Listener Questions #19

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about how pinworms know it's nighttime, how quarks contribute to mass, and why eating too many carrots makes your skin yellow. 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?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:05Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series, on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:37Speaker 04

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• 2:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey everyone, Daniel here with a quick note that my new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? is coming out soon, November 4th, and I'd love if you considered pre-ordering it. The book imagines the arrival of aliens and what it would be like to try to make mental contact and download their understanding of the universe. Do we have physics in common with the aliens? If you like how the podcast asks deep physics questions and dabbles in philosophy, you'll enjoy the book, which also features cute cartoons of aliens from my friend Andy Warner. Find it anywhere or check out the book website, www.alienspeakphysics.com. Okay, on to today's episode.

• 2:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  How do the pinworms know that it's night when they lurk in a place with so little light?

• 3:04Daniel Whiteson?

  If I upgraded my quirks to top quirk class, would I automatically get a bigger mass?

• 3:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you eat certain foods, your skin will change hue. Why does that happen? Do we have any clue?

• 3:18Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 3:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I've never had pinworms.

• 3:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, I'm Kelly. I'm a biologist and I'm not sure Daniel can be sure that he's never had pinworms.

• 3:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to the episode where we dig deep into Daniel's condition.

• 3:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so Daniel, my question for you today is, what was the most surprising thing about parenting?

• 4:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, great question. I think one of the most surprising things about parenting for me was how the gross quickly becomes monotonous and everyday. Like wiping somebody else's feces off of your hands or face is just like, you know, it's just another Tuesday.

• 4:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, I totally agree. The first time my daughter like projectile pooped and it was on the wall and on me, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so gross. And then by like the fifth time, I was like, I got some more laundry to do today. And it was like, it was like, nothing, whatever.

• 4:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And when you have visitors and they see the inside of your actual day to day routine and they're like, whoa, it gives you a taste for like, how far you've drifted from societal norms.

• 4:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you, you pretty quickly get back to normal expectations. You know, when your kids get past the age where you have to wipe your butt, you very quickly return to, I would prefer to not wipe people's butts if I could avoid it. Although I think taking care of each other is one of the best things that humans can do.

• 5:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I agree. But if my 16 year old pooped on me, it would be a pretty big memory. And I can't remember all the times she did it when she was young.

• 5:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Things change. Things change.

• 5:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. It would stand out now.

• 5:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 5:20Daniel Whiteson?

  How about you? What is one of your most surprising discoveries about parenting?

• 5:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it also has to do with hygiene. And it's how far our species has come with hygiene, because there's so many things that kids don't do naturally that you would expect they would want to do naturally.

• 5:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Like wash their hands?

• 5:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like wash their hands or take a shower.

• 5:37Daniel Whiteson?

  But doctors weren't washing their hands until like 150 years ago.

• 5:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. No, I, culture has played such a huge role in keeping us healthy. And it's amazing. And it really hit home for me when I was a parent. But I think that the, one of the things that surprised me in particular is the number of times I've had to say the phrase, get your hand out of your butt.

• 6:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which leads us into question one, because kids sticking their hands in their butts is how they transmit pinworms. And why pinworms is probably the most common worm infection in the United States.

• 6:13Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So get ready to get itchy, everyone.

• 6:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. So we have an amazing Discord community. And you can join us by going to danielandkelly.org and clicking on the link to our Discord channel. And Julian on Discord had this question that he wanted to share with us.

• 6:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And let me add another shout out to our Discord community. If you want to reach us, you can write us questions at [email protected]. But the Discord community is also a lot of fun. You can ask your questions there. There's lots of folks chatting and discussing, sharing recent articles. Talking about science. If you can't get enough Daniel and Kelly and science, come join us on Discord and be part of the inner sanctum.

• 6:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'd just like to shout out to our moderators, who are the best moderators on the whole entire internet, I'm sure.

• 6:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yes, absolutely. They win all the awards.

• 6:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  They do.

• 6:59Speaker 06

  Hey, Daniel and Kelly. This is Julian in Houston. As a parent of a small child, I've had pinworms on my mind a bit in the past couple of years. And I think I heard on a previous episode, you mentioned that pinworms tend to come out at night to lay their eggs and cause itchy butt. So my question is, how do pinworms know it's nighttime to come out and cause itchy butt? Thanks so much, and I look forward to hearing the answer.

• 7:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So Kelly, tell us, what is a pinworm?

• 7:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  A pinworm is a little worm. When it's an adult, it's about the size of a staple, so they're tiny. About 40 million people in the United States probably have pinworm right now, and a billion people worldwide. I think I said a moment ago that pinworms are the most common worm infection. That's in the US, where we don't have a lot of other kinds of worm infections. They're very common in children, and they're also kind of common in people in long-term care facilities.

• 7:52Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so let's estimate what fraction of our audience have pinworms right now as they're listening to this. We're talking 40 million people. That's like 15% of the US. Is it not evenly distributed? Because you're saying it's like children and old folks homes?

