Listener Questions #43

Daniel and Kelly marinate in ethanol and saltwater, and reflect on the symmetries of antiparticles. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 2:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ethanol is toxic, but many animals still love it. So is ethanol ever helpful? Please don't tell me no.

• 2:21Daniel Whiteson?

  When antimatter and matter meet, they totally annihilate. If you are your own antiparticle, then what is your fate?

• 2:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  If I slurp down loads of seawater, death is my fate. Ugh, why is it so hard to osmo-regulate? And I'm realizing right now, we both use the word fate in a rhyme. And so this is anyway, here we go.

• 2:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it all right.

• 2:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to listener questions, episode number 43.

• 3:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who loves thinking about aliens. And I wonder if aliens drink alcohol and seawater.

• 3:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, hello. I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I studied parasites and space. And so, Daniel, let's go ahead and do what we do to all of our listeners.

• 3:22Daniel Whiteson?

  What's that?

• 3:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you think that aliens drink alcohol or seawater?

• 3:29Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sure that aliens know how to have a good time, whether that involves ethanol or smoking alien banana peels or the moral equivalent. I don't know, but I sure hope aliens have figured out how to have fun in this universe. It would be pretty disappointing to meet aliens and have them just be bored and boring.

• 3:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, hold on, they can be fun without imbibing toxic substances.

• 3:54Daniel Whiteson?

  No, absolutely.

• 3:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Your definition of fun is too narrow.

• 3:57Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I was speaking more broadly, like, I hope they know how to have fun. And maybe that's a part of it. But absolutely, I hope that aliens have figured out a way to have fun in this universe. And it doesn't have to be toxic substances. I have fun eating cookies, for example, or, you know, watching a nice movie, or just interacting with my fellow beings, you know, but partaking of the universe, man.

• 4:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, man, do you have fun drinking seawater, man? I advise against that.

• 4:25Daniel Whiteson?

  I like a nice salty beverage.

• 4:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Margarita with salt on the rim, yes. Otherwise, no.

• 4:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, what is Kelly's fun beverage of choice?

• 4:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right now, it's like carbonated water. Because at the moment, alcohol gives me a horrible headache the next day and it doesn't seem worth it. But I hope somehow this aspect of my physiology changes because I'm not a fan. What about you?

• 4:54Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm a big fan of carbonated water. We have a keg and a CO2 tank and a little kegerator at home. So we, we roll our own bubbly water.

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So, um, trigger warning today. Uh, Daniel and I might be making a fair number of off color jokes and at some point I will be talking about animal research. Uh, and so decide if you want to keep listening to the rest of this episode or not.

• 5:18Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, I live with a home master kombucha brewer and you know, that's both slightly bubbly and slightly alcoholic. I know it's slightly bubbly because at random times during the day or night, the top of the kombucha container will just blow off.

• 5:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  I had a roommate who brewed her own beer and one night in the middle of the night at like 2am, we hear.

• 5:42Daniel Whiteson?

  We're being attacked.

• 5:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  We thought it was like gunshots or something. And then we saw something that, you know, at first in the dark looked like blood seeping out from under her bed, but it was, uh, the dark beer that she had brewed and then had just sort of exploded. Uh, I think she's learned a lot since then about how to, how to do that safely.

• 5:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Wonderful. Well, today on the episode, we're not going to figure out what was under Kelly's roommate's bed. That's a question that may go unanswered forever, but we are going to answer questions from listeners, people who are curious about the universe, people who have fun just thinking about how it all works, man.

• 6:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  The best kind of fun.

• 6:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Figure it out. Absolutely. Engaging with the universe, partaking in its mysteries and looking to get a few answers. If you have questions about how things work, we want to hear from you. I mean, you, not the person next to you, you, you, you, the person who's listening right now. You know, you have a question. You should send it to us to questions at danielandkelly.org. What's stopping you?

• 6:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  We answer every email that we get and a subset of them show up on the show.

• 6:41Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. So your curiosity could help lots of people understand the universe better. And on today's episode, we have a really fun blend of topics. Should we jump right in and talk about ethanol?

• 6:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  We should. So this first question is from Phil from Christ Church, England.

• 6:57Speaker 07

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I once read about an experiment where male fruit flies, after being rejected by females, saw alcohol in rotting fruit. So this got me thinking, at what size do organisms actively seek toxins? Also, is this a universal trait? And does it affect evolution in positive ways? And ultimately, has it shaped behavior and physiology? I'll be super grateful if you could shed some light on this. Thanks so much. Bill Thorne from Christ Church, England.

• 7:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So this is a pretty broad topic. I'm going to be honest, I decided to narrow this down a little bit, just to make it feasible to answer in 20 minutes. So instead of toxins, we're going to talk about ethanol in particular. But let's go ahead and talk about what a toxin is.

• 7:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Is ethanol a toxin, really?

• 7:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so that toxin is, so I'm going to be honest, I didn't like look up the Webster definition, but my personal understanding of toxin is that this is a bit of a slippery word. How would you define toxin, Daniel?

• 7:57Daniel Whiteson?

  I guess without looking into it, I would say a toxin is something that you have so much of that it damages you. I have the feeling there of like the dosage being important. I know some things like, you know, fluoride in the water is helpful for your teeth, but too much of it is bad for you. And I don't know, does that apply generally to everything? That like a reasonable amount of it is good and too much of it is bad? In which case, toxin would be a dose dependent thing? I have no idea. How far off am I?

• 8:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's how I think of toxin also, that it's a dose dependent thing. And I'm going to just quickly go on the record and say I am pro fluoride in the drinking water for teeth related purposes. But, but you know, toxins, it can even depend on what species you're talking about. Like, so for my sheep and my goats, we have a bunch of minerals out for the goats, but we have to make sure we have different minerals out for the sheep because copper is good for goats, but toxic for sheep. So it can depend on species and it can depend on dose.

• 8:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I have this impression that goats can basically eat anything, though. Is that true? I mean, they can eat copper, like they can like entire like copper piping?

• 8:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, no, they're not eating like tin cans and copper piping. They're

• 9:03Daniel Whiteson?

  bumpers off of cars.

• 9:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. Cartoons that we watched in our childhood aside. No, actually, my goats are picky about plenty of things and won't eat. They do want to eat my hair, but there's plenty of other things that they will refuse to eat. So that they're kind of picky. But okay.

• 9:17Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 9:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we're going to focus on ethanol, which I'm going to go ahead and say is a toxin, but this is a dose dependent thing. You have a little bit. And and part of why I think it's a toxin is because our bodies do have to break it down in a particular way, because otherwise it does harm us. And so we have two different enzymes. One of them breaks ethanol down into another substance that's toxic and can build up in our body. And another breaks it down into something that is less bad, acetic acid. We can totally handle that.

