What’s Next in Science? Nobel Prizes, Space Missions & More (EP 57)

What science should you be watching this fall? From Nobel Prize season to NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, Mars’ moons and Mercury, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary take a relaxed tour of the discoveries and missions on their radar. In Episode 57 of From First Principles, we explore why curiosity-driven research matters, what the Golden Goose Awards celebrate, and how questions that once sounded impractical can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Then we turn to space: Roman’s search for dark energy and exoplanets, JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, and the mysteries ESA and JAXA’s BepiColombo mission will investigate at Mercury. Along the way, we tour the updated FFP website, revisit some favorite episodes, and ask which stories you want us to cover in depth next. A note before we begin: the main conversation was recorded before Labor Day weekend. The opening announcement addresses your requests for a separate episode on OpenAI, Navier–Stokes and the wider AI conversation. This episode is our fall science rundown; that deep dive is still to come. CHAPTERS 00:00 Update on our upcoming Navier–Stokes and AI coverage 03:43 Episode intro and football banter 05:47 FFP intro 06:01 Nobel Prize season and our coverage plans 10:45 Golden Goose Awards: why basic research matters 21:02 FFP website tour and favorite episodes 42:24 Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope 46:20 Microlensing, exoplanets and dark matter 51:25 MMX: where did Mars’ moons come from? 54:40 BepiColombo and the mysteries of Mercury 1:02:17 Your questions, future deep dives and sign-off 1:05:40 Outro SHOW NOTES NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/ JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX): https://www.mmx.jaxa.jp/en/mission/ ESA / JAXA BepiColombo: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo Explore the research and episodes we cover: https://ffppod.com Science R&D Funding Tracker: https://ffppod.com/funding Science Transfer Board: https://ffppod.com/transfers America 250: https://ffppod.com/America250 Support the show: https://ffppod.com/donate WATCH ON YOUTUBE https://youtu.be/snhQh0fjTX4 Follow @FFPPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook Breaking down science news so it makes sense to curious people everywhere. Which mission or research story deserves a full FFP deep dive? Tell us in the comments.

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking Lester Nare with a brief announcement before we jump into this week's episode. We have received a massive number of requests from many of you in FFP Nation to cover the recent proof published by OpenAI on their solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. We see it in our DMs and comments, in our email inbox, and we are going to give the people what they want. We have recorded this week's episode prior to Labor Day weekend on our regular schedule. Obviously, this news has created a lot of waves, and we have been working diligently

• 0:44Lester Nare?

  on wrapping our head around not only OpenAI's solution, but many of the larger conversations that have now arisen out of the publication of this paper. Among other things, there is now huge tension within the community of mathematicians as it relates to alignment with AI models. We've now seen multiple CEOs from all of the major frontier labs come out in support of a new AI safety pacing, a request for a regulatory framework and government involvement, as well as global involvement. There's been a lot of debate

• 1:23Lester Nare?

  politically about how a democracy can operate in the context of having what appear to be increasingly intelligent systems that we may not have quite a handle on how to keep under control. It is a very complex issue. It's a very nuanced issue. There are a lot of high emotions and tensions coming from all of the different parties involved in this discussion. And over the last week and a half, since OpenAI published their proof, that conversation has reached a fever pitch, in part triggered by a tweet from a former

• 2:08Lester Nare?

  anthropic researcher regarding his personal belief about AI's possibility to cause human extinction. We are going to be covering all of that in next week's episode. We are aware about how important the Millennium Prize problem solution, as well as these larger conversations, are for you in FFP Nation to hear. What is our opinion? And what is the actual science and mathematics behind the solution? Is it what it's all cracked up to be? Is it all hype? And we will get into all of those details. This week's episode, as I mentioned, was recorded prior to Labor Day weekend. We were going to be taking some

• 2:49Lester Nare?

  vacation time in order to rest up and relax as we get prepared for a very intense few couple of weeks leading up to the Nobel Prizes. But science does not wait for those who want time off, and we are going to be sure to get you guys a really, really strong episode on all of those issues next week. And we appreciate you all having the patience to let us get that correct. Because as you know, on this show, we really want to focus on the facts and make sure we've gathered them sufficiently to be able to present them to you. So please, in the meantime, enjoy this laid back, relaxing episode, which will be

• 3:30Lester Nare?

  more of a rundown episode, covering some of the upcoming things happening in science in the fall. And we will see you all next week with the Navier-Stokes solution and the greater AI conversation. Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. For those who joined us for the last episode, as we mentioned, we are going into our Labor Day weekend and are going to have a little bit of a relaxing episode. And I will start off with something that is not very scientific, but is very near and dear to my heart. And it has to do with the jersey that I currently

• 4:11Lester Nare?

  have on my body, which was purchased at Stanford Bridge during the Carabao Cup against Tottenham Hotspur, the second biggest team in London, behind Chelsea. And this is happening prior to our first game against the third biggest team in London, Arsenal, which will be happening on Labor Day on Monday. And my assumption is that we're going to win that game. So I'm wearing this jersey in celebration of the unexpected success of Jaby Alonso's vision to bring Chelsea Football Club to a Premier League championship in his first

• 4:54Lester Nare?

  year. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. I predicted that for the first time in five years, we're gonna beat Arsenal. I believe it will happen.

• 5:03Krishna Choudhary?

  You'll beat Arsenal in...

• 5:04Lester Nare?

  Let's not talk about it. Third biggest team in London is Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal, West Ham, and we won't even talk about that. And so, up the Chels, well done, boys, on a big victory. I will stop with the sports ball talk. We're gonna have a fun, relaxing episode. We're just gonna do a little bit of a rundown. We're going into the fall season. And there's a couple of different big scientific events that are happening. And so, we're just gonna do a very light overview of what those look like. So unlike some of our normal deep dives, we're just gonna cover the surface, but still keep it focused on the science, because this is from first principles.

• 6:01Lester Nare?

  So we're beginning the fall season in science, and one of our main events that we are excited for, some may say it's the Ballon d'Or of science, it's like the Oscars, is the Nobel Prizes. And we usually, like we did last year, cover the big three.

• 6:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 6:26Lester Nare?

  Which will be medicine on Monday. This is gonna be from October 5th through 12th. We care about three days. Medicine Monday, physics Tuesday, chemistry Wednesday, and then the rest.

• 6:39Krishna Choudhary?

  The rest, yeah.

• 6:40Lester Nare?

  Our marquee games are at the beginning of the week. And I'm really excited, because we did, you did, you did pretty good last year.

• 6:50Krishna Choudhary?

  I got one out of the three.

• 6:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 6:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Last year, which honestly, I don't think you guys understand, the probability of getting this right in all of chemistry, in all of medicine, in all of physics, to get the prediction right is not easy. But I got Omar Yagi.

• 7:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:12Krishna Choudhary?

  We've talked about him a lot, actually, on this podcast, not just for the Nobel Prizes, but also for his transfer to China, to Tsinghua University.

• 7:21Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Krishna Choudhary?

