Listener Questions #10

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about prions, playing music near a black hole, and medical maggots. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:07Speaker 01

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• 2:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  How do creons infect healthy proteins? Someone please ask about ant lion queens.

• 2:17Daniel Whiteson?

  What does a concert sound like near a black hole? Can medical maggots help make a wound hole?

• 2:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Biology, physics, archaeology, forestry. We like medicine, so thank you, chemistry.

• 2:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you have questions about particles or cats? We'll find answers to all of that.

• 2:35Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 2:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to another Listener Questions episode on Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.

• 2:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist with a growing interest in biology, and I love hearing feedback from listeners about the new podcast format.

• 3:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study space and parasites. I also love hearing from the listeners, and I'm excited about the kind of creepy crawly stuff we're talking about today.

• 3:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I am, too. There's so much about our natural world, which is amazing. Even if we don't understand quantum gravity and how all the particle bits come together to make this bizarre world, it's still totally worth studying with so many incredible gooey mysteries.

• 3:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the non-gooey mysteries are good, too. I'm also becoming a budding physics enthusiast. You gave me the other day a P O D in physics, and I'll take it.

• 3:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it turns out people can be interested in physics and in biology and in all sorts of crazy things about our extraordinary universe. And I just wanted to read a snippet from a listener who wrote to me, and I encourage anybody out there to write to us, [email protected]. Send us your questions, send us your feedback, send us your ideas, send us your hopes and dreams, send us your love letters from fifth grade, whatever, and we'd love hearing from you. This particular listener has a long history with me and wrote that he originally, quote, "had the idea that I wouldn't be as interested in a podcast that wasn't focused entirely on physics. How wrong I was. I have found myself fascinated by the biology episodes, especially the recent episodes on insulin and gender. And I have to feel like I'm going along for the ride also.

• 4:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, I didn't know how fascinating biology was, and so I'm really grateful to get to explore all these topics.

• 4:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm so grateful for everyone who's given the biology a chance, everyone who sort of came for the physics, but is staying for the biology and hopefully is enjoying it as well. And the listener mentioned the insulin episode. We are super lucky to have Katrina Whiteson coming for a little guest appearance on the show again today. But yes, I read that email too, and it absolutely made my month. I love when we get emails like that.

• 4:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Me too. And also, you can't mention Katrina without referring to all of her accolades. I don't know if you're aware, she's the Whiteson endowed chair at the Whiteson Institute.

• 5:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh. Wow. That's incredible. I have been dying to get an adjunct position at the Whiteson Research Institute.

• 5:11Daniel Whiteson?

  The review process is really strict. Yeah, a bunch of snobs over there.

• 5:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  I've met Katrina. I'm not sure about that. She seems very nice.

• 5:20Daniel Whiteson?

  No, of course, we'd love to have you. Anyway, today, we are talking about your questions about this extraordinary universe. Physics questions, black hole questions, weird protein questions. We'd love to answer your question on the podcast. Please do write to us, questions at danielandkelly.org. Again, if you write to dot com, you'll be sending your message to a very lovely couple who just got married, but that's not us.

• 5:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Congratulations, Daniel and Kelly. We wish you a beautiful forever together.

• 5:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And danielandkelly.com. If you guys have questions, send them to us. We'd love to have you guys on the podcast.

• 5:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay, Daniels and Kelly's. Well, our first question today is an amazing question by Niall about prion or prion. I don't know. I'm going to say it. However, you know, it comes out of my mouth at the time, but let's go ahead and hear the question.

• 6:10Speaker 07

  Hi, Kelly and Daniel. My name is Niall, and I have a question regarding prions and prion diseases. I understand that prions are misfolded proteins that are capable of causing significant damage to our nervous systems if we are exposed to them. However, I am particularly interested in understanding why prion diseases are infectious slash contagious. Specifically, I'm wondering what causes our normal, properly folded proteins to adopt the misfolded prion structure when exposed to them, rather than just defaulting to their correct structure?

• 6:51Speaker 07

  I would greatly appreciate any insight you can provide on this topic. Thank you so much, and I love the show.

• 6:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is a fantastic question that I did not know the answer to. And you'll see that by the end, I spent five hours slamming my head against the literature. And eventually, we called in someone smarter than either of us. And that's where Katrina comes in, but let's back up a little bit. All right, so how do diseases usually replicate and transmit? So if you have a bacterial infection, like you've got a cold, the bacteria get into your body, and then those bacteria start making more and more of themselves and they, you know, spread throughout your body.

• 7:28Daniel Whiteson?

  That's kind of creepy, right? You're being like colonized by some malevolent force.

• 7:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is pretty creepy, yeah. And then if you get parasites, like, you know, the parasites that I love to talk about so much, something like tapeworms or nematodes, what usually happens there is every single infection you get is because you have accidentally, for example, consumed an egg that was in the environment. And so the way you get more of those infections is you accidentally encounter and consume more of those eggs. For viral infections, the way you get more of those is that the virus injects some of its genetic material.

• 8:03Daniel Whiteson?

  So gross.

• 8:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  So gross, yes. Yeah, I know, I hate viruses and bacteria, but none of them are as bad as ticks. Ticks are the worst.

• 8:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 8:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  So they inject genetic material into your own cells, hijack your cells machinery, and your cell essentially makes more viruses for the virus.

• 8:20Daniel Whiteson?