• 9:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 9:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you only have one of these enzymes, then the bad byproduct builds up and you end up getting what is sometimes called Asian flushing syndrome, which isn't fair, because other parts of the world also have people who have this as well. But this byproduct builds up, your face gets red, you get heart palpitations. And so our bodies do need to do stuff to ethanol so that it doesn't hurt us. So it does feel like it fits the definition of toxin to me.

• 10:10Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. But the body metabolizing it, breaking it down into smaller pieces, it does that with everything, right? When I eat pizza, the body breaks that down into pieces, right? How is this different?

• 10:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, that's a that's a really good point. Yeah, it's a really good point. That's a really good point.

• 10:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And at my very basic level of understanding of biology and biochemistry, which is shameful, you know, ethanol in the body influences, you know, the way your brain works. But then when your body metabolizes it, it no longer does. And so there's this like, I'm not sure that makes it a toxin. But, you know, like pizza doesn't influence my thinking before it's metabolized the way ethanol does, unless I'm misunderstanding how that all works.

• 10:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, okay, so. If you eat a lot of pizza your whole life, that's not going to be good for you.

• 10:59Daniel Whiteson?

  It's gonna be fun, though.

• 11:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's gonna be fun.

• 11:01Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm partaking of the universe.

• 11:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, that's right. That's right. But and if you drink a lot of alcohol, it's going to like, give you cirrhosis. It's gonna damage your liver. And so like, it is very clear. I'm gonna like, pull us a little bit back from maybe the hole that I jumped into. But if you have a lot of alcohol, we know that that's bad for your liver. And essentially, being an alcoholic can kill you.

• 11:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, absolutely.

• 11:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, so dose, bad. Okay, so Phil's question was, why do animals seek out this alcohol? Or why do they seek out the toxins? And so first, let's talk about this fruit fly study. So the idea here was that fruit flies get rejected by females, and then they go drink because they're sad. It's a little bit more complicated.

• 11:41Daniel Whiteson?

  That's kind of cute. A bunch of male fruit flies hovering over the rotten orange, being like, man, alone on a Friday night again.

• 11:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, okay, but it's a little bit more complicated. And it's important that we understand what's going on here, because fruit flies have become a model system for trying to understand alcoholism in people. And so if fruit flies, when they're stressed or bummed out, go to drink, and you can sort of understand what's happening there, maybe you can understand something about alcoholism in people. So the argument goes. But like all things that Kelly talks about, this is slightly more complicated. They were able to differentiate between rejection and like, just not getting to have sex. So for example, they exposed them to decapitated female flies, which couldn't reject them, but they but also didn't like, initiate sex. You know what I mean? And so anyway, just not getting laid

• 12:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  makes you interested in going to have alcohol.

• 12:38Daniel Whiteson?

  As a fruit fly.

• 12:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  As a fruit, as a fruit fly. That's right. Thank you.

• 12:41Daniel Whiteson?

  How general are we speaking here?

• 12:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. But it's worth noting that there have been some other studies that have found that if male fruit flies go and consume fermented fruit, that might be helping them produce some pheromones that then make them more attractive to females. And so in general, fruit flies have this. Complicated, complex relationship with rotting fruit because that's where they lay their eggs, that's the food that they eat. Uh, and so the fact that males are going back to the alcohol doesn't necessarily mean that they're like, oh, I'm super bummed out. I need to like get drunk so I can forget. It could mean that they're like, okay, well, maybe I need some more food so that I can be a bigger, more attractive maid, or maybe I need to have some more fruit because then I can make some more pheromones to attract the ladies. And it doesn't necessarily have to mean they're bummed out.

• 13:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  It could be something else because fruit flies rely on rotting fruit in a way that like humans don't necessarily. We don't lay our babies into vats of bananas.

• 13:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Speak for yourself, Virginia.

• 13:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  You weird Californians. I did give birth in California, though.

• 13:42Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. All right. So you have a native born Californian?

• 13:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I do, yes, yes.

• 13:47Daniel Whiteson?

  When we become our own republic, we will grant citizenship to that child.

• 13:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  To just one, you're gonna exclude, no, I'm sorry, the other one's going to be, I bet Texas gets its own statehood first. And he's gonna be, he's gonna be a Texas, a citizen of the great nation of Texas.

• 14:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, but California is gonna have its own space program before Texas does.

• 14:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't, isn't that where Elon Musk right now? He's got Starship in Boca Chica? Yeah. Yeah, good luck, Daniel.

• 14:13Daniel Whiteson?

  We'll see.

• 14:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, okay. So let's get back on track. So Phil generally wanted to know, like, what organisms seek out alcohol and why do organisms seek out alcohol? So it turns out, actually, lots of animals seek out alcohol. I found this great paper that was talking about how, you know, when you go through the news, you'll see reportings of like, oh, an elk ate some fruit that was fermented and then they got stuck in a tree because they were drunk. Or, you know, you'll hear a bunch of different stories about drunk animals. And so the idea is that animals stumble upon alcoholic stuff sometimes and accidentally consume it and then they do stupid things.

• 14:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And I've seen those videos from France, for example, of deer like prancing in a circle and looking crazy because they ate rotten fruit. But it's not clear to me whether that deer is having fun.

• 15:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, or if it's like really miserable.

• 15:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 15:03Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's not clear that this deer is like, would seek this out again, like, you know?

• 15:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, right. But so, so the authors were arguing that actually if you go out and you sample a bunch of different kinds of like fruits and nectars and basically sugary things produced by plants, a lot of them have low levels of alcohol. And so animals are encountering low levels of alcohol often, and we don't have a very good understanding of like, what that does, like what kind of blood alcohol level is relaxing for an elk, or is something that would make an elk feel horrible? Like, we really haven't started looking at this in a framework other than, oh, this only happens by accident.

• 15:41Daniel Whiteson?

  And we're talking about fermentation here, right? There's like a process where microbes are breaking down sugars and producing ethanol, the same process that happens in like kombucha in the corner of my kitchen, for example.

• 15:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. So let's dig into that for a second. So the idea behind ethanol production is that yeast are living in sugary environments and they're competing with bacteria. And bacteria could break that stuff down faster and keep the yeast from consuming it. But if the yeast break it into ethanol, the ethanol makes that habitat bad for the bacteria. So now the bacteria can't compete, they wipe the bacteria out. And then after they've converted stuff to ethanol, they can then break the ethanol down into something else and consume that as well. So we think ethanol came about as a way for yeast to essentially usurp sugary products produced by plants to keep the bacteria out, so they can keep it for themselves.

• 16:34Daniel Whiteson?

  My understanding was that also the ethanol is toxic to the yeast at some concentrations. So for example, when you brew beer, you have yeast in it, it's alive. But then it gets to a certain concentration of alcohol and that kills the yeast. So in the final product, you're not drinking live yeast. Is that true? Or does it just run out of sugar?

