Nobel Prize 2026: The Science Gets Stranger

Can light restore aspects of sight? Can recalling a cold experience change an animal's metabolism? And what can ghost particles and mirror-image molecules tell us about the universe? Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary follow up on our 2026 Nobel Prize episodes with research building on optogenetics, IceCube and molecular handedness. We unpack an early human vision-restoration trial, cold-memory experiments in mice, cosmic neutrino flavors, and a tiny electrical sensor for distinguishing left- and right-handed amino acids. Plus: how the Nobels work, our follow-up on the Nobel chemistry illustration, a brief look at neutrino Earth tomography, and why fundamental research matters. Which discovery would you like us to explore next? CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: memory, neutrinos and mirror molecules 00:28 Hello Internet and how the Nobels work 04:32 Optogenetics recap 10:23 Restoring aspects of vision 25:43 Controlling movement in worms 29:31 Cold memories and metabolism 41:07 Memory, trauma and ethical questions 45:44 FFP housekeeping 48:17 IceCube recap 56:23 Measuring cosmic neutrino flavors 1:10:30 A brief look at neutrino Earth tomography 1:12:20 Why fundamental physics matters 1:26:58 Chemistry and molecular handedness 1:29:08 Correcting the Nobel illustration 1:39:30 Measuring chirality in tiny samples 1:46:42 Testing the sensor on meteorite and desert samples 1:51:22 Why these questions matter 1:57:20 Closing thoughts and signoff RESEARCH & FURTHER READING Optogenetic therapy for visual function (NEJM, 2026): https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2602215 Cold memories and thermoregulation (Nature, 2025): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08902-6 Three-flavor composition of cosmic neutrinos (PRL, 2026): https://doi.org/10.1103/vntd-m133 Chiral discrimination in meteorite and desert soil extracts (Nature Communications, 2026): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77947-6 Further reading, briefly mentioned: neutrino Earth tomography (preprint): https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02644 EDITORIAL NOTES The vision trial was small and exploratory. The cold-memory findings discussed are from mice. On-screen clarifications: 16:53 Both eyes were profoundly visually impaired; the worse-seeing eye was treated. 19:57 The untreated eye was patched during testing, not a normal-vision control. 54:41 Neutrino event rates depend on energy and selection, not just detector volume. 1:05:47 Flavor identification efficiency is distinct from interaction probability; both depend on energy. 1:13:35 Other astronomy-related Nobels include 2017 (LIGO) and 2019 (cosmology/exoplanets). 1:18:00 The LHC at CERN enabled the Higgs discovery; CERN itself was founded in 1954. 1:44:25 Both enantiomers produce current signals; waveform features distinguish them. 1:46:42 Murchison is a meteorite. Diego de Almagro and North of Antofagasta are soil sites. 1:47:40 The sensor study reports mixed agreement and limitations, not uniformly negative results. 1:49:00 Phobos is a Martian moon; a captured-asteroid origin is a hypothesis. WATCH & LISTEN Full video: https://youtu.be/C9K6onZxyN4 Episode notes: https://ffppod.com/episodes/ep64 Follow @FFPPod on Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook. Breaking down science news so it makes sense to curious people everywhere.

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

• 0:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Researchers switched on neurons that were linked to a mouse's cold experience. And its oxygen consumption went up without actually experiencing the cold. And still, there are neutrinos going through my fingernail because they're going through the earth and then going through my fingernail. Like, that's how little they interact, right? The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, they actually responded.

• 0:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 0:23Krishna Choudhary?

  To our.

• 0:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 0:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Video on Instagram.

• 0:28Lester Nare?

  Hello, internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We are back for a follow-up on the Nobel Prizes. The last few episodes, we have spent going through the winners of this year's Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine. And today, we're going to take a little bit of a further look at what researchers are doing with the science of our award winners. Now, we've got four papers that we're going to talk about. Restoring aspects of vision in people who've lost it. How activating memory can change metabolism. A way scientists are using neutrinos to understand the universe around us,

• 1:12Lester Nare?

  as well as a little bit about what's going on here at home on earth. And then molecular handedness and the search for life, one of my favorite topics. But before we get into those, there were some interesting comments over the last couple of weeks, and I wanted to get into a little bit of how, what are the Nobel Prizes? And how do they actually get nominated? And so, the prizes came out of Alfred Nobel's will in 1895. And the first one was awarded in 1901. I believe his initial money that was given was actually only 31 million Swedish kroner at the time. Not inflation adjusted. This has been going on for more than 120 years.

• 1:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Lester Nare?

  Not a short period of time. Alfred Nobel was the Swedish inventor, entrepreneur, scientist. He was a chemist and businessman who also happened to write both poetry and drama. So that gives an interesting reference point to his respect for literature. Famously known as the inventor of dynamite and holder of 355 patents. The idea was to recognize work that brought the greatest benefit to humanity. One interesting note that came up in the comments was who gets to decide the winners? And notably, there isn't just one committee for the Nobel Prizes that decides all of these. There's first, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the ones we focus on.

• 2:35Lester Nare?

  Some of the ones we focus on, physics, chemistry, and the economics prize, which was added later and first awarded in 1969. Medicine is decided by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute. Literature is the Swedish Academy. And finally, the Peace Prize is the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is composed of five members that are appointed by the Storting, which is the Norwegian Parliament. Interestingly, in Nobel's will, he did not give a reasoning why the Peace Prize.

• 3:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Was randomly Norway?

• 3:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah. There's not really an understanding of where that was coming from, but the point.

• 3:15Krishna Choudhary?

  I wonder if his wife was Norwegian or something. And that's like, I have no idea. It seems kind of random, but yeah.

• 3:21Lester Nare?

  So, different prizes have different committees. And so, if you're unhappy with one prize and how they decide to give it out, it's not necessarily across all of them. So, the way, the other thing is that came up is, you know, these things are old. Why are they just getting a prize now? And I think the way to think about the science prizes in particular is more akin to or similar to the Hall of Fame in sports for all the sports ball fans out there. So, you're recognizing a particular discovery or contribution. But the work may have happened decades earlier, allowing you to sort of see how that contribution has grown over time and how researchers have built on top of it to see where it leads.

• 4:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:01Lester Nare?

  This allows us to be able to trace the connection between the original question that was asked and how it's now being implemented, which is part of what makes these follow-ups that we do now for the second year running so interesting. So, as always, we're going to talk about the science from the ground up today because this is from first principles.

• 4:32Lester Nare?

  So Krishna, let's start with a quick recap of medicine and optogenetics.

• 4:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Optogenetics won the medicine prize. Specifically, they recognized Karl Dyseroth, Peter Hegelmann, and Georg Nagel for discoveries concerning light gated ion channels and optogenetics. Those are the three with their artwork. This is a technology that allows neuroscientists to turn on and off specific neurons in the brain using light. And this allows scientists to establish causal links between stimuli, neural firing, like the activity of neurons in the brain, and behavior of the animal at large. This is one of the first times that we can really do this kind of science. The notion of causality here, the notion of causality is what's important.

• 5:24Krishna Choudhary?

  So, how does it work? Well, very briefly, you can think of the neuron as a type of capacitor, okay? It stores a voltage across a membrane using charges on either side. These charges, instead of being the electrons of a conventional capacitor in your electrical grid, these are ions, like calcium ions, sodium ions, potassium ions. There's ions on either side of this membrane, on the inside and the outside, and that stores a voltage. Now, to activate the neuron, all you have to do is introduce a short in the capacitor. When you introduce a short, the ions can freely flow from the inside of the neuron to the outside or vice versa. And you can sort of activate this thing and the neuron starts firing.

• 6:07Krishna Choudhary?

  It can then influence other neurons to fire, right? What optogenetics lets us do is open up the short circuit on command. That's the point. So, there's a protein called channelrhodopsin. It's a type of protein, really. It's a class of proteins. And what it does is absorb light and use that energy from the light to open up and close channels on the membrane, such that ions can move from the outside to the inside in this case, but sometimes from the inside to the outside. It doesn't really, right now, we've gotten so good at this thing that we've just generalized it as a tool for whatever type of ion transport you want. So, depending on the channel and the electrical conditions,

• 6:49Krishna Choudhary?

  it's going to change the cell's voltage and we can command now turning on neurons. We can command turning off neurons and we can see what that does to a behaving animal.

• 6:59Lester Nare?

  It's quite nice if we're trying to understand.

• 7:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Lester Nare?

  How the brain works.

• 7:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Because you can literally poke at the cellular level a neuron in a living animal, in a living brain, and see what happens, right? So, you know, the brain is still a black box, but at least we can poke at stuff in the black box.

• 7:20Lester Nare?

  For the AI people in the audience, this is the thing they talk about, interpretability.

• 7:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Lester Nare?

  And it's a vector for us to be able to interpret and make some understanding of what's actually causal links.

• 7:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, 100%. And actually, I mean, you make a good point about like how a lot of times with interpretability in AI, some of the experiments you do are very similar to these optogenetic experiments, where you go into a single layer of a neural network and you like silence them, right? Or you like, you silence particular neurons and you try to see what kind of output the giant neural network gives out, right? Or you try to see like what types of inputs are activating specific neurons in the middle latent spaces of these models. So, pretty similar to the kinds of optogenetic experiments we're doing, but it's obviously harder in a biological animal, right?

• 8:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Than just like code, where you can just go, okay, like if in this layer, you know, flip a coin and turn off all these neurons, right? So, it's pretty important. This is why it won the prize. The important combination here is the genetic selection plus the optical timing. Because what you can do now is you can express this channelrhodopsin type protein in specific circuits in the brain, right? You can be like, I only want layer five pyramidal neurons. The way you do that is you figure out a kind of genetic cocktail that only layer five pyramidal neurons will respond to. And in that cocktail, you add the genetic instructions for channelrhodopsin too.

• 8:54Krishna Choudhary?

  So, the pyramidal five, the layer five pyramidal neurons, they're going to recognize the cocktail. They're going to be like, oh, I'm going to take this amount of genes in. Part of the genes that they take in are also the instructions to make that channelrhodopsin. That goes into the cell membrane and all of a sudden, now we can control using light. So, this shows, you know, different types of neurons. On the bottom there, that's a pyramidal neuron. On the top, those are different types of neurons. And each one, you can tag with different types of channelrhodopsins. And now you can even do multiplexing. You can be like, blue light activates this population. Green light activates this population. Red light activates this population. You can do like, you know, strobe-like.

• 9:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Control of single neurons even sometimes, mostly populations of neurons, but it's an incredibly powerful tool.

• 9:46Lester Nare?

  Uh, neuronal, uh, Burning Man. Um, and it's sort of akin to this, keeping the analogy going. We're, with AI, we have the code and we can manipulate it directly. We're giving the code to the neuron cells with the genetic delivery, which then we now know, we have the tools to be able to say, turn off or on.

• 10:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:04Lester Nare?

  But it first needs to be able to do so, uh, in a way where we understand that when we turn the lights, blue, green, et cetera, the actual cells themselves have the instructions to respond the way that we want them to.

• 10:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah. And so, um, there's two papers that I want to talk about as a follow-up to that Nobel Prize. The first one is going to be a direct medical application. And the second one is going to be more kind of fundamental sciency and really the reason why these three authors won. But the first one, you know, um, I think it's still pretty cool that you can directly apply it to a medical therapy. So this has to do with a vision treatment. This vision treatment asks the eye's output cells to take over the job of broken light detectors effectively. Like there's a, you know, there's a disease called advanced retinitis pigmentosa, where the retinal pigments that capture light from the surroundings, they get deteriorated. This is an attempt to restore vision among those patients. Okay?

• 11:03Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a paper from the University of Pittsburgh and actually really a whole consortium out in the New England Journal of Medicine. Again, I had to get my bootleg version from my friend who's a doctor. Um, but this was out in October 2026. So like this month.

• 11:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Very, very recent.

• 11:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 11:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And it examines a optogenetic therapy in 10 people with blindness due to advanced retinitis pigmentosa. So to understand this approach, let's first actually just review what the retina is as a neural circuit. So this is what the retina looks like. The retina is one of my favorite neural circuits, not only because of its simplicity, but also because, um, in undergrad at Princeton, my senior thesis was on physically modeling the retina as like an electrical circuit in some sense. It's a very simple circuit. Okay? In the back of the retina are the rods and cones. This is the stuff that's in the back, like towards the back of your head. So the eye, the, the light is coming from the center from, from

• 12:04Krishna Choudhary?

  in front of you. The sensors are actually in the back, which is weird. You would think that the sensors, like in a traditional CCD, it goes CCD and then the wires come out from behind it. Right? Um, here it's the opposite. Like the, the CCD is kind of in the back and the wires come out forward and then have to go through a hole to get to the brain. The reason for that is because our detectors, the rods and cones, they deteriorate very quickly because they respond to so much light, right? The proteins are always like, you know, changing shape. That's going to lead to degradation. And so you need to be close to blood vessels to like trash all of the proteins and get new proteins or get enough energy to get new proteins. You know what I mean?

• 12:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Krishna Choudhary?

  So you, you need to be close to like the trash chute.

• 12:51Lester Nare?

  The, the structural shape is related to how it's actually used functionally and proximity to basically the recycle mechanism.

• 12:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 12:59Lester Nare?

  Matters.

• 12:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. Like if, if the rods were actually in the, in the same design of cameras, then you would just get a buildup of like your rhodopsins that have been used up in the front and you'd very quickly not be able to see, right? So, okay, that's why the rods and cones are in the back. And then you have a bunch of cells in the middle that are kind of like processing cells. There's bipolar cells, amacrine cells. And at the very end, you have these things called retinal ganglion cells. These are single cells that have their cell body in our eye and they've got an axon that goes through the hole that I was talking about from the retina because they're in the front. So, you know, you got to topologically go through the hole. There's a hole that goes through the eye to the, to your brain, right? And it crisscrosses right in the middle and that's where the center

• 13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  for your, um, uh, the circadian rhythm is, all that other kind of stuff. But in any case, the, the actual sensors that go all the way to your brain are in the very front. Okay? Those are the retinal ganglion cells and the cell bodies are in the very front. There's a little bit of processing that's happening. I want to, I want to be clear here. This is not just simply whatever I see in this pixel is what I'm sending. There's a little bit of data compression that happens within our eye because you can't send all of the raw data, right? It's a thin wire. Um, you better not fry it.