  All of these things have nucleic material, right? There's DNA or RNA or something in all these things. People argue about whether viruses are alive or not, but like they have this code inside of them. That's what they all have in common, right?

• 8:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. And so when the first person suggested that what's happening with what end up being called prion diseases is that it's actually a protein that is essentially replicating, not by sort of copying itself, using genetic material like you would expect, but is essentially touching other proteins and making those other proteins infectious. That was a bit controversial for a while because that's not how we usually see infections transmitting in any of the ways that we sort of understand this.

• 9:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Are you underplaying it a little bit, a bit controversial? Like, wasn't that sort of laughed out of the room for a while? People were like, that's impossible.

• 9:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yes, no, we were all very skeptical. It took a while for that to be widely accepted.

• 9:16Daniel Whiteson?

  And for those of us who are not biologists or biochemist, remind us what you mean when you say protein, you're using it in a technical sense, not like chicken breasts or tofu on top of your salad. When your server asks if you'd like to add protein, you mean something about the chemical structure, right?

• 9:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So I mean, chicken breast is made of proteins. So your genetic code contains the information that your body needs to make proteins and proteins are strings of amino acids and they essentially make up all of your body and they help your chemical reactions happen and they are ubiquitous.

• 9:49Daniel Whiteson?

  And they're incredible little molecular machines, right? They do stuff. They come from the DNA and then they fold into these shapes. They're like little robots, right? They're amazing. The engineering here is just astounding.

• 10:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Delicious in your salad and fantastic in your body. So the listener wanted to know about prions. So these are protonaceous infectious particles is the fancy way of sort of saying it. And there's a couple of different ways that proteins can transmit disease. So one of them is that they're sort of infectious in the way you might usually think of infectious material. So for example, if you eat meat that has the mad cow prion in it and you consume that meat, that prion can then move around your body and cause your proteins to become abnormal. So that's infectious in a way that we sort of are used to thinking about infectious material.

• 10:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And just to make sure I'm following, when you say prion is a protonaceous infectious particle, it's still just a protein. It's just like a weird protein in a particular shape, right? It's not like it's turned into a particle the way we talk about it.

• 10:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh yeah. No, forget the physics, man. Forget the physics. We're in bio world right now.

• 10:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm listening to biologists talk about particles, but it has nothing to do with particles. That's great.

• 11:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know whether particles in biology are more confusing than particles in physics, but either way, we're going to muddle through.

• 11:07Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So you can get these in your body and they can turn some of your proteins into prions. What's another way that you can get one of these horrible diseases?

• 11:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Another way you can get one of these horrible diseases unfortunately is if you end up with a mutation in your own genes and then your genetic code now produces a protein that folds in a way it's not supposed to fold. And usually when you get this heritable gene that has this bad mutation, you don't start making these weird proteins until you're a little bit older, like 60s or more. Funny story, I was talking to a neighbor the other day who said something to the effect of, oh, well, when I'm talking to young people, they're not so interested in this. And I was like, oh, I'm interested. And then I realized that he didn't mean me. He could tell I was interested because I was one of the old people and he was talking about other people. Anyway.

• 11:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Did I ever tell you about the time I was accidentally CC'd on an email where they were looking for a young-ish professor to take on some role? And somebody said, White son, is he youngish anymore? I'm not sure. And I was like.

• 12:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, slice.

• 12:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought I just had a little gray in my hair and someone told me I was rocking the salt and pepper look, which was very nice, but that was the first time I realized that I had transitioned to salt and pepper. Anyway, you and I are aging, but hopefully we don't have this mutation.

• 12:21Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So this mutation just means that you produce a protein through the normal mechanism of like DNA RNA protein, but it's one of these bad proteins.

• 12:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 12:30Daniel Whiteson?

  You said that it doesn't fold the way it's supposed to. Is it that it doesn't fold the way the DNA tells it to, or that it folds in a way that's damaging?

• 12:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  It folds in a way that's damaging.

• 12:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 12:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you have this mutation, mutations often result in changes in an amino acid in the sequence that makes up a protein. And when you have a change in that amino acid, it can change the shape of the protein. So the protein might be doing what the genetic code told it to do, but now it's folding up in a configuration that's bad for you and can go and cause other proteins to do it too.

• 13:00Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So you can either get them from outside the body or you can just have your genetic code produce these terrible things? Is that it? Or is there another thing we have to worry about?

• 13:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  The third way is what they call spontaneous. So you've got proteins and actually something that I learned while doing this research is that sometimes your proteins will change shape and then go back to their normal shape.

• 13:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 13:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  While they're in your body and it doesn't seem efficient, just like be consistent, man. But so I guess sometimes they will sort of get out of their configuration. And when they go back into their configuration, they don't go back correctly. And so now they've got this bad shape. And once you've got either the heritable or the spontaneous version of these prions, they start to act infectious. So they go around and they make other prions abnormally shaped as well.

• 13:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Weird. That's incredible that one protein can turn another protein bad. It's like the bad influence protein.

• 13:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  This spontaneous prion thing, this is like stay up at night worrying about what all your proteins are doing. I'm not worried about my kids anymore. I'm worried about whether or not my proteins are behaving, but I'm sure it's fine.

• 14:08Daniel Whiteson?

