18:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Holy cow.

• 1:18:29Lester Nare?

  But it's a great, it's a great movie.

• 1:18:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, I gotta watch that movie.

• 1:18:32Lester Nare?

  It's a class, it's like a little bit older, but this, just this idea that there's a reference. If you have a double standard, double stranded break, there's still a reference.

• 1:18:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:18:40Lester Nare?

  That you can then rebuild that, that break from that is independent of these two strands.

• 1:18:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can make sure that you're not missing anything.

• 1:18:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:49Krishna Choudhary?

  You didn't like staple things wrong.

• 1:18:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:50Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? So that's, so, so, so all of that is background about sort of what are the things?

• 1:18:59Lester Nare?

  The levers.

• 1:19:00Krishna Choudhary?

  The levers that, that we can pull. Okay. And the main thing that we want to do is we want to fix DNA instability. We want to make our genome more stable. And that is where the naked mole rat comes in.

• 1:19:11Lester Nare?

  Let's go Rufus.

• 1:19:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Rufus comes in and the biological name is heterosophalis glaber. It's probably the ugliest mammal I have ever seen. I'm going to be honest. Okay? We had some photos here. Uh, it's, it's pretty bad. To be honest, I think Rufus, like they, they, they really, the cartoon guys, they, they deserve a raise because they, they, they made a really cute cartoon from that.

• 1:19:39Lester Nare?

  They Disneyfied Rufus.

• 1:19:40Krishna Choudhary?

  It looks so bad.

• 1:19:42Lester Nare?

  They kept the teeth though.

• 1:19:43Krishna Choudhary?

  They did. They kept the teeth.

• 1:19:44Lester Nare?

  The teeth.

• 1:19:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Um, these things are incredible though. Okay. They live in East Africa. They, um,

• 1:19:52Krishna Choudhary?

  They live in large communities and they live for nearly 40 years.

• 1:19:57Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:19:58Krishna Choudhary?

  That's insane. I remember when I was in um in my lab at UCLA, we were doing experiments on rats. Our rats, our lab rats lived max two, three years, right? And that's like max, because in the wild rats are gonna live like, you know, there's rat on rat violence.

• 1:20:16Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But they lived a pretty good life in the, in our behavior lab. We weren't one of the, you know, other labs, let's say, but like, you know, the tops two, three years. These guys are living 40 years.

• 1:20:29Lester Nare?

  That's actually crazy.

• 1:20:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:20:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Naked mole rats live 40 years compared to three years for a mouse. Anything that is that size lives around three, four years. Dogs live only 10.

• 1:20:39Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:20:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? These things are living 40. So clearly.

• 1:20:42Lester Nare?

  Orders of magnitude.

• 1:20:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, clearly they're doing something.

• 1:20:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? They're, they're, they're, clearly they're doing something. They've evolved some potent biological mechanism that is delaying aging.

• 1:20:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:20:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And so they've been a really great model organism to try to figure out what is going on.

• 1:20:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:20:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Um, they're resistant to diseases. So not only do they live long, they live really healthy lives. They don't get cancer. They don't get neurodegradation. They don't even get arthritis like every other mammal does, right? And it suggests that, like, the fact that they don't get these age-related ailments suggests that there's some fundamental underlying process.

• 1:21:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:21:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That they're doing. They're not like fixing every little thing.

• 1:21:25Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:21:26Krishna Choudhary?

  With a custom fix. There's one underlying fix that they're doing that is, that is sort of fixing all of the rest. Right? That's why it's so, it's so interesting, right? And.

• 1:21:41Lester Nare?

  They sort of have like the, the janitor at the school that has the admin key that unlocks all the doors.

• 1:21:47Krishna Choudhary?

  All the doors.

• 1:21:48Lester Nare?

  You don't figure out and pick every lock on every door. You just have.

• 1:21:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you just have it. And, and, and for, for the longest time, it's been like, what is that?

• 1:21:56Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:57Krishna Choudhary?

  What is that key? Right? Um, the other really cool thing, it's, it's very relevant to humans because um. There are transcriptomes. The transcriptome is basically all of the mRNA that gets transcribed from the DNA. And there are protein coding sequences. So the parts of the genome that actually code for the protein, those are very similar to humans. And they're more similar to humans than mice are to humans. Okay, so it increases the likelihood that whatever mechanism is happening in the naked mole rat, we could maybe translate that to human longevity.