  So I got that one right, and I will be making my own predictions this time as well. Actually, this is, this is something that you guys should say in the comments. Who do you think is going to get the Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry Nobel Prizes? I'd like to know, so that I can maybe piggyback off of your predictions when we make our prediction episode, because I'd like to, I'd like to go two years in.

• 7:46Lester Nare?

  Back to back.

• 7:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Back to back, making a prediction, you know?

• 7:49Lester Nare?

  You know who else has gone back to back with winning the prem? Chelsea. You know who hasn't? Arsenal.

• 7:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, man.

• 7:56Lester Nare?

  Just saying, just saying.

• 7:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, my cousins are gonna be so pissed.

• 8:00Lester Nare?

  For those who are interested in that prediction episode, it's our episode 10. We did talk about some other things in that, within that episode, but that episode 10 is where we did our Nobel Prize 2025 predictions.

• 8:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's a great episode. We also covered two of my favorite Nobel Prizes, the LIGO, which is the gravitational wave observatory that first detected gravitational waves, and also CRISPR, which is the great genomic technology that is giving us so many strides in the biomedical field.

• 8:36Lester Nare?

  And for those who would like to get a preview of what it'll look like when we do our Nobel Prize episodes, it's going to be a little bit different than how we do our normal episodes because each day, we're going to basically do it the day of and release standalones for each of the prizes during Nobel Prize week. This is a big deal. Yeah, this is our favorite time of the year. So you're going to get live, you know, daily drops. And then we also will compile it into a long form episode. So last year's episode 11 was a two and a half hour epic that combined each of the days where we stay up until we're up at 2am. Yeah, when it first drops, we see

• 9:17Lester Nare?

  the drop, we then dig into the background of it and give an explainer, just like our deep dives that you all are so used to. It's a really fun time of the year. Last year's that we covered in that that episode where it was a macroscopic quantum tunneling for physics, metal organic frameworks for chemistry. And one of my favorites, which was a sleeper, peripheral immune tolerance in medicine was super fascinating. Yeah, it was very, very interesting. And we've talked about the immune system a lot. Yeah. In correlation with a lot of our medical or bio stories. So you can catch either the individual explainers or the the the big summary episode. It's definitely worth a watch as we prepare a month from now

• 10:00Lester Nare?

  from one of the for one of the most exciting. Yeah, science stories of the year.

• 10:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And let me just um, let me just tell everyone who's in the comments and in the DMs telling us to cover the economics prize. First of all, the economics prize is not a real Nobel Prize. That's why it's called the Nobel Memorial Prize. No, it's the Memorial Prize in Economics in memory of Alfred Nobel, because in his will, he did not think that the economics prize was something that he was going to dish out money for. Why? Because the economics is not a real science. And I don't know how many times I need to say this, but I'm just going to say it again. It's not. So let's just move on. All right.

• 10:44Lester Nare?

  We and we will be moving on. And what's so interesting about the fall, which is why we wanted to do a fall season rundown, is the Nobel Prizes are not the only award show right that really recognizes science. And the other one that's coming a little bit sooner, I think it'll be probably a few weeks, a week or few weeks before the Nobels is going to be the Golden Goose Awards. And what's interesting about the Golden Goose Awards, many of you may not be actually super familiar with the Golden Goose Awards, which is done by AAAS, the same nonprofit that produces the journal Science. We cover a lot on the

• 11:27Lester Nare?

  show. And the idea behind the Golden Goose Awards is it celebrates federally funded research that unexpectedly benefits society. We talk a lot about this on the pod where the the benefit of basic research, you know, sometimes the Nobels are areas where people know that there's something. Yeah. And so they go after the thing where they know there's something. Yeah. And the Golden Goose is sort of like, well, the thing that they discovered actually had this weird other benefit that was not expected based on what they were studying initially. And a perfect example of this, which is a callback to our last episode, episode

• 12:07Lester Nare?

  56, where we talked about combating brain disease, MS and others through the study of

• 12:15Krishna Choudhary?

  evolutionary pharmacology. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

• 12:17Lester Nare?

  Right. Evolution in 2013, the Golden Goose Award was given to Dr. John Eng, and he had federally funded research on drum roll, please, Gilgeous Monster Venom, which, as we talked about in our last episode, was the precursor that created GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy. Wegovy, I think it's pronounced Wegovy. And so this, this is the idea that how, how do we go from a venomous animal in an extreme environment to a diabetes and obesity weight loss drug that's exceptionally popular. And sometimes the through line is

• 13:00Lester Nare?

  not very clear. And I think that's the focus for the Golden Goose, which is, which is super interesting. And I think we're exploring potentially adding it into our coverage as as a part of the show.

• 13:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, it underscores this idea of fundamental science for science's sake, for curiosity's sake. The idea that if there is an interesting question out there, maybe it is worth pursuing an answer, just because it's a question out there that has piqued our curiosity as humanity about the natural world around us. We don't know what it's gonna, what it's gonna come up with, right? There are so many examples of this in the history of science. I mean, CRISPR came out of us studying the bacterial immune system. If you told someone, hey, I'm studying the bacterial immune system, they'd be like,

• 13:52Krishna Choudhary?

  why is my taxpayer dollars going to study that? Well, it gives us all of the genetic technologies that we know and love. GLP-1 and the Gila monster venom is another one of these. I think as a society, we need to be very proud of the fact that we support this kind of research because it, it, it shows, you know, just sort of where we stand and what, what we're after.

• 14:17Lester Nare?

  I know many of you, I'm sure are being bombarded by GLP-1 ads in your Instagram and TikTok feeds everywhere. And you can thank John Eng, who figured out the active ingredient in this Gila monster venom. And I think what's, this is, this is an active area of conversation right now, because there is an ongoing battle within, you know, the political architecture around two aspects of grants, grants being the money that goes into research and development. Research and development is a very wide surface area of things. R and D and funding

• 14:59Lester Nare?

  for basic research does not just exist within the National Science Foundation. National Science Foundation is 4% of the entire research and development budget that the federal government puts money into. The majority of that actually goes to, unsurprisingly, the Department of Defense, recently rebranded the Department of War. The second place is Health and Human Services, HHS. So a lot of times when people talk about funding for scientific research, scientific research happens in a lot of these other agencies. This includes NASA, this includes the Department of Energy, and several others. And the point I'm just bringing up

• 15:42Lester Nare?

  here is while the NSF is probably the agency where the majority of their funding is purely focused on basic research, as opposed to applied research, right? The idea that you have a specific commercial outcome that you're driving towards. We actually have a great tool on the site now that looks at the history of funding by the federal government and by the private sector since the 1950s, that shows how the government was the largest funder of this research, both basic and applied. And the private sector is now well outsizing the federal government in terms of research and development funding. Most of the private

• 16:26Lester Nare?

  sector is applied. Yeah. Versus basic. That's a key difference. And so the current battle that's happening around who gets to decide what ideas get grant funding. And there's this move to say, we want less basic research and more applied research. I think one of the big things that's missing from that conversation is the private sector is already well, is funding applied research, well beyond the scope of anything close to the amount of money that's coming from the federal government. Yeah. And so we're not lacking applied. Yeah. Research and like, we're not lacking funding in that arena. That's a good point. Yeah. Like, the federal government does not need to put more money in that.