  This is a whole fascinating area, though, protein folding. We describe it as if it's like DNA RNA protein, but it's very complicated, right? You build this sequence of amino acids and when they fold, they're like settling into a lower energy state. They're like relaxing into it and it's really hard to know what that state is. You can look at the DNA code. It's not easy to predict the configuration, the proteins that come out of that sequence. There was a huge result recently, AlphaFold, where people were able to predict these things very well using AI. Really incredible breakthrough. People have been working on that for decades.

• 14:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that is fantastic. Let's go into one real example. Fritzfeldt-Jacob disease. So sorry about my pronunciation. Apologize ahead of time.

• 14:51Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not even going to correct you because I enjoy listening to your mispronunciations.

• 14:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you know how to pronounce it correctly?

• 14:58Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm pretty sure it's Fritzfeldt-Jacob disease, but I like the way you said it.

• 15:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, thanks. I appreciate that.

• 15:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I especially like the way you like tiptoe through it in a terrified manner.

• 15:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, from now on, it's CJD.

• 15:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 15:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  So for CJD, what happens is that in older people, sometimes you sporadically get a protein that folds up incorrectly. Now you've got this abnormal form. And I read a bunch of papers that suggested that as various vertebrates age, our proteins are sort of more likely to fold the wrong way because aging is a real pain in the rear end. And then in 10% to 15% of the cases, this has to do with a genetic mutation that's giving the protein essentially bad instructions. And every once in a while, in a rare case, you can get it transmitted. So for example, if you get a cornea transplant from somebody who has CJD, then you can get CJD. So it's important to screen for this kind of stuff. And so unfortunately,

• 15:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  once you get it, we don't have any treatment. And usually the symptoms get worse quite quickly by the time the symptoms are identifiable. And according to the CDC website, it causes a person's brain to break down or stop working normally, which I'm sure we can all agree is not a way we would like our brains to be described.

• 16:08Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I do not want my brain to turn into a smoothie.

• 16:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, me either. I think most people initially started hearing about prions when they learned about bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, mad cow disease. And this showed up in cows. Turns out cows were getting it from one another because we were feeding cows cow parts. And yeah, bad idea.

• 16:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Cannibal cows.

• 16:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cannibal cows, right. And you might remember from when we were feeding pigs pig parts, that that was bad for the transmission of trichinella. So in general, it seems like it's a bad idea to feed animals animal parts, although I do feed my chickens chickens sometimes.

• 16:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Uh oh.

• 16:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, maybe I'm asking for it.

• 16:47Daniel Whiteson?

  That's horrible. There's something really creepy about that. I don't know why, like chickens eating pork, whatever, chickens eating chickens, whoo.

• 16:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, they don't seem to mind. They love the nuggies. They love the chicken nuggies. All right.

• 17:00Daniel Whiteson?

  What kind of sauces do they like to like the dip it or they into the barbecue?

• 17:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, they don't have the dexterity for that. I don't know if you've seen chicken claws. They're not real good. They can scratch and that's about it.

• 17:10Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we know that getting these prions is bad. You get these terrible diseases and they spread from body to body. And even if you eat like meat that's been cooked, we're used to like cooking something to kill it. But if you cook a prion, is it then better? Is it like denatured? Or can you still get it from cooked meat?

• 17:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  As far as I can tell, one of the things about these prions that is incredible is that they're really resistant to things like cooking. And so you can cook your burger and if it had BSE, there's still some chance that you could get it.

• 17:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I heard that even if you irradiate these things, like zap them with radiation, they're super duper robust, which is one reason that they're able to spread from one to the other. And so it's like really hard to kill a prion. Like when they do brain surgery in hospitals, they just throw away everything that touched the brain because it might have a prion in it. And you do not want that stuff to spread.

• 18:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  We are so stinking lucky that prion diseases are not more common. Thank your lucky stars, everybody.

• 18:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So then let's get to the heart of the listener's question, right? He's asking about the fundamental mechanism, like, how does this happen? You were talking about one prion turning like a normal protein into another prion. Do we know how that happens?

• 18:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  If by we you mean Katrina, the answer is yes. But let me quickly summarize the three problems that you need to understand to understand prions. So one, an abnormal protein is made. This is pretty much what we've been talking about, the various ways that you start getting these abnormal proteins. Problem two is that the prion starts causing more prion proteins to be made. So it interacts with the healthy proteins in the area and starts turning them into bad proteins. And then problem three is that these proteins start clumping together and it's these clumps that start causing problems. So the brain has trouble clearing these clumps out. So the listener wanted to know the details for problem two. How does one prion cause another protein to start misfolding and becoming another one

• 19:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  of these sort of infectious prions? And I was so annoyed because I found so many papers and every paper was like, okay, here's how we're going to illustrate how it works. And they were like, the normal protein is a circle and the abnormal protein is a square and the circle becomes a square and then the square interacts with other circles and turns them into squares. And I was like, that doesn't really explain what's happening.

• 19:25Daniel Whiteson?

  That's just a cartoon.

• 19:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's just a cartoon. How does the circle turn the squares in any way? Eventually, I threw my hands up and we were so happy that we know a biochemist. And so, Daniel, go ahead and introduce your amazing wife.

• 19:41Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. Katrina actually has a PhD in biochemistry, proteins folding, DNA, all this kind of interaction. She did her PhD on like how proteins cut DNA and interact with it. So she like has her head around all of this stuff. So I asked her, hey, can you explain to us how this actually happens? How two proteins come together and both end up bad? Like, why don't they both end up good? You know? All these arguments are like template this, template that, but like, why do they both end up bad? So I asked her on the couch last night, and here's what she had to say. Hey Katrina, so how does a prion turn another protein into a prion?