• 8:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so if you have children, and they are, let's say, preschool or elementary school age, there's a pretty good chance they have or have had pinworms. And there's a decent chance they gave it to you, although it does seem like adults become more resistant. And so even if your kids have it, you're not definitely going to get it. But doctors will often prescribe medication to an entire family if anyone in it gets the parasites, because it is pretty, pretty easy to transmit.

• 8:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So maybe like 1 in 10 of our listeners right now have pinworms? Maybe the pinworms are listening to this episode?

• 8:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if I have to remember our demographics from the last time we did a survey, we have a lot of men over 50 or 60, and they are highly unlikely to have pinworms. So I don't know about one in 10. It depends on how many of our current listeners have young kids, but there's a good chance that you have either had it at some point in your life, or if you have kids, you have it now.

• 9:03Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So tell us, what do these guys look like?

• 9:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  So they're in kind of nematodes. So these are cylindrical worms. They have no segments. So don't think about an earthworm. Think about just kind of like a hard outer case and a very tiny worm. They kind of come to an end, which is why they're called pinworms. As I mentioned before, they're like the size of a staple when they're adults.

• 9:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see.

• 9:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you might remember that a few months ago, we talked about geohelminths, or we called them the dirt worms. These are nematodes that you find in the dirt. This is another kind of nematode. So they're kind of related to the dirt worms we were talking about earlier.

• 9:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So you're using this phrase nematode, and it sounds like it describes a category of worm. What is a nematode?

• 9:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nematoda is a whole phylum of worms that have this like hard outer cuticle. Some of them live in the soil. Some of them are commensal with plants, and some of them are parasitic.

• 9:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. If I had to guess, if somebody just asked me what a nematode was, it sounds to me like some sort of miniature Japanese frog.

• 10:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's great.

• 10:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Like it might be served in a weird sushi or something, you know, very high end sushi.

• 10:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, that's completely wrong, but that is very cute. Very cute.

• 10:13Daniel Whiteson?

  So I'm imagining that the life cycle of these guys is not very cute. So tell us about it.

• 10:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 10:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And everyone, finish that snack you're having before you listen to this.

• 10:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or go wash your hands. So, so the infection route is what's called fecal, oral, or poop to mouth.

• 10:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Good start.

• 10:33Daniel Whiteson?

  That's an actual phrase people use?

• 10:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  I've heard it said in my community more than once. I don't know if it shows up in any textbooks, but poop to mouth.

• 10:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Ooh, all right. So tell us about it. Yeah.

• 10:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  The idea here is that you accidentally eat the eggs. So you accidentally consume an egg. It hatches into your body. And when it gets to the intestine, the males and the females will find each other and they'll mate. And then the males die.

• 10:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Inside you.

• 10:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Inside you.

• 11:00Daniel Whiteson?

  They're having a party inside you. Oh, my gosh.

• 11:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. You might not be dating, but The worms inside you might be. So someone's finding love in that body of yours.

• 11:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I guess that's good news.

• 11:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  I guess. I don't know.

• 11:12Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So they start out as eggs. You end up in your mouth. We'll get into that in a minute, I imagine.

• 11:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 11:18Daniel Whiteson?

  They hatch, they mate inside you and they have little babies. Oh, no, eggs, I guess.

• 11:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so the female starts producing eggs. The male, after reproducing, dies and gets digested. And so you'll never see the male.

• 11:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 11:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  The female, her eggs, she starts making eggs. They start maturing a little bit inside of her. Then she moves down farther into your intestine. And when she is ready to lay those eggs, at night, she will come out. She will crawl out of your anus.

• 11:47Daniel Whiteson?

  One's anus. Excuse me. One's anus.

• 11:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Crawl out of one's anus. And on the CDC website, it cracks me up because it says anus, and then in parentheses, butthole, just in case you weren't sure what an anus is.

• 12:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  So crawls out your butthole and the female needs oxygen to stimulate the release of eggs. And apparently, in some cases, she has what's called a prolapsed uterus, which essentially just means that her uterus sort of comes out of her body and expels the eggs. And I guess in some cases, they've observed the eggs going airborne. This expulsion happens so violently.

• 12:22Daniel Whiteson?

  This is much less cute than miniature Japanese frogs. I vote for miniature Japanese frogs. We should have that instead.

• 12:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you know, you don't get to choose.

• 12:30Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. But I have an actual side question.

• 12:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 12:32Daniel Whiteson?

  How do the eggs survive in my digestive tract? Like, you're dropping them in stomach acid and they're surviving?

• 12:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  So in this case, they're still inside of their mom. She doesn't expel them until she gets outside of the body.

• 12:43Daniel Whiteson?

  But the eggs I've consumed, right? The mom herself was born from an egg that I swallowed, right?

• 12:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. And your digestive juices helped it escape from the egg that it was living in.

• 12:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then its tough cuticle protects it from your juices.

• 12:57Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So she comes out the anus, does her little oxygen dance?