• 17:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Lester Nare?

  It's like so. And again, you can see this directly. So there's this argument like, oh, we want federal government funding more things that become commercial technologies.

• 17:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Why?

• 17:16Lester Nare?

  There's already too much money going into that arena. And these basic research ideas that the Golden Goose Awards identifies that end up having GLP-1s, like we talked about last episode, is going to be a driver of GDP growth in America. Yeah. Period. Because of how successful it is. And if that federal research grant to study Gila monster venom was not given.

• 17:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. None of that would have.

• 17:41Lester Nare?

  LA would look very different right now. I'm just saying. Yeah. I'm just saying.

• 17:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Hundred percent.

• 17:46Lester Nare?

  There's a lot of nuance to the funding conversation. And I think it's important to understand the data. And one of the things we try to do here at FFP is we have seen a lot of comments as we've talked about funding.

• 18:00Lester Nare?

  And part of the thing we did was like, okay, let's go look at the data and not only look at the data, but give you all as the audience, the ability to also look at the data and understand what's actually happening here. We'll continue to talk about this. There's an ongoing conversation about where funding goes and why. And one of the interesting things about basic research in the federal government is the majority of it goes to the hard sciences and not the social sciences. And a big talking point, as we've seen, is people interdigitating the culture war.

• 18:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Lester Nare?

  Without understanding the data of like, how much of the funding goes to what they perceive to be social sciences that are not important. They are important, but the majority of the funding is not going to the things that people are complaining about.

• 18:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:50Lester Nare?

  And it's a very, so again, check out the tracker.

• 18:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And those who don't want the funding to go to sciences will use that tiny fringe.

• 18:57Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 18:58Krishna Choudhary?

  To justify a blanket.

• 19:02Lester Nare?

  Wholesale.

• 19:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Wholesale like overhaul of the federal funding infrastructure. Look, there's a reason why America is at the forefront of technology and it has been since post-war. And it's because we have invested clearly in fundamental science, right? So before you go on your tirade about how, oh, you know, it's pseudo, it's because taxpayer dollars are going into pseudoscience. The, the numbers do not agree with you.

• 19:31Lester Nare?

  It's the data does not.

• 19:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Lester Nare?

  It, that's not. And again, we've provided it so that it can be looked at. And this is like, it's, it's a valid conversation to have about like, how do we as a democracy choose to spend our money?

• 19:45Lester Nare?

  Science R and D as compared to the rest of the US.

• 19:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Lester Nare?

  National budget is a rounding error.

• 19:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:52Lester Nare?

  And so if you're worried about your taxpayer money.

• 19:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And the value per dollar.

• 19:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah, is like well outside the other ways we spend our money. Um, maybe like all these tax credits and stuff we're giving to record profit corporations.

• 20:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Hey.

• 20:06Lester Nare?

  Maybe that's a great area to start to claw back taxpayer dollars.

• 20:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Lester Nare?

  Just an idea, just an idea. So again, the, the Golden Goose Awards really tries to identify this connection between curiosity-based research and these outsized impacts on all of us. And as you can see, uh, we're, we're just breezing through today, guys. It's been a couple of tough episodes. We did Jacobian conjecture, Reamont hypothesis, two-part quantum computing.

• 20:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Lester Nare?

  Six hours total over two episodes.

• 20:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Lester Nare?

  And then a phenomenal deep dive on this like evolutionary pharmacology episode. I'm trying to, guys, I'm trying to give Krishna a break here. Okay. It's been a lot.

• 20:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Lester Nare?

  It's tough. It's weekly. It's dense. We really try to do our research, provide the information. It's just the two of us. We're doing the best we can. We're going to take a quick break here, uh, and talk about the shilling we have to. Uh, for those listening for the first time, this is not like our normal episodes. We're talking about some of our great episodes that go into deep dives. But one of the things we did want to do is take an opportunity to look at, uh, one of our, uh, recent upgrades that many of you may not know. I always talk about the website and the fact that it's a great

• 21:32Lester Nare?

  resource. And I think many may not have noticed, but we did a huge.

• 21:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Ooh, look at that.

• 21:42Lester Nare?

  We did a huge revamp on the website. You can see our platonic solids on the homepage. Now doing our animation around from first principles, but I wanted to take this opportunity to identify, because we have so many new listeners.

• 21:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Lester Nare?

  That have joined us, uh, just in the last couple of weeks. And our archive is absolute gold.

• 22:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Lester Nare?

  And so I wanted to go through and ask you, our resident PhD Krishna, you know, what are some of your favorite episodes or ones that you think that the viewers should take a look at, uh, if they want to kind of go back into the archives, uh, to see something they might be interested in?

• 22:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, one of the big ones that I'm proud of is the Reamont hypothesis episode, episode 53. Um, but I think a lot of the new, a lot of the new, um, viewers may have actually come from that. So let's go, let's go to some of the other ones that are, that are, that are a bit older. Um, the one before that would have to be, I think, if you go down, episode 46 and 47.

• 22:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 22:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Our America 250 celebration. Um, this is where I compiled a giant list of some 400 plus American achievements in science and technology and patents. And, um, it was something that we had planned for just one episode.

• 23:02Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 23:03Krishna Choudhary?

  And it, it became so much. And we, we had these, we had these.

• 23:07Lester Nare?

  Outrageous outfits.

• 23:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Outrageous outfits because it was our 250th birthday as a nation, as a nation that has contributed so much to humanity in terms of science and technology. Um, so I would definitely suggest checking those out. If you want a fast-paced kind of what did we do? Um, it just goes through timeline, one after the other of all the things that we have done. And for those who would like to go through the interactive timeline that we actually go through on the episode, you can go through, uh, innovation and discovery by discovery at our America 250 page. It's a great way to just do a retrospective on it. That is a great episode to reference. That is fantastic.

• 23:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Krishna Choudhary?

  So I like that one. That's a good call out.

• 23:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that one's a good one. Um, after that, I would say the harder than diamond 38, episode 38, when we did, um, our second.

• 24:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 24:05Lester Nare?

  Um, new hexagonal diamond.

• 24:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 24:07Lester Nare?

  That one was a really good one because there was such a nice human story behind it. There were two Chinese groups that I think basically hate each other.

• 24:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 24:16Lester Nare?

  That were like trying to claim that they had gotten the new hexagonal diamond first. And we went into some of the intricacies of the reviewer comments about how the reviewers didn't believe them and how this group had to really convince them. And once they convinced them, the reviewers went to bat for them. And then they basically had like a, a duel in the press where the old, the old hexagonal diamonds guy were like, they didn't do anything new. And then the reviewer was like, nah, kinda. I mean, it's, it's, it's a really fun, cool human story about just how competitive.

• 24:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 24:55Lester Nare?

  Sciences and specifically how competitive Chinese sciences in the modern day.

• 25:00Krishna Choudhary?

  I also think another good, interesting part about that episode specifically was unpacking the word peer review.

• 25:07Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Gets thrown around a lot.