• 20:16Speaker 08

  So proteins are just these chains of amino acids and each block has different likeness for water. Like, some of them like to be near water, some of them hate water. The balance of those things forces the protein into a certain shape. So each protein makes a really unique shape. However, some proteins have more than one stable state. So they might be happy in a slightly different shape. And what prions do is they force the protein into an alternative shape.

• 20:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I think that's the bit we want to dig into. When two proteins come near each other, why does the prion force the good one into a prion shape rather than the good one forcing the prion into a good shape? Why does the prion win?

• 21:02Speaker 08

  And that shape is usually one that's a little hard to get itself out of. So they get stuck in that direction. So basically, if a protein forms the prion shape, which it usually does at a lower rate than the healthy, correct shape. But if that happens, then when another healthy protein gets near it, It gets peer pressured essentially into forming that alternative, but like disastrous and like disease forming alternative shape. This happens for certain sequences of proteins and they often have repeat zones in them that are like making it easier for them to collapse into this unhealthy state.

• 21:47Speaker 08

  And so I can think of a couple of cases of proteins that misfold where it's driven by having these like repeat zones. So that would mean that when the healthy protein touches the prion protein. Imagine a Lego clicking into a Lego. It like clicks it together and forces it into this unhealthy alternative but stable state. All of the proteins are not like a hundred percent folded all the time. They're kind of like wiggling around a bit and it makes it so they can kind of like explore which shape they're gonna sit at. And the prion shape is harder to get out of. Once you get collapsed into that prion state, you're like a goopy mess.

• 22:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So the two come together, but the good protein is still flexible about its actual shape. While the prion is stuck into this deep local minimum, it's very stable configuration.

• 22:35Speaker 08

  Yes, exactly. And so if you get stuck in that deep local minimum, it's harder to get back out of it. And if another protein gets nearby, it gets tempted into that goopy minimum. And molecularly, what I mean is that a region of the misfolded, of the bad shape that the prion is forming will have mirrored sites, like it'll have interactions with the other healthy protein that will force it into that shape. And then it stays there because it's a local minimum that's hard to get out of.

• 23:10Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. So it's true that when the two proteins sort of try to fit together, they're more likely to end up similar. But the bad one, the prion one, is harder to pull out of than the normal one is to pull into the bad state. And so they both end up in the bad state.

• 23:26Speaker 08

  That's my understanding.

• 23:28Daniel Whiteson?

  So my takeaway from this is that it relates to the conversation we were having earlier about how proteins fold. It's not easy to predict like how a protein is going to fold. And it turns out sometimes they can fold in multiple different ways. And the prions are special and weird because they're like a very strong fold. Like it's hard to get them back out of that. For people who like to think about optimization and minima, it's like a very deep local minima they're stuck in. And it's extraordinarily hard to get them out, which is why cooking or radiation will not bust these guys. And if you have a prion meets a non-prion, then it's much more likely they both end up as prions because it's harder to get the prion out of the prion configuration than it is to get the normal protein out of its normal configuration.

• 24:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And to build on that a little, often when your body ends up with a protein that's shaped the wrong way, you send in what are called proteases, and they essentially break the protein into pieces that are easier to clean up and remove from the body. But these proteases can't get into these clumps or into these abnormally folded proteins. And so rather than getting cleared out, they remain and they start clumping and they cause problems.

• 24:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing. Biology is incredible. What boggles my mind is all this stuff is happening all the time, and it mostly just works. I go about my day, I drink coffee, I think about particles, and inside, all these little proteins and these molecular machines are doing their thing. Thank you, little biology particles.

• 24:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you work right, we thank you. But understanding how proteins get abnormal and start clumping up is important, we think, for understanding neurodegenerative diseases because sort of similar things happen where proteins start accumulating and clumping and causing problems. So you've got amyloid beta and tau for Alzheimer's disease, alpha synuclein for Parkinson's disease, and huntingtin for Huntington's disease. So sort of understanding what's happening here is a very active research field.

• 25:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, thank you for sending this question in, Niall. It turns out to be a perfect union of our interests because not only is biology, and does it have the word particle involved in it, we also had to bring in Katrina. So bup bup bum.

• 25:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the whole White-Sun Research Institute with the adjunct faculty included.

• 25:32Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. Well, let's hear from Niall if we answered his question or just confused him further.

• 25:39Speaker 07

  Hi Kelly and Daniel. Thank you for this response. You definitely answered my question. I think the most surprising revelation for me is that the reason prions are infectious has more to do with chemistry and the molecular structure of proteins rather than some other sort of active biological process.

• 26:00Speaker 07

  It was a really interesting discussion and super enlightening. Although I do have to agree with Kelly that now knowing there is such a thing as spontaneous prion formation, this will keep me up at night. Thank you again.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast. A show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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• 27:45Speaker 10

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  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 28:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we are answering questions today from listeners who think deeply about the nature of space and time and whether their brain is infected by the meat they eat. So now we have a question from Owen and his daughter about concerts near black holes.

• 28:42Speaker 13

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I was curious, my daughter plays violin, and if she were to take a trip to a really deep gravitational well, like close to a black hole or a neutron star, and recorded herself playing violin, and then brought the recording back, would the time dilation cause a key change? Would it make the frequency higher or lower? Or when we played it back here on Earth, would it be the same?

• 29:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, that is a fantastic question. All right, let's start by talking about what is time dilation?