• 13:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. And she will lay her eggs in the peri-anal region. And then often she will die. And we'll talk about what happens if she doesn't die as a symptom that's bad, but. Most of the time she dies. And the eggs are sticky. And so they stick to your butt and they also kind of make you itch because now there's like some sticky stuff in your butt. And that's not great. And kids are likely to stick their hands in their butts, which is what I learned as a mom, is that they're always sticking their hands in their butts. And so they stick their hands in their butts and then they get it underneath their fingernails or on their fingers. And then

• 13:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Because they're scratchy because it's itchy.

• 13:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 13:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't make it sound so weird. They're itchy, so they're scratching.

• 13:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, okay, they're itchy, so they're scratching. They're humans. And then these grubby little creatures we call children go around and touch things. You know, they put their fingers in their mouths. They put their fingers in your mouth. They put their fingers on the kitchen table. And in that way, these sticky eggs get to lots of different places. And when they get consumed, then you're back up at the start of the cycle that we talked about, where your stomach juices will open up the eggs and the process will start again.

• 14:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is a story I use to convince my kids to keep their fingers out of their mouth. So, you know, kids like to chew on their nails or whatever. And anytime I see my kids chewing on their nails, I just make this wiggly fingers hand gesture and it recalls for them the story I told them about pinworms. And they go, oh, they're immediately grossed out by what might be under their fingernails and they stop. So this has been an effective parenting technique.

• 14:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fantastic. Now, have you, have your kids ever had pinworms that you know of?

• 14:37Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't think I should be discussing my kids' medical history on the podcast.

• 14:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 14:43Daniel Whiteson?

  So, you know, let's keep it abstract.

• 14:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, have you ever had pinworms?

• 14:47Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I have not personally ever had pinworms, to my knowledge.

• 14:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, so that's the thing. Most people who have, no, not to my knowledge, but, but I've had periods of itchiness where I wondered if maybe, maybe I had it. Anytime there's a little itch, I think, pinworms.

• 15:05Daniel Whiteson?

  And now everyone listening to this podcast is suddenly feeling itchy.

• 15:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. I mean, the females lay like 10,000 eggs.

• 15:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my God, how tiny are these? Can you not see them?

• 15:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can't see them. They're teeny tiny.

• 15:16Daniel Whiteson?

  But you can't even see them when you lay 10,000 of them? Like, it doesn't look like a little blob or a smear or something?

• 15:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, it's teeny tiny. I mean, if you put it, you don't have to put it under a super high powered microscope to see it, but you do need a microscope to see it. You know, they're kind of clear. They're not very big. These eggs can survive for two to three weeks, like out on a counter or something. But the way that you find out if someone is infected.

• 15:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is called the Scotch Tape Test.

• 15:43Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, no, no, no. Where are we putting the Scotch Tape, Kelly?

• 15:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Where do you think, Daniel?

• 15:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Around the black hole.

• 15:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  The physicist comes in with the black hole joke. Yes, around the black hole. Yeah. So, so the females come out at night to lay their eggs, which is going to get us to the listener's question in just a minute, but they lay their eggs at night in particular. And so in the morning, right when they wake up before they've, you know, used the restroom or wiped or anything, you take a piece of tape and you sort of pat it around the perianal region and then you stick it on a glass slide and you put it under a microscope. So you can see those eggs. Sometimes you even catch the mom because she's just sort of died and she's still there. And so you'll see a worm and those you can see. So sometimes you do know that someone's infected because you find one of the mom worms and you're like, oh, shoot.

• 16:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 16:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  We've got worms.

• 16:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Yikes. Yeah. So then the listener asked, how does the mom know that it's nighttime and she should come out and do her dance? Why doesn't she come out during the day?

• 16:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Great question. I didn't know the answer. And I asked the American Society of Parasitologists Facebook page, which has like 15,000 followers. And I was like, all right, team, how do we know that pinworms know that it's nighttime? Because I looked through a bunch of medical books about parasitic diseases and they all said pinworms come out at night. Some of them would say that the pinworms were detecting our drop in body temperature when we sleep.

• 17:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 17:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then others would say they might be detecting a drop in body temperature, but they wouldn't say it definitively. And none of them included an inline reference that I could check for the study that showed that they're responding to body temperature. Because they could also be responding to like, you know, you're not moving for a couple hours.

• 17:33Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's the question of how the worms know it's night to come out, but how do we know they only come out at night? And why do they only come out at night? Do they come out at night because that's the best time to lay the eggs while we're asleep? Or do they need a darker environment or what?

• 17:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. I think the answer at the end. End of the day is, we don't know. Because the American Society of Parasitologists, when I asked them, the best answer I got was from my friend Brandon, who said, "They have little watches, and that's how they know it's nighttime." I said, "Thank you, Brandon." But anyway, as far as I could tell, we haven't done studies to figure out, one, why it's nighttime, or, two, to confirm that they're actually queuing in on temperature. I think we suspect that that's the cue that they're using, but we haven't ruled out other possible cues. And as to why they do it at night, it could be possible that while people are sleeping is a time when you're less likely to have a bowel movement, and this parasite doesn't pass in feces, it passes on fingers.