• 14:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And you better not heat it up. So you have to sort of compress the data in order to send it to the brain in an, in a efficient manner.

• 14:24Lester Nare?

  So you're saying that.

• 14:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And the retina is doing that.

• 14:25Lester Nare?

  Our eyes are Pied Piper for data compression.

• 14:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude. They're creating zip files in some sense. The, the, the retina itself is creating a zip file to send to the brain. It's pretty remarkable and I love this, this network for that reason. It's very simple. There's only like five or six different types of neurons involved and yet you can have this rich machinery for a lot of very cool computation.

• 14:50Lester Nare?

  And everyone can understand the benefits of having eyes because it's a part of our, you know, core five senses and our lived experience, um, in terms of how we interact with the world around us. And so to have something that's so visceral to everyone's lived experience and the, the mechanics, the functional mechanics being complex, but in a way that is s- s- simple enough compared to other biological systems, uh, is, is actually quite interesting.

• 15:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah. And the, the problem that these patients have with, um, this retinitis pigmentosa is that the photoreceptors, the original photoreceptors get damaged. Okay? So how do you do this? Well, the strategy is to give retinal ganglion cells a microbial light sensitive channel. You basically do optogenetics on the cells in the very front, the ganglion cells that are sending messages to the brain. Okay? So you're like, okay, I'm not going to care about the photoreceptors and things like that. I'm not even going to care about the middle circuitry. I'm just going to go to the output. I'm going to express my optogenetics in that. And then, you know, when the, when, when the things

• 15:59Krishna Choudhary?

  light up, the light is going to go in, but it's not going to hit the rods and cones because the rods and cones are kind of degraded, maybe even dead. The light is going to go hit the channel rhodopsin. That's going to cause these ganglion cells to fire, which is then going to send the signal to the brain.

• 16:12Lester Nare?

  Ah, so I see what you're saying. So the, the, the middle and back layers, right, are not, there's a direct connection between what's happening in the ganglion cells in the front that sends the actual signal to the brain that does the interpretation. And so even if your middle and, and back, uh, machinery is degraded, which is what's happening in this particular disease.

• 16:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Lester Nare?

  We're just overriding that by saying we're, we're going to take the direct route.

• 16:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Lester Nare?

  We're going to take the express lane, uh, and activate what we need to in the actual sensors that are taking in the light and doing this zip file type, uh, compression.

• 16:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Lester Nare?

  To the source.

• 16:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. That's exactly the point. And so how do you actually administer this thing? Well, in the 2026 trial that we're talking about here, each participant received an injection into the worst seeing eye. So they had like two eyes. One of them had this retinitis, the other one didn't. So in the worst eye, you inject this kind of capsid, which is like a viral capsid with this particular gene. There's a genome for, um, crimson R, which is the, um, the like, the channel rhodopsin type thing.

• 17:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 17:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you've got a promoter that like kind of tags the retinal ganglion cells. And once those cells see this piece of DNA, they can express the protein on their membranes and then they are now light sensitive before they weren't.

• 17:24Lester Nare?

  This is the delivery device.

• 17:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. This is the delivery device. Exactly. And so one key point to make here is that we're going not to the photoreceptors, but to the ganglion cells, right? And I told you that there's some compression that's happening, right? So you can't just deliver light like it's normal eyes. Okay? You have to use specific types. You, you have to do a little bit of the data crunching before you send it in.

• 17:51Lester Nare?

  Nah.

• 17:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because the ganglion cells are expecting a data crunched set of numbers, right? A, a set of stimuli. They're not expecting the, the raw light. They're expecting all of the, they're expecting zip files.

• 18:06Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 18:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 18:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 18:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And so, and so you have to, you have to give them kind of zip files.

• 18:11Lester Nare?

  We have to pre-process.

• 18:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we have to pre-process and that's why we need goggles. Okay? So there are goggles that the patients wear that are, that's not going to actually give you the, the raw image. So on the lower right, you're seeing what the projected image is from the goggles. Okay? In this case, what they're doing is like kind of an edge detection. Okay? The, the left is just a hand, black and white, but the edge detection is detecting movement and like changing pixels and it's only highlighting those pixels. Now, one thing that the authors are careful about is that this is not the only type of pre-processing that the retina does, right? The circuit is extremely complex. There are on off cells. There's movement cells. There's all sorts of like different types of, um, processing that happens. And this is just one of them.

• 18:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And furthermore, in the ganglion cells population, there's specialized ganglion cells that do one thing or the other, right? It's not like all of them respond to edge detection. In a specific slice, there's going to be some edge detection cells, but there's also going to be some on off cells and so on and so forth, right? So this is a crude way of kind of approximating what the retina does, but it's not even close really to what the retina does. The point of this study was to establish safety, okay? So that they can go on and do other studies, right? Because you're doing a lot here. You're administering some genetics into a patient's eye. You're trying to see whether it responds to light. You're trying to make sure that it doesn't give them like epileptic seizures in the worst case scenario. You know, there's all sorts of things that can go wrong in biology.

• 19:42Krishna Choudhary?

  So the first and foremost, um, primary purpose of this 2026 study was safety. The secondary one was to measure, okay, like, does the full field stimulus like change the threshold of the eye? Can the eye like increase threshold sensitivity? This is why they actually did patients with one eye with retinitis and the other one normal, because then now you can compare like how, how much better is the left eye compared to your control, which is the normal eye, you know?

• 20:08Lester Nare?

  Makes total sense.

• 20:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's a well, it's a well done study. Um, there were 10 patients.

• 20:12Lester Nare?

  That's really clever, actually.

• 20:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And it was, it was done pretty well. The 10 person study, open label. So that means that, I mean, obviously the people know that they're getting the viral vector, right? There's also, if you wanted to do a real study, you'd have to do a fully blind one where people are getting saline, right? And then, I don't know, what if the, the mind body connection?

• 20:30Lester Nare?

  I see better now.

• 20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like, things are crazy, dude. The mind is crazy.

• 20:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 20:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, that's totally an outcome that could happen. So, um, this is the first in, in, in multiple, but it's, it's, it's a pretty cool scientific payoff, right? It's a new route into surviving neural circuitry.

• 20:50Lester Nare?

  One of the things about this story that, you know, because when we talked about the prize originally, it was just looking at the sort of the past and how it built up to now this being again, an October study that came out literally like.

• 21:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Like this month.

• 21:03Lester Nare?

  Right, you know, just not that long ago. Um, and how we've taken what the original, an original question, which was totally unrelated to giving partial, uh, visual restoration. And we can say like, in the clinical context, we can say, okay, well, there's only partial vision repair. And we talked about this edge detection idea, like, okay, well, that's, you know, you're not giving people their sight back. And it made me think about this idea of, you know, for people like us that currently, maybe not into the future, currently have our full ability to see in our sight, it can be hard to understand the impact of even this first incremental step in someone who was a part of the study and is experiencing it directly.

• 21:48Lester Nare?

  We can look at the measurements, we can talk about the calculations, but there is a real lived experience that is getting fundamentally changed.

• 21:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Lester Nare?

  Even if not perfectly back to their original state by these early steps, um, which I, I find, you know, it's important to always remember that when we talk about the, these things ending up in patients, uh, these are people who didn't even think there was an opportunity for them to get their sight back.

• 22:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Lester Nare?

  Um, and I think like some of the things now, it's like, yes, maybe they can't make a person's face, maybe they can't, you know, uh, read perfectly, but they can start doing things that were removed from their lived experience that I think is, is really, really, um, unbelievable. Again, we started this by looking at like how, uh, it was working algae.

• 22:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, channelrhodopsin was first found in algae by Peter Hegelmann.

• 22:41Lester Nare?

  And then it became, oh, this is a way for us to be able to, uh, create and drive action within neurons. And then now this is being applied by clinical researchers for restoration of eyesight. And when we, you were looking at this idea in algae, you were not thinking that, oh, this is going to lead to restoration in eyesight. Maybe once you got to the transitional step of understanding that you can control neurons, obviously the, that's Pandora's box.

• 23:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Lester Nare?

  But, um, it, some of these things can take, one of the things that I think is incredible about this discovery especially is sometimes when you're these researchers, you don't get to live to see the impact on people's real lived experience of the work that you do.

• 23:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Lester Nare?

  Uh, a lot of these researchers have been able, are still around and are able to actually see it come to fruition in everyday lived experience, which sometimes basic research and lived experience, there's a large delta between these two things. I think that's just such a cool part of this story.

• 23:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, yeah, and it's only going to get better.

• 23:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like this is the first few things. I mean, this isn't even the first, um, paper that we covered that was trying to restore eyesight. We had the Prima paper.

• 23:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Earlier, but, and that, that one was actually much more involved because that involves like a, a literal chip going in the back of your eye that is responding to infrared.

• 24:02Lester Nare?

  Great episode.

• 24:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That's, that's a crazy episode too.

• 24:04Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Krishna Choudhary?

  So, I mean, you know, we live in a, we live in a day and age where like medicine is the frontier, right? It's, it's, it's pretty cool, the things that we can do.

• 24:14Lester Nare?

  And there are more than one ways to solve the problem, and this just happens to be one, but I think the thing you brought up that's important is, uh, safety was the key aspect of the study, but they now have, uh, a foundational platform around the, those, um, was it, uh, uh, ganglion?

• 24:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Ganglion cells.

• 24:34Lester Nare?

  On the front, knowing that there's multiple functional pieces to it. Okay, now we can start to take this, uh, success with doing one to now making it a, a, a multiplex kind of solution and seeing if we can now not just do edge detection, can we get movement, can we get these other things? It's going to be fascinating to see. And a lot of people in the comments were like, I'm studying in optics genetics, we do it, we're, we're doing this and we're doing that. So it's an area clearly of, of robust interest in research.

• 25:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, as I said, every single university has an optogenetics lab, right? The main justification really for the optogenetics prize is, is not its application in these niche sort of medical disciplines, which of course, it's amazing that it's happening, but the real bread and butter for why optogenetics has transformed neuroscience is because of what I talked about earlier, which is this ability to establish causation between neural circuits and behavior, neural circuits and aggregate bodily functions in some sense, right? Um, it's become the hammer for neuroscience fundamental research. Especially this is true in simple organisms.

• 25:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And I wanted to showcase C. elegans, which is the nematode, because, um, I remember actually when I was, um, doing my PhD in physics, um, I went to, uh, summer school, like, uh, in Okinawa, Japan. It's amazing, right? That I get to go to like.

• 26:04Lester Nare?

  I'm going there in 10 days.

• 26:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, really?

• 26:06Lester Nare?

  That's where, anyway.

• 26:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okinawa?

• 26:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That's awesome. Yeah, no, they have the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology, OIST, which is on a hill, um, beautiful architecture over there. They, they have like a summer school for computational neuroscience, which I had the pleasure of attending. Um, I, I forget who the PI was, who gave this talk.

• 26:24Lester Nare?

  Comment, comment when you see this.

• 26:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. But, um, but, um, they, they were talking about their use of optogenetics in C. elegans to understand motor movement, okay? This particular video is from the Gen Lab at the, um, Research Institute in Toronto, the Tannenbaum Research Institute in Toronto. Here's what's happening, okay? You're optogenetically activating the inhibitory motor neurons when the light turns on and watch the behavior. It arrests the behavior, right? This is a pretty easy causal link, right? I mean, we already had the causal link. Obviously, if you inhibit the motor neurons, you're going to stop the movement of the, of the worm. But here it's just so obvious, right? That when the light turns on, the, you can imagine, right?

• 27:07Krishna Choudhary?

  There's little proteins in the neurons of that nematode that are, as soon as the light turns on, they're letting in ions, which are depolarizing the cell or hyperpolarizing the cell in this case, because it's inhibitory, and it's stopping the activity of the muscles.

• 27:22Lester Nare?

  We're hitting the e-brake on the nematode.

• 27:25Krishna Choudhary?

  It's pretty insane, right? And it happens almost immediately.

• 27:27Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah. And we talked about the, the time as being a key part of this and, and the immediacy. And again, this is just a great visual.

• 27:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Lester Nare?

  To express that.

• 27:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And so this is, this is just like stopping movement. Now, can you control movement? This is next video is from the Alkama Lab at UMass Chan Medical School. Here, the animals express a light gated, um, channelrhodopsin in a pair of motor neurons called RIV. These neurons innervate the ventral neck muscle and they're important for the omega turn in C. elegans. And now you'll notice whenever the light turns on, there, I mean, it shows, I don't know if you can see, there's a little blue like thing that says, blue light on. Whenever the blue light turns on, the thing is going to turn left, right? You are now controlling the motor movement.

• 28:17Krishna Choudhary?

  You're controlling like the movement of this worm using light by turning lights on and on, on and off.

• 28:24Lester Nare?

  This is clearly American because it said it can only turn left like NASCAR.

• 28:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, effectively.

• 28:31Lester Nare?

  But, but I think the, the bigger point here is, is it's not just, uh, there is, there is a granularity of control, uh, and that, that's the big step here. It's not just on and off, but like we can actually, that on and off from a behavior perspective, uh, can be very specific.

• 28:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And now using these types of optogenetic tools, we can map out the entire circuit to be like, what is the if else code for motor movement in this worm, right? C. elegans is really nice because there's only like 300 neurons, so you can get that kind of granularity. But now with the advent of large data, um, with the advent of artificial intelligence and with the honing of these types of tools, we could get granularity to much larger neuron, much larger species, mammals perhaps.