• 29:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, time dilation, one of my favorite topics and very confusing aspect of special relativity. And one thing that's really important to understand about it is that there are two types of time dilation that work differently. It's important to keep them separate, especially for this question. One is the one we hear about a lot when you're like in a rocket ship, moving fast. And this is velocity based time dilation, which you can summarize very easily, just by saying, moving clocks run slow. So if Kelly has a clock in her ship and she's moving very fast relative to me, I see her clock moving, so I see her clock going slow. Kelly doesn't see her clock moving, it's right in front of her, she sees it running at the normal time.

• 29:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that's the right time.

• 29:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, it's East Coast time, which is whatever. I prefer best coast time.

• 30:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think the world runs on East Coast time, my friends. But all right, moving on.

• 30:04Daniel Whiteson?

  That might be true. That might be true.

• 30:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I win.

• 30:07Daniel Whiteson?

  But the cool thing about this kind of time dilation is that it's symmetrical, right? I see Kelly's clock is running slow because I see her moving quickly, but she sees my clock moving, which means she sees my clock running slowly. So we both see the other person's clock is running slower than ours. So it's symmetric, which is beautiful, but it also feels contradictory because you have this instinct to say, hold on a second, whose clock is really running slower, right? Because our accounts are discrepant. And the answer is, there's no single true answer. There is no authority. There's no single clock in the universe. Both of our accounts are correct, and you can't actually link it together into a complete understanding. It's just that everybody sees things differently from different perspectives.

• 30:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. So now we've got our minds wrapped around velocity-based time dilation. What is the other kind?

• 30:53Daniel Whiteson?

  The other kind is gravity. You don't have to be moving fast to have your clock run slow. You just have to be near a massive object, like in the movie Interstellar, where they land on Miller's planet, which is super duper massive. When you're in space that's curved, time runs slower. So for example, if you're standing on the surface of the Earth, your clock will run slower than a clock that's in orbit around the Earth, or out in deep space where there's less curvature. You're further from masses, so your clocks run faster.

• 31:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  So your clock would run much slower on Jupiter relative to Earth?

• 31:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. And it would run much slower on the surface of the Sun, and much, much slower near the event horizon of a black hole.

• 31:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 31:31Daniel Whiteson?

  And the amazing thing about this one is that it's not symmetric. Everybody can agree on it. Like, if I'm in orbit with a clock, and Kelly's on the surface of the Earth with a clock, we will both agree that her clock is running slower. I see her clock running slower. She sees my clock running faster. This is the only time in relativity when you can see something speed up. Mostly, you're just seeing time slow down, but with gravitational time dilation, you can see things speeding up. So if you stand near the edge of a black hole, for example, you see the time in the rest of the universe go faster, and like, fast forwards you to the future.

• 32:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if you could live near a black hole, could you live forever? Is this what biologists have been looking for?

• 32:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Your time would still run normally, right? So you would still live 80 years or whatever in your time. That might last 80,000 years or 80 million years in the outside universe. So it's a way definitely to fast forward to the future, but not to live infinitely long.

• 32:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Physics keeps disappointing me. All right, go ahead.

• 32:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, so those are the two kinds of time dilation that we need to understand to answer Owen's question about his daughter with a violin. But there's one more piece we need, which is red shifting, right? All this changing of time has consequences, like it changes how long things seem to be because it affects when people measure the front and the back. And we can dig into the details of length contraction another time. But if you change the way clocks run, you also change the frequency of waves, right? The wavelength of a wave. So for example, if light is emitted to you by an object that's moving away really, really fast, it lengthens the wavelength of that light. It redshifts it. So things that are moving away from you get redshifted. Things that are near black holes get redshifted.

• 33:11Daniel Whiteson?

  One way to think about it is that it's just all about time dilation. Clocks are slowed down, and so the waves get slower and redder. If you watch a spaceship approach a black hole, it's not going to look normal to you. It's going to get redder and redder and redder, and then eventually become invisible.

• 33:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm. We're near a black hole, so we're talking about gravity dilation. And we are thinking about waves because sound is a wave. And we've just established that waves get spread out near a black hole because of the gravity dilation.

• 33:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, I'm on the same page.

• 33:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's get to Owen's question, but there's a few versions here. Imagine that Owen is far away from the black hole, and his daughter is near the black hole, and she's playing the violin, and he's watching and he's listening. So what's going to happen? Well, her time is going to be slowed down for him, so he's going to see her moving and thinking and drinking and breathing in slow motion. And the light and sound that come from her will have longer wavelengths. So he will watch a video, and he will see her moving in slow motion, and all the light will be redder than it normally is. If it's really dilated, it'll be invisible and won't be in the visible spectrum anymore. And it'll happen slower, so the key will be lower. It'd be like in the old days when your tape deck is running out of battery and everything sounds low.

• 34:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  You said key. Is key the same thing as frequency? These music words go past me.

• 34:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Ooh, I'm so not an expert in that. But the wavelength will get longer and the frequency will go down, which I think means a lower key.

• 34:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. That's how I imagine whales sound.

• 34:46Daniel Whiteson?

  But he's not asking about that scenario. He's asking about what happens if a recording is made near the black hole. Right? So now let's do another scenario. Let's say Owen is next to the black hole also with his daughter. Right? She's next to the black hole. She's playing the violin. He's there right next to her. What does he see? Everything looks normal to him because she experiences it normally and he's there with her. So yes, somebody far away will see them both in slow motion. But from their perspective, everything is happening normally. The outside universe is fast forwarding. So if he's there with her, everything seems normal.