• 18:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, and the reason that we know that it happens at night is because if you do the Scotch Tape Test in the morning, you get a bunch of eggs. If you do it at other times of day, you don't get a bunch of eggs. And you would expect if they were laying randomly throughout the day, the Scotch Tape Test would give you eggs at just about any time of day.

• 18:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Fascinating. So Julian's question is really at the forefront of science.

• 18:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. I encourage any young people out there to search for this answer. I don't know what it would take to answer this question. Pinworms are pretty host-specific, and so like Enterobius vermicularis, which is the species that humans have, I don't know, you might be able to do it in some other mammalian species do the experiments, but I don't know, maybe you'd have to heat people up and cool them down and see what their worms were doing, or ask them to stay still, or mess with some hormones that are associated with sleep that maybe the pinworms are queuing in on. But anyway, inquiring minds want to know, but we don't know the answer as far as I can tell.

• 19:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, if you've always been interested in black holes, and this podcast has piqued your interest in biology, maybe this is the perfect crossover topic for you.

• 19:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could be. All right, Julian, thank you so much for this question and for joining us on Discord. Did we scratch your itch? Please don't give us worms.

• 19:46Speaker 06

  Hey, y'all. Yes, you absolutely scratched my itch. I think my favorite part was hearing about the violently explosive egg laying, also how small the eggs actually are, as I always assumed that you'd be able to see them in the poop or something like that. I'm also glad to hear Kelly give a "we don't know" answer, and I hope Daniel gets to drop an "it depends" soon. Thank you so much for your answer, and maybe my kid will one day figure out the answer, though hopefully not by catching pinworms.

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  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:21Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners because your curiosity literally powers science. If people didn't want to know the answer to these questions, we would not get to do it. So we want to hear what you wonder about the universe. Write to us to [email protected]. Our next question comes from a lawyer in the UK. Rebecca wants to know about top quarks.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  If I weigh 55 kilograms, on the basis that my protons are up quarks and down quark, how much would I weigh if my protons were made of top quarks? And why is there a difference, if any?

• 23:02Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, this is a really fun question about what it might be like to have top quarks in your life.

• 23:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  I can imagine there being a new diet fad where people say, oh, I've created a thing that turns your bottom quarks to top quarks, and that's how you're going to lose 10 pounds. So you better not say this works.

• 23:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I don't recommend that. No, definitely no particle physics inspired diets. Do not fall for that.

• 23:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, there's got to be some quantum something, something diet out there that people have tried out.

• 23:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you could have quark, right? Quark is some German yogurt like product, and that sounds kind of quantum-y, but it's not any more quantum than anything else. I mean, literally, everything is quantum because we're all made of quantum particles, right? So your diet is already quantum.

• 23:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. All right. Well, so mass is a concept I understand biologically. Let's go ahead and understand it physically. Where does mass come from?

• 23:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so Rebecca wants to know what would happen if you built your protons out of top quarks. So we've got to understand mass for that. So your mass mostly comes from the stuff you're made out of, right? The mass of Kelly is very close to the mass of all of Kelly's parts added up. You are not much more than the sum of your parts. I mean, intellectually, of course, you are. Personally, you are. When it comes to a mass point of view, you're mostly your chunks added up.

• 24:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you for pulling me out of the depression black hole I was inevitably going to slide into.

• 24:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's where our intuitive sense of mass comes from, right? Like, stuff is made of smaller stuff and the mass of the bigger stuff is the sum of the mass of the smaller stuff. Like, you weigh a cat made out of Legos, and then you take it apart and you weigh the Legos, you get the same answer, right? That's where our intuition comes from.

• 24:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cats are way less fun when you take them apart.

• 24:46Daniel Whiteson?

  And also, when you make them out of Legos, they're not as cozy.

• 24:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, nope.

• 24:49Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, you're made out of your atoms, and your atoms are made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And we can mostly ignore the electrons, because an electron weighs almost one two-thousandths of a proton. So they're basically irrelevant when it comes to what you're made out of. So mostly, you're made out of your protons and your neutrons.

• 25:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sorry, electrons.

• 25:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so then where does the mass from a proton and a neutron come from?

• 25:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, and so Rebecca is referring to up quarks and down quarks, because that's what makes up protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are just different combinations of the same two bits, which is awesome and amazing, and also requires them to have these weird charges. Like, to make a proton, you add two quarks that have a charge two-thirds and another quark that has a charge negative one-third. So, plus two-thirds, plus two-thirds gives you four-thirds, minus a third gives you three-thirds, or a charge of one, that's a proton. Neutron is one quark with a charge two-thirds and two quarks with a charge negative one-third. So you get plus two, minus one, minus one, zero. It's amazing how you can build these things out of the same building blocks, right? That's something sort of cool.

• 25:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, we were talking the other day about whether or not the universe is, like, beautiful and sort of meets the expectation of our aesthetic preferences. And I gotta say, there's something about plus two-thirds and negative one-third charges that's not aesthetically pleasing to me, but I like that.