• 25:09Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Krishna Choudhary?

  What does it actually mean in practice? Uh, how rigorous is it really?

• 25:14Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and I think, cause we again, went into the actual peer review files and talked about the back and forth. And I think it was a great, uh, expose in, in how, in how robust that process is, um, and what it actually looks like. That's a great one.

• 25:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that's, that's a really good one. Episode 35 is really great. It's, um, about our good friend, Daniel Tokers.

• 25:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 25:40Lester Nare?

  Science of consciousness. Um, he is the brain scientist on Instagram. He has a bunch of followers, a great scientific communicator. Um, definitely check out that episode because he had developed a new AI model to not only detect consciousness, but also figure out ways to, um, you know, wake them up.

• 25:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Hopefully.

• 26:00Lester Nare?

  Big deal.

• 26:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Like people in comas. It was, it was a huge deal. And it was a really eye opener for me because I didn't know a lot about this subject. So when I was researching it, I had a bunch of calls with him. I mean, he's a good friend of ours, uh, former classmate at Princeton University. So it was really nice to be able to just call up the first author.

• 26:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Krishna Choudhary?

  On the phone and be like, hey, what, what was this figure exactly? And then he'd be like, well, okay, this is how I did it. It, it was really cool to see that happen.

• 26:27Lester Nare?

  And if you want to see me with extra short hair, this is a great episode to check out. Uh, and when you say AI models, I want to be clear, there's a difference between what people think of just generative AI.

• 26:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

• 26:39Lester Nare?

  The AI is a very broad term that addresses a wide variety of the technology.

• 26:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Lester Nare?

  And there are amazing ways in which it's being used in scientific contexts.

• 26:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 26:51Lester Nare?

  That was a very good one.

• 26:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that was a good one. Um, episode 33, this is where can human neurons really play Doom?

• 26:58Lester Nare?

  Ah, Doom. Can it play Doom?

• 27:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we, we really went into the nitty gritties of what does that mean for a human Petri dish, a Petri dish of neurons to play Doom? How does, how do you actually train a Petri dish of human neurons to play Doom? How do you keep it alive long enough for it to learn how to play Doom?

• 27:19Lester Nare?

  Because that was the claim.

• 27:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And it turns out there's, there's a little bit of hype. There's also some really cool science, but if you want to understand what is hype and what is science, that's a great way of figuring that out.

• 27:34Lester Nare?

  What has been deemed wetware engineering.

• 27:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 27:38Lester Nare?

  Um, in the intelligence community, wetware or wet works, I should say, is a very different connotation, but that is not the scope of this show.

• 27:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Lester Nare?

  Moving on, next one, I'll actually go back to episode 23.

• 27:52Krishna Choudhary?

  23, okay.

• 27:53Lester Nare?

  Um, time vaults.

• 27:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, classic.

• 27:57Lester Nare?

  This one was crazy.

• 27:58Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a classic.

• 27:59Lester Nare?

  This one was crazy. I mean, it starts with, um, James Webb telescope's little red dots, which is already, that's a great astrophysics story if you guys are interested. But I think the real gem in this one is the time vault story. Um, I think it's a future Nobel Prize. They basically, I mean, you, you made the analogy of it's a Mac time machine.

• 28:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Lester Nare?

  But for your cells.

• 28:22Krishna Choudhary?

  But for your cells, which is, it has incredible implications.

• 28:25Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Uh, for cancer research, for just understanding how cells work in general. I thought that was a, that was a really, really cool one.

• 28:33Krishna Choudhary?

  This was one of my favorite episodes we've ever done. Again, some, you know, we've iterated on the show a couple of times, doing multiple stories in a single episode versus doing a deep dive. It's, it's been an ebb and flow, uh, but the time vaults segment in this episode is top tier.

• 28:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Krishna Choudhary?

  It's been one of our most popular clips.

• 28:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Like set, set of clips on social media.

• 28:55Lester Nare?

  100%.

• 28:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Because it is such an incredible, it's so incredible.

• 28:59Lester Nare?

  It's so good. It's so good. Next one, episode 20.

• 29:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 29:03Lester Nare?

  This was. The fusion story that got us on Joe Rogan. Yes, this is our Christmas special in end of 2025. Yes, and so it was, it was an unfortunate sort of Yeah. situation because MIT plasma physicist, Professor Nuno Larrero had been recently just murdered in Cambridge in his apartment in what seems like a crazy, crazy situation. Yeah. But we, we wanted to just give him and his science the due spotlight that it deserves. And we talked about some of the science that he was responsible for. We went pretty deep and we talked about some of the fusion problems that he had solved.

• 29:48Lester Nare?

  And some of the problems that his science is still solving to this day. This idea of fast magnetic reconnection. Mm hmm. Uh, which is, is really fascinating. And obviously, um, this area, uh, particularly within, uh, circles in this new, uh, nuclear age in America is, it's really important because we've seen a lot of these like micro nuclear reactor startups and there's this reinvigoration of, of looking at this as a means of energy production. Exactly. And there's some fundamentals in here that are interesting as it relates to kind of understanding that

• 30:30Lester Nare?

  that boom, um, it did get us, shout out to, to young Jamie. Yeah. Who pulled us up out of the blue. Uh, while they were talking about, uh, UFOs. Yeah. Where the connection was, I don't really remember, but, uh, we did get a, a huge shout out there, which again. Yeah. I mean, I, look, regardless of what you think about the Joe Rogan podcast, it's the, it's the biggest podcast out there. And for, for two unknowns like us who just started a podcast like six months ago. At that point, it was five, five months in. Yeah, like five months in to get like a shout out on the Joe Rogan podcast. Uh, we, we thought it was a pretty cool deal.

• 31:11Lester Nare?

  And I will say, if we can bring that audience in and talk to them and help them understand the idea of what we try to do it from first principles, we can start to kind of again combat this anti-science movement. Yep. This conspiracy laden movement and just like, we have the tools to understand information. Yeah. We gotta do it. Next one, episode 19, the one right before the double helix episode. We were on a heater. That one was a good episode. I gotta say, that one was a good episode. The Watson and Crick, Watson is not the guy. Uh, uh, Krishna in his Chamath fit.

• 31:47Lester Nare?

  And I literally, I do the thing.

• 31:50Lester Nare?

  I think you literally called it out, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But this was about the human story behind the, um, discovery of the structure of DNA. It was commemorating James Watson, who had recently died. His legacy, both the good and a lot of the bad. We don't shy away from the bad on this podcast. So we talked about Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin. And that human story, which is full of drama. It's like something that you could make a movie out of. A hundred percent. Yeah. And I believe actually Natalie Portman is going to be starring in a movie very soon. Oh. Where she is playing Rosalind Franklin. Oh, so for the. Yeah, I heard on the grapevine.

• 32:30Lester Nare?