• 35:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. But what if they're recording it?

• 35:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, right. I love these versions of the questions. So if instead of Owen, you have Owen's video camera and it's there with her and it takes a video of what's happening near the black hole, it's going to record what Owen would have seen, which is a normally occurring violin performance. Right? You then take the video somewhere else. The video hasn't changed. You play it back on your TV at home. You're going to just play back a normal recording. And so everything is going to look normal on the video because it was taken near the black hole, where everything seems normal to the people near the black hole.

• 35:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now, are you sure that's right? Because that sort of matches my intuition, which usually means it's wrong.

• 35:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because I'm really good at this stuff. But all right, I'll go with it.

• 36:02Daniel Whiteson?

  There are other weirder versions of this question, you know, that depend on exactly how the information is encoded. Like, we're talking about literally sending waves from the black hole and interpreting them literally. If instead you have computers and they're coding this in binary, then they can avoid the time dilation effects. There's some subtle wrinkles there if you word the question differently. But the way he asked it, the answer is that the concert would appear normal if it was filmed near the performers.

• 36:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, let's go ahead and see what Owen thinks of this answer and if there's any follow up questions.

• 36:34Speaker 13

  Wow, thanks for answering my question, you guys. You know, I think you nailed it. Thank you so much.

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• 37:47Speaker 10

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 38:01Speaker 11

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to "I'm deathly allergic", in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 38:12Speaker 10

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 38:18Speaker 12

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 38:23Speaker 10

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 38:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so we wrapped up a question that was beautiful, playing music in deep space near a black hole. And now we are descending into the depths of biology to discuss maggots. All right, what does Jonathan want to know about maggots?

• 39:10Speaker 15

  Hi, Kelly. I remember reading about medical maggots five or 10 years ago. As I recall, it was an experimental procedure back then, but showed real promise in the fight against drug resistant bacteria. Where are we today on this? Can I stop worrying about superbugs now? Thanks.

• 39:26Daniel Whiteson?

  I thought we had already reached maximum grossness on this episode. I didn't realize we were just in the foothills of grossness. And now we're climbing to the peak.

• 39:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, Daniel, we have just begun.

• 39:38Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, take us there, Kelly. What do we need to know about medical maggots?

• 39:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so apparently for centuries, folks have realized that if you find maggots in someone's wounds, those people with maggots in their wounds tend to have faster healing wounds than people who don't have maggots in their wounds. So you might be thinking, it would be better to not have maggots in my wounds. But if you want your wound to heal quickly, apparently it would be good to have it. And this bit of disgusting wisdom was known by Genghis Khan, the Mayans and other indigenous peoples, according to videos I watched on YouTube from reputable sources like the BBC.

• 40:18Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, I think that's incredible because I think it's often included as like things we did before we really understood science. You know, leeches and maggots and drilling holes in people's heads and praying to the gods and whatever. But actually, this is another example of sort of pre-modern science, experimental understanding, right? You're saying people like looked at the data and they're like maggots are gross, but they do seem to help people. Maybe we should use maggots. I mean, isn't that scientific? Isn't that hypothesis forming and drawing conclusions from data?

• 40:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so my understanding is that for a long time, folks noticed that there seems to be this association, but they might not have had control over, for example, the fly life cycle to be able to purposefully infect people with maggots. The first documented instance of someone purposefully placing maggots in someone's wound was in the American Civil War. And, you know, can you imagine being the first person where someone's like, no, really? These maggots are gonna do you wonders. But

• 41:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is gonna be great for a biology podcast in a couple hundred years. Trust us.

• 41:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. It'll all be worth it when Kelly and Daniel get to gross out over this.

• 41:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Here's the big payoff. All right.

• 41:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And then an orthopedic surgeon in World War I named William Baer started applying maggots to wounds that wouldn't heal at Johns Hopkins University for a patient community of children. And from that, medical maggots kind of took off. In the 1930s, you get medical maggots that are very common in America, Canada, Europe. Hospitals open insectaries so that they can have medical maggots on hand whenever you need them.

• 41:52Daniel Whiteson?

  What a word.

• 41:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you can order them from a company called Surgical Maggots out of Pearl River, New York.

• 41:58Daniel Whiteson?

  And so other than looking gross and being gross, what are these maggots doing in these wounds?

• 42:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the first thing they're doing that's helpful is what's called debridement. So essentially, they are removing the dead and dying tissue in the wound. So they are secreting and excreting stuff that starts breaking down the dead tissue and it makes it into sort of like a slurry. And then the maggots suck up that slurry.

• 42:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

• 42:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yum, yum, yum. Yes.

• 42:28Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm trying to get into this. I'm like, let's go the non gross route. Let's just like really marinate in the biology.

• 42:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Marinate. Yeah, no, I love the attitude and I appreciate the energy and the motivation you bring to these discussions. You're really trying and I like that.

• 42:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I'm like, let's get a nice big ice cube. We'll have like, you know, a slurry cocktail. It sounds fantastic. You can get into anything.