• 29:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And that is the, the second paper that I want to talk about. This is, um, in Nature 2025 from Trinity College Dublin.

• 29:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And it asks a different kind of question. This is in mammals.

• 29:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And here you can do crazier things because mammals don't just move around. C. elegans, like the worms, you know, they're nice. They're a nice model organism because they really have very prescribed typical types of movement. They eat, they poop, they reproduce, right? It's about the spectrum of their behavior. I know there's gonna be some C. elegans neuroscientists out there who are gonna be pissed off, but like, I'm sorry. It's, it's, I'm not saying it's a bad thing, right? For certain questions, it's really good to have very simple model organisms, right? It's several Nobel prizes have been won by C. elegan scientists. Okay, so don't come at me. But mammals can do even crazier things. And in this case, here's what they're asking.

• 30:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Can retrieving an experience, like reliving a memory by activating the neurons that are associated with that memory? Can doing that recruit the body's responses to the experience?

• 30:30Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 30:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, can like the body feel the memory being reactivated?

• 30:35Lester Nare?

  And because we have the remote control now.

• 30:39Krishna Choudhary?

  It gets weird.

• 30:41Lester Nare?

  Gets weird.

• 30:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? I mean, it's, it's a real, and let's just talk about the science. Okay, first, let's just talk about the science. So the idea is, um, the researchers, in a nutshell, the researchers switched on neurons that were linked to a mouse's cold experience. And its oxygen consumption went up without actually experiencing the cold. Okay, so the neurons that thought, that, that made it think that it was cold, started creating a bodily effect. Where it started consuming more oxygen, the metabolism increased, so on and so forth, right? We already understand that a mammal exposed to the cold can increase heat production. This is why Joe Rogan is always in his ice baths.

• 31:26Krishna Choudhary?

  What are these called? Cold plunges?

• 31:28Lester Nare?

  Cold plunge is the new brand.

• 31:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, he's, he's in there with all of his friends in Austin, Texas. The idea is that you go into this cold plunge, it like momentarily increases your metabolism. It increases your oxygen intake because your body is like, oh, my God, I'm really cold. I need to like regenerate heat on my own, right? And this has like, you know, benefits purported. Some of it's actually, you know, true and documented and in scientific literature. In any case, the experimental logic now for this paper is the following. What we're gonna do is we're gonna pair an environment with the cold. So when the mouse is in a certain type of room with certain types of stimuli, we're gonna pair that with cold.

• 32:13Krishna Choudhary?

  So now he's gonna associate the stimuli with the experience of cold. Now later on, we wanna see if the mouse has earned, has, sorry, has learned that association. So we're gonna put the mouse in that environment again, but no cold. And see if it responds as if it is cold. And the mice do. So that means that they have learned that association, okay? Now what we do is we, we ask, what are the neurons that were activated in this experience?

• 32:46Lester Nare?

  Oh, okay. Okay, so, so first, we need to make sure that we understand that when, uh, the mouse has a baseline. Without doing any of the optogenetics magic yet.

• 32:55Krishna Choudhary?

  We gotta make sure that it even, there's some construct in its brain.

• 32:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:59Krishna Choudhary?

  That's like, oh, this is cold, I am cold.

• 33:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 33:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Even without the cold.

• 33:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 33:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:06Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so, so now we've got an association where there's certain neurons that are activating in the brain that are associated with this cold experience, right? And that are eliciting, eliciting a cold response of elevated oxygen.

• 33:21Lester Nare?

  Physiological response.

• 33:22Krishna Choudhary?

  More metabolism.

• 33:24Lester Nare?

  Body.

• 33:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Elevated heart rate, that kinda stuff, right? And now we ask, what are the neurons that are involved? And can we optogenetically enhance those neurons? Right? That's exactly what they do. So here, um, this is figure four of their paper. This is, uh, again, this is a, not a deep dive, this is a rundown, so we're skipping directly to figure four. Usually we go one, two, three, right? Anyways, so on the left-hand side, the green is the, where the channelrhodopsin is. Okay, so the green is the optogenetically tagged neurons. Those specific neurons are the ones that were activated during that cold experience.

• 34:02Lester Nare?

  Which we are able to see because we have these tools to be able to scan the brain and know what was activated before. So we're just trying to artificially activate what we've already seen previously.

• 34:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And on the right-hand side, we've got the, on, on the, on the Y-axis is the volume of oxygen that is consumed, like per minute or whatever. And then X-axis is time. The blue regions are where we've illuminated those neurons. So we've activated those, those neurons, the oxygen intake goes up. Nothing is happening to the mouse. The mouse is not in the environment that it's associated with the cold. And it's not in the cold, it's just in a normal, it's just chilling.

• 34:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then you activate those neurons and all of a sudden the mouse thinks it's cold, I guess. We don't know, right? I don't wanna say that. Sorry, I don't wanna say that. The neurons that are associated with the cold experience are activated and that causes a physiological response. We can't say subjectively what the mouse is feeling.

• 35:03Lester Nare?

  Feeling or experience.

• 35:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, I shouldn't say that. But it's very easy to, and I always make this mistake, you know, even as a trained neuroscientist or whatever, but yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's important to have that distinction.

• 35:14Lester Nare?

  I, I think it's, when, what's so important about the construction we have here is we've now removed the environmental stimuli.

• 35:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Lester Nare?

  That was driving this response. And we're now just artificially with light. Trying to, uh, trigger the same thing that the environmental stimuli was doing before in a completely different, unassociated environment. And we are seeing that is driving the same physiological response.

• 35:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 35:40Lester Nare?

  So we've effectively taken the, the memory of a, of a, of a lived environment in this, in these mice. And are able to artificially create, to artificially trigger something that results in a similar physiological response.

• 35:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Lester Nare?

  Without necessarily making this connection that what the mouse's subjective experience is, is necessarily what it was like. When it was in that environment.

• 36:06Krishna Choudhary?

  But it could be, it could not be.

• 36:07Lester Nare?

  Right, but it almost doesn't matter because the body is responding.

• 36:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the body is responding, right? And so we have established a causal link.

• 36:14Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 36:14Krishna Choudhary?

  And this, in this case, this is in the dentate gyrus, which is a region of the hippocampus of the, of the mouse. Um, dentate gyrus very famously is one of the few regions in the brain where active neurogenesis happens. There's like new neurons being created in the dentate gyrus. The other one is the olfactory bulb. But it's very rare for that to happen, right? So one question that you might ask is like, well, how do you actually tag the cells that are active, right? And I just wanted to briefly mention, I'm not gonna go into too much detail, but this alone, I think, is something that deserves a Nobel Prize. In, in neuroscience, in like physiology and medicine. Is the ability to actually even do that.

• 36:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, is to use, it's a general strategy that uses active, activity-dependent gene expression. The idea is that like when neurons become active, they start expressing specific genes. They start transcribing those genes. And you can have like a tracer that tags exactly those neurons that were active during that experience. And then tag that tracer or like tie that tracer to then, when you inject your optogenetic cocktail, right? Only the neurons that were active during that time are going to then respond to the optogenetics and express channelrhodopsin.

• 37:31Lester Nare?

  That's actually a huge, uh, let us know in the comments if you want us to cover that because there's actually, I have so many questions.

• 37:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Lester Nare?

  About, cuz that's a non-trivial component of part.

• 37:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Super non-trivial, yeah, yeah, it's super non-trivial. It's, it's a, it's a thing called TRAP2, Targeted Recombination in Active Populations, version two.

• 37:50Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's absolutely incredible that we can even do these things. But, but there's two conditions here, right? You have the activity and then you have an open labeling window, which is like, right after, right after the experience of cold and everything that you have the activity, you label those neurons. And then if the cells meet both of those conditions, they, they receive some kind of genetic change. And then only those things that have the genetic change are the ones that are going to express the optogenetics. And that way we can only turn on those cells that were important for that particular experience.

• 38:22Lester Nare?

  So when we talk about that delivery device that we mentioned earlier, this is figuring out what locations do we need to deliver that delivery device to? In order for it to generate the channel, uh, to generate the expression, so when we hit it with the certain, the channelrhodopsin, so when we hit it with the light we want to. What we've labeled and associated with the experience of whatever experiment we're doing.

• 38:45Lester Nare?

  Like that's how we know what the map is.

• 38:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's pretty general strategy.

• 38:49Lester Nare?

  Which is.

• 38:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means, that's crazy.

• 38:51Lester Nare?

  That's crazy.

• 38:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yo, it's crazy. Okay, so the other causal, whenever we talk about causal tests in biology, you always want the negative version of it. Like you've shown the positive version, which is you activate this thing, the animal responds as if it is cold. What if you put it in the experience of cold, but you deactivate the neurons, right? Does the animal respond as if it is not cold? And that's exactly what they did in figure five, right? So they, they show the other way around. This is not optogenetics. Here they use actually pharmacology. They use a drug that's activated, um, that's activating a receptor in those targeted cells that like inhibits those cells. And then you can deactivate this population and that's gonna trigger the response.

• 39:33Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's gonna suppress the usual learned response of, I am cold, I need to, um, you know, the body at least needs to increase its metabolism. So you can show this both ways. Uh, it's incredible paper out in nature.

• 39:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yep, yep. So I wanna come back to this idea that we started with this idea of memory. And, you know, we talked a lot about the methods and the details, but one of the big ideas here is for, memory is something that everyone can relate to. Whether it's through our own personal lived experience, positive, negative memory. You know, you hear a song come on on the radio and it reminds you of being in high school. Or you smell the, the smell of rain in the summer and it reminds you of like summer camp back in the day or like. So we like, we kind of have this thought of like memory being backwards looking.

• 40:24Lester Nare?

  And I think one of the things that this paper really shifted my thinking around is, uh, it's actually a two-way street where.

• 40:34Lester Nare?

  This idea of memory, and I understand with these caveats of we don't know what the subjective experience is of these, the subjects in this study.

• 40:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Lester Nare?

  But just to generalize it a little bit, your experience, which generates this activation in your brain, which in some cases will relate to how we recall and memory, actually has this aspect where when you are under similar conditions environmentally, it will prepare your body for that experience. I mean, the immediate thing I think about is like PTSD.

• 41:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Lester Nare?

  As an example.

• 41:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 41:10Lester Nare?

  Just in terms of like this connection between memory and then a bodily, physical, physiological response to some future stimulus that's not.

• 41:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's not really real, right? But, but there's some like weird stimulus that then triggers the same neurons that then causes the response that we call PTSD.

• 41:28Lester Nare?

  I, I, this, in my head, this gets dark very quickly.

• 41:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it gets dark very quickly. It also, I mean, if we linger on the PTSD aspect a little bit, right? If you can identify the neural population that creates the response like PTSD, like trauma and things like that, then you can find ways to perhaps delete those neurons, right? I mean, that's the most crude way of thinking about it, but there could be ways to restructure that neural network so that those triggers do not trigger anymore, right? That could be a possible therapy in some future.

• 42:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Seems pretty cool.

• 42:04Lester Nare?

  Huge beneficial.

• 42:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Lester Nare?

  For trauma victims of a wide variety of types.

• 42:09Krishna Choudhary?

  At the same time.

• 42:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, you know, the, the.

• 42:12Lester Nare?

  You know?

• 42:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like it, it, it, you know.

• 42:15Lester Nare?

  It's like Total Recall.

• 42:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Lester Nare?

  You know that movie?

• 42:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Lester Nare?

  Like the, yeah, it's literally like you could do Total Recall. And the, our ability to now understand the, to make these biological systems better, like this is the tension that always happens, right? Which is that, yes, science is an incredible way for us to understand the world around us. And the discoveries, in, in many cases, understandably, some people's reactions, like, oh, some billionaire is going to use this for evil, you know? And so I want to make a quick distinction, shout out to my SpongeBob fans out there, between like where, like, so where we are right now is that we're doing these in, in model organisms, in this case, mice. This is not necessarily something

• 43:03Lester Nare?

  that has risen to the level of doing so in humans. And so that delta is not small.

• 43:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:09Lester Nare?

  So this is not like a overnight, tomorrow, the surveillance state is going to be like, you know, manipulating your memories.

• 43:18Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 43:18Lester Nare?

  But there are always these ethical challenges.

• 43:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Lester Nare?

  That arise with these things. Again, I'm not.

• 43:24Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, I've seen, I've seen a lot of like, science fiction short stories in the, in the age of like Neuralink and these types of brain computer interfaces that, that talk about, you know, a world where having a BCI, having a brain-computer interface is like a mandatory thing.

• 43:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:43Krishna Choudhary?

  That like, just how like nowadays, you know, everyone has these like medical tests that everyone has to do, like, this is in a weird dystopian world. Every, there's that Black Mirror episode, right? Where everyone has that, like, the implant in their retina in their brain that like downloads the memories and like you can like relive memories. This is kind of that.

• 44:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 44:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Black Mirror continues to have been very prescient.

• 44:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Lester Nare?

  In many of these intersections.

• 44:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And Black Mirror is very, very far away, I think, from the technology of today.

• 44:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:12Krishna Choudhary?

  But at the same time, you know, it, it's incredible just how much we're commanding the, the human body and the human brain as we move forward, right? And there's still so much left to know, right?

• 44:26Lester Nare?

  A hundred percent.

• 44:27Krishna Choudhary?

  The brain is still very much black boxy.

• 44:29Lester Nare?

  A hundred percent.

• 44:30Krishna Choudhary?

  But we're chipping at it.

• 44:31Lester Nare?

  I think these conversations will continue to become more relevant because we are getting to a place where the powers that we are discovering are increasingly powerful, to make an eloquent statement. And so it's never too early.

• 44:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Lester Nare?

  To just ask the question.

• 44:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Lester Nare?