• 16:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I don't know if that's true for sure, but that checks out with the general idea that alcohols in general are also disinfectants. So it wouldn't surprise me if yeast were essentially producing enough to hopefully kill the bacteria, but not kill themselves, sort of the same way that we produce fevers in the hope of making our body inhospitable to bacteria, even though it's kind of bad for us. But if it gets too high, then it gets really bad for us.

• 17:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Very cool because then they're taking advantage of the fact that different doses for different species are toxic. And raising the levels to kill their competition, but that they can survive. Pretty savvy little yeasty beasties.

• 17:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Pretty savvy, right. And so Phil wanted to know, like, what's the smallest organism that seeks out alcohol? Yeast helped to make ethanol. Sounds like bacteria would generally want to avoid ethanol since it's being produced to try to like out compete and kill them. I did find a lot of examples of insects other than fruit flies that seem interested in alcohol for a variety of reasons. For example, some beetles seem interested in yeast and the alcohols that they produce because they farm fungus and they want to keep the bacteria out. So they use yeast and alcohol as a way to keep the bacteria from destroying their crops. Okay, so yeast, there's lots of insects. And so now let's talk about like,

• 18:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  what kinds of benefits alcohol might have for animals? Like, why would you search it out? So one group was hypothesizing that if you have ethanol produced by yeast in a fruit, that's a sign that that fruit isn't infected by bacteria that like might make you sick if you eat it. And so if you eat fermented fruit, that's a way of knowing that you're eating yeast, but not bacteria.

• 18:36Daniel Whiteson?

  I like how fermented fruit makes it sound yummy and cozy instead of like stinky and gross. Because we're talking about rotten fruit here, right?

• 18:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, we are talking about rotten fruit. That's right. There's in some insects like Drosophila, so that like those fruit flies. Sorry, I used the D word. Like the fruit flies.

• 18:54Daniel Whiteson?

  One of my good friends is a neuroscientist and she studies Drosophila. So it's a word that's been in my brain for decades. So I'm totally immune to its Latin nature.

• 19:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, so if it's a Latin word that you know, it's okay. I see.

• 19:07Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I just forget to complain about it. I think it's still bad for science communication. My triggers don't fire on that one.

• 19:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Okay. So. Alcohol isn't just something that the males go to when they aren't able to be successful with the ladies. It is also something that they go to when parasitoids are around. So you might remember that parasitoids are usually insects that lay their eggs inside of other insects and then kill their host, kill the host insect. Well, if there's parasitoids around, females will lay their eggs in super alcoholic fruit because that alcohol isn't so great for her babies, but it's even worse for the parasitoids. So if a parasitoid egg gets laid in there and it's super ethanol-y, that's much more likely to kill the parasitoid. And so they use the fact that ethanol is like a disinfectant or a toxic substance that

• 19:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  varies in how toxic it is to different organisms as a way to sort of protect themselves.

• 20:02Daniel Whiteson?

  So they have their babies in alcohol, basically.

• 20:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Daniel Whiteson?

  To protect it from things that are more susceptible to alcohol. Not parenting advice on the show here, people.

• 20:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was gonna say, based on what you said at the beginning of the show, do you think that's a more fun way to have children?

• 20:16Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, I admit you painted me into a corner on that one.

• 20:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 20:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not going on record saying bathe your children in alcohol.

• 20:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's good, that's good. Okay, so some other hypothesized benefits for alcohol. For humans, we've got this drunken monkey hypothesis. And the idea here is that ethanol is a sign that there might be sugar around. Of course, that sugar gets eaten up over time, so you don't want it to get to the point where the sugar has all been converted into ethanol. If you read stories from long ago, you'll often hear people say that when water has like waterborne pathogens in it, people have a tendency to drink more beer because you are less likely to drink something that will make you like, that will give you cholera, for example. Although there's a counterargument that like, why didn't everyone just boil water instead of drinking alcohol?

• 21:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because boiling water also would kill most waterborne pathogens.

• 21:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I've heard that story before, like in the context of the history of Danes drinking beer and how, you know, Vikings used to be like allocated five liters of beer a day or whatever, and it was like the only source of clean water because it was filtered in some way that normal water wasn't. Is that all just apocryphal?

• 21:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that there's some truth in it. And I remember reading the ghost map about Jon Snow and the cholera epidemic. And it was mentioned in passing that there was a group of people who were kind of near the pump where you would have expected them to have gotten cholera from, but they didn't. And the idea was that they worked in a brewery and they were just drinking beer all day instead of water, and that that maybe saved their lives.

• 21:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. And I think this is much lower alcohol percentage. So it's not like they're totally sloshed all day.

• 21:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, exactly. Right. And then there are some other hypotheses that stretch out a little farther, like maybe part of how we manage to be such a social species is because alcohol sort of like lubricated the way to living in large groups. I'm not totally sure how much I mean, today, we have plenty of people who don't drink, living in packed cities. But we also have plenty of people who drink there, too. And maybe they're more pleasant because they're drinking. And so I don't know. So some of these arguments, I think, go a little bit outside the bounds of what we can really get at with data.

• 22:34Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a nice way to say that it's very speculative.

• 22:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that it can be pretty speculative.

• 22:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And I was gonna say, it's always very tempting to tell cute sounding stories to explain something. But there's lots of cute sounding stories or not cute stories that are consistent with the data. And just because you have one cute story that describes the data doesn't mean it's reality, right?

• 22:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amen.

• 22:55Daniel Whiteson?

  You need to be like, make predictions, you need to verify these things.

• 23:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm glad that you elaborated on that. But my, my intention for saying it's a cute story is to make clear that we don't really have this backed up by data at the moment. So I've sort of gone around Phil's question. And so to try to nail a couple of things in, what kind of organisms consume alcohol? Actually, it looks like lots of organisms are encountering ethanol. For example, bats, when they eat their fruits, like organisms that eat fruit or nectar or sugary substances are probably often coming into contact with alcohol. But it sounds like until recently, we haven't. Really thought about the implications of that? We've mostly thought about alcohol in terms of like, do animals get drunk? And why would they get drunk? But we should maybe be thinking more about like,

• 23:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  animals encountering ethanol in low levels in lots of different instances in their lives and what the implication of that is for them. In terms of impacts on behavior and physiology, there's some ideas that ethanol could impact preferences for certain kinds of fruits, because as we mentioned earlier, if you've got some ethanol, that indicates there might not be bacteria there. But now you've got like the super ripe fruit. But anyway, so maybe it impacted behavior in terms of fruit seeking behaviors. In terms of physiology, it looks like a lot of enzymes that we were maybe using for other purposes and had already are now used to break down alcohol, which makes these kinds of foods, you know, digestible and usable for us.

• 24:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  So maybe some of these enzymes got new purposes or became more widespread because of the presence of ethanol in the lives of many different kinds of animals. And that is all I think I'm able to say on the topic of ethanol.