• 42:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Just start having themed drinks for some of these episodes or themed meals like pasta for the parasite episodes. All right. The stuff that they release that starts breaking down the dead tissue tends to leave the living tissue alone. And so if you have a wound that's got a combination of dead and living tissue and you'd like to remove the dead stuff so you can specifically start working with helping the living stuff to recover, these are pretty helpful. They do it in sort of surgically precise ways, it seems. So that's benefit one. Benefit two is that some of the stuff that they're excreting and secreting has antimicrobial properties. So it's killing some of the bacteria that could be infecting the wounds.

• 43:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  And while they're slurping that stuff up, they're also consuming the bacteria that could be infecting a wound. And you have like a thousand yard stare right now.

• 43:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm just wondering like, why maggots would do this? Like, I mostly see maggots in garbage or whatever, that they didn't evolve in garbage, right? They must have evolved like eating feces and rotting carcasses and stuff. Is that why they're good at this? Because they evolved basically eating dead, dead flesh or near dead flesh?

• 43:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the horrible truth is that there's lots of flies in this world and they have lots of different life cycles. And so the carrion flies, what happens is that the mom comes along and she lays her eggs in dead tissue. And those eggs hatch and you get maggots that have to go through a couple of different life cycles. And those maggots are competing with the bacteria who want to break down the dead stuff. And in some cases, those bacteria release toxins that might not be good for the maggots. And so being able to consume the bacteria is good because you're accidentally going to consume some of them anyway. But also killing some of them, remove some of the competitors in your food.

• 44:36Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is exactly what they evolved to do, right? To outcompete the bacteria and to eat all the dead stuff. Why don't they also eat the living flesh? Like, why do they leave that alone? That's awfully convenient.

• 44:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm going to preface this with, I'm spitballing because you asked me lots of great questions I don't necessarily know the answers to. So my first guess is that mostly what these guys are doing is the moms are laying their eggs on stuff that is like totally dead, totally dead. And every once in a while, they opportunistically find an open wound with some dead skin and they lay their eggs in there too. And so they are specialists on the dead stuff and are less interested in the living stuff. There's also... A bit of a trade off, I think, between being able to infect and break down living tissue, which has like an immune response and might try to fight back versus just going after dead tissue, which isn't going to fight back. That's my best guess.

• 45:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. All right. So they're lazy. They don't want to work hard. They just go for the easy dead stuff. And that amazingly worked perfectly for our use case, right?

• 45:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And I mean, I hate diphtherins. So they go through a couple of stages in the dead stuff. They have a wandering phase where they fall off of the dead thing and then bury underground. And that's thought to maybe help them avoid drying out or keep them safe from predators. So like, you know, crows will go around and they'll find dead insects in carcasses and eat them up. So they kind of hide and then they hatch as adults and they go off to complete their lifecycle. Okay. So that's all kind of complicated. So you can imagine that growing flies in a lab could be a little complicated, especially if you want to make sure that when you grow those flies, they're grown under sterile conditions.

• 46:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 46:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you don't want flies walking around on some dead infected roadkill and then getting added to your wound because that would be pretty gross. So while this was popular in the 1930s, it was difficult to, you know, cheaply provide maggots for wound debridement and to find ways to contain them. So you definitely don't want your leg maggots or your foot wound maggots to escape. And then now they're like free in the hospital and they can like go and spread whatever diseases you had on your foot to somebody else. And it's also gross to have flies around. So it was kind of a pain. It was expensive.

• 46:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Because the maggots literally sprout wings and try to fly around. Like that's what they do. They we call them flies, right? So that's.

• 46:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. They're going through their insect stages. They transform it or metamorphose into adults. And yeah, then they go and they fly around and they're super gross.

• 47:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Does that mean that if you have a wound with maggots on it, there's some like container that captures the flies? Then you have like dead flies on your wound? You have to clean off all the time?

• 47:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're going to get there.

• 47:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was looking on the website of companies who grow medical maggots, but I'm almost there. I'm almost there, I promise. So in the 1940s, antibiotics become widespread. And, you know, quite frankly, if I had the choice between someone sprinkling maggots on my legs or giving me, you know, penicillin medication I could pop in my mouth, I'm going to go for the penicillin.

• 47:39Daniel Whiteson?

  But is that just because of the size? Like, you can see maggots and they seem gross? Because penicillin is like a fungus and it's like also growing and attacking the bacteria. If the fungus was like bigger, if you had like mushrooms growing out of your wound, would that be as gross as maggots?

• 47:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, they're not like spreading fungus like you spread butter on a piece of bread, like onto your leg.

• 48:00Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm thinking of marmite now, I'm like, mm, yum.

• 48:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Sometimes it's like a pill that you take orally, or, you know, maybe it could be like a cream or something. But, you know, the maggots, they escape. Sometimes you can feel them moving around and, you know, I get that it's gross.

• 48:15Daniel Whiteson?

  We should have a whole episode on the biology of grossness. Like, why do we think some things are gross and not other things? Where does that come from? Anyway, back to maggots.

• 48:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that would involve a lot of evolutionary psychology, I think. I'm totally down for tackling that. But so in the 1940s, antibiotics come along that solves a bunch of the problems. Maggots fall out of favor because they were kind of a pain in the rear end. In the 1980s, 1990s, antibiotic resistance starts becoming a big problem. People have non-healing wounds and it's starting to get harder and harder to kill the bacterial infections that are in those wounds. So medical maggots come back in style. And in 2004, the Food and Drug Administration in the United States actually approves maggots as a medical device to treat things like diabetic foot ulcers that won't heal. And there's also some evidence that for some sort of limb issues, maggots can help with debridement and help with antimicrobial stuff.