  So for the producers who are working on that, uh, scientific advisors, even for creator, marketing promotion, uh, we're the best in the business. Yeah. You know where to find us. Yep, exactly. This is actually, it, it's the same episode that has the first unbreakable diamonds. Yeah, yes, yes. So the, the, the first group that showed hexagonal diamonds. And then they're the ones that were shitting on Yes. the, the more recent episode. Yes. Um, but the hacking the hu- human brain one was really cool because it was a mind reading brain computer interface. Yes, yes. That at its, at its face was something that is very benign because you know, a lot of people have debilitating

• 33:14Lester Nare?

  paralysis. And so they can't actually express what they mean. This is something that was reading inner thoughts. Well, it gets a little hairy. It gets very dicey. We get into some of these, some of these questions there. I, I will note for those who are watching the show right now, you can see, uh, the production has evolved quite a bit. Yeah, it has actually. Look at that. Since, since we started, um, it's taken a while. Um, but one of the things that's always been consistent is we've been overlay heavy. Mm hmm. Since day one. Yeah. Always citing sources has been a key part of the show. Yep. Uh, shout out Princeton Tigers, as you can see. Yeah. This is like, this is a very.

• 33:58Lester Nare?

  A trip down memory lane. This is a month in. Yeah. Literally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is our fourth, fifth episode. Yeah. Like, yeah. We had just, five weeks in. Look at, we were just like, yeah, let's just keep going. Look at how, we look so old now. Yeah. We do. Oh, my gosh. We've aged so much. In like a year. In a year. Look, the content hamster wheel is tough, y'all. I don't, I don't. I'm a father, right? Yeah. I don't know what your excuse is. Look, look, look, I, I agree with you. My hairline is not receding. I was born this way. Uh, so that's not where it's coming from. Yeah. And then finally, I think, I think the last one I would say is just episode one. If you want to see like. Where we started. Where we started.

• 34:42Lester Nare?

  Where we, yeah, it was, it was. I, I still remember this day when we were like, you know what? Yeah, whatever. Let's, let's, let's post it online. Oh, my God, look at this. We still had the platonic solids. The color scheme is different now. We've, we've honed in on it. Honed in on it. We didn't have a logo yet. Yep. Um, I'm still wearing Princeton at the time because I felt I needed to wear, I thought I needed to wear it for every episode. Studio is very different. Uh, Not that different. Same, same. Same, same. Yeah. But different. And at the time, we just basically had two static videos of both of us. Yeah. Awkwardly looking at each other across the video in the middle. Yeah. So clearly we've, we've come a long way, but that's as a, as a small kind of, uh,

• 35:24Lester Nare?

  for those who may be new to the show and haven't gone through the archive, uh, there's a lot of great, great stuff. That's evergreen. It's, it's stuff that's still relevant. Unlike news and sports where like this week it's relevant, next week it's not. Uh, a lot of what we talk about is timeless. Yeah. Um, and there is, it's not by accident. Um, so again, the website is great. Actually, you know what? Hold on. We're having fun today. Let me, let me do a couple. Let me do a couple. Yeah, no, you should show them, dude. This is sick. Cause there's a couple of things on the website that folks might not be aware of that are there. And so when you come to the homepage, what, one of the things you'll be able to see is, we talked about the science funding piece earlier.

• 36:06Lester Nare?

  Our science funding explorer is very robust. And so if you don't really understand who pays for American science and the history of that, we have a great sort of story view that'll take you through the history of how this has happened. And you can just see from this view here, the red line we're looking at is the federal government and how it used to spend for research and development in the US, going back to the late 50s, 60s and 70s, where the federal government was the biggest driver here. This is where we're getting things like Manhattan Project, et cetera, et cetera. And that was the Cold War. Right. So it need, it made sense. Yeah. There was a military incentive, blah, blah, blah. But you know, basically after, you know, 1980, industry is orders of magnitude more in spending on research and development. So this is why when we talk about

• 36:51Lester Nare?

  this argument about the federal government shouldn't be spending on basic science research, you need to understand the scope of the volume of how much money is being spent by the federal government versus, it's literally 5X. Yeah. So, you know, it, it's just very different. There's great charts. It's super interactive, but we also have the ability for you to dig in by agency. So if you want to know, right? So we have this ranked here in terms of like what agencies get the most money. Um, and this is sort of looking at, uh, the, the current year's budget. DoD is number one. A Department of Health of Humans and Health and Human Services is number two. Department of Energy, NUCS, uh, is number three. NASA, unsurprisingly, number four. Only then. Yeah.

• 37:36Lester Nare?

  Do we get to the National Science Foundation, which could take so much oxygen in the room. Uh, NSF is $7 billion. DoD is 95 billion. Yeah. So like, we're, we're not even the same, but people would be surprised to know that Department of Commerce and Agriculture and the VA and DOT and Department of, these agencies also have very interesting research programs. And again, you can click into any of these to see a breakdown of like how that budget has changed over time. What are they spending their money on? So there's the Office of Science in the DOE versus energy efficiency and renewable energy. And you can see how those budget ranges have changed over time. Nuclear energy, as you can see in the DOE, has seen a huge boost.

• 38:19Lester Nare?

  Uh, it's always been big, but especially recently has seen a, a huge boost. So it's very detailed. It's well worth a look to really get a grounding about what's happening in that space. Another cool thing is all of our research papers that we cover, uh, you can get to here. So if you're like, oh, where's the DOI link? Like where's the research paper link? Go to the website. The quantum computing episode we just did, we have the research paper right here. You can get to it, what the paper is, what episodes we cover in those papers. We've really spent a lot of time trying to build an ecosystem that's interesting. And as a fan of the prem.

• 38:57Lester Nare?

  We've now implemented our science transfers, our transfer market. Something that's making people very upset because the idea that the US is losing its edge is a math, a mathema, whatever the word is, is just, it's so counter to their worldview. We're still building it out piece by piece, but you can start to see with our first 37 scientists we've put in here, who are big names, global laureates, people who've won big prizes, leaders of labs, uh, it's not looking good right now.

• 39:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Lester Nare?

  It's not a complete data set, but you'll be able to look at each of the transfers individually, their effective date, you can see where they're coming from, where they're going, what the sources are for it. This is really cool stuff, y'all, and we already talked about the America 250. I'll just mention, if you want to support the show, the shop's got a couple of things in it. It's got some good stuff. We just added the platonic tea. I think we're going to order some of these, uh, these bone.

• 39:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I'm gonna get a bunch of those.

• 39:50Lester Nare?

  We're gonna get some of these soon. So in any event, we'll stop shilling. We had to take a little bit of time to talk about it.

• 39:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:58Lester Nare?

  Uh, because we have to fill some airtime here, everybody. We're having a good time. We're having a break. We're gonna get back to the rest of the fall season calendar, uh, as we are going through some of the exciting things. The next thing we're gonna talk about, we did not talk about the launch, which occurred on August 30th.

• 40:16Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 40:17Lester Nare?

  We are going to do a little discussion on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is already launched. What we're seeing now is a visual of how it's going to deploy as it reaches L2, Lagrange point two, which is its destination, uh, with the first images, again, space-based telescope, uh, very similar to the James Webb Space Telescope in that it's space-based, but very different in what it's going to be capturing. We should be expecting images in early 2027, which is fantastic. So again, we're watching this deployment sequence here, which I think is so good.