• 24:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I think this has really helped me reinforce something I've come to realize recently, which is that alcohol is not something humans like created and inserted into the environment. It's like a natural part of decay and fermentation and microbial life. It would exist even if there weren't humans on earth. It's just something we've captured and manipulated in the way that we've like manipulated some crops to be larger and tastier and whatever, because we have a certain relationship with it. But we should expect lots of critters to have relationships with it that are going to be complicated and different from the way we do and not easy to anthropomorphize.

• 25:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, absolutely. And just to put like a nail in how excited humans are about alcohol, though. Like, if you look at some of the earliest archaeological digs, you'll find vessels that were clearly meant to hold alcohol. So we've been excited about alcohol for a really long time. And I'd just like to highlight that a lot of my thinking and research for this topic came from a 2025 paper that was making this argument that like ethanol is actually way more widespread than we've given it credit for. And we should be thinking about this question more broadly. And so I do think this is like a sort of new way of thinking about it, which I thought was exciting, which is why I kind of emphasized that here. All right, so Phil, did I answer your questions? I hope so. Follow up questions, welcome.

• 26:06Speaker 07

  Hello, Daniel and Kelly. Firstly, I feel slightly flabbergasted and honoured for two titans of science to spend time on my question, mostly Kelly. Yes, you've cleared up the alcohol topic nicely. I'm fascinated that it's used to preserve food and destroy bacteria. How the hell did those behaviours come to be? Also, I'm relieved there might not be millions of fruit flies drowning in their sorrows, as this is probably not the best answer. As you said, my question was rather broad, so I do have a follow up. In the evolution of omnivoryism, would there have always been a small percentage of genetically determined risk takers? This would keep the broader population safe while seeking new potentially toxic and fatal food sources, using a kind of suicide squad.

• 26:52Speaker 07

  And if so, has this been passed on to more complex life? I mean, I have no intention of going to Mars, but some people do. Once again, thank you so much, Phil.

• 27:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hey, Phil. Thanks for the great follow up question. So I don't think that there would be genetically determined individuals whose job it was to go out there and eat everything to see if it's toxic or not. In particular, you asked if this would help the broader population. And usually you don't see behaviours that are really bad for an individual, but good for the rest of the population, because the genes for that individual that would go out and eat everything and get themselves killed would probably get washed out of the population pretty quick as those individuals kept dying from poisoning. It could maybe stick around if they were specifically trying stuff and that had a massive fitness benefit for their immediate family.

• 27:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  So for example, if the environment is just loaded with toxic foods and one individual in the family eats those foods first, and then they see what happens, and then the rest of the family gets to eat stuff. Like if it was specifically benefiting family members, maybe you could imagine genes for that trait sticking around as long as families that had one of these risk. Risky eaters had loads and loads of extra babies. But that said, as far as I know, we don't see populations or families tending to have like an individual who's the one that eats all the risky foods. At least I don't remember us seeing that in the wild at any point. But that's a fantastic question. Thanks so much.

• 28:37Daniel Whiteson?

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything.

• 29:22Daniel Whiteson?

  This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. So you're helping Will.i.am write hooks. What made "Ordinary People" become the one song from those sound checks you knew you had to make your own?

• 29:33Speaker 02

  I was just writing for the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn't expecting to write something for myself in that session, but I wrote the hook for "Ordinary People," and I recorded a demo, and I'm like, I would rather keep "Ordinary People" for myself. This station in Chicago, WGCI, they start playing it before we're promoting it. The song spoke for itself. It became the defining song for my first album. I knew it was special, but you never know how special it's going to be and how much impact it's going to have in people's lives. And you never believe that you're going to actually change people's lives with a song.

• 30:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:12Speaker 03

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

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  I'm Ron Moore. And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting. The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships. We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team. It's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients. We help the Veterans Resource Center and we give scholarships. I'm doing this for my heart, for my children, for you, for your children's family. I don't want anything back. And I tell a lot of people, don't give back to me. Pay it forward. If you work to give, you just see the world differently. I'm gonna help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back. And everybody, take a sip from your favorite beverage, alcoholic or not, because we are going to be imbibing from the cup of particle physics in a moment.

• 32:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. And so, Daniel, who is this next question from?

• 32:10Daniel Whiteson?

  This is from Reg Proctor, who's been emailing me, asking me questions about particles and the universe.

• 32:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, let's see what Reg had to say. Hi, Daniel. I have a question about particles and antiparticles. I get it when they annihilate each other because they have opposite charges. But this is often talk about a particle being its own antiparticle. And my question is, is this like a convenience, like a mathematical construct? Or is there something real like, like a particle is actually different to its antiparticle in some way that no one's ever said. I, I don't quite understand this and I'm hoping you can help with it. And, you know, obviously because I can't imagine anyone else saying this, but thank you so much for this wonderful podcast.

• 33:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, this is fun.

• 33:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, I love talking about antimatter because there's so many fun wrinkles here and interesting philosophical nuances. But antimatter is such a big place in the public conception of particle physics in a way that I think is often misrepresented and people come away confused. And so I'm always excited about an opportunity to dig into it and break it down.

• 33:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, let's break it down then, starting with anti-particles. What the heck are anti-particles?

• 33:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so anti-particles are not some special fancy thing. They're just particle physicists doing their thing, which means looking for patterns and symmetries. You know, the basic process of physics is let's look at everything in the universe and then let's try to explain it in terms of a small number of ideas or rules, right? We don't just want to list everything that happens in the universe. We're reductionist. We want to come up with like a compact, tidy explanation. And that means if you see two things that are similar, you treat them as similar, you respect that similarity. So for example, we see the electron, right? It's a thing in the universe. And then we found another particle called the muon. And we weren't just like, there's an electron, there's a muon. We were like, wow, these two things are very similar. In fact,

• 34:11Daniel Whiteson?

  they're almost identical, but one is heavier. Let's see if that pattern happens elsewhere. And it does. Every particle we've discovered has a heavier version. So we categorize them in this way. We're looking for patterns, for symmetries. It's sort of similar to the way we build the periodic table of the elements, right? We slot everything into where it belongs and we look for patterns. These are metals and those are not metals. So particles and anti- particles are just part of that game. We found electrons and we also noticed that there are other particles that are just like the electron, but have the opposite charge. So we call that a positron or an anti-electron. And the muon- Also has a positively charged version. And the quarks also have oppositely charged versions.

• 34:56Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is a symmetry. It's like a mirror in our world that says particles don't exist on their own. They have a partner. And anytime you have something and a partner that are related by some transformation, some symmetry, then you're curious about that. What does that mean about the universe? That it can do A and the opposite of A at the same time? Are we looking at something that are two sides of the same coin? We should be treating them as a whole instead of investigating them individually? The way that, for example, we've made great insights by combining electricity and magnetism into one concept. It makes much more sense mathematically. It gives us insight into special relativity. We shouldn't treat positrons as just another kind of particle that happened to be similar to electrons.

• 35:38Daniel Whiteson?