  And it just makes me feel like this idea of memory really became much more interesting after looking at this paper, because I never thought about it in this, it's not a one-way street.

• 45:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. Now we're getting a.

• 45:04Lester Nare?

  It's.

• 45:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Two-way exchange.

• 45:05Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, which is, again, a totally different way to think about it. And we're gonna have to decide what kinds of interventions we're comfortable with allowing, because obviously we want the benefit, but, you know, who gets to make that decision?

• 45:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Lester Nare?

  But not to end on, in that segment, a awkward place, but we're gonna pause to do a little bit of housekeeping. Again, we're trying to be careful because we want to make a distinction between where we are now and where these things can go. But where these things can go, we know very much in our history, when we don't have these conversations early enough.

• 45:43Krishna Choudhary?

  We will go.

• 45:45Lester Nare?

  Correct. For those who are joining us recently, whether it's through our Nobel Prize coverage, Golden Goose, all of our AI math stuff recently, welcome to FFP Nation with Krishna and myself, Lester. We are very happy to have you. One of the best ways you can help to support the show, the like, share, a comment, a five-star review on the podcast networks, really helps us get the best science show on the planet to more people. One thing that we've been waiting for, but we've taken matters into our own hands, for those who listen on Apple Podcasts, you've been audio-only for so long, we are transitioning to a new

• 46:25Lester Nare?

  provider to get our videos delivered on Apple Podcasts. We're looking to push that in November, so keep an eye out on that. For those who watch on Spotify or YouTube, video is already available as well as on our website, ffppod.com. Shout out to the big Instagram audience that has been following us for our clips. One of the best ways to get bite-sized experiences of the pod to help dilute the brain rot that you're getting from other channels. A recent milestone, which we could not have expected to have passed in our first year in a few

• 47:05Lester Nare?

  months, is FFP Nation is now bigger than Nature Magazine on Instagram, Springer Nature.

• 47:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 47:14Lester Nare?

  Which we actually have right here behind us.

• 47:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right here, look at that.

• 47:16Lester Nare?

  That, that one. We don't have a magazine, but there are more people that now follow us on Instagram than Nature. Sorry, Nature, we love you. Thank you for all the work that you do, but we'll.

• 47:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Thanks for publishing me.

• 47:27Lester Nare?

  We'll take it from here. No, no, no, just kidding, just kidding. No, but the huge shout out to everybody that continues to just pick up what we're putting down and support this way of talking about science. And the last that I'll just make is, for those who want to take the experience even further, if you go to our website, there are a variety of different ways to engage in the stories we talk about and take it to the next level, all the papers we talk about, some fun, interactive components. We want to continue to build these learning tools, whether you're a graduate student, a PhD, you're a PI at a lab, or you're an undergrad, you're in high school, you're just starting to get interested in these subjects. That is what we are here for. With that, now let's get back to the

• 48:11Lester Nare?

  science with the next subject or the recap, which is physics.

• 48:17Krishna Choudhary?

  The Physics Prize this year recognized Francis Halsin's contributions to IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources. Now, this instrument, IceCube, is absolutely wild.

• 48:32Lester Nare?

  Love it.

• 48:32Krishna Choudhary?

  It's in the South Pole, on the Antarctic ice sheet. The Antarctic ice sheet is, you know, two kilometers plus of sheer ice. And what they've done is drill down into the ice sheet and create a giant neutrino detector, the only one of its kind in the world, funded primarily by NSF and managed primarily by the University of Wisconsin, where Francis Halsin is on the faculty. The idea is to use the ice as a medium in which these rare particle interactions, the ones that neutrinos in, take part in, become visible, because neutrinos are notoriously hard to interact with. They're called the ghost particle in

• 49:15Krishna Choudhary?

  the standard model. They whiz right through. There's about trillions of them going through my fingernail at this very moment per second, even though the sun is on the other side of the earth, right? It's not even daytime right now in Los Angeles. And still, there are neutrinos going through my fingernail because they're going through the earth and then going through my fingernail. Like, that's how little they interact, right? So you need a large volume to basically, you know.

• 49:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Hedge the bet in your direction, right?

• 49:48Lester Nare?

  You're gonna have this incident capture.

• 49:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's like the probability is so low. But if you flip a coin, that's like super low probability. A million times, at some point, you're gonna get heads, right? Like, you know, it's the gambler's fallacy, except in physics.

• 50:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So what's a neutrino? Well, a neutrino is a particle that has no negative charge. And it's got interactions with ordinary matter that is quite infrequent. But what sometimes, when it does interact with ordinary matter, it knocks out a charged particle, something like an electron or a muon. We'll get into more of those details later on. But effectively, the way it works is those electrons or muons that are gonna go through the ice. And they're gonna travel faster than the speed of light in ice.

• 50:33Lester Nare?

  In ice.

• 50:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, because the speed of light in ice is about 20% lower than in a vacuum. And the speed of light in vacuum is the universal speed limit. So you can still technically go a little bit faster than, you know, that if you get a little bit closer to the speed of light, but just faster than the 20% deficit, then you're technically going faster than light in that medium. And you'll initiate a shock wave in the electromagnetic field, essentially. And if we can record that shock wave, we can figure out what the direction was of the neutrino that it came. What was the initial momentum, things like that? And from that, we can understand a little bit more about where that neutrino came from. So that's how IceCube works, right? And IceCube, at the very top, there's a tiny dot. That's the building that we were just looking at.

• 51:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Otherwise, this whole thing is a cubic kilometer of

• 51:24Lester Nare?

  It's a small dot.

• 51:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Of ice.

• 51:25Lester Nare?

  For those, for audio listeners, it's a very small dot.

• 51:27Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a very small dot. This thing is absolutely massive, right? So what's special about IceCube is because it's so big, it can capture high-energy neutrinos. High-energy neutrinos are neutrinos that come from these sources in the universe that are the greatest, largest, and most powerful particle accelerators ever, right? They make CERN look like tiny, tiny little I need another thing. I said Hulu last time. I should have come with something else. Some other, you know, you know, those racetracks, the Hot Wheels racetracks? Yeah, that's what that's what it makes CERN look like, you know? This thing is massive. It's the size of galaxies. And it's flinging these charged particles,

• 52:13Krishna Choudhary?

  accelerating them to incredible energies, several orders of magnitude higher than what CERN can do.

• 52:20Lester Nare?

  If I recall correctly, were we talking about how these are there? They're approaching the speed of light in the vacuum. Not quite.

• 52:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Lester Nare?

  Right?

• 52:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but it's like 99.99999. And I think it's like 29.

• 52:34Lester Nare?

  Right, it's quite close.

• 52:35Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like as close as anything has ever gotten, right? That is massive. Obviously, light goes at the speed of light. But this is something that is going as close as it can to the speed of light and still have a little bit of mass. So there's a little bit of like mass energy in that term. You know, it can't, it can't go truly at the speed of light, but it can get really, really close. We want to understand how these things work. And what is the nature of these things?

• 53:04Krishna Choudhary?

  The problem is that these giant particle accelerators, they fling out cosmic rays, which is what we've seen before. These are charged particles that move at that speed.

• 53:19Krishna Choudhary?

  They also fling out gamma rays, and they fling out neutrinos. There's three types of things that come out of these particle colliders, okay?

• 53:28Krishna Choudhary?

  The cosmic rays are usually charged particles. They're like protons or heavy atomic nuclei, which means that they're gonna be perturbed by magnetic fields in the extragalactic medium. And that means that if I saw a cosmic ray come from here, I'm not sure if it actually came from here or if it curved from over there and came from here, right? So I can't actually localize the source. Gamma rays, on the other hand, have a similar kind of problem. They're more straight. Gamma rays are just photons at the end of the day. But these gamma rays interact with the intergalactic medium. So they can get bent somehow. And they can also lose energy by interaction within the intergalactic medium. On the other hand, neutrinos just go straight, okay?

• 54:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Their cross-section with respect to like how much they interact with stuff is like tiny, tiny, tiny. So they're just going straight from source all the way to us here on Earth, right? And so if we happen to catch one in Antarctica and we can localize where it's coming from, we can be pretty sure that it actually is a straight line to the source, okay? And that's the idea. But at the same time, they're very rare. These high-energy neutrinos are extremely rare, which means you need a giant detector of the size of IceCube. The rarity of these events, you can calculate. It's something like one per cubic kilometer per year. So if you had a cubic kilometer detector and you saw this thing, then you'd see one every year.

• 54:56Lester Nare?

  So crazy.

• 54:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's why we need a cubic kilometer detector.

• 55:01Lester Nare?

  It's also, and to come back to like this idea, I think if I recall correctly, part of, you know, what we're trying, this is a mapping endeavor. Because why, like, we're trying to understand where it came from. And so we've now looked at all the options to do this mapping endeavor. And we've figured out that this is the best thing to, this is the best secondary or outcome of a process that's happening very far away for us to try to trace back the source of that process and the scale of that process. And so fundamentally, you know, the purpose is we're trying to understand astrophysical phenomena that are these massive, quote, particle accelerators

• 55:47Lester Nare?

  that are some of the most violently high-energy things in existence in the universe.

• 55:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And the key thing here, and this kind of follows up to the paper that we're gonna talk about, is that by studying these astrophysical sources, we can also glean insight into the fundamental physics of particles in general and like the standard model. We can push the standard model to its limit in terms of, you know, trying to understand how neutrinos work. They're a very enigmatic particle, right? And catching them is extremely rare. The higher the energy, the more kind of esoteric physics you can get into. And that's the point. So this next paper, it's the IceCube paper from the IceCube Collaboration, published in the Physical Review Letters in August 2026. So again, very recent.

• 56:39Lester Nare?

  Very recent.

• 56:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Very recent. This is like, you know, two months before IceCube won the Nobel Prize. And it measures the three-flavor composition of cosmic neutrinos.

• 56:51Lester Nare?

  The cosmopolitan IceCube of cosmic neutrinos.

• 56:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's actually, that should have been the title, honestly. What are you guys doing at IceCube?

• 56:59Lester Nare?

  This branding opportunity.

• 57:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. So let's review the standard model real quick. Here's the standard model.

• 57:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Beautiful, beautiful standard model of particle physics. Everything that is anything except gravity and maybe dark matter and dark energy, I guess, if those things are real.

• 57:21Lester Nare?

  So you're saying the majority of the universe?

• 57:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 57:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, things that are normal, all right? Things that are normal, it's in here, okay? At the center and the four that are flanking the center, those are the bosons. At the very center is the Higgs boson. And the four on the side, those are the gluon, the photon, and the W and Z bosons. The gluon mediates the strong nuclear force. This is the thing that keeps the nucleus of the atom together. The photon mediates the electromagnetic force, like, you know, electricity, magnetism, light. And the W and Z bosons mediate the weak nuclear force. This has to do with beta decay. And it turns out that, you know, the photon, the W and Z bosons,

• 58:10Krishna Choudhary?

  they're kind of part of the same sort of gang, the electro-weak force.

• 58:13Lester Nare?

  The weak gang.

• 58:15Krishna Choudhary?

  And the Higgs boson is just sort of this enigmatic particle that gives the W and Z bosons mass, okay? Finally, on the outer ring, those are the stuff that have mass, okay? Those are the particles that create matter in some sense. The top six are the quarks. You've got the up and the down, the charm and the strange, and the top and the bottom. Those are, those come in those pairs. There's three pairs. And then on the bottom, you have the leptons, which are the electron and the electron neutrino, the muon and the muon neutrino, and the tau and the tau neutrino. Crucially, those neutrinos come in three different flavors

• 58:59Krishna Choudhary?

  for the three generations of matter. And this is the standard model. Each of these things actually represents quantum fields, okay? And the particles are excitations in the quantum field. But the thing that is like fundamental is really like the field of the thing, right? But quantum field theory is very weird. And, you know, I need a few more semesters understanding it before I start talking about it in a bit more detail.

• 59:25Lester Nare?

  We love QFT.

• 59:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in any case, three types of neutrinos, three different flavors of neutrinos, okay? The question that we want to ask here is

• 59:39Krishna Choudhary?

  The flavors of those neutrinos, right, that are observed in IceCube? Can we infer something about the physics of the sources that made those neutrinos? By looking at the distribution of the flavors of the neutrinos? Okay, because IceCube is gonna see this number of electron neutrinos, this number of tau neutrinos, this number of muon neutrinos. Using that numbering scheme, the statistics of that, can I tell something about how the blazears and those weird particle accelerators at the edge of the universe? How those work?

• 1:00:12Lester Nare?

  I have strawberry, I have vanilla, I have chocolate. If I have more strawberry, and then vanilla's the next biggest, and then chocolate's the next biggest, it came, like, it can tell me the source of what produced my cosmopolitan ice cream.

• 1:00:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, what's wrong with the ice cream machine?

• 1:00:29Lester Nare?

  Right, right, perfectly, but again, as a, being annoying about the analogy, but this idea that the ingredient, the proportionality, the proportion of the ingredients, if we take the flavors of ice cream, uh, tell something about the McFlurry machine that made the ice cream?

• 1:00:45Krishna Choudhary?

  The In-N-Out?

• 1:00:46Lester Nare?

  The In-N-Out.

• 1:00:47Krishna Choudhary?

  We're, we're from California here, we are fans of In-N-Out Burger. No sponsorship yet, but, yo, In-N-Out Burger would be a great spot.

• 1:00:56Lester Nare?

  We're hungry, you see how bony we are over here? So, we need a little caloric intake, anyway.