• 1:22:31Lester Nare?

  So we're saying that we can make Iran unstoppable.

• 1:22:37Lester Nare?

  We're moving from stoppable to unstoppable.

• 1:22:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Lester Nare?

  I told you I'm gonna crush the impossible jokes on this one.

• 1:22:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that was a good one, actually.

• 1:22:48Krishna Choudhary?

  So, all right, so now the problem is, we got, we gotta figure out like, what, what exactly is going on, right? And for the longest time, people actually thought they maybe knew what was happening, which is the C gas protein, the C gas pathway. I don't know if you remember, but this was one of my predictions.

• 1:23:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:23:08Krishna Choudhary?

  For the medicine prize this year.

• 1:23:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:23:10Krishna Choudhary?

  The C gas pathway.

• 1:23:11Lester Nare?

  Yes, it was.

• 1:23:11Krishna Choudhary?

  It didn't win, but it's coming back. And maybe it's gonna come back and win the Nobel, you know, in the next few years. You can already see that it's like a very, a very big deal. Okay, so the C gas protein has a primary function with innate immunity. The, let's just do a little bit of review. DNA lives in the nucleus of our cells. We are eukaryotes. And so there's not going to be any DNA in the cytoplasm of the cell. Everything is going to be compartmentalized in the nucleus, which means if you ever see a DNA molecule in the cytoplasm, something has gone wrong. Either a virus has come in and infected you, or something that should have been in the nucleus has now strayed out, and the cell

• 1:23:51Krishna Choudhary?

  is like straying into cancer territory, or like doing weird stuff, and it needs to be dealt with. Okay, so the C gas protein, the primary function is to detect that cytoplasmic DNA, bind to it, and then catalyze some reaction that activates an inflammatory response, or an antiviral response. Okay?

• 1:24:13Lester Nare?

  So it's basically looking for intruders in the cytoplasm.

• 1:24:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Lester Nare?

  Identifying it and then bringing in people to deal with.

• 1:24:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yeah. And those intruders are always just double stranded DNA. If I see double stranded DNA in the cytoplasm, you're not in the house. What are you doing out here? You know, there's a problem. Either you're from out there or you're like supposed to be in the house, right? What's going on?

• 1:24:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, that's great for the innate immunity part, right? It's detecting stuff in the cytoplasm, but it also has a paradoxical role where it starts detecting stuff in the nucleus of our cells.

• 1:24:47Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:24:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And when it does stuff in the nucleus of our cells, it can actually suppress that homo- homologous recombination. You know, the part I was saying where you got the double stranded break? And then the homologous chromosome comes in and then it does this whole thing. Well, during that whole part, there's going to be like a lot of naked DNA hanging out, right?

• 1:25:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:25:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And the seagas protein is just looking for DNA to bind to. It's just lock and key.

• 1:25:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:25:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:25:14Lester Nare?

  So the seagas doesn't necessarily have the like flight list.

• 1:25:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Lester Nare?

  Of everyone who's supposed to potentially be in transit during this recombination.

• 1:25:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:25:22Lester Nare?

  It's just like, if you're out here, you're a problem.

• 1:25:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, if I see you, you're a problem. Most of the time they're hanging out in the cytoplasm, but every time they're in the nucleus, they get, it starts getting confusing, right? Because there's a bunch of DNA in the nucleus and it's not always surrounded by histones and things like that. So the seagas can actually inhibit that repair.

• 1:25:42Lester Nare?

  Process.

• 1:25:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Repair process. And so that's kind of weird, right? Because like you can have this, so why is it doing that? Well, it could be just an evolutionary trade off where you've got a rapid immune response. And okay, to have the rapid immune response, maybe you do need long term. Maybe you let go of the long term DNA efficiency, the repair efficiency.

• 1:26:02Lester Nare?

  You can't do both.

• 1:26:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, you can't do both. This is already working, right? But with a mole rat. You need both because you're living that long, right?

• 1:26:14Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:26:14Krishna Choudhary?

  So there was evolutionary pressure for the mole rat to fix this problem that maybe other mammals didn't have, okay? And that's what this paper is doing, okay? So this paper that was out in Cell, it's unraveling the naked mole rat's genetic secret. They found the seagas mediated mechanism in that naked mole rat and they showed why that that DNA, the part of the DNA that codes for the seagas is different than the humans and how that difference actually manifests within the cell.