  We should acknowledge this relationship and hope that that gives us some insight into how the universe works.

• 35:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I remember when I first learned about this concept, I was confused about why protons weren't the antiparticle for electrons. But the answer is that protons, yes, they have the opposite charge, but they don't weigh the same amount. So there's something totally different.

• 35:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And you put your finger on the crucial concept for antiparticles because there's nothing anti about a particle. You can't look at a particle and say, this one's a particle, this one's an antiparticle. The particle antiparticle thing is a relationship. You have a pair and you say, these are related by the particle antiparticle relationship, which means you take one of them, you flip the charges, you get the other one.

• 36:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 36:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? And so it's a relationship between two particles. And the relationship is symmetric. So if you gave me an electron and an anti-electron and you said, Daniel, which one is the particle and which one is the antiparticle? I would say it doesn't matter. You could label either one matter and the other one antimatter. It's arbitrary. We happen to call the ones that are around a lot, particles, and the ones that aren't around a lot, antiparticles, because that's just historically how we started. It would have been weird to start off calling everything antimatter. So that's just historical, but it's about the relationship. And so as you say, if you take an electron and you flip its charge, then you get a positively charged electron that's not the same as a proton, right? They're different mass, they have different constituents.

• 37:08Daniel Whiteson?

  One has a hadronic interaction, one doesn't. So a positron and a proton are very different things. Whereas a positron and an electron are only different in these charges. You flip the charges, you get the other particle.

• 37:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I was going to highlight that hadronic thing because I totally know what that means. But, but is this another example of physicists not doing a great job of naming things? Like instead of particle, antiparticle, should it have been like particle, oppo particle, or like opposite particle, or oppo charge, or like anti just seems confusing?

• 37:41Daniel Whiteson?

  No, that's a fair question. Anti does seem confusing. It feels like it's in opposition, it's like against us or something. They're fighting back or something. I do think that after understanding something more fully, we will give things better names, definitely different names, because we understand it more broadly and in the right context. So like, what would I name particles and antiparticles with this knowledge? I would give them names that reflect that they are part of something larger, but that there's a symmetry there. And so.

• 38:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Semi particles.

• 38:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Flipicles.

• 38:24Daniel Whiteson?

  I would choose a name that reflects, for example, a positron. It's not really its own particle, it's just another kind of electron. And so the electron has really two different ways to be, right? There's the positive and the negative version of the electron. They really are two sides of the same coin. And so you can't call the whole system an electron, because we already think of that as naming one of them. So you'd have to come up with a totally different name, and then you'd give them like, you know, call them one of them, the positive, the negative version of that particle. You know, the Daniel on, the positive and negative Daniel on.

• 38:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. Let's pull ourselves out of this hole. You and I keep digging holes and then getting stuck. So tell me, what would you do if you had a particle that had no charge? Like, what about neutrons? Do neutrons have? Flipicles?

• 39:12Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, great question. And so I said earlier that the particle anti particle relationship is about flipping the charge, but it's not just flipping the electric charge. Particles also carry a bunch of other things like leptin number and baryon number, these things that particles keep track of and respect when they have interactions. So the universe, for reasons we don't understand, keeps track of like the number of electrons in the universe. And you can't just like create or destroy electrons because that would violate this rule that the number of electrons can't change. We don't know why that rule exists, but we've observed it. We know the universe respects it. And so electrons carry this electron number to them and anti electrons have the opposite. So when you flip a particle to the anti particle, you flip its electric charge and also its

• 39:55Daniel Whiteson?

  leptin number and a couple other bookkeeping numbers. All right. But you ask a great question, which is what happens for a particle with zero charge, right? And so let's take an easy case first because the neutron is complicated. Let's take the photon.

• 40:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 40:09Daniel Whiteson?

  The photon is no charge. It also doesn't carry any of these other numbers, leptin number, baryon number, all zero. So you take the photon and you flip all those charges. What do you get? You get the photon.

• 40:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? So that's why we say the photon is its own anti particle.

• 40:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  It has no flipicle.

• 40:25Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. That sounds like a tasty afternoon frozen treat.

• 40:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, it does. You're right. You're right. But that might make people like physics more.

• 40:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, look, the flipicle truck is coming. Let's go get one. Yeah.

• 40:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, it just has photons.

• 40:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, so in that sense, like the photon is its own particle is just a statement of what happens when you take the photon and you do this transformation to it, the one that's supposed to take you from particle to anti particle or from anti particle to particle. That doesn't mean that the photon is an anti particle. Remember, there's nothing anti about an anti particle. It's about a relationship. So it has this relationship with itself. Say, for example, that your face is like perfectly symmetric. You're like a beauty model or whatever. So you stand in a mirror and you flip your image and it looks exactly the same. My face is quite anti symmetric, like my ear is higher on one side, my beard is very differently shaped on the other side. If you flip me. Then you get like the anti Daniel, right?

• 41:23Daniel Whiteson?

  But if you have a perfectly symmetric face, then if you swap left and right, you get your face. Right? So you are your own anti person. You are your own reflection. Whereas I'm not my reflection. I see my reflection in the mirror. I'm like, that's a different person. That's not me. Right? So photon has that relationship with itself.

• 41:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 41:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And the same is true for the Higgs boson. The same is true for the Z boson. It might be true for neutrinos. We don't know.

• 41:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 41:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Get to work.

• 41:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. So neutrinos might be particles the way that like quarks and electrons are in that they have anti particles, which would mean they get their mass from the Higgs boson, because to get your mass from the Higgs, you have to have an anti particle as well. You can't do it on your own. See, this is one example of how like electrons and positrons are not different things. When they get their mass from the Higgs, they work together to get their mass from the Higgs. They can't do it by themselves. We don't know if neutrinos do that. If they do, it'd be really weird, because then they would get only a tiny little mass, which would need its own explanation. There's a whole other fun theory about how neutrinos might be their own anti particles. It's a Majorana particle. And that would very naturally explain why they have so little mass. All right. So let's get to your question about neutrons.

• 42:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Neutrons are neutral, hence the beautifully chosen name.

• 42:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Good job, guys, on that one.

• 42:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Does that mean that they are their own anti particle? Well, no, because they have other charges. They carry these baryon numbers, et cetera. And those things are not zero for the neutron. More concretely, a neutron is made out of quarks, and quarks have anti particles. So for example, a neutron has one up quark and two down quarks. An anti neutron has one anti up and two anti down quarks. Now, they're both electrically neutral, but they have very different internal bits, and they carry different baryon numbers. So a neutron is not its own anti particle. There is an anti neutron.

• 43:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Okay, I'll admit, my brain is still catching up. My first thought was if you have one up and two down, shouldn't you just have one down and two up? But now I remember that the up and the down have different masses, and that would be something totally different.

• 43:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  And, all right, my brain caught up.

• 43:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. So the anti neutron is built out of the anti quarks, whereas the neutron is built out of the quarks.