• 26:14Daniel Whiteson?

  What? I thought you were gonna go the other direction. Tweet, that's beautiful, showing how you can build two very different things out of the same pieces. It's like when you see somebody build something incredible out of Legos, you're like, wow, that's awesome that you can do it out of the same bits. There's something simple and ergonomic about it. That appeals to my aesthetic.

• 26:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I guess that's why this question about whether or not physics and math meet our definitions of beauty is so hard, because what's beautiful to some person is, you know, maybe not beautiful to others. And we don't even have the same definition of beauty.

• 26:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's true. And I can also get rid of the one thirds easily. If I just redefine the electron mass to be negative three, then the up quarks and down quarks have charge plus two and minus one. And, you know, it's just because of Ben Franklin that the quarks have a charge one third. There's no absolute scale there.

• 26:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why is it Ben Franklin's fault that the charge is negative one third? We're getting way off track here. But was Ben Franklin around when we were figuring this stuff out?

• 27:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, Ben Franklin, you know, the best president of the United States, he helped to find the direction of the currents. And so the direction that we later discovered was caused by electrons, he called negative.

• 27:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Was Ben Franklin ever a president?

• 27:19Daniel Whiteson?

  No, he was not a president. That's an internet joke.

• 27:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that went right over my head. All right. Look, this isn't a history podcast, Daniel. Let's get back on track.

• 27:29Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Anyways, so your protons and neutrons are made out of up quarks and down quarks. But this is where our intuition breaks down. You might imagine that the mass of the proton is just the mass of the quarks it's made out of, added up, the way the mass of the Lego cat is the mass of the Legos. But it's not true. Because mass is not just the stuff you're made out of. Mass is a measure of your internal stored energy, which is a much weirder and more abstract concept. But the universe is not required to be intuitive, right? Or to make any sense to us at all. It's amazing. We can't understand any of it. But like to give you a sense for what I'm talking about, if you have a box made of mirrors, and you shine a photon in there and then slam the door. So now the photon

• 28:13Daniel Whiteson?

  is bouncing around inside of it. And I ask you, well, what was the mass of the box before and after? You'd say, well, you've just added a photon. Photons have no mass. You've put a zero mass thing in the box. So it has the same mass before and after. And you would be wrong. Because now that photon is trapped in the box, it's internal stored energy of the box. So the box gained some mass by E equals mc squared.

• 28:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute. The other day, you were telling me that energy doesn't have, I thought you were saying that energy doesn't have mass and people get confused about E equals mc squared. Doesn't imply that photons have mass.

• 28:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Photons do not have mass.

• 28:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 28:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Photons do not have mass. But what is mass anyway? Mass is internal stored energy. Photons have no internal stored energy, but you can capture a photon. Same way that, for example, if you absorb a photon, you lay in the sun, you absorb photons, you gain mass. Because those photons, energy gets converted into other kinds of energy in your body. And any internal stored energy, that's what mass is.

• 29:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  So can we get a short answer for how do you define energy then? Or is that another philosophical side road? So if you've got, if you've got a photon in a box and now you have more energy, what does that imply that energy is then?

• 29:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, yeah, we don't really know what energy is. If you want to go like really deep and fundamental, it's not even something that's conserved in the universe, which makes it even harder to define. But we have categories. There's energy of motion, which is what a photon has. A photon is pure energy of motion. There's also internal stored energy, which is what mass is. So we have these examples and we know that in many situations, the sum of these two things is conserved, that you can convert one kind into another and back and forth. They slosh back and forth. There's also potential energy, which is just energy of like configuration. You know, if you have a ball on a shelf in a gravitational field, then it has energy stored. Like you can make a gravitational battery just by lifting concrete blocks up to the top of a building.

• 30:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And like that has energy in it and you can recover that energy by like dropping those rocks. And then it turns into kinetic energy and you can have that spin a wheel, which then generates electricity, for example. So there's lots of different forms of energy. But mass is a measure of your internal stored energy, which is really weird. Because in the end, what we're talking about is the inertial mass of the object, right? Like how hard is it to accelerate it? And if you shine a light into a box and then slam the door, you need to give it a bigger push to accelerate it to the same velocity.

• 30:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. So you've got that photon in a box. And you switch one of the quarks to up. And now you have two, or no, you've got three quarks in there. So it's

• 30:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Photons, you're talking about photons and protons.

• 30:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 31:01Daniel Whiteson?

  I was talking about photons which have no mass.

• 31:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  But they have quarks.

• 31:04Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, protons have quarks. Photons.

• 31:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Photons, dude. Ah, oh, man, there's a lot to keep track of.

• 31:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I was using photons because they have no mass, which makes it especially obvious that when they add mass to the box, it's not because they have stuff to them. It's because you now have internal stored energy. You've captured their energy.

• 31:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it.

• 31:26Daniel Whiteson?