• 1:01:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so, that's the idea, right? We're trying to, we're trying to measure the distribution of the types of neutrinos that we see in IceCube. Now, it's useful to separate three different things, okay? There's the distribution that comes out of the particle accelerator at the edge of the universe, then there's all of the stuff that happens in between, and then there's the statistics of the IceCube detector itself, right? We're gonna separate those three parts. Let's start with the production, okay? The production of these neutrinos happens in probably this way. This is how we're guessing. There's a proton that's coming in from these jets, super high energy, it interacts with a gamma particle, which is a really high beam of, high photon of light,

• 1:01:46Krishna Choudhary?

  high energy photon of light, and when it interacts with that, it's gonna create pions, those pions are gonna then decay into muons and gamma particles and electrons and so on and so forth. Let's just look at the, the, the end of the diagram, the end of the trees, where the branches are, okay? You've got the positron at the top, then you've got an electron neutrino, that's the nu, e, the v-looking thing with the e, that's an electron neutrino, then you've got an anti-muon neutrino, that's the bar, and then a muon neutrino, and then the rest are electron, positron, gamma, gamma.

• 1:02:19Lester Nare?

  At the bottom.

• 1:02:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Out of the neutrinos, we have two mu neutrinos, two muons, muon neutrinos, and one electron neutrino, right? So it's a two to one, sort of, ratio, okay? Let's not worry about the fact that one of them is an anti-neutrino and the other one's a neutrino. There's this like, there's this weird theory that like, the neutrino is its own antiparticle, but we don't know, because again, we don't know a lot about neutrinos. But in any case, the signature in our detector would be very similar, given if it's a muon neutrino or an anti-muon neutrino. What's really important is the flavor, and in this case, the flavor is a two to one ratio. Two muon neutrinos, one electron neutrino, okay?

• 1:03:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what we're guessing, is the starting distribution.

• 1:03:07Lester Nare?

  What's happening at the source.

• 1:03:08Krishna Choudhary?

  What's happening at the source, okay? Crucially, no tau flavors.

• 1:03:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, where's my?

• 1:03:14Krishna Choudhary?

  No tau.

• 1:03:14Lester Nare?

  Where's my umami?

• 1:03:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no tau flavors, okay? Now, from the source, it's gonna come through billions of light years to the Earth, and during that time, it is going to change the mixture, because neutrinos mix. They've got these things called mass eigenstates, which you can imagine are like, three directions in your Hilbert space of possible neutrino flavors, okay? They're not really even, it's, you wouldn't even call them, like, what's interesting about neutrinos is like, the, the three relevant directions that you can express what the neutrino is, aren't even like electron, muon, tau.

• 1:03:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like mass one, mass two, mass three, okay?

• 1:04:02Lester Nare?

  I don't like it.

• 1:04:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's weird, um, and, and the three flavors are expressed as combinations of these three different directions, in some sense. So you can imagine, it's kinda like, you know, if we go to the analogy of the ice cream, it's like, imagine there's like, three ingredients that make up chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, but they come in different, like, sort of proportions for each of them.

• 1:04:23Lester Nare?

  For each of the individual parts.

• 1:04:24Krishna Choudhary?

  For each of the individual ones, but they're, they're like a mystery, like, box.

• 1:04:28Lester Nare?

  So you could get the dark chocolate chocolate, or the milk chocolate chocolate.

• 1:04:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and, but like, but like, somehow, if the milk chocolate and the dark chocolate combine, it gives you strawberry, you know? Neutrinos are weird, right? But in any case, these three mass eigenstates are mixing all the time, and so sometimes the electrons, the electron neutrinos will like, transition to tau neutrinos, will transition to muon neutrinos. And one of the famous experiments done by the, the Nobel Prize winners that discovered the neutrinos, Raymond Davis, he discovered that, you know, there's only a third of the neutrinos that we see from the sun showing up in my detector, right? And it's like, where are the other two thirds? And everyone thought, we went over this in the episode of America 250.

• 1:05:14Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, the, uh, John Bacall at Princeton was going, well, you should be seeing this many events, and he's like, no, I'm seeing exactly a third of what you're saying, right? So what's going on? Turns out, there's three flavors, and the neutrinos were changing flavor on their way from the sun to the Earth, okay? So, that's the idea. On the way here, that ratio is going to change.

• 1:05:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And finally, when we get to our detector,

• 1:05:41Krishna Choudhary?

  the detector has a different probability of measuring the three different types.

• 1:05:45Lester Nare?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:05:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, because it's not like all of these three interactions are created equal, right? If the tau came in, that has a lower percentage of interacting with the ice than, let's say, the electron neutrino.

• 1:05:58Lester Nare?

  So good thing there's not a lot of tals coming from the source.

• 1:06:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, but we, we don't know.

• 1:06:02Lester Nare?

  Oh, that's true, cuz I, that's the theory. It, it might transition on the way.

• 1:06:07Krishna Choudhary?

  On the way.

• 1:06:08Lester Nare?

  So, that's the theory, but it might be the case that it's there, but we just don't, we, on the observational level, we actually are not, ah, yeah.

• 1:06:13Krishna Choudhary?

  So you gotta be careful, right? Now, there's three different signatures for the three different flavors.

• 1:06:18Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:06:19Krishna Choudhary?

  The electron one just looks like, kind of like a single track. The, the, the electron one is in the center. It's not even a track, actually, it's more of just like an explosion that happens in the, in the center of the detector. The track actually is the muon looking. So the muon neutrino looks like a track that like, goes through the detector. The electron one is kinda like a central explosion.

• 1:06:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:06:43Krishna Choudhary?

  You can't really tell where it came from, but you've got a really good estimate of the energy, because all of the stuff is inside the detector. With the muon, it's like, it's coming through, it could have lost energy outside, it could have lost energy on its way out, like, but you know where it's coming from, because it's a really nice sort of linear thing. And the, the tau one has this like, double bang idea, where like,

• 1:07:03Lester Nare?

  Bang, bang!

• 1:07:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it, it goes through one, and then it transitions in the middle of the detector, it transitions into another particle, and then does another, um, track. So it dumps a bunch of energy, and then it has a little bit of energy left over.

• 1:07:19Lester Nare?

  And then does, I, I just want you to know that I just gave a very, very famous sports meme that you have no idea about.

• 1:07:27Krishna Choudhary?

  I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 1:07:28Lester Nare?

  And people in the comments will know what I'm talking, I'm not gonna tell you. I didn't mean to, I just couldn't stop thinking about the double bang, because double bang is of, in the lexicon, it's a very specific thing.

• 1:07:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Really?

• 1:07:40Lester Nare?

  And it's not talking about the tau neutrino.

• 1:07:42Krishna Choudhary?

  No, dude, when, when people, in physics, when people say double bang, everyone knows you're talking about the tau neutrino, and you're talking about this sort of double explosion that happens, because a decay happens in the middle of the track. Everyone knows that's what you're talking about.

• 1:07:57Lester Nare?

  I'm gonna now call the, and I'm not gonna tell you, but the, what I'm referencing, I'm now gonna call it, uh, the tau neutrino, uh, and make it a thing. For the physics, who are also sports fan people, let's make it happen. But not to, not to take away from your point here, but there's signatures on the observational level that are very unique, and have different, uh, uh, they express themselves differently. They're very distinct, so we know, uh, what flavor we're getting.

• 1:08:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:22Lester Nare?

  And we are getting some tau, because we know that it's the double bang.

• 1:08:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, but those things are quite rare, right? But you have to, you have to, um, scaffold the actual data that you see with the probability that you would see that thing, right? Because like, it could be that the thing is actually rare, or it could be that, like, there's a lot of it, but it interacting with the ice in my IceCube detector is rare, right? Which one is it? And so you have to do a lot of forward modeling to actually figure out what is the incoming mixture from what you see. There's like, a distribution of what you see, and from that, you build, like, what is it that is actually coming into the Earth, from, from the source?

• 1:09:03Lester Nare?

  The actuality and the possibility are different things.

• 1:09:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Very much so. And so, this is what this new analysis did in the Physical Review Letters. After 11.4 years of IceCube data, they figured out the best-fit cosmic flavor fractions, and it's roughly at about 30% electron, 37% muon, 33% tau.

• 1:09:24Lester Nare?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:09:25Krishna Choudhary?

  But, so it's about a third, a third, a third, and the, the error is quite big, because there's not that many events. It hasn't been online for that long, and again, we only have a cubic kilometer, right? You've got a bigger thing, you've got more, more data, and you can constrain this thing a little bit more. But for all intents and purposes, we can use at least this data to create some kind of inference about what's happening at the source.

• 1:09:49Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:09:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And we can tell that we're probably correct about the fact that it's a proton that's interacting with the gamma to create a two to one ratio, muon-electron.

• 1:09:59Lester Nare?

  Neutrinos.

• 1:09:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:00Lester Nare?

  This, this is.

• 1:10:02Krishna Choudhary?

  But this is, this is cool because we're gleaning insight into those particle reactions at the edge of our universe.

• 1:10:10Lester Nare?

  This is, um, I have so many thoughts about this. It gets back to, you know, and we'll, we'll talk about it in a moment, but like, why, why are we doing this? And so I'll leave that for a moment. But one of the things that we didn't, this is just one aspect, again, paper that came out recently of how we're using this new instrument, uh, the IceCube neutrino observatory, uh, to look at things that are very far away. A paper that we did not cover, which is another aspect of this, is this sort of earth tomography.

• 1:10:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Lester Nare?

  Concept, which is similar to the muon tomography that we've actually talked about on the pod, which was related to, um, research in like volcanology and mapping the pyramids, which is basically.

• 1:10:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the hidden chambers.

• 1:10:54Lester Nare?

  In the, yeah.

• 1:10:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the Kufu pyramids.

• 1:10:56Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:10:56Krishna Choudhary?

  In Giza.

• 1:10:57Lester Nare?

  Uh, great, great past episodes for you to look at, but it's, it's giving us another way to, the actual instrument of IceCube in the earth tomography paper was looking at how it passes through the earth.

• 1:11:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:08Lester Nare?

  Which lets us then understand the structure mapping of the insides of, of our own planet. So this is not just a thing that's looking outward. It is also giving us the ability to understand more about our home. Here on earth. And it goes to this idea that these tools, these instruments that are very expensive are not necessarily single use. And also you might build them as single use initially and discover that there are these ancillary use cases, these other use cases after the fact, that you might not have initially thought was going to be the case, but they're so powerful, um, that we can do a lot of things with them. So I, I, I think IceCube is so cool.

• 1:11:53Lester Nare?

  Because I'm a space nerd.

• 1:11:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Lester Nare?

  And so the space stuff is super interesting to me, but the, uh, the earth tomography paper, I think may be worth a follow up in the future because there's some interesting aspects to that.

• 1:12:04Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's totally, that's totally, that's totally fair. And like, well, before we move on to the chemistry.

• 1:12:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:12:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Prize.

• 1:12:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:12:10Krishna Choudhary?

  I do want to linger on some of the reactions that this physics Nobel Prize caused.

• 1:12:15Lester Nare?

  There were reactions.

• 1:12:16Krishna Choudhary?

  There were reactions. Okay. There's always reactions, right?

• 1:12:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Let, let's talk about it.

• 1:12:22Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:12:23Krishna Choudhary?

  So there's been a lot of support from the experimental astrophysical community, from the astroparticle community and from the cosmology community. It's been enormous support for Francis Halsin. They think this is a no brainer. They've been calling IceCube as something that wins the Nobel Prize for a long time. And Sean Carroll, very famous, um, scientist and physicist and science communicator, I guess, in some sense. He said Francis Halsin is a great person and quote, "Let's turn the Antarctic ice sheet into a neutrino detector is exactly the kind of idea that deserves a prize if you can pull it off." Such a good Nobel Prize.

• 1:13:07Lester Nare?

  And if I recall correctly, it's been a while since an astrophysics or cosmology related, uh, topic won the physics Nobel?

• 1:13:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think the last one was 2020.

• 1:13:20Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:13:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, for the, that was Andre Gez.

• 1:13:23Lester Nare?

  That's right.

• 1:13:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And cohort for the Sagittarius A star Milky Way.

• 1:13:28Lester Nare?

  Not that long ago.

• 1:13:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, not that long ago, but I mean, it's, it, it's been happening, right? Like, I think the one before that was probably the dark energy one by, um, Reese.

• 1:13:43Krishna Choudhary?

  For, for the, I shouldn't call it dark energy because they said the accelerated expansion of the universe. The Nobel Committee is very, very particular, like, cause we don't know if it's dark energy or cosmological constant, but certainly the accelerated expansion is a thing. So for the experimental discovery, they won the Nobel Prize. But, but still it's, um, it's, it's, in the grand history of Nobel Prizes, astrophysics is certainly rare.

• 1:14:10Lester Nare?

  Fair enough.

• 1:14:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, it, it's nice to see astrophysics that get some kind of credit, you know? So the vast majority of the community was very supportive. Some have not been so kind. Sabina Hosenfelder, who has a very entertaining show on YouTube. Usually I, I quite enjoy her sass for physics, but you know, every once in a while, I guess in this particular one, I did not enjoy it. She had a video titled "Benefit to Humankind?", question mark, um, Nobel Prize in Physics. "You will hate me for saying this." Well, hate is a strong word, but I think I will certainly disagree. So here's what she said in the video. She said, "What have we learned from it?

• 1:14:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, we have learned that neutrinos exist, which no one doubted. It does teach us something about neutrino sources outside our galaxy, but that's pretty much it. This Nobel Prize just documents how irrelevant the foundations of physics have become." Okay?

• 1:15:12Lester Nare?

  Those are, those are some pretty strong words.

• 1:15:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Those are some pretty strong words. Well, I would like to contend step by step. Okay? So she says, "What have we learned from it? Well, we've learned that neutrinos exist." She says, "Which no one doubted." Right? "No one doubted that these neutrinos existed, and so the fact that we saw them doesn't really change anything." Well, there are several Nobel Prizes in our history that do exactly that. One of our favorite ones that we've talked about on this show is the Lamb shift from 1947. Willis Lamb at the University of Columbia determined that two specific energy levels of the hydrogen atom had distinct energies.