• 43:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 43:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And quarks do have anti particles. They are not their own anti particle. They have these weird electric charges, one third and two thirds. It's kind of crazy. All right, so back to Reg's question. He's asking, are particles being their own particles a convenience, like a mathematical construct, or is it something real? Well, it is a mathematical relationship between particles. This particle antiparticle pair thing, it's a relationship. It's an example of a symmetry. Some particles really are their own antiparticles in the sense that if you transform them from particle to antiparticle, you're back to where you start. So I hope that answers your question. And I said earlier that thinking about particles and antiparticles together can help us understand the universe more deeply.

• 44:17Daniel Whiteson?

  An example of that is that we sort of left this whole particle antiparticle picture behind a little bit because we've sewn particles together into a more unified theory, which is quantum field theory. So we don't think of particles as the fundamental basis of the universe anymore. We think of them as ripples in fields. And there's an opportunity here to recognize that electrons, for example, and positrons have a deep relationship because in quantum field theory, they don't come from two different fields. They come from the same field. There is just the one field that can do two different kinds of ripples. One of those ripples is the electron. The other ripple is the positron. So you see how they're deeply, deeply woven together, and that's reflected naturally

• 45:02Daniel Whiteson?

  and natively in quantum field theory. And so identifying that relationship is more than just like, hey, this is a cute construct or this is a cute thing we discovered. It was a clue towards understanding the universe much more deeply.

• 45:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Awesome.

• 45:16Daniel Whiteson?

  So the electromagnetic field, for example, which has the photon as its particle, can only ripple in one way. It ripples like the photon. There's no other way for it to ripple that you would call an anti-photon. And so we have different kinds of fields can do different kinds of ripples, and that's why some particles are their own antiparticles and some particles are not. But all of them, I hope, will buy from Kelly's Flipper On afternoon treat truck when it comes around.

• 45:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I hope so, too. Well, I could use a drink, so let's take a break and see what Reg had to say about this very informative answer.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Thank you, Daniel. That really does answer my question, especially understanding that this is all coming from quantum field theory. That helps visualize why particles and antiparticles

• 45:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Always annihilate being there from the same quantum field. Although now that I think about it, I think there was a slightly deeper question that I did not properly articulate. When I was asking whether this is a mathematical convenience, I think what was going through my mind was, is this just a way for scientists to say that every single particle has an antiparticle? Even if it doesn't have, you know, a countercharge particle, just to make it better for the standard model? Or does that actually do something practical? As in, it defines how it interacts in some way in the math or something?

• 46:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's a good question. What's the benefit of calling a photon its own antiparticle? Does it matter? Ha, ha, ha. Well, there's no practical benefit. It's not necessary for the standard model and it doesn't change its predictions at all. It's just a matter, ha, ha, of consistency. Because particle and antiparticles are a relationship rather than a label or an assignment. It makes logical and mathematical sense to say the photon has this relationship with itself, as opposed to electrons that had that relationship with positrons. But it makes no practical difference. If you instead said particles and antiparticles just don't apply to neutral things like photons, that would change nothing about physics.

• 47:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 48:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  To this day, Ordinary would not have done anything, and I would have not been able to put it out if Book Talk didn't back it up and if my wife and her friend didn't back it up.

• 48:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Pretty crazy how like, just one thing.

• 48:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 48:36Speaker 05

  I mean, I bet you, we could point to nine different things in our careers where it's just one thing, all of a sudden, if that one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here.

• 48:42Daniel Whiteson?

  What you're talking about right now is what I've been talking about since the beginning of my career. There's these things outside of you that make everything happen. These other forces somehow came into contact with each other and helped propel you to this place.

• 49:00Speaker 05

  It's just insane.

• 49:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:10Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  I'm Ron Moore. And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting. The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships. We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team, it's the

• 50:10Speaker 03

  The team of our vendors, the team of our clients. We help the Veterans Resource Center and we give scholarships. I'm doing this for my heart, for my children, for you, for your children's family. I don't want anything back. And I tell a lot of people, don't give back to me, pay it forward. If you work to give, you just see the world differently. I'm gonna help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me.

• 50:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, man, Doug had some questions.

• 51:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is the episode about drinking stuff today.

• 51:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yes.

• 51:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Kelly, what were you sipping while you were working on this? Is it like a nice Earl Grey tea or bubbly water?

• 51:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  It was bubbly water without a lot of salt in it. And let, you know, let's go ahead and listen to all of Doug's questions and then we'll, we'll dig in a little bit more.

• 51:18Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 51:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Ocean water is too salty for us to drink. We end up thirstier than before we drank it. But saltwater fish, sea turtles, seals, walruses, dolphins and whales live in it just fine. There must also be saltwater tolerant birds. Are there saltwater tolerant land animals? Which animals that currently find the ocean water too salty evolved from animals that lived before the ocean was as salty as now? Which evolved away from saltwater tolerance because they found freshwater sources, ponds, lakes and rivers? Which species live near the mouths of streams and rivers in order to get a drink that's not too salty?

• 52:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Our cells are saltier than freshwater, but Not as salty as the ocean. Do saltwater tolerant species just have saltier cells? Or do their bodies desalinate the water? When we eat a saltwater fish, do we need to drink extra water to offset the extra salt? Why not? What would it take to make a saltwater tolerant species from a non-saltwater tolerant species? Could scientists implant a gene like the one that made fluorescent fish?

• 52:34Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, Doug is very curious about saltwater. And I've often wondered that myself, you know, like you're in the ocean, you can die of thirst. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

• 52:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 52:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Why is that, Kelly? Tell us.

• 52:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, how literate. And so, uh, how, how literary? I mean, I know you're literate.

• 52:51Daniel Whiteson?

  That was for Zach's benefit there.

• 52:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. He's gonna judge us somehow. But, okay, so what, what problems are caused by saltwater?

• 53:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  The answer is a lot of them. All right, so there's this idea that you try to reach equal concentrations of things like salt on both sides of permeable membranes like our cells. So a permeable membrane is a membrane where something can go across it in either direction. And so if you have fresh water on one side of the permeable membrane and saltwater on the other, the salt is gonna flow over to the freshwater side until it's reached an equilibrium. Does that make sense?

• 53:29Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so I think you're telling me that when you have saltwater near freshwater, that the salt molecules don't like to stay on one side. They like to spread out and things get sloshed around evenly.

• 53:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly. We have, and this is surprisingly consistent across different cells in different organisms, like a set amount of potassium ions in our cells and a set amount of sodium. So salt is sodium chloride. And so if you have saltwater and you have a set amount of salt inside of your cell, but then you surround that cell in a saltier environment, you're gonna end up with a bunch of salt going into the cell.

• 54:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 54:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And this can cause a lot of different problems. One of the problems has to do with protein folding. So folks might remember that we had Benjamin de Bevora on the show and Daniel and Benjamin had this conversation about how-

• 54:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm terrified because I don't remember this.