• 41:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So I mean, there's so many things that have to go right in order for this thing to work. And did you know that this started its life as a spy satellite?

• 41:11Lester Nare?

  Uh, I was, I saw some headlines about this.

• 41:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy. The, the mirror is from a former spy satellite that the military was like, oh, we're not using anymore. And NASA was like, whoa, can we have it? And then they put it on this, on this thing. It's, the mirror is actually identical to the Hubble mirror.

• 41:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:31Krishna Choudhary?

  But the camera is very different, which is why this particular telescope is going to be very different. And there it is, flying to L2, which is just behind the earth,

• 41:45Krishna Choudhary?

  where the James Webb Space Telescope is hanging out.

• 41:49Lester Nare?

  And we can see how far we're talking, like, we, you know, are we talking about?

• 41:52Krishna Choudhary?

  The orbit of the moon.

• 41:53Lester Nare?

  Well passed. And we talked about Artemis two, and now it's crazy. And we can sort of see the, the orbital mechanics here a little bit.

• 42:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It's just behind the earth. If, if the sun is in front, this is behind, and it's going to be orbiting that L2 point, the Lagrange two point.

• 42:09Lester Nare?

  And so I saw this description where it talked about how we can think about the, the James Webb Space Telescope as like a zoom lens on a camera, looking really far away to the beginnings of the universe. And Roman is more like this wide angle survey camera, very much like Hubble.

• 42:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Lester Nare?

  Trying to just capture.

• 42:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Although, no, I would say it's, I would say it's very much like Vera Rubin.

• 42:34Lester Nare?

  Uh, that's a very good point. Yes.

• 42:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Because Vera Rubin is one of these survey telescopes with a very large field of view.

• 42:40Lester Nare?

  That's very fair.

• 42:40Krishna Choudhary?

  The Hubble is kinda like James Webb in that it's still zoomed in.

• 42:43Lester Nare?

  It's still zoomed in. That's very fair.

• 42:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Lester Nare?

  No, that's very fair. And there's so many aspects of science with dark, uh, dark matter, huge exoplanet census through this micro lensing concept. There are so many things, like we talked about in our Vera Rubin, Vera Rubin episode, which was important is this idea that let's just capture all the data.

• 43:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Lester Nare?

  Dump it down and then let people have at it.

• 43:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Lester Nare?

  And there's so much science you can do, once we start actually doing these, you know, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Vera Rubin surveys, and now this, this Roman. And, and the, uh, the sports analogy, because for all the sports ball fanatics, I'm so determined to continue this ESPN for science concept. It's like, we're in the process now where we're going through training camp as we prepare for the first season.

• 43:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:33Lester Nare?

  Of this new signing, uh, and it's a, it's a very promising signing.

• 43:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, it is. I mean, the, the thing that I think everyone is excited about is the fact that it has the same resolution as Hubble, but the field of view is something like a hundred times larger. So it can see a bigger patch of the sky at the same fidelity. Um, what, and a lot of astronomers are really excited because it's going to answer questions about dark energy and dark matter. Me personally, if you were to ask me, I am very excited about this idea of micro lensing.

• 44:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And you're gonna like this idea because, so most of the planets, most of the exoplanets that we know about are from Kepler, and Kepler was a transiting observatory, right? Which means that the planet has to go in front of the star, and then the star's light is gonna dip. And if that dip is rhythmic, then we know that the planet has gone in front, and it's gone in front, and it's gone in front, and we know that there's a planet there. And then we can do all sorts of, um, nice analyses about the atmospheric.

• 44:37Lester Nare?

  Retrieval.

• 44:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Retrieve, yes, atmospheric retrieval, what is the atmosphere on this planet, and so on and so forth. But in order to find those types of planets, you have to get very lucky.

• 44:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Because the angle of that solar system, the axis or the, the plane of rotation of that solar system has to be in line with however the earth is looking at that star.

• 45:00Lester Nare?

  Our line of sight to the star.

• 45:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, yeah. Like if, if the star is over there, then the solar system better be rotating this way, such that the plate is like edge on.

• 45:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 45:10Krishna Choudhary?

  If the star is over there, then it better be edge on, and so on and so forth. And that's because it relies on the transit method. What about solar systems that are oblique?

• 45:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 45:21Krishna Choudhary?

  For example, the star is like this, and the solar, the planet is revolving this way.

• 45:25Lester Nare?

  Meaning the planet is not gonna, uh, uh, revolve in front of its, yeah, star.

• 45:30Krishna Choudhary?

  There's no eclipse.

• 45:30Lester Nare?

  In our line of sight.

• 45:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So there's no dip in the.

• 45:34Lester Nare?

  In brightness.

• 45:35Krishna Choudhary?

  In the brightness. Um, what about then? That's where this micro lensing techniques comes in. Okay, what they're using is piggybacking off of Einstein's general relativity to say that when there's a star, let's say the star is right here, and there's a background star behind it. If the star moves in front, it's gonna gravitationally lens that light, and the background star is gonna get a little bit brighter. Well, if there's a star and a planet right in front, then I'm gonna see a sort of spike in that gravitational lensing, right? And so now this is a technique where we can start having access to solar systems,

• 46:18Krishna Choudhary?

  exoplanets, that no longer have that constraint, you know?

• 46:24Lester Nare?

  And if you're interested in this topic, we actually talked to a friend of the pod, astrophysicist Dan Gillman.

• 46:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 46:31Lester Nare?

  While you were on paternity leave, about how scientists actually study dark matter. And we talked in depth about this concept of strong gravitational lensing, but it'll at least be somewhat adjacent or tend, you know, to this idea, which is very interesting. And again, to your point, it is a, is a very important distinction between the transit method in terms of how we do exoplanet detection.

• 46:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Lester Nare?

  His reference point for, um, this idea of gravitational lensing is for dark matter detection.

• 47:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, and it's an incredible episode. And this one is, you know, you can use gravitational lensing for exoplanets itself. And also shout out to Dan, he's actually organizing a conference right now.

• 47:12Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 47:14Krishna Choudhary?

  At the University of Chicago, at the KICP. Um, it's a dark matter physics in the era of large surveys conference. So best of luck to you, Dan. Hopefully the, the conference goes well.

• 47:28Lester Nare?

  There's some news headline I just saw the other day about Slack finding, figuring out something about dark matter. And I don't remember what the headline was, but it was.

• 47:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah. Um, I don't think it was Slack. It was, it was, well, maybe it was Slack, but it was, it was direct detection.

• 47:42Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 47:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Of dark matter.

• 47:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Krishna Choudhary?

  There was a news headline. I was tempted to do a story on it, but I want to.

• 47:49Lester Nare?

  It's a little early.

• 47:50Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a little early, is all I'm gonna say, right?

• 47:52Lester Nare?

  Let's, let's, let's let them cook.

• 47:54Krishna Choudhary?

  The sigma is not that high, and, um.