• 1:15:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And there was a tiny, tiny difference in that energy, which he measured using microwave radar technology. This was in 1947, so post-war, there was a bunch of radar technology that the US government had developed. He used that to find that shift. Now, in the 1930s, people had been measuring the spectrum of hydrogen using visible light, and they already knew something was up. Okay? Dirac had came up with his equation for the electron in the late 1920s. And from Dirac's equation, from Dirac's theories, you can post, you, you can sort of theorize

• 1:16:36Krishna Choudhary?

  and you can sort of deduce what the energy spacing should be, but it's, uh, one of those energies, one of, two of those energy levels should be degenerate, meaning they should have the same energy level. And pretty soon, even in the 1930s, using visible light, people had figured out something was up. Right? It took Willis Lamb to actually measure that thing. And there's a very famous, um, there's a very famous interview by Hans Bethe. I think it's either by Hans, no, yeah, it's a very famous interview by Hans Bethe, who said, "Everyone knew that it was there, but until Lamb measured it, we were just kind of like, it was a coffee conversation."

• 1:17:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:17:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It was a, it was like, oh, like, that's kind of interesting. And then Lamb put a number on it. He's like, "This is the number. This is the shift between those two energy levels." And all of a sudden it became a real thing that the theorists were like, "Okay, so now there's a number that I can chase, right? To try and understand what's going on." We already knew that, that no one was, no one was surprised that the Lamb shift existed, but measuring it was important. Right? Because it falsifies several theories and it gives room for theorists to actually propose new theories.

• 1:17:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:17:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Same thing happened with the Higgs. The Higgs is something that we knew to, to exist for a very long time, 40 or 50 years since Peter Higgs wrote that paper. Measuring its mass is something else.

• 1:18:02Lester Nare?

  We still built CERN.

• 1:18:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we still built CERN to measure the mass. And I'm sure Sabina Hosenfelder is going to say that CERN is a waste of time too. Right? So, you know, she's got her opinions, but I would like to say that, you know, Lamb did it with microwaves, even though the visible spectrum people had said that, you know, it might not exist. I mean, sorry, that it definitely exists. And that led to the revolution of QED and quantum field theory. That's how we have atomic clocks, that, that's how we have GPS.

• 1:18:30Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:18:30Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, come on, it's pretty nice, right? So similarly, in the case of IceCube.

• 1:18:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Observing neutrinos and finding the distribution of the neutrinos, the power distribution, right? Of like, not only, yeah, in the, in the, the case that we just reviewed, which is the flavors of the neutrinos that are coming through, but also the power distribution.

• 1:18:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, how often do I see a neutrino of a certain power?

• 1:18:55Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:55Krishna Choudhary?

  That is going to constrain the physics, that is going to constrain the physics of the sources, and also constrain the physics of the particles themselves. That's gonna tell us more about neutrinos in general. And who knows? At some point in the vast future, it might lead to things that we can't even dream about.

• 1:19:17Lester Nare?

  This is what we just talked about with optogenetics. Optogenetics started with someone in looking at how light and algae.

• 1:19:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:23Lester Nare?

  And now we're solving vision.

• 1:19:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26Lester Nare?

  And understand how to control, to activate neurons in the brain.

• 1:19:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:30Lester Nare?

  And so you can't always know where this goes.

• 1:19:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And I think physics has been, you know, physics has had the luxury over the past century or two centuries of almost having like, an immediate effect on economics.

• 1:19:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's like, we discovered the nucleus, and then like 20 years later, we build a bomb. And it's like dope, like, yo. And so, and so-

• 1:19:53Lester Nare?

  Hold on, hold on. I don't wanna be careful. There's a difference between the scientific process of the bomb and the, the lived experience, just to be clear.

• 1:20:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, just to be clear, like, yeah, we split the atom. Now we, we have nuclear fission technology, right? We have, we have unlimited power in some sense.

• 1:20:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:20:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Um, we have radioactive carbon dating. We have radiology for cancer. Like, we have all of these-

• 1:20:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:20:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Technologies, right? With the quantum mechanics stuff, like 1920s, we, we had quantum mechanics. Like, 20 or 30 years later, we're inventing the transistor and superconductivity and all the other stuff.

• 1:20:25Lester Nare?

  And supercomputer, all this stuff.

• 1:20:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, it's like, very quick. But that's because we've like, lived in an energy regime where like, this physics is like, right there for us. It's like, right there.

• 1:20:35Lester Nare?

  Just touch it.

• 1:20:36Krishna Choudhary?

  You could just touch it, you could just like, tune up the voltage. And like, oh, all of a sudden, like, new physics is happening in front of me, right? We've, we've kind of spent our tokens.

• 1:20:47Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And now, now we need, we need the big models, you know? In some sense?

• 1:20:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, and so, yeah, like, the progress is gonna be a little bit slower because the questions we're starting to ask now require a lot higher energy and a lot more time and a lot more work. But that doesn't mean that it's not worth it, you know?

• 1:21:10Lester Nare?

  I, I wanna ask an, uh, a stupid question. Under that same construction-

• 1:21:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:16Lester Nare?

  That's the Venus put forth.

• 1:21:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Lester Nare?

  Uh, I wanna talk about string theorists.

• 1:21:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Yeah, she hates string theory.

• 1:21:23Lester Nare?

  You know, they're like, oh, we, the thing works. It makes predictions. But there would obviously be, but it can't be experimentally tested.

• 1:21:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Lester Nare?

  And so-

• 1:21:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Not yet.

• 1:21:32Lester Nare?

  Not yet.

• 1:21:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:32Lester Nare?

  And so, you know, would it be fundamentally different between where the string theorists are now, where it can make predictions, versus some experimental detection?

• 1:21:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I think, I think, I think that's a, that's a very good and relevant question.

• 1:21:47Lester Nare?

  As the, as a similar kind of analogy, because it's basically saying, you're saying, oh, the string theorists already figured it out. No, you just measured it. And it's like, well, that's a very big difference.

• 1:21:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. It is a very big difference. I mean, so there, there are some, there's something to be said about maybe the over-exposure of the theoretical physics grant commu- granting-

• 1:22:10Lester Nare?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:22:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Initiatives.

• 1:22:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:22:12Krishna Choudhary?

  And let's say, string theory.

• 1:22:13Lester Nare?

  Uh, which, right? Which, yes.

• 1:22:15Krishna Choudhary?

  May- maybe that's true. I mean, I'm sure that, I, I, I think string theory should get funded. And actually, in the advent of AI, solving math problems, like, string theory should, in some sense, get cheaper because you can just like, ask, a, because it's like, pure math in some sense.

• 1:22:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:22:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can just ask AI to solve some of the string theory.

• 1:22:33Lester Nare?

  It shouldn't take all the oxygen in the room, which is what a lot of people in the physics community complain about. It's like, it's become the old, like, the, this, it just absorbs. It's just like this black hole.

• 1:22:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Lester Nare?

  Funding black hole. And it's like, okay.

• 1:22:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but, and, but also, I've been, I've been looking more into it.

• 1:22:47Lester Nare?

  Oh, ooh.

• 1:22:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And it seems that like, a lot of the noise against string theory are by, like, the types that don't actually have an in on the physics community at large in the first place.

• 1:23:00Lester Nare?

  That's, that's fair.

• 1:23:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, like, there is a truth to it, that like, the string theory community has maybe an outsized role in-

• 1:23:08Lester Nare?

  The cabal.

• 1:23:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in the cabal. But it's, it's not nearly the extent that like, is, is reported in the popular zeitgeist, right? It's, it's not like, because like, there's, there are quantum gravity people, there's like, the loop quantum gravity.

• 1:23:22Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:23:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a big initiative that like, a lot of people are getting money for, to explore. There's, um, there's other ways to do grand unified things, right? So, yeah, it's, I, I see where you're coming from. And I do think that like, there, there's a healthy tension that should happen between the theoretical physics community and the experimental physics community. In terms of like, you've gotta give us stuff to test, right? And the experimental community also has to find experiments that will push the theorists.

• 1:23:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And Ice Cube is one of those.

• 1:23:55Lester Nare?

  It's a perfect example.

• 1:23:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Lester Nare?

  Of, and the, I think the, the point I'm trying to land the plane on here is like, the experimentalists have a role to play, even if the theorists have arrived at a conclusion prior to the experimentalists being able to show it in lived experience.

• 1:24:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And the experimentalists, like, experimental physics has a role. So, what am I trying to say? So, experimental physicists, they've got an obligation, in some sense, to just push the frontier at all times. Okay? When the muon was discovered, there was no theorist-

• 1:24:35Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:36Krishna Choudhary?

  That had that on the radar.

• 1:24:37Lester Nare?

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? When the muon was discovered, I think it was Wolf, no, it was Robbie.

• 1:24:43Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Is it Robbie? Who was like, who ordered that? Because it didn't make any sense, right? We've, we're, we're, we're sitting very nicely. We've got the quark, we've got the up and the down, we've got the electron, we've got this nice generation of stuff. We even have the neutrino from Pauli being like, you know, let's just do the bookkeeping and make sure the energy is conserved. All of a sudden, the muon shows up, and it, it's a parallel universe. And then the tau shows up, and it's another parallel universe. We still don't have an answer to those three generations of matter, right? But that happened because experimentalists were just pushing the envelope on the types of particles that they could see.

• 1:25:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:25:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? The theorists didn't even have it on their radar, that something like this could exist.

• 1:25:23Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:24Krishna Choudhary?

  So, experimentalists have an obligation to just keep pushing the envelope. On the more and more sensitive the experiments can get, the more and more the parameter sweeps that we can see, it's, it's always gonna be good for humanity at large.

• 1:25:38Lester Nare?

  My favorite, I think my favorite physical, physics experiment continues to be LIGO. But that is a previous episode.

• 1:25:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:45Lester Nare?

  Uh, so if you wanna know about LIGO, uh, gravitational wave detector. And the, the, was it the, uh, graduate students or postdocs that were driving?

• 1:25:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. They were driving, and, and, yeah.

• 1:25:56Lester Nare?

  At the same time?

• 1:25:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Lester Nare?

  The detection.

• 1:25:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58Lester Nare?

  And, uh, great story.

• 1:26:00Krishna Choudhary?

  No, like, like, an hour before.

• 1:26:01Lester Nare?

  Hour before.

• 1:26:02Krishna Choudhary?

  But the, the PIs were frantically calling them.

• 1:26:05Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable story. Um, in any event, that, that concludes, that was a large digression, but I think an important kind, this is a discussion. And it's, it's fun and it's healthy. One of the things I think I love about our community in FFP Nation, we have the smartest comments section on the internet.

• 1:26:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. We really do.

• 1:26:22Lester Nare?

  And I, I don't think it's close.

• 1:26:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24Lester Nare?

  If you think you have a better one, please, try.

• 1:26:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Because every time we talk about something, there's always like, at least five people who are like, oh yeah, that's my PhD.

• 1:26:33Lester Nare?

  It's unbelievable. Uh, and shout out to all the folks who are, are hard at work here in the comments, sharing, because, uh, it makes us feel, uh, very nice. Very nice.

• 1:26:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it really does.

• 1:26:44Lester Nare?

  We will end with our, uh, chemistry recap, uh, and breeze through this. Uh, again, this is a recap episode, so we're trying to have a little bit of fun here.

• 1:26:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Lester Nare?

  Not going too deep, but let's start with, uh, let's end with, I should say, chemistry.

• 1:26:58Krishna Choudhary?

  The chemistry prize recognizes Henri Cargan and Kenzo Soi for nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Asymmetric in the sense that chemistry has a handedness, and it cares about the handedness, it cares about mirror images. The theme was how reactions can produce an excess of one mirror image form, and in suitable systems, it can amplify that small handedness imbalance.

• 1:27:29Krishna Choudhary?

  The central property that we're talking about here is chirality. Chirality is a geometric property of 3D molecules. Two mirror images, they're different in the sense that the bonds are exactly the same. The atoms are exactly the same, but the arrangements of them in 3D are exactly mirror flipped in one direction. Okay. And these are called enantiomers. Here we're looking at two examples of L alanine and D alanine. These are two enantiomers of the amino acid alanine. Same exact molecular formula, but the 3D structures are flipped.

• 1:28:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, for unbiased synthesis in a symmetric environment, there's no obvious reason to prefer one over the other. But life, for some reason, biology strikingly uses a consistent handedness for every single molecular species. All of the amino acids that could be chiral are always in their left-handed versions in life. All of the sugars that could be chiral are in their right-handed version. And the prize-winning work this year demonstrates that there's chemical mechanisms through which you can establish an imbalance, and then that imbalance can become a lot larger than it was previously. And perhaps it is a way in which you can achieve homo chirality from an initially,

• 1:28:57Krishna Choudhary?

  you know, sort of balanced environment.

• 1:29:00Lester Nare?

  Like an unbiased initial condition.

• 1:29:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. Now, before we talk about biological homo chirality and the historical origin and all that.

• 1:29:08Lester Nare?

  You know, light, light conversation.

• 1:29:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Before we talk about all that, I do want to do some very light conversation and recap some of the whirlwind, the whirlwind of events that happened the morning of Wednesday.

• 1:29:21Lester Nare?

  I just want to preface this for those who might be podcast listeners or audio and video listeners, but don't follow us on socials. Yeah, this was crazy. This purely happened in the, in the social media.

• 1:29:31Krishna Choudhary?

  On Instagram.

• 1:29:32Lester Nare?

  On Instagram. It was all Instagram. And so there's a whole universe of FFP that like happens on the socials, particularly Instagram. So if you don't follow there, this is a very good reason.

• 1:29:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Lester Nare?

  To follow, sorry, please.

• 1:29:45Krishna Choudhary?