• 1:26:47Lester Nare?

  Fascinating.

• 1:26:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so they're actually doing that. So there's an unexpected function. The first thing they did was they used GFP, which is green fluorescent protein. It's a great tag for whenever you want to see stuff that's going on in the cell, you tag it with GFP and what they can actually see with the GFP is this activity that's happening inside the nucleus. And what they found is when you have the naked mole rat's seagas version versus the human version or the mouse version, the naked mole rat's seagas version had threefold higher concentrations during this homologous recombination than the human version.

• 1:27:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:27:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And so, and if you, if you take CRISPR-Cas9 and you cut out the, the naked mole rat version, then those cells can no longer do this homologous recombination. So not only is the, the naked mole rat version not inhibiting this homologous recombination, it's actually helping. So they went in, so somehow the evolution went into the naked mole rat genome and made the changes to switch the behavior of seagas to something that was, from, from something that was inhibiting to something that is actively helping this high fidelity DNA repair.

• 1:28:01Lester Nare?

  As, as independent from the job responsibility of dealing with rogue DNA within the side of.

• 1:28:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Outside, yes. It still does that job.

• 1:28:08Lester Nare?

  It still does that.

• 1:28:09Krishna Choudhary?

  It still does that job, but inside the nucleus, now it's doing an additional job. It's actually helping this homologous DNA repair.

• 1:28:15Lester Nare?

  And not having this sort of conflict of. It now has access to the classified system.

• 1:28:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And so they did a bunch of different, you know, molecular biology techniques to pinpoint the domain of the seagas protein that was different. Once they pinpointed the domain that was different, they went in and looked at what were the amino acids that were different. They found 16 different amino acids. Then they went in and made chimeric proteins where what you can do is you can put in this amino acid and this amino acid and see which of those, because some of those 16 might just be like random evolution type stuff.

• 1:28:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:28:52Krishna Choudhary?

  But four of those 16 were specific substitutions that caused this switch. What you can do is you can take the human version and you can put in those four instead of our human version. And then that protein now becomes the naked mole rat version. So we've pinpointed exactly what are the genetic changes that caused this. Isn't that insane that we can actually do that, dude?

• 1:29:18Lester Nare?

  That's so unreal.

• 1:29:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Lester Nare?

  To think about, down to literally the amino acid.

• 1:29:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:29:27Lester Nare?

  Like the four individual amino acids that make the difference.

• 1:29:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, it's insane.

• 1:29:33Lester Nare?

  And it's like, it's like, it's like a consequential difference.

• 1:29:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:39Lester Nare?

  It's the difference between three to five years and 40.

• 1:29:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, exactly. Which is four, which is four, which is four. It's pretty insane. And then, so now we have this difference, right? Between human seagas regulation, which what is, what human seagas is doing is it binds to the DNA and then it kind of prevents all of the other repair mechanisms from coming in. What the naked mole rat version is doing is it binds to the DNA and then it actively recruits all of the other chromatin binding aspects to like make this thing go faster. Right? And have higher fidelity.

• 1:30:13Lester Nare?

  Instead of being an absolute firewall and blockade, it's it sort of basically has its little porous for specific helpers that it knows are actually there to facilitate.

• 1:30:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's insane.

• 1:30:26Lester Nare?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:30:27Krishna Choudhary?

  We can do this. And then the real nail in the coffin for me was like, what they did was they could they could now introduce the the mole rat version of this gene into model organisms like the Drosophila. And the fruit flies lived longer and they were they were more robust and and they could climb up walls faster, right? All of the ads, all of these assays, the fruit flies were doing, right? They they went to maximum lifespan in mice. The mice were living longer and they were they were living more healthy. And so now we we start thinking, okay, what are we going to do with the humans, right? I mean, we can't genetically engineer, but what you could do is you could have um. You could have, well, gene, there's obviously gene therapy, right?

• 1:31:08Krishna Choudhary?

  But you could always also have small molecule drugs that mimic what the naked mole rat version of the protein does. So you've got the human version, right? And let's say the human version has a particular shape. And we we can take a small molecule molecular drug that binds to that human version to make the make it mimic the shape of the mole rat.

• 1:31:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:31:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then now it's going to do all the recruiting that the the mole rat version was doing.