• 47:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a notoriously hard measurement to make. I mean, all power to them. If, if we get a coincident measurement at another direct detection dark matter, like Japan has one, Italy has one in these mines. The South Dakota one is in a mine and they, you know, they purport to have found a dark matter particle. If there is a coincident detection with the same mass and the same energy scale, that's a Nobel Prize waiting to happen, right? So.

• 48:26Lester Nare?

  Immediately.

• 48:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that is an immediate, immediately, yes.

• 48:32Lester Nare?

  Immediately, yes. We're not gonna wait until you're on your deathbed for that.

• 48:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so I'm, I'm waiting for this type of coincident detection. If it does happen, we will 100% cover it. It's very exciting.

• 48:44Lester Nare?

  To stay tuned for future news there. We just have two more in our fall season update to cover. And we thought this was gonna be a short episode, but like always, we find a way to yap away. So our next one, many of you know, I'm a big space fan, so pulled a lot of space stuff for this. But this is some of the most exciting things at the frontier that people all feel very resonant around. And our next story is going to be about JAXA's Martian moon exploration mission. I should say Martian moons exploration mission.

• 49:24Lester Nare?

  We're now looking at their fancy video breakdown of what we're gonna do.

• 49:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And JAXA, real quick, is the Japanese.

• 49:32Lester Nare?

  Yes, excuse me.

• 49:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Version of NASA.

• 49:34Lester Nare?

  Correct, that's correct. And this is a mission that is in collaboration with NASA as well as the European Space Agency, ESA, along with both the French and German space agencies. The idea is to do a survey of Mars's two moons, Phobos, Deimos, and to land on Phobos.

• 49:55Krishna Choudhary?

  That's crazy.

• 49:55Lester Nare?

  To take a sample.

• 49:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 49:58Lester Nare?

  And, you know, so we're seeing here, it's getting close and it's doing.

• 50:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Slowing down.

• 50:02Lester Nare?

  Slowing down, cuz you know, we gotta slow it down. And what, what we've covered on the pod before here, right? And I'll actually pull up this next video example where we're gonna see, it's gonna drop its little probe. This is very similar to the Hayabusa 2.

• 50:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Very similar, yes.

• 50:21Lester Nare?

  And it's effectively like the level up where they, you know, took a sample from an asteroid, which has been returned to Earth. And so now we're like, okay, let's do one better. And so this is a very interesting, we're now seeing the solar panels pop out.

• 50:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Wow.

• 50:35Lester Nare?

  The real structure, right? And it's, it's super fascinating. It takes a village to make something like this happen. And then it goes and retrieves it.

• 50:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Retrieves it, right?

• 50:46Lester Nare?

  From the surface, comes back up, again, very similar to Hayabusa 2, which we covered on the pod. And then it's gonna return back to Earth and then it's gonna just shoot it apparently at Australia.

• 50:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Australia, yeah.

• 51:02Lester Nare?

  But the core scientific question that it seems like they're looking to answer with this is, are Mars's moons captured asteroids? Or are they debris created by a giant impact?

• 51:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Ah, okay, okay. Kinda like, cuz there's a hypothesis that our own moon is created by debris from giant impact when a Mars-sized object ran into us like, you know, a few hundred million years into our existence, like four billion years ago.

• 51:31Lester Nare?

  That's, that's exactly.

• 51:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, that's interesting.

• 51:34Lester Nare?

  And we now know we can land on something, send something down, collect something. And when we talked about Hayabusa 2, it's like had a little detonation to loosen up the asteroid surface to be able to collect it and come up. And so this is gonna be, again, an interesting next step here. It's, it's sort of like JAXA's moving up from the championship to the prem. They're moving up the division in complexity. And so we shall see. This is now slated for October 20th for a launch window.

• 52:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 52:08Lester Nare?

  And looking to return samples to Earth by 2031. It is a long drive. So this is again, in this fall window, something that's super exciting and we'll keep an eye on.

• 52:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that is super exciting.

• 52:23Lester Nare?

  Speaking of ions, which is something we've talked about a lot in the brain in recent episodes. No, I'm kidding. For, for our last piece of coverage here, we will talk about, surprisingly, another space story.

• 52:37Krishna Choudhary?

  All right.

• 52:37Lester Nare?

  And this is the Bepi Colombo Mercury arrival. So this is what is the second and most complex mission to orbit Mercury, the first rock from the sun. Going towards, Mercury's tough because it's so close to the sun. There's so many challenges of, of doing that. We've had some solar, you know, missions go and have been very impressive.

• 53:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, some of the ones like straight up like go and like touch the sun.

• 53:06Lester Nare?

  It's very impressive.

• 53:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like the Parker Solar Probe, which is named after Eugene Parker, who we cover in the America 250. He's the one who postulated that something like the solar wind should exist. So again, plugging that episode, that's a great episode.

• 53:25Lester Nare?

  Interestingly, Mercury is the least explored planet of the inner solar system. And one of the goals of learning about Mercury would be to shed light on the history of the entire solar system.

• 53:39Krishna Choudhary?

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 53:40Lester Nare?

  Given its proximity to the parent star. It's named after Giuseppe Bepi Colombo, who's a scientist, mathematician, and engineer. Yes, they exist, triple threat, at the University of Padua in Italy, who first proposed this idea of interplanetary gravity assist maneuvers, which was used by the 1974 Mariner 10 mission. And if anyone's watched Interstellar, is, is now, it's in every movie. It's everything. When we do.

• 54:12Krishna Choudhary?

  It's how we got to Pluto, it's how we get anywhere.

• 54:14Lester Nare?

  It's how we get anywhere. It's packed with a bunch of scientific instruments. And so part of what they're looking to do, in terms of the questions they're trying to answer is, why is there ice in the polar craters of Mercury, given how close it is to the sun and how hot it is?

• 54:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, interesting, yeah.

• 54:32Lester Nare?

  Why does Mercury have a magnetic field?

• 54:35Krishna Choudhary?

  That is a weird one, actually.

• 54:37Lester Nare?

  Right? And what are the mysterious hollows on its surface? Cuz it has these hollow areas on its surface. And so there's a couple of different components to the mission. It has the Mercury Planetary Orbiter. It has the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, which is specifically around this idea of studying the magnetic fields. And it has the Mercury Transfer Module. Now, it launched in 2018 from Europe's spaceport. Europe's still in the game. It's in operation and en route to Mercury. It's done several Mercury flybys already.

• 55:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, okay.

• 55:17Lester Nare?

  October 21, June 22, June 23, September 24, September 24, December 24, and January 25. Its arrival at Mercury is scheduled. And it's basically, it's been tuning its, it's tuning its approach. They've been testing the systems.

• 55:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 55:35Lester Nare?

  It's expected to arrive around Christmas time 2026, December 2026, and to begin routine scientific operation, hopefully around April of 2027. And the two orbiters that we discussed, the ESA is gonna be doing the Planetary Orbiter, studying Mercury itself. JAXA, Japanese Space Agency, is gonna be the one studying the magnetosphere. And so it's, it's a weird planet.

• 56:06Krishna Choudhary?

  It is.

• 56:07Lester Nare?

  And we don't really have enough data to make any conclusions around it. And so this has been an eight-year road trip. And we're finally getting to our destination to be able to do the science.