• 49:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And in some cases, people can keep their limbs because of what a great job the maggots did.

• 49:12Daniel Whiteson?

  So people are still using maggots today?

• 49:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, so maggots are making a comeback.

• 49:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 49:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're not incredibly widely used. And based on the surveys that I read, that is mostly from what everybody calls the quote "yuck factor," end quote. And I totally get that. Apparently, like, sometimes you can feel them moving around a little, but mostly what they're doing is moving around in dead tissue, so you don't usually feel it a lot. But here's what happens. They sprinkle some little maggots, they're like a couple millimeters long, in the wound.

• 49:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then they have really fancy bandages that cover up the wound and keep the maggots in the wound and don't let them get out.

• 49:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 49:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's a company called Monarch Labs, for example, that sells the Maggot Mega Pack, Maggot T-shirts, and the Les Flaps de Jour case dressing. So it contains the maggots while still letting the maggots breathe. And what happens is the maggots spend a couple of days in their larval form, going around, eating dead tissue. And then when they get to the stage where they would usually fall off and try to bury themselves in the soil, you remove the dressing, you collect all of the maggots, and then you just take them away. And the maggots have cleaned off the dead tissue, they have fought some of the bacterial

• 50:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  infections, and there's fairly good evidence that actually outcomes are pretty good. Here's where some of the nuances of biology come in, because the answer is never clear. Some studies do find that the maggots do less well against particular species of bacteria. Sometimes the results are contradictory between studies, suggesting that you don't always get consistent results. For obvious reasons, pharmaceutical companies are trying to figure out if you can not have the maggots, but still have the antimicrobial properties. So they're trying to understand what kind of compounds the maggots are secreting and excreting. And there is a drug called Seradisyn, which was, it sounds like, derived from maggot

• 51:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  secretions, excretions, and it inhibits 12 strains of MRSA, which is that multi-antibiotic resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Was that right?

• 51:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Sounds right.

• 51:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, nice.

• 51:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Is there some tech bro out there making tiny robotic maggots that walk around and eat dead flesh and ooze out this medicine?

• 51:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe eventually. Who knows what the future holds? Magbots.

• 51:42Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a billion dollar idea right there. Somebody call me.

• 51:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, you should patent it while you're ahead. So there's other kinds of compounds that have been secreted that help with different kinds of bacteria. So folks are working on this. And there have been some studies on wounds in children that were having difficulty sort of healing up. And they had multidrug resistant pseudomonas originosa in them. And they had been treated with things like antibiotics, but the bacteria were resistant. And they treated the kids with maggots. And the maggots really did seem to help. They still did some other follow up treatments, but the maggots seemed to be like the thing that helped these diseases turn the corner. And after 34 days, these infections no longer had bacteria.

• 52:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Amazing. Good job maggots.

• 52:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. But so our listener wanted to know if they can stop worrying about superbugs because we're all going to be using maggots. There's a couple of problems with that. So first of all, maggots tend to be used for a pretty narrow range of problems. So diabetic foot ulcers, pressure ulcers, basically wounds on the exterior of your body that are having trouble healing. And we have problems with antibiotic resistant bacteria inside our body too. And, you know, drinking a slurry of maggots isn't going to help us with that.

• 52:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's super weird to have maggots like eating a wound on the outside of your body. I can't imagine having maggots like crawl around inside you.

• 53:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think they'd survive for very long, but you'd feel them wiggling to their death and it would be unpleasant.

• 53:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I also imagine that if we started using maggots to the same extent that we use some of our current antibiotics, it wouldn't surprise me if resistance arose to whatever the maggots were producing as well. And so I don't think this is a panacea, but it is a solution that seems to be working pretty well for certain types of non healing wounds.

• 53:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing. It's incredible how many times evolution has found the answer to a problem that we have. You know, it's just like. Give it a billion years and so many mutations, it will explore the whole landscape and find an incredible solution.

• 53:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, this field is called Darwinian medicine, I believe, where you go to nature for some answers. I found a doctor named Dr. Ronald Sherman, and I loved reading his papers because he was so excited about the maggots. So I want to wrap this up on a quote from the conclusion of one of his 2009 papers. He said, "Medicinal maggots are as precise in their debridement as a highly skilled microsurgeon, as attentive to their host's wounds as the most dedicated wound care nurse. It is no wonder that they have found their way into the hearts and wounds of so many."

• 54:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Hearts and wounds is the title of his autobiography.

• 54:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, thank you for your enthusiasm, Dr. Sherman, and let's go ahead and reconnect with Jonathan and see if we've answered his questions.

• 54:28Speaker 15

  Yes, indeed, you have answered my questions. Thank you. It looks like what was old is new once again.

• 54:34Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thank you very much, everybody, for sending in your questions. We'd love to hear your questions on the pod. Please don't be shy. Send them to us to [email protected].

• 54:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can't wait to hear from you.

• 54:51Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 54:57Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 55:03Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 55:09Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 55:16Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 55:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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• 55:46Speaker 02

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• 55:49Speaker 03

  Safe Balance Banking, one less thing to figure out. Learn more at BofA.com/simplebanking. Terms and conditions apply. Bank of America and a member FDIC.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 56:30Speaker 16

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 56:43Speaker 17

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair.

• 57:26Speaker 17

  This is an advertisement for Zolair paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 57:30Speaker 18

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops, while Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in. Get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 58:08Speaker 14

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.