• 1:31:37Lester Nare?

  So it's it's sort of like we create a therapy that like mimics the sea gas process.

• 1:31:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Lester Nare?

  Uh, the the four amino acids.

• 1:31:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know exactly what that difference is, right? Because we know these are the four amino acids, right? Now we can now we can start doing structural studies.

• 1:31:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:31:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Which I'm sure is going to be next.

• 1:31:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:31:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, what is the exact structure of those four versus these four?

• 1:31:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:31:56Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:31:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:31:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, and how do we how do we engineer a drug that that looks exactly like that? That binds exactly the way I want it to. And then and then and then all of a sudden, our DNA repair mechanism can be. What the naked mole rat had.

• 1:32:13Lester Nare?

  Which is, which is.

• 1:32:14Krishna Choudhary?

  It's so cool.

• 1:32:14Lester Nare?

  Which is now the idea being, you know, there are a variety of factors that impact aging. And the one that this is solving for is the sea gas, which is meant to be a protection mechanism for like rogue viral DNA being inside the cytoplasm. But then also sometimes can be inside the nucleus and doesn't have the right instructions.

• 1:32:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38Lester Nare?

  So it can disrupt a normal process of double stranded broken pairs needing to be repaired. That's another prop. The problem is that double stranded break is a driver of the aging.

• 1:32:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:49Lester Nare?

  And so we want to make sure that those double standard breaks are fixed without this sea gas interrupting it because it's trying to do another job and miss kind of applying it here.

• 1:33:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Just getting confused.

• 1:33:01Lester Nare?

  And we sort of are now like, we can just give you like four amino acids and now you can still do the viral cytoplasm stuff, but not just only not screw up the repair, you can actually make it more efficient.

• 1:33:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:15Lester Nare?

  That is crazy.

• 1:33:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:33:18Lester Nare?

  That is actually crazy. And again, not to know, to understand, to be able to draw the through line through all of those things.

• 1:33:25Krishna Choudhary?

  All of those things like.

• 1:33:26Lester Nare?

  To that level of precision, to be able to now mimic it in naked mole rats, in fruit flies.

• 1:33:33Krishna Choudhary?

  In mice.

• 1:33:34Lester Nare?

  In mice.

• 1:33:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Like.

• 1:33:35Lester Nare?

  It's going to continue on, on the journey. I mean, that's, you know, for we.

• 1:33:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Like it's working.

• 1:33:40Lester Nare?

  It's working.

• 1:33:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Lester Nare?

  And we've talked about longevity in a, in a previous episode in that, you know, these two, these two theories, is it error or is it pre programmed? The fact that there's indication that it's not pre programmed and it's, it's because of this.

• 1:33:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And it is this error thing that maybe we can mitigate.

• 1:33:57Lester Nare?

  This is just one of many avenues of attack to sort of deal with the quote unquote aging problem.

• 1:34:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And this might not be the only secret that the naked mole rat has, right?

• 1:34:08Lester Nare?

  Right. It's just, it's again, it's just, it's just one.

• 1:34:10Krishna Choudhary?

  It could be, it could be, as you said, the janitor with the master key. There might be, you know, groundskeepers with a master key as well.

• 1:34:16Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes, this is truly, truly fascinating. This was a great series of stories this week. Yeah. We are starting off the fall with a bang. We hit at the top. Not portable yet, but new laser plasma device that could be light enough to be used in the field. This was around muon generator and, you know, the implications that it has for a variety of fields. That came out of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and was published in the Physical Review Accelerators and Beams. Yep. We mute on to the second story about sodium batteries.

• 1:34:53Lester Nare?

  The sodium batteries, how they can be cheaper than lithium, but just as powerful. What the limitations are, where we kind of are in the frontier. Great paper out of University of Chicago and UC San Diego in Juul. It's clearly, there's clearly going to be pickup on that story. There's so much, there are so many incentives for a variety of nation state and private sector players. In addition to academic community to want to push that forward. And we ended with our story about Rufus out of Tongji University in Shanghai. About unlocking longer life by this key understanding from the naked mole rat DNA, which was very fascinating. That was cool. Very, very fascinating. So this is the conclusion of our episode 13.

• 1:35:39Lester Nare?

  My name is Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. This is from First Principles. We'll see y'all next week.