• 54:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's all right. It was fascinating. It was fascinating. So you make a protein and proteins have these charges and based on the charges that determines how they fold up. And the way a protein folds up impacts what that protein does. Does that make sense?

• 54:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so a lot of what's holding that protein together are pretty weak charges. And so if you end up with a bunch of charged sodium particles in an environment, that can pull your proteins apart. And now they no longer have the right shape. They can't do the things that they're supposed to do. This can also mess with the way that DNA holds itself together and folds up. And so basically, if you start ending up with a bunch of extra charged particles going in there, it messes up the way all of the stuff inside the cell is sort of held together and it can't do what it needs to do anymore.

• 55:09Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so so far I understand that if you're in a saltwater bath, you're going to end up absorbing that salt and that having too much salt inside you messes up some of the basic biochemistry, like how DNA gets turned into proteins and how those proteins do their job.

• 55:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 55:24Daniel Whiteson?

  I guess I'm confused because I thought life began in the ocean and I thought of us land creatures as basically walking bags of ocean, bringing that environment with us. But now you're telling me that like saltwater in the ocean is bad for life. How does that work?

• 55:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  So salt concentrations are not the same everywhere you go. Salt environments can vary from less than one part per thousand of sodium chloride or salt in the water to over 400 parts per thousand in super saline environments. And so basically, the the thing that you need to know there, it doesn't really matter what those numbers are. There's just tons of variability. And so if our bodies are adapted to a certain amount of salt in our cells, and maybe that reflects our saltwater past, we're still wanting to move between a bunch of different kinds of environments with different concentrations of salt. So just because we do okay at one concentration doesn't mean we'll do okay at all concentrations. Plus, you and I are very far removed from our salt environment.

• 56:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 56:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so we don't have super great ways of dealing with excess amounts of salt. So our kidneys do what they can to remove salt from our blood so that it doesn't go throughout our bodies and mess with all of our other cells. So it removes the salt from our blood and then you pee excess salt out. So if you have too much salt in your diet, your kidneys try to remove it and pee out the extra so that you can maintain the right concentration. Does that make sense?

• 56:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so you're telling me that Daniel's picture of we all came from the sea is too naive because we've come from a wide variety of different environments with more salt or less salt, and we've evolved so that our chemical processes do what we need to. And that requires a certain salt concentration, which might be different from what we encounter. And so our kidneys and our bodies do their job to try to maintain the right salt concentration, but it's tough.

• 57:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, and also, we and many organisms live in environments where salt concentrations fluctuate.

• 57:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, right, exactly. And so you gotta be a little bit robust to it.

• 57:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, yeah, you need to be robust to it. And so the way mammals are robust to it is we have kidneys that try to extract salt and we've consumed too much salt.

• 57:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, like pizza night?

• 57:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like pizza night or ramen night. Gotta love ramen night.

• 57:36Daniel Whiteson?

  That's why it's so good, I know.

• 57:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's so good. And then my blood pressure is like, woo, through the roof because too much salt is bad for you.

• 57:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 57:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so, but Doug had a lot of questions about how different animals respond to this.

• 57:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 57:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  And these are great questions and I learned a lot. Okay, so, one of the questions was about what happens if you have like turtles or birds or animals that like are, you know, maybe not fish that are encountering a lot of salt, how do they deal with it?

• 58:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the answer is that a lot of these animals have glands in their face where when you first take the salt in, like maybe you're taking a drink of salt water, it actively extracts the salt out of the water and concentrates it so that it can then get like extracted through specialized holes in the head. So for example.

• 58:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 58:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  There are marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands that can like live on land, but they also swim in the water and they extract the salt out of the water that they're like, you know, consuming while they're eating plants underwater and stuff like that.

• 58:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 58:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then, like a snot rocket, they shoot it out of their face. And you should watch videos of this because it's crazy. And apparently they sometimes use it to like scare off predators or mess with competitors. But they're like, and then there's salts, like big chunks of salt, like spraying out of their face with some snot. And it is gloriously disgusting.

• 59:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Snot rocket is a great name, though.

• 59:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Makes me wonder if it's one of the things you're selling in your flippical truck.

• 59:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, well, you know, why not? And so anyway, okay, so birds also, like so birds that eat salty fish also have these glands that actively pull salt out of stuff and then concentrate the salt and then expel the salt through these holes in like their beak. The way sharks do it is their bodies actively pull out salt and then they excrete concentrated salt out of their rectum.

• 59:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Whoa.

• 59:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not a salt rocket. That's something else.

• 59:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Out of a rectal gland, not just their rectum, but a rectal gland. It's a poop rocket. It's a.

• 59:45Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a salty fart. I don't know.

• 59:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, that's too, that's too visceral.

• 59:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not buying that from the ice cream truck.

• 59:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not. I don't think I'm selling that in my ice cream truck. And so, and sometimes if you see turtles that live in the ocean, like eating jellyfish or whatever, and then they come up to lay their eggs on land, it looks like they're crying. And what's happening is they have glands near their eyes where they excrete the salt out from like the sides of their eyes. And so it looks like they're crying, looks like they've got tears, but they're just excreting the salt in high concentrations out of their face.

• 1:00:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 1:00:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So how do fish do it? Fish are kind of amazing. So fish have this very energetically expensive process where their gills are able to tinker with the amount of sodium and potassium that's like getting into the body.

• 1:00:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. How did they do that?

• 1:00:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm not going into detailed biochemistry. I'm giving you the broad strokes, man. There were a lot of questions here. So, all right. So what they do, like if you're in a freshwater environment, you actually need to hold on to salts because there might not be enough salt in the water to help you maintain the salt that you need inside of your cells. And so cells in the gills, in those cases, are pulling salt in.

• 1:01:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  But if you are in a saltwater environment, there might be too much salt. And so those cells in the gills are actively pushing or keeping salt or sodium ions out. But fish are able to what's called remodel their gills depending on their environment. So there are fish that go from freshwater to saltwater or saltwater to freshwater, depending on what stage of their life they're in.

• 1:01:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 1:01:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  And as they start to change salinity, their gills can kill off cells that do one function. For example, try to suck up the sodium ions and then replace them with cells that do the opposite thing, like cells that try to kick out the sodium ions.

• 1:01:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, how quickly can they do that?

• 1:01:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Couple of days, takes like one to three days or something. But like, still, that's amazing. Like, they've got this procedure for like killing off cells that are like not doing what they need them to do right now and replacing them with cells that do the correct thing. But it's worth noting that this is very energetically expensive. And so if you take a fish and you move it from a saltwater environment to a freshwater environment and it needs to do all of this remodeling, it might reduce its energy because now it doesn't have energy to like move around as much because its body is using its energy to kill off some cells and build new ones. It might grow more slowly, it might have fewer babies. It's very stressful for an organism to adapt to a different kind of environment or to fix the damage that happens to their body after they've been put in the wrong kind of environment.