  This is crazy. Okay. So usually with our Nobel coverage, we wake up 15 minutes before the prize and we're watching it live. The press conference, 2:45 AM, the Nobel Committee announces the prize. And as soon as the prize is announced, we're like, okay, um, my predictions didn't work, but oh, well, I get to devouring their popular information and their scientific background. So the Nobel Committee puts out this PDF of popular information and for scientific background, presumably for journalists like me and Lester to sort of understand and create content out of. Okay. I noticed that in one of the SOI reaction visuals in the popular information, there might've been a mistake.

• 1:30:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Specifically, they had two versions, the two enantiomers of a particular intermediate in the reaction. The left version had a dotted link to a zinc oxygen pair. And the right version had the whole thing flipped, but the thing wasn't dotted. It was a solid line. And I thought, you know, that thing should be dotted because you've already flipped it, so it should probably be dotted. I asked ChatGPT actually, and it said it was fine. And then I went through the logic, my own logic of like, it should be dotted because it's like flipped or whatever. And then it like spent some time and it was like, oh yeah, you're right. But then I was like, you know, I'm still doubting it because it's like, okay, is ChatGPT just telling me I'm right because I am right? Right. It's like being synchophantic.

• 1:31:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:31:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So we get to the podcast recording. And I'm still like wondering if I'm right or wrong, but I go off on a limb and say, I think I made a mistake. We post it on Instagram.

• 1:31:25Lester Nare?

  Mind you, this is five hours.

• 1:31:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Lester Nare?

  After it was announced.

• 1:31:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is five hours after it's announced. I mean, I should have really called up some of my chemistry friends, but you know, I'm not going to wake them up at like 6 AM. Hey, can you check this enantiomer for me? And like, they'll be like this, I'm deleting you from my context. So I, we talk about it on the, on the podcast, we posted on Instagram. It gets a lot of traction. There's a lot of chemists in the audience saying that I am actually right. And they notice another mistake, which is that the, the flipped version was actually, it was, it was connected to the isopropyl group in the right version. On the left, it's connected to the oxygen.

• 1:32:11Krishna Choudhary?

  It should be connected to the oxygen because the oxygen has two bonds, one to the carbon ring, one to the rest of the zinc isopropyl thing, right? But the isopropyl doesn't have any bonds left to go to the carbon. It doesn't make any sense. So the, the chemist, the actual organic chemist in the audience actually noticed that. There are several organic chemist teachers in, in the audience who are just, you know, they, they fulfill the, the stereotypical organic chemistry teacher of just being like masochists.

• 1:32:40Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're like, this is a great, like, this is a great test problem. This is a great homework problem.

• 1:32:47Lester Nare?

  To all the undergrads who are going to get this as a problem in the future, apologies in advance.

• 1:32:51Krishna Choudhary?

  I pity your students like I pitied myself when I was in Orgo. God, that. Yeah, you guys are all the same. All of the Orgo, Orgo teachers are all the same. In any case, so the, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, they actually responded.

• 1:33:12Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:33:12Krishna Choudhary?

  To our.

• 1:33:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:33:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Video on Instagram, they, they, they posted a photo of the Futurama scientist and they said, dear FFP pod, we are very glad that you like the material and find it useful. We certainly do like the material.

• 1:33:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:33:29Krishna Choudhary?

  The popular information and the scientific background is essential for getting me the, the background that I need to like do this episode in five hours. Right? So yeah, they said, thank you for reading it so carefully. Good catch. You are certainly correct about the error in figure six, which has been now corrected. We have posted the updated version on our website. And the updated version has not only the dotted line, which I noticed, but also the oxygen.

• 1:33:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:33:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Getting flipped, which means that they actually read our comments.

• 1:34:01Lester Nare?

  So FFP Nation, you have impact on what is being decided in terms of the public information, the popular information from the Nobel Prize Committee.

• 1:34:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, absolutely insane. I mean, this is, by the way, this is already like something that I never could have imagined.

• 1:34:18Lester Nare?

  This is ridiculous.

• 1:34:18Krishna Choudhary?

  This is ridiculous that like the Royal Academy of Sciences in Sweden, the guys who are in charge of giving the physics and the chemistry Nobel Prize and disseminating the information about them are actually responding to us. And like, we caught an error and they're like, they're gracious enough and true scientists to like, be like, yeah, you know what? That's a mistake. We're going to correct it. And so, yeah, I'm freaking out. You're freaking out. We're both like, okay, what do we do? What do we do?

• 1:34:44Lester Nare?

  We like wake up the next day or whatever. It's like, what's happening?

• 1:34:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So we're like, okay, well, ah, um, and then I'm like, okay, I'll like, I'll like make a, a response video in my bedroom. Right? So, because we didn't have a, we didn't have a plan.

• 1:34:57Lester Nare?

  You're right.

• 1:34:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, it was like, it was like, once, once chemistry is done, it's like, I want to take the week off.

• 1:35:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right. We were supposed to be on vacation until today.

• 1:35:04Krishna Choudhary?

  This happened. So I'm like, okay, I'll, I'll like make a video at my desk. We make a quick reply video and at the end of the whole thing, I do a cheeky like, you know, if you guys are interested in a podcast covering the Nobel Prizes, like we're.

• 1:35:20Lester Nare?

  We're available.

• 1:35:21Krishna Choudhary?

  We're available. And the Royal Academy of Sciences in, in Sweden, they respond. They say, dear Krishna and Lester, you are both very welcome to Stockholm in 2027. I've passed your email addresses onto our press officer who will send you a reminder when press accreditation, accreditation, when press accreditation opens in early September. Hope to see you then. Yes.

• 1:35:45Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:35:47Krishna Choudhary?

  How about yes? And my, my comment with, with our, with our podcast account is literally, wait, I can't believe that worked.

• 1:35:54Lester Nare?

  Like it's, it's so, there's so many things that are so incredible about this because for those of you who have been with us for a long time, the original construction for the show was this idea of we're trying to build an ESPN for science. And so many comments on our Nobel coverage, independent of this, were like, it would be incredible if you guys could like be there.

• 1:36:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:14Lester Nare?

  Like it's the NFL.

• 1:36:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Lester Nare?

  And like, do like reporting.

• 1:36:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Lester Nare?

  The way ESPN does it.

• 1:36:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Lester Nare?

  And it's literally now manifested itself in real time.

• 1:36:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:24Lester Nare?

  Unreal. I want to make one last reference to this because again, it's, it's incredibly humbling and we're incredibly gracious to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for even engaging with it.

• 1:36:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like even.

• 1:36:39Lester Nare?

  You know, like that's, you know, and it's a testament to what the scientific community is about, which is, it's a collaborative search for the truth and the right answer without ego, which, which, you know, we can all participate in, including you in the comments. A funny added tidbit was the American Chemical Society, which is like the trade organization for chemists, has a publication called Chemical and Engineering News. And this was now a few days after this. It came up in our Instagram feed where the title of the article, which unfortunately we don't have an overlay for, was something to the effect of, you know, uh, we, uh, we think there was a mistake in the chemistry Nobel.

• 1:37:24Lester Nare?

  And it looks like some, oh, go ahead, go ahead.

• 1:37:25Krishna Choudhary?

  It was, it was editorial. How many chemists does it take to check a stereo center? The 2026 Nobel announcement sparked a frenzy of chirality fact checking. Turns out nailing stereo chemistry is tough for everyone. Yeah. And I sent you the screenshot and I'm like, is this movie about us?

• 1:37:44Lester Nare?

  And then midway through the article, they had been looking at this similarly to how you were in the early morning. And then someone on their team. frequent Instagram and was like, look, guys, we're not the only one. And by that time it had gone

• 1:37:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Lester Nare?

  super viral already.

• 1:37:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And I actually read the, the article. They noticed discrepancy in the stereo chemistry illustrations in the press conference because the press conference, they have like material in the back. And some of the versions of the molecules there had, because stereo chemistry is very difficult. And, and so then there, they, they mentioned that actually even in the popular information, we had noticed.

• 1:38:19Lester Nare?

  Notice the same thing.

• 1:38:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Lester Nare?

  So, uh, it's just shout out to all the chemists that chimed in. Y'all are the goats. This was a, a team victory. It takes a village and you were part of that village. And so when we're, when we're reporting live from Stockholm next year, uh, we will be sure to have you all with us in our spirits.

• 1:38:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41Lester Nare?

  And we're going to try to come up with some clever ideas to spice up what is otherwise a very understandably dry. And academic endeavor. We'll try to find clever ways to make it, uh, exciting. Anyway.

• 1:38:56Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm excited about it.

• 1:38:57Lester Nare?

  So excited.

• 1:38:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I've already blocked out my, my calendar for that.

• 1:39:01Lester Nare?

  I've only ever been to Sweden. I've been to Sweden a few times, but it was to play football at the Gothia Cup in Gothenburg.

• 1:39:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Wow.

• 1:39:07Lester Nare?

  Which is not Stockholm. So I've never been and I was very young then. And so I'm very excited to go as an adult.

• 1:39:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh dude, I'm so excited.

• 1:39:14Lester Nare?

  And get some of that, the, the, the sort of Scandinavian humor that I hear so much about.

• 1:39:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 1:39:20Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna be good. Not excited for the food though, but you know, maybe, maybe I'll be wrong, but I, I haven't heard good things. I'm gonna be honest.

• 1:39:28Lester Nare?

  Surprise us. Surprise us. Put us on game, guys.

• 1:39:31Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. So the, the follow-up that I want to do for the chemistry Nobel Prize asks if we can measure the handedness that we were talking about, right? With, with stereo chemistry, the idea that you have these mirror molecules and the idea that, um, life is homo chirality. It's a single handedness. Well, um, can we measure chirality in the first place in very limited samples? Why is that important? Well, for the origin of life stuff, it's important because it's possible that life arose elsewhere and came to earth on a meteorite. And if the life on that meteorite, you know, if the sample size there, it's like a bottleneck effect.

• 1:40:11Krishna Choudhary?

  If the sample size there is very, very small and the skew is one way versus the other, that could introduce the initial asymmetry that causes the asymmetry that we see today.

• 1:40:23Lester Nare?

  This is a very strong candidate for panspermia.

• 1:40:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. So panspermia is the idea. How did life become homo chiral? Well, the idea is that a meteorite comes in, um, from outer space. You have this racemic primordial soup, racemic meaning like both left and right-handed. Doesn't matter which. It's sort of an equal. It's, it's an equal, uh, proportion. And then finally you have mechanisms that create homo chirality. For example, ultraviolet radiation selects for one over the other. Or a meteorite comes in and introduces a little bit of imbalance. That causes homo chirogenesis, which is what this Nobel Prize is about.

• 1:41:06Lester Nare?

  Exactly.

• 1:41:06Krishna Choudhary?

  The idea of going from a racemic mixture of 50%, 50% plus point 0001%. And then that's sort of taking over and becoming the homo chirality landscape that we see today. Right? So a meteorite can contain amino acids without ever having contained life.

• 1:41:26Krishna Choudhary?

  And their molecular handedness adds a clue to maybe how life on earth arose and why it became homo chiral. That's the idea. This October 2026 paper, again, just this year.

• 1:41:37Lester Nare?

  It's happening right now.

• 1:41:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Just this year, just this month in nature communications on the 5th of October. So like two days before the chemistry Nobel Prize in chirality. This is from Osaka University in Georgia Tech. It examines an electrical discrimination technique for amino acid and antumors. Okay. It's trying to say, if you were to give me a meteorite sample that has very small number of amino acids, can I still give you a, a sense of what the inantiomer landscape is, right? What the left versus right-handedness is on that meteorite. Now, why is this difficult? Well, if the, if the sample size is really, really small,

• 1:42:23Krishna Choudhary?

  it's going to be really hard to use conventional strategies because conventional strategies involve like effectively doing a chemical reaction. Some kind of mass spectrometry and like, uh,

• 1:42:36Krishna Choudhary?

  you, you do kind of a mass spectrometry liquid chromatography, which is the idea of, um, taking a bunch of these samples and separating them by mass. And then with liquid chromatography, you have them go through liquids. And the different types of inantiomers, the red and the left-handed are going to go through that differently based on their little chemistry. And that's going to tell you the mixture of left versus right.

• 1:43:02Lester Nare?

  But you need a lot of source material.

• 1:43:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:43:05Lester Nare?

  To, to pull that off, which is not.

• 1:43:06Krishna Choudhary?

  You need a lot of source material.

• 1:43:07Lester Nare?

  Which you can't do here.

• 1:43:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. So the researchers here, they're introducing this mechanically controllable break junction technique. Here's the idea. You've got a narrow gold junction that you break to create a kind of tunnel. Okay. And the separation of the, the two gold plates can be sort of adjusted. You hook that up to electrodes and the gap, you make kind of a molecular scale gap. And then you let the samples go through that molecular scale gap.

• 1:43:39Lester Nare?

  This is so ridiculous.

• 1:43:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And what you're relying on are quantum tunneling effects.

• 1:43:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:43:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. It's pretty insane. The solution involves quantum tunneling. Because here's what's happening. You've got that gold gap, the molecules go through.

• 1:43:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And depending on whether they're left or right-handed, they're going to cause a current to go through that gap. Because the, the current is going to quantum tunnel through. It's not a classical effect here.

• 1:44:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:44:05Krishna Choudhary?

  So how does quantum tunneling actually work? Well, here's how it actually works. So, you know, you've got these electrodes on two sides. Extremely small gap. You need an, an incredibly small gap. And when whatever substrate goes through, whatever left-handed or right-handed inantiomer, if it's right in the middle and if it's left-handed, it's going to cause a current. And if it's not, then it's going to not cause a current. And depending on the shape of that current, you should be able to tell.

• 1:44:34Lester Nare?

  If it's left.

• 1:44:35Krishna Choudhary?

  If it's left or right-handed. That's the idea.

• 1:44:37Lester Nare?