  But so let's return to the proton, which is a good idea. Where does the mass of the proton come from? It does get some contribution from the mass of the quarks, like those little Lego pieces. But those masses are really, really tiny. Like they're about a thousandths or two thousandths of the mass of the proton. Most of the mass of the proton comes from the energy of those quarks. The binding of them into a proton. There's a lot of energy stored in there. And we know there's a lot of energy in protons because there's a lot of energy in the nucleus. It's the strong nuclear force. This is what fission and fusion deal with, and that's why they're so powerful. And so most of the mass of the proton doesn't come from the bits it's made out of. It comes from the binding energy. And the mass of the quarks themselves does come from the Higgs boson.

• 32:11Daniel Whiteson?

  But so most of your mass comes from the binding energy of quarks inside protons, not from the Higgs boson, which gives those quarks mass.

• 32:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  So to imagine what this, this experiment would look like, if you wanted to switch your quark from down to up, you would need a bunch of energy

• 32:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 32:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  to break that bond and switch it. And then you don't even really have protons anymore.

• 32:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you wouldn't have protons anymore. So a proton is defined as this combination of up and down quarks. And you can have other combinations. Like you can replace one of the up quarks with a charm, or you can replace the down with a strange. And we've done all those. We've seen those particles. We call them other weird things, deltas and omegas. You can have three strange quarks. There's all sorts of different combinations. These particles can be neutral in triplets, meaning like their color charges are all balanced. And so we've made every possible combination we can make. But most of them are not stable. Like even the neutron is not stable. The neutron will decay into the proton. The proton is the stable one. It's the lowest energy state of all of these things. So you can make other particles out of quarks,

• 33:13Daniel Whiteson?

  but they wouldn't be stable and they wouldn't be protons. But let's say you did. Let's say you took a proton and you made the top quark version of it, whatever you call it, and you make it like top, top, bottom, which is the analog of like up, up, down. Number one, it would already be a lot more massive because the quarks themselves are much more massive. Like a top quark has the mass of 175 protons. Right? So the up quark has the mass of like a thousandths of the proton and the top quark has the mass of like almost 200 protons. So it's a huge ratio. Nobody understands this, by the way. Why is the top quark so much heavier than the up quark? Nobody knows. It's just this incredible, heavy grandpapa of a particle.

• 33:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Nobody knows why it's so much more massive.

• 34:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  If we could take a quick step back. So up and down quarks are different than top and bottom quarks. And what are top and bottom quarks again?

• 34:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, top and bottom quarks are the heavy versions of them. There are up and down quarks, which we use to make the proton and neutron. And then for some reason, that's a mystery to us, there are other heavier versions of them. The charm and the strange are just like the up and the down, but they're heavier. The top and the bottom are just like the up and the down in terms of like electric charges and weak charges and behavior and stuff like this, but even heavier. And the top and the bottom are like the grandma and grandpa of these things. They're much, much heavier than the up and the down.

• 34:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 34:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's why I think Rebecca was asking you about this because they feel like different flavors of the same particle. In fact, we call this field flavor physics because if top quark and bottom quark feel like different flavors. And people who study this, we call them heavy flavor physicists, which makes them sound much cooler and hip hoppy than they actually are.

• 34:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  That does sound way cool.

• 34:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Do they have big necklaces and stuff?

• 35:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, okay.

• 35:02Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you replace the up quarks with top quarks and the down quarks with bottom quarks, you already, just from the stuff you're made out of, just from the quarks, would increase the mass of this new version of the proton by a factor of hundreds, right? So like a particle made out of a top, top, bottom would have a mass, just from the quarks, of like 355 protons. And that doesn't even account for the binding energy, which is most of the mass of the proton. So now this new particle you're building, what would be the binding energy of this thing? How much binding energy is required to bring two top quarks and a bottom quark together? We don't know. We can't do that calculation because quantum physics in the strong force is too hard.

• 35:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, we can barely calculate what the mass of the proton is. It's like not an easy thing to calculate because the strong force is so strong that every time you try to do a calculation, there's gluons, and there's gluons making more gluons, and those gluons make more gluons, and those gluons stick to each other and interact with each other. It gets very complicated, and all the tricks we can use for other weaker forces don't work because the approximations break down. So we can't make that prediction. I don't know the answer to that. Nobody knows the answer to that. But I can tell you that that particle, if you made it, it wouldn't be a proton and it wouldn't be stable, right? Top quarks are not stable. Bottom quarks are not stable. No combinations of these quarks are stable, except for the proton. And so this top, top, bottom thing that Rebecca wants to build would definitely not be stable.

• 36:31Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you're designing some like, super massive version of humanity, and you made it out of these things, it would last for like 10 to the negative 23 seconds before it decayed into something else. Probably you would end up with protons.

• 36:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm. You know, I gotta admit, I misunderstood Rebecca's question initially. So when she says that the proton is made of up and down quarks, which are light, I thought she was asking if we, instead of having up, up, down, what if it was all up, up, up? How would that change the mass? But now, I thought maybe top was another way of referring to up, because it's, because up, it's on top. But now, now it is all clear.

• 37:04Daniel Whiteson?