• 1:02:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  So for example, if you're exposed to a high saltwater environment and your proteins start to like change their configuration, there are some things that you can do. So sometimes you need to kill that cell if things are just too much of a mess and be like, nope, starting over. But there are proteins you can make called heat shock proteins that help you sort of put things back together. And so the point is animals have ways for dealing with this kind of stuff, but whenever you're asking them to make a change, or if you're just asking them to live in super saltwater environments in general.

• 1:02:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 1:02:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  That takes a lot of like calories and energy to be actively moderating the concentration of salt inside of the body.

• 1:03:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense. That doesn't seem like an easy thing to switch to do. I can't just like switch to being able to drink saltwater, no matter how much energy I spend.

• 1:03:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, you'd be a goner, total goner.

• 1:03:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Doug had a great question about animals that are in environments that are changing their salinity. And this is a really relevant question right now, because as global climate change is happening, you get environments where saltwater is inundating land and areas that were once freshwater. And part of that is because sea levels are rising as things like icebergs are melting. And so as seawater gets farther inland and gets into like ponds and lakes and streams and stuff that used to be freshwater, you now have a lot of animals that are encountering saltwater that weren't meant to encounter saltwater. And global climate change is changing where you end up getting a lot of precipitation. So you

• 1:03:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  get some environments that used to be super salty, but if they get a lot of extra rain, then that water becomes dilute and now it doesn't have as much salted as it had before.

• 1:04:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Makes sense.

• 1:04:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so the question is, what's happening to these animals? Some animals are just paying a higher energetic cost and their body is able to adapt and deal with it, but more of their energy is going towards just trying to survive in this environment that has different amounts of salt than it had before.

• 1:04:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And is the salinity changing kind of rapidly, like a huge rainstorm and now it's more fresh? And then a drought and it gradually gets salty and salty?

• 1:04:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  It depends on where you are and how much, what the, what kind of volume of water you're working with. And so, you know, like a huge volume of water, it can take a long time to change the salinity of that. But if you're, you know, working in a pretty small pond, and then it gets inundated by the ocean for the first time, that can be a pretty massive change in salinity.

• 1:04:42Daniel Whiteson?

  So it depends.

• 1:04:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it depends. So there was a paper that was looking at what animals are most susceptible to like essentially dying during these changes. And they found things like freshwater turtles.

• 1:04:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 1:04:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know I love freshwater turtles, but they've got, if there's freshwater bodies that they can get to in the area, they can behaviorally deal with this. But, you know, you got to make sure they got somewhere to go. Fish often do a pretty good job of dealing with it because they can do this gill remodeling. Not all species can do that, but fish as a group seem to be pretty well placed to deal with global climate change. And I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people who are like, no, they're not. Uh, fish have a lot of other things to worry about also.

• 1:05:24Daniel Whiteson?

  They got mortgages, they got kids to raise.

• 1:05:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, I'm gonna backpedal and say that global climate change is gonna be catastrophic for a lot of fish species. Some of them will be able to handle the changes in salinity better than others.

• 1:05:36Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 1:05:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Other animals that are pretty susceptible are zooplankton. So these are little like aquatic crustaceans. And you might be like, little aquatic crustaceans, I can't even see them, who cares? Point is, you need them to-

• 1:05:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not so callous, I like those little aquatic crustaceans.

• 1:05:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  I saw you yawn when I said zooplankton, I saw it, I saw it.

• 1:05:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I was gonna yawn in that moment anyway, I love zooplankton, really, tell me more.

• 1:06:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, they are food for lots of other things. So maybe the fish can handle the salinity changes, but they might not be able to handle their food, which couldn't handle the salinity changes biting the dust. So these things are complicated.

• 1:06:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, the whole ecosystem is sensitive to salt, right? So it makes sense that as things are changing, everything is gonna get skewed.

• 1:06:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, yep, that's right. And amphibians are also particularly sensitive because their skin is like particularly permeable. And so, uh, you know, if they're in a more saltwater environment, that salt is going to like rush through their skin and get into their bodies.

• 1:06:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so let's say this is Doug's last question. He wanted to know if you could make a saltwater tolerant species tolerant to freshwater. Essentially, could you take a gene and make it so that an organism that was freshwater could now live in saltwater? Or an organism that was adapted to saltwater can now live in freshwater?

• 1:06:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, good question.

• 1:06:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  I, yeah, great question. I think the answer is not a gene. I don't think we understand this at the gene level.

• 1:07:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 1:07:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  But like what we've talked about requires multiple levels. And these are very complicated mechanisms where more than one thing is going on. So like for the gill remodeling, there's some genes that are associated with destroying the old cells, other cells that are associated with building in the new cells. And I don't think we have all of those genes identified. And even if we did, genes usually have multiple functions. So if you took a bunch of genes from one species and moved them into another, you could like mess up a bunch of stuff. Uh, and so I don't think that we could at the moment with what we know, turn a freshwater species into a totally saltwater species, or a saltwater species into a totally freshwater species with genetic engineering. Maybe one day?

• 1:07:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Because every organism is a huge Rube Goldberg machine that we do not understand and we can mash the buttons, but there's like millions of them. So who knows what knobs you have to turn to make things happen.

• 1:07:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I would like to get a shirt that says that and it has, you know, quote by Daniel, Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. And there's the Daniel, you'll quote, cause uh, one, I totally agree. And two, the number of times listeners write to me and say, as Daniel says, our body's a huge Rube Goldberg machine or whatever. And I'm like, yes, yes, Daniel says that. And they're totally right. I'm not tired of hearing about it. I'm just like, man, that thing that Daniel said really sticks with people.

• 1:08:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, that's funny. I didn't realize that. Well, I'm feeling totally pickled and thoroughly brined and marinating in this answer. Let's see if it works for the listener.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  So to summarize, all earth animals must have a similar level of cell saltiness. Otherwise, proteins and DNA wouldn't work right. Saltwater tolerant animals evolved organs and processes to eject excess salt. Animals that are not saltwater tolerant likely evolved away from tolerance due to local abundant freshwater sources. To make a non-saltwater tolerant species into a saltwater tolerant species, you'd have to add or modify a whole organ system and perhaps teach the animal to use it, a tall order indeed. I'm still wondering whether life evolved in a less

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  salty ocean and how do single cell life, plankton and plants tolerate salt? But that can wait for another episode. Thanks.

• 1:09:25Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thank you very much to everybody who writes to us, who engages us with your curiosity. We will ferment your questions. We will pickle ourselves in your conundrums. We really want to scratch your itches. We want to reflect on it. We want to show you the beautiful symmetry of the universe.

• 1:09:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or we want to be able to say, it depends in a whole new context. So please send your questions to [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.

• 1:09:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 1:10:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:10:10Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:10:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:10:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 1:10:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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