  The, the, the, the tunneling current is the signal that, with which we can detect the handedness. When we look at quantum tunneling and it's so funny that macroscopic quantum tunneling won last year. As the Nobel.

• 1:44:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, as in physics.

• 1:44:51Lester Nare?

  In physics. It's just that these things, again, the connections are just.

• 1:44:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. That's, that's a, that's a good point, actually. Yeah.

• 1:44:58Lester Nare?

  Anyway.

• 1:44:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And so, all right. So how do you actually do this in practice? Well, they got a bunch of samples together. They like built samples out of like, you know, uh, make sure that they already knew. They're like, okay, I'm going to put this amount of L alanine and this amount of D something, right? And what they want to do is train, um, machine learning model to discern between one type of anantiomer and another.

• 1:45:21Lester Nare?

  This is where we're controlling now what's going to go through this gold apparatus.

• 1:45:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Lester Nare?

  Knowing the, what the handedness.

• 1:45:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Knowing what the ground truth is.

• 1:45:28Lester Nare?

  Is before we put it in, because we want to, uh, test to see if this architecture and the hypothesis that the quantum tunneling and the tunneling current will trigger based on the handedness actually happens when we are controlling the input.

• 1:45:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. Like, we want to make sure that like even in a controlled scenario, this actually works before testing it on like actual meteorite stuff, right?

• 1:45:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:45:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And so this is how it actually works. You, you get your, you, you make your mixture that's very prescribed. And you know what the signals look like. And then you train on your data. And on the left hands, on the right-hand side, you see the actual versus the predicted. The actual is 202020. There's five different versions of these amino acids.

• 1:46:10Lester Nare?

  It's quite close.

• 1:46:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's pretty close, right? It's getting you to 2215. Like, it's not something that's crazy.

• 1:46:16Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Krishna Choudhary?

  But again, this is the first iteration.

• 1:46:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's getting pretty close.

• 1:46:20Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:46:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So the predicted versions, at least it's not missing anything. It's not like, oh, there's none of this, when actually there's 20%.

• 1:46:28Lester Nare?

  I mean, only one of the five bands is, you know, a, a difference of five. The other are effectively a difference of two.

• 1:46:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:35Lester Nare?

  It's quite.

• 1:46:36Krishna Choudhary?

  It's getting close. And this is the first time that we're doing something like this, right? Now, how does this do on real world samples?

• 1:46:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:46:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, they, they got samples from two different meteorites. There's one meteorite from the Diego de Almagoro in the Adacama Desert in Chile. And then there's another one, that's the Merchantson meteorite extract from Victoria, Australia. These are two meteorites that had amino acids on them. They took those samples and they tried to look at if it would actually work. Didn't do so well.

• 1:47:08Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:47:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. On the X-axis is the stuff that we get from liquid chromatography.

• 1:47:15Krishna Choudhary?

  On the Y axis is the stuff that we get from this new method. And if it's perfect agreement, everything should lie on the

• 1:47:24Lester Nare?

  The green dotted line.

• 1:47:25Krishna Choudhary?

  The green dotted line in the diagonal, right? But obviously it's not, right? One thing that we do know for sure that's happening is that if there is an imbalance, the method tells you that there is an imbalance. It's just doing an imbalance in the other direction almost. It's like uncorrelated. So you might say that it's kind of, um, it's kind of surprising that this got into nature communications, given that it's a negative result. But I still think it's kind of nice because it's the first time that we're doing something like this. And I think that's what the editors really saw in this paper is like, this is a challenging problem. Perhaps it requires more data to do the machine learning. Perhaps it requires more careful analysis, so on and so forth.

• 1:48:06Krishna Choudhary?

  But really, um, these researchers, they're trying to distinguish mirror image molecules.

• 1:48:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:48:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means it's again, the same atoms, the same mass, the same geometry almost just flipped.

• 1:48:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:48:21Krishna Choudhary?

  In one direction to another. So the quantum tunneling effect is going to be very small.

• 1:48:27Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Krishna Choudhary?

  The difference is going to be very small between a left-handed and a right-handed version. But there's a chance you can clearly see that in the control experiment. And now all we have to do is tweak the knobs.

• 1:48:40Lester Nare?

  It's a translation problem.

• 1:48:41Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a translation problem to get to the actual kind of distributions that we would see on an actual meteorite. This is going to get very important moving forward. And there's a reason why Japan and America are collaborating on this because we've covered the space missions that they are going to

• 1:48:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:48:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Be pursuing in the near future where they're trying to get samples of asteroids from Phobos

• 1:49:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:49:04Krishna Choudhary?

  On Mars.

• 1:49:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:49:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And from like these random asteroids in the asteroid belt. And they're bringing back the samples, right? Even these meteorites that they're talking about, the Merchantson and the Diego de Almorgoro meteorite, those are the ones that have been contaminated by Earth. You don't know, right? If those amino acids like are from the earth somehow creeping in, right?

• 1:49:24Lester Nare?

  This is the Martian moons explorations MMX, which we covered a few episodes back. Which, uh, the, uh, target launch date is actually approaching, uh, in a few days.

• 1:49:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, very nice.

• 1:49:39Lester Nare?

  And it's, you know, it's a arrival is scheduled for late 2027 on Mars. And then the retrieval, uh, targeted for 2031. We've already done this with an asteroid.

• 1:49:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:50Lester Nare?

  Uh, and have returned the sample. And so this is a scale up of that same idea. The point being we're going to be able, we now have the methodology to start to retrieve more of these things.

• 1:50:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00Lester Nare?

  We know that meteorites can carry amino acids.

• 1:50:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:02Lester Nare?

  We might see other things as we get more of these from celestial bodies. Both ones that are local to our, uh, solar system and ones that are coming in or traveling throughout our solar system. Or if it's like a Muamua that are interstellar objects, uh, we, you know, which is more difficult. And there's challenges and timing and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:50:23Krishna Choudhary?

  But next time we're going to be ready.

• 1:50:24Lester Nare?

  We're going to be ready. We're going to be ready. There's, uh, and it's, it's so, it's so cool because I think the point about, uh, negative results getting published.

• 1:50:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:33Lester Nare?

  I actually think is a good side note, just to briefly touch on, which is, I think they do matter a lot.

• 1:50:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:38Lester Nare?

  And they, there's, and my understanding is there's currently a skew where, uh, negative results proportionally are obviously not published as much as like, I found the thing.

• 1:50:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:49Lester Nare?

  But there, there is, I think, benefit to encouraging people to publish negative, take the effort to publish negative results because it, it is, it is helping draw the path. And, you know, especially for complex problems like this, we need to celebrate people taking the time and spending the money to do so, even if they didn't get the thing.

• 1:51:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13Lester Nare?

  And so I do think to your point, it is interesting that it did get published, but I think it matters.

• 1:51:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I think it does matter. And I mean, it's the first step to an instrument that could tell us the inantima ratio, the left and right-handed ratio on these meteorites, right? And it could even like lead to a space instrument.

• 1:51:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:51:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Like on the International Space Station or like on these asteroid probes themselves.

• 1:51:38Lester Nare?

  Right, which can do it, you know, without having to bring it back.

• 1:51:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:42Lester Nare?

  Which would be, uh, fantastic. I, I think this brings us back to, there was this sort of thought earlier around Ice Cube that I was kind of thinking about, which is this whole question of why does this stuff matter? How's it impact us? And like with Ice Cube, the thing that it made me think about is, you know, two of like the most important questions that many people have, you know, particularly across cultures and across religious practices is, you know, where did we come from and what is our kind of purpose in life? Like what is the purpose of life? What is our place in the universe? Uh, this, these are questions that are so important to billions of people, deeply important to billions of people on the planet.

• 1:52:27Lester Nare?

  And the through line, both with Ice Cube and this like meteorite amino acid handedness detection concept kind of poke at the exact same question, but in a way that's not through theology or philosophy. Um, and it's also secular. It's not necessarily people who are, are religious that all ask these questions because we're looking at these things at these grand scales of the universe around us. And they are poking at that same curiosity, that same internal thing that's within us, just in a different way.

• 1:53:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02Lester Nare?

  And so, you know, people practice in, in a religious context, if you're secular, it's fine. Or a philosophical context, asking these exact same questions. And it's not looked at in the same way as when we ask these questions from a scientific perspective. It's the same, same.

• 1:53:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Same thing.

• 1:53:21Lester Nare?

  Same thing.

• 1:53:21Krishna Choudhary?

  To me, it's the same thing, right? Like who, who am I, who are you and what the hell is all this? It's always, it's, it's always that same question.

• 1:53:29Lester Nare?

  It's, and it's, it both, the interesting thing about Ice Cube is that it has both the potential to help us understand some of the physical aspects of that question very, very far away. But also some aspects of the questions close at home.

• 1:53:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:43Lester Nare?

  And the, this, um, handedness, this chirality question is another two-way street. Similar to our memory story, because it's both about origins of life. Like the, ultimately the Nobel Prize was given in part to this idea that you can have a small imbalance in left and right-handedness that becomes runaway reaction. That then creates effectively like a 95, 99% uh, uh, proportion of one or the other handness, even though your original balance.

• 1:54:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, was effectively 50/50.

• 1:54:18Lester Nare?

  Was effectively 50/50. That's very interesting.

• 1:54:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:21Lester Nare?

  And then when you talk about origin of life, it, it is a question that you have to then ask, which is, okay. Well, if our basis is homo chiral and you look at this idea of panspermia, if you have this sort of, uh, unbiased soup.

• 1:54:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:37Lester Nare?

  As the starting point.

• 1:54:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And a small bias came in.

• 1:54:40Lester Nare?

  There, there seems to be a very easy to jump to conclusion through line between those two things. I'm not saying that that's the case, but.

• 1:54:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but it's there. It's cool to think about.

• 1:54:50Lester Nare?

  It's, it's very cool to think about. And then the reverse of that is we're now in a place as a human species where we're about, we're going to Europa.

• 1:54:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:59Lester Nare?

  Where we think there's going to be maybe something underneath these ice sheets, ice sheets that are life.

• 1:55:07Lester Nare?

  But similar to meteorites landing and having impact here in terms of how life happens, both from a origin of life and the, the mirror life problem, which is a potential threat, which many people had opinions about. And like, it's complicated and we have solutions.

• 1:55:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:27Lester Nare?

  But it's, you know, not ideal.

• 1:55:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's not ideal.

• 1:55:30Lester Nare?

  When we go somewhere else, it's like, you know, colonial times where we introduce things that this environment hasn't seen.

• 1:55:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Tiny bacteria.

• 1:55:37Lester Nare?

  And then all of a sudden, you know, and we, we should be, as we can continue to increase our power to probe the universe, we both need to be careful about how we do that to ourselves, which links to our first story and how we can now activate the physiological reaction from memory, how we explore our local solar system. I mean, these are such incredibly awesome conversations to be having because we're now getting so good at this stuff.

• 1:56:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And I just, I, I love this time of year for science because I think the Nobel Prizes like give us an opportunity to just like step back. You know, we're usually on this podcast, we're always talking about the current event.

• 1:56:18Lester Nare?

  Totally.

• 1:56:19Krishna Choudhary?

  And things like that, right? The Nobel Prize always like is an opportunity to step back and be like, yeah, that was sick, right? Like 20 years ago when Peter Hegeman, actually no, 30 years ago when Peter Hegeman like figured out this algae has a one millisecond time response to light. That's sick.

• 1:56:35Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:56:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That's cool.

• 1:56:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:56:37Krishna Choudhary?

  That like he did that, right? And then it's, um, Soi doing the Soi reaction like 20 years ago.

• 1:56:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Francis Halsen trying to figure out how to do Antarctic neutrino astronomy, again, 20, 30 years ago, like.

• 1:56:54Lester Nare?

  And spent years doing it in the ocean and being like, ah.

• 1:56:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it doesn't work.

• 1:56:58Lester Nare?

  Doesn't work that well.

• 1:56:59Krishna Choudhary?

  There's all these, there's all this bioluminescence that's annoying.

• 1:57:02Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, I, I just, I love this time of year. And we now are the official show covering the Golden Goose Awards and next year, uh, the Nobel Prizes. So shout out to AAAA, shout out to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, uh, details TBD. But, uh, we again, find our way to be able to make two hours of just when we're having a relaxing follow-up.

• 1:57:31Krishna Choudhary?

  This was pretty relaxing.

• 1:57:32Lester Nare?

  It was, it was, the last couple of weeks have been intense, guys.

• 1:57:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Lester Nare?

  Uh, very intense on the material, on the schedule, especially because we had to do daily drops.

• 1:57:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:42Lester Nare?

  Uh, and travel. We really appreciate you all so much for joining us. If you've made it to the end, what should be our comment for the comments?

• 1:57:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Give us an idea on what to do when we're in Sweden.

• 1:57:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54Krishna Choudhary?

  It can be from, if you've been to Sweden or if it's just random, like stuff that Mimi, Sweden Scandinavian stuff. Yeah.

• 1:58:04Lester Nare?

  Don't just say eat Swedish meatballs and that might not be a thing, but something, something, give us a deep cut.

• 1:58:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Lester Nare?

  And maybe Zlatan will be there and we can hang out with Zlatan. My name is Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. Thank you for joining us for our Nobel follow-up. We will be having a couple of interview episodes coming up over the next several weeks as we get into spooky season. And as the weather cools down, although there was just a wildfire on Mulholland like earlier.

• 1:58:33Krishna Choudhary?

  LA, baby.

• 1:58:34Lester Nare?

  Uh, the Santana winds are kicking up and we're having that Santana winds. We had, we've had three hurricanes off the coast.

• 1:58:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the Kelvin wave.

• 1:58:43Lester Nare?

  The, the beach is gone.

• 1:58:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Homes are gone.

• 1:58:46Lester Nare?

  The great, there's a great white, a 20-foot great white that's swimming around like, and so you can't swim, no surfing. We're going to need help. We will see you all next week.