  No, top is just another example of particle physicists being brilliant at naming things, you know? Top and bottom is like an analogy to up and down. Don't ask me why charming stranger called charming strange. It breaks the pattern, but...

• 37:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm sure my confusion with the question reveals how clear you guys are with your naming.

• 37:21Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, there's a whole group of physicists who reject the names top and bottom, and they call them truth and beauty. And so there's a whole group of people who say, we don't do flavor physics. We do beauty physics.

• 37:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wow. Do you guys like get really heated? Do guys and gals get really heated at conferences about this kind of stuff?

• 37:40Daniel Whiteson?

  More snide and snarky than heated, but yeah.

• 37:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're all just human beings after all.

• 37:47Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, Rebecca, so the answer to your question is if you tried to put Rebecca together with top quarks, you would be very, very massive, at least hundreds of times more massive, probably much, much more. And you would also decay very quickly down to protonic Rebecca.

• 38:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sounds like a bad idea, Rebecca. I don't recommend it.

• 38:04Daniel Whiteson?

  No, let us know how it works. I'm curious. Maybe you'll discover something awesome.

• 38:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  We don't want to lose a listener.

• 38:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, Rebecca, what do you think?

• 38:13Speaker 06

  Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for giving me the extra time and your indulgence responding to your answer. Don't think I didn't notice the terminology drift from barrister to lawyer. And I know that you have spared yourself having to explain to all of your viewers that in the UK barristers don't actually make coffee. Anyway, back to the quirky court question. Thank you very much, Daniel, for explaining the difference between the ups and the tops and the downs and the bottoms, which now actually makes good sense to me.

• 38:51Speaker 06

  However, it strikes me that there is research to be had because it doesn't explain why people gain weight over the winter months, specifically in the holiday season. And I wonder if there is a moment in time, possibly due to reduced photons in the atmosphere at that time of year, that in fact, all of the fields do a switcheroo. And my protons are comprised of top, bottom, rather than up, down. And that accounts for the weight gain. I think that there is money to be had in researching this. What do you think?

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• 41:02Speaker 07

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• 41:20Daniel Whiteson?

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• 41:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So our next question is from Robert, who noted that on an episode, I made a mistake by joking about something that actually happens. Let's hear Robert's question.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Hello. In one of the podcasts for the past few months, Kelly made a random side comment about how it would be cool if eating carrots turned you orange, which, as it turns out, it actually does. I don't really understand how, though. So I'd love it if you could look into why and do some sort of segment about keratinemia, beta carotenes, and all of that. Thanks.

• 42:13Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, Kelly, being called out by our audience. I wonder if this is a physics-inspired listener. Hmm. That would be juicy.

• 42:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know, but I would like all listeners to call me out, at least. I assume you'd like us both to be called out.

• 42:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Of course.

• 42:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you catch us making a mistake, please correct us. We want to get this stuff right. And, you know, lots of times, knowledge is moving quickly, and we might not be all caught up. But in this case, this is something that I got wrong. We've known this for a long time. I think I knew it, but I've since forgotten. And so...

• 42:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, let's dig in and marinate in your wrongness. What exactly did you say?

• 42:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And exactly how was it wrong?

• 42:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is my favorite thing to do. So I said, I think I made some joke about, like, wouldn't it be funny if you turned orange when you ate carrots? And this is called keratinemia. And it's not called keratinemia because you ate carrots. It's called keratinemia because of the keratin that you find in a lot of different kinds of fruits and veggies.

• 43:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And are carrots called carrots because of beta carotene? Or is it just a totally random connection?

• 43:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm gonna bet that carrots had a name long before we knew what keratin was.

• 43:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, Google tells me that the word originates from a Greek word, which is derived from an Indo-European word for horn or head. So it has to do with the shape of the top of the carrot.

• 43:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, and keratin is not spelled C-A-R-R-O-T-E-N-E. It's just got one R. So maybe it's just a... Coincidence. So anyway, around World War I and World War II, actually, carotinemia, I'm going to slow down and stumble every time I have to say it, was actually moderately common because there were some food shortages and lots of people kept eating large quantities of the same fruits or veggies. And lots of different kinds of fruits and vegetables, not just carrots, have carotene in them.

• 44:11Daniel Whiteson?

  What's an example of something that's not a carrot, but has a lot of beta carotene in it?

• 44:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Apricots, mangoes, oranges, green beans, et cetera. Lots of different fruits and vegetables have it.

• 44:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So these were all sort of orangey stuff until you got to green beans?

• 44:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, they don't have to be orange. And if you remember, we were talking about carotenoids when we were talking about flamingos. And we were talking about how flamingos extract the carotenoids from the food that they eat and they use that to make themselves pink. And they're not always eating pink foods. It has to do with how your body sort of converts and deals with these products. And so in our body, when we consume carotenoids, in our liver, we convert some of those carotenoids into vitamin A, using a particular kind of enzyme that we have. And then we go ahead and we use that vitamin A to help us with things like vision and the functioning of our immune system. But if you have too much vitamin A, it can be toxic.