• 56:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:19Lester Nare?

  And this should be pretty interesting.

• 56:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm actually quite excited about that. Mercury, you know, you remind me of all the things that make Mercury so weird. One of the things is, as you mentioned here in the notes, enormous iron core. That's a weird one, because like if, if you've ever seen the, a photo of Earth and its core, the core is about the size of the pit of a peach. And then the meat of the peach is like the mantle. With Mercury, it's kind of like, you know, those lint chocolates?

• 56:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Or something where the, it's mostly the core and then there's a, there's a layer of like crust of the chocolate. That's what Mercury is like. Most of it is iron and then, and then the crust and mantle are like very, very thin. Now, one of the reasons for that is because Mercury is closer to the sun. And so when the solar system formed, the heavier elements were closer to the sun, while the lighter elements sort of just got like blown off by the protostellar wind that happens when you start, first start like making that furnace of, of a star, right? Like imagine you've got the gas cloud that's like collapsing. The heavier elements are in the, in the, in the center. The lighter elements are in the, in the, in the periphery.

• 57:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And then when you create fusion, there's gonna be intense stellar wind that's gonna blow off everything. That's why Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune and Uranus are the gas giants that are on the outside. And the rocky planets are on the inside. Well, Mercury is like the extreme version of the rocky planets, right? Where like the heaviest elements like iron, which is where fusion stops.

• 57:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:58Krishna Choudhary?

  So that's, that's where you're gonna have most abundance. That Mercury is gonna have most of the iron. But what's weird is like, for how small Mercury is, for how small Mercury is, its core should basically be solid, like it should have cooled off. But the fact that it still has a magnetic field means that there's some activity happening within the core that is creating the magnetosphere. That's how magnetic fields originate, right? It's because of charged particles moving around. That's why the Earth has a magnetic field, is because the core, the outer core mostly is like moving around. And that's why we think.

• 58:33Lester Nare?

  It's got a little jiggle.

• 58:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, have you seen the movie The Core? It's a great movie.

• 58:38Lester Nare?

  No, no, I haven't.

• 58:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, it's a great movie.

• 58:40Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 58:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Actually, even though a lot of, a lot of science people hate on it because it's like terrible science. Yeah, it's terrible science, but like. It's a great movie.

• 58:49Lester Nare?

  Look, it's entertaining.

• 58:50Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm not gonna lie.

• 58:51Lester Nare?

  It's entertaining.

• 58:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, the, the, the Earth's core stops spinning. So then the magnetic field stops being a magnetic field. And then we're about to get roasted by the sun. So they have to like go into the core to restart the core by nuking it. Come on, like, that's, that's dope.

• 59:08Lester Nare?

  That sounds very entertaining to me.

• 59:09Krishna Choudhary?

  It's dope, dude. Um, the, the science, not so much, but like the, the human stories behind it. Stanley Tucci's in it. He's like, he's like one of the main big scientists.

• 59:19Lester Nare?

  Of course he is.

• 59:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Who's like, who's like the, one of the famous scientists and the ego of the Stanley Tucci character is just so very on point with some of the big egos that I've interacted with in academia. Anyways, so Mercury is like this enigma because it still has a magnetic field, but it shouldn't because it's small enough to have cooled off. You know, the moon doesn't have a magnetic field and the moon is comparable to the size of Mercury. So it is a bit weird.

• 59:48Lester Nare?

  What's going on?

• 59:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Lester Nare?

  Um, thank you all for, uh, dealing with us in our half break week where we wanted to have a little bit of fun, talk about some of our favorite history. I'm going to ask two questions for those who may still be watching. We're keeping this almost exactly at an hour. This is record time. The yap sesh is going to cut at record time. The two questions I have is of all of the things we covered today, which one of them do you want us to do a deep dive on? Like, yeah, the Nobels is happening. Uh, are folks interested in the Golden Goose Awards? Uh, do they want us to look at any of these space missions and get a little bit more deep into what's going on there? Uh, so that's question number one.

• 1:00:32Lester Nare?

  The question number two, for potential long time listeners, what's your favorite episode?

• 1:00:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:00:38Lester Nare?

  We talked about some of our favorite episodes. I would love to know, uh, what brought you to the show? What was one where you're like, oh, this was fire? This is, this, this, this, you guys were in your bag on this episode.

• 1:00:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Lester Nare?

  Um.

• 1:00:52Krishna Choudhary?

  It helps us.

• 1:00:53Lester Nare?

  It helps us know kind of where to go and what to do. Um, but again, uh, kind of like the rundown format for those who've come to show for a while, where we touch on different things and give you a little smorgasbord. That was the goal for this episode. At some point in the future, when we have the ability to do so, a deep dive a week and a rundown a week would be ideal.

• 1:01:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Lester Nare?

  So you get to know exactly what's happening at the frontier, right when it happens. But then we still get the best part of the show, which is the real first principles deep dive, which in my view is like, that's our, that's our, uh, Michelin star dish.

• 1:01:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Lester Nare?

  Uh, you can't get anywhere else because this is the best science show on the planet. I'm Lester Nare joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. We are going to get out of your hair. We hope you all enjoyed your Labor Day weekend. We are about to go into ours. Up the chills. Can you believe it? It's unbelievable. Arsenal, it's unbelievable. I'm, I don't know what to tell you. You thought just because you beat us for the last five years meant that you were just going to stomp all over us in your own house? I'm sorry to tell you, times have changed. Enzo Fernandez, who needs him? He can go to Man City. It's fine. We don't need him. Y'all thought our centerman, oh, we're going to get chance. Uh, we have a good team. It's a good team. We had a great transfer.

• 1:02:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Wait, so is Enzo not coming back to Chelsea?

• 1:02:18Lester Nare?

  He's not. It's okay.

• 1:02:20Krishna Choudhary?

  It's okay.

• 1:02:20Lester Nare?

  There's a lot of drama around it, which we're not going to get into because this is not a, this is not a sports show, but there's some great drama.

• 1:02:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, I didn't, I didn't like him anyways.

• 1:02:27Lester Nare?

  We got a hundred twenty-five million dollars for him.

• 1:02:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. That's pretty good.

• 1:02:31Lester Nare?

  Look.

• 1:02:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And you got rid of Enzo.

• 1:02:33Lester Nare?

  No, I'm just kidding. He didn't want to, he didn't want to be there. Look, if you don't want to play for the Blues, for the badge, if you don't want to play for this, that's okay. We get it. Move on.

• 1:02:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Lester Nare?

  You wanted to go to Real Madrid and you ended up in Man City. I don't know what to tell you. You guys are probably going to get relegated for your crimes against the league because of all your cheating. So look, when we see Enzo Fernandez next season in the championship, I'm just, look, and we're going to win the prem, we're going to be world champions from the FIFA World Club World Cup, and we're going to be prem champions. And, you know, unlike Arsenal, we have a Champions League. You know, I, I don't know what to tell you. I'm sorry for your loss. Uh, you're going to come to the Stanford Bridge and you're also going to lose. I'm done. We will see you all next week.