• 45:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  So no matter how much beta carotene we consume, our bodies only convert a small amount of it to vitamin A.

• 45:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that because we only need a certain amount of vitamin A? Our body's not capable of converting more? Or why does it reject it?

• 45:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  We only need a certain amount, and if you have too much, it becomes toxic. And so our body sort of protects us from that toxicity by only converting some amount of it.

• 45:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that's clever.

• 45:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Into vitamin A. Yeah, go us. Go us. But our body still has it. And it binds to fat. And if you accumulate enough of it, sometimes you can actually see those accumulations in our hands and in the soles of our feet. So when you get carotinemia.

• 45:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Carotenemia. See how fast I said it? I'm really good. So when you get carotenemia, you mostly can see like a yellowish tint in your soles and in your hands. You don't tend to get it in your eyes because your eyes don't have the right kind of stuff for the carotenoids to bind to. And this is one of the ways that you tell the difference between if somebody has jaundice, which is a liver problem versus carotenemia. If their eyes aren't yellow, they probably don't have jaundice. But anyway, so it tends to build up. And you could also get lycopeneia, which is when you have too many tomatoes.

• 46:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no.

• 46:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which has a different kind of carotenoid called lycopene.

• 46:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I eat a lot of tomatoes.

• 46:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which, uh, yeah, well, are you yellow?

• 46:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Everyone's a little yellow, right?

• 46:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  I get, well, you're not noticeably yellow and you don't have yellow hands. So you have, probably haven't eaten too much. In general, this condition isn't dangerous. And, you know, we think that in general, like if you become orange or yellowy, the solution is to just change your diet. Stop eating that stuff. Eventually your body will extract the carotene and you will go back to your normal tone. But I did find a paper that said, you know, this problem is almost never associated with poor health. Quote, "However, a man who allegedly ate six to seven pounds of carrots weekly was found to have constipation, hypercarotenemia, increased liver enzymes and possible vitamin A toxicity." So you can overdo it, guys.

• 47:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Your body tries to save us, but if you're eating six to seven pounds of carrots weekly, you might have some problems.

• 47:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Is this a carrot farmer or what's the story with this guy?

• 47:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't, that's all I could find. I don't know, man. Moderation is key. That's right. That's right. That's right.

• 47:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Throw in some tomatoes, dude. Jeez.

• 47:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Have a little lycopeneia to go with your carotenemia.

• 47:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, this is fascinating. And so can people Google to get like pictures of people with carotenemia that look crazy orange? Is it impressive or is it sort of underwhelming?

• 47:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's kind of underwhelming, not super impressive. And that's a fairly safe Google search as far as I can tell. I don't remember seeing anything.

• 47:53Daniel Whiteson?

  More than pinworms, I'm guessing.

• 47:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't recommend actually looking up pinworms, pictures of pinworms. But anyway, that's the answer that I have for Robert.

• 48:04Daniel Whiteson?

  And so is there anything else that if you eat it, you will turn that color? Can I turn purple by eating enough eggplant?

• 48:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Um, I don't know about eggplant in particular, but any of those plants, be they fruit or vegetables, that have a lot of carotenoids, you risk your body storing them in your, in your body as something that will make you yellowy. So.

• 48:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, as a kid, I enjoyed having a blue tongue after eating blueberries. There's something really cool about that, but like you are what you eat and you are get that color. That's super cool.

• 48:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's kind of cool to like turn orange after eating carrots. It feels like cartoony biology, but real.

• 48:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  It does. Yeah. And I like that you can do this without harming yourself too much.

• 48:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And it is so sort of counterintuitive that if you eat too many green beans, you could turn yellow or orange, but it is weird. Yeah.

• 48:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it depends, right? Because it's biology.

• 48:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. But unlike physics, I had a clear answer. And so let's, let's see what Robert thinks of our clear answer. And Robert, pick a team, biology or physics?

• 49:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I'm just kidding. You don't have to do that.

• 49:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Can't we all just get along?

• 49:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  You started it.

• 49:16Daniel Whiteson?

  I say after tossing so many bombs.

• 49:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 49:20Speaker 06

  That is super interesting. I would not have expected it to be a lipid binding process. I wonder if that means if a person got liposuction procedure, if their adipose would also come out more yellowish? Super cool regardless, though. Thank you so much for exploring my question. And as my degrees are social work, psychology and sexuality, I'm gonna have to abstain from your biology and physics rivalry. I think all science is great. Nothing more human than one to understand.

• 49:43Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thank you, Robert, for writing in. And thanks to everybody who sends in your questions. We really do love hearing from you. Write to us, [email protected].

• 49:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Looking forward to hearing your questions. Thanks.

• 49:59Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 50:05Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 50:11Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 50:17Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 50:24Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 50:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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• 51:36Speaker 06

  Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. That's why Chase for Business helps small business owners like you by offering personalized guidance and digital tools that can help your business grow. With our guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business. Make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyrighted.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Right 2026 JP Morgan Chase and Company. Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.