Listener Questions #4

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about binary star seasons, meat wasps and freefall. 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.

• 0:05Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  How do some bees make meat, honey? What are tapeworms up to in my tummy?

• 1:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Can light escape from a black hole? What process produces coal?

• 1:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did Franklin hang that key from a kite? Why is dark chocolate better than white?

• 1:27Daniel Whiteson?

  How do moles smell underwater? Why is the planet getting hotter?

• 1:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  How can humans live on Mars? What's the holdup with flying cars?

• 1:35Daniel Whiteson?

  The current state of space law, the powerful mantis shrimp claw.

• 1:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Biology, physics, archaeology, forestry, really, anything other than chemistry.

• 1:45Daniel Whiteson?

  What diseases do you get from your cat? Well, we'll find the answers to all of that.

• 1:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whatever question keeps you up at night.

• 1:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Daniel and Kelly's answer will make it right.

• 1:55Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 2:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I've never read a poem on the podcast before.

• 2:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith and my husband just assumed that I'd be so bad at writing poems that when I read it out loud to my daughter, he left the room just so that he wouldn't be embarrassed. But you know what? I had fun.

• 2:32Daniel Whiteson?

  I hope he's blushing somewhere whenever he's listening to this.

• 2:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  He might skip all of our listener questions episodes from here on out, but that's all right. I had a good time.

• 2:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that's too bad because those are my favorite episodes. I love hearing what people are wondering about, helping them unravel their confusion and getting to the topics that are really in people's minds. It's my favorite way to interact with our audience.

• 2:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love it as well, and I'm particularly excited about this listener questions episode. You know, one, because my daughter's questions included, and that's pretty cute. But two, because we got a biology question for me that I was just completely unaware of this group of species, and they're so creepy and right up my alley, and it was so much fun.

• 3:13Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's not waste any more time. Let's dig into it today. We have questions about seasons on binary star systems, about meat, wasp, honey, and about how gravity actually works.

• 3:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's do it.

• 3:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So our first question is from Ada. She's 10 years old and she lives in Virginia, and I think she knows Kelly pretty well.

• 3:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Great place to live. I'll just throw that in there.

• 3:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Here's Ada's question.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ada. I'm 10 years old. I have a question for you. What would seasons be like if you were on a planet in a solar system that had two suns? Thank you.

• 3:50Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, I like how she gets right to the point.

• 3:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, she's very succinct. I like that, too.

• 3:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Is she reading a book about life on a solar system with two suns? Or where do you think this question came from?

• 4:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Gosh, you know, I'm sure it didn't come out of nowhere, but I don't know where she heard about solar systems with two suns that sparked this. Could have been science class at school.

• 4:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe she's writing a science fiction novel and she needs some science consultation.

• 4:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, yes, and she reached out to the right person.

• 4:17Daniel Whiteson?

  She certainly did.

• 4:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So let's dig into it. First, let's remind ourselves why we have seasons on Earth. And then we can teleport ourselves mentally to a solar system with two stars and think about that one. So on Earth, the reason we have seasons is because the Earth is tilted, right? The Earth goes around the Sun and there's a plane there where all the planets go around the Sun in the same plane. And the Earth also spins, but the axis that it spins on is not perfectly perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. So it's tilted a little bit. It like leans over. Now, the Earth is a sphere, so you know, what is really leaning? It's still a sphere when it's tilted, but what's leaning is that axis of spin, that axis that controls the day/night cycle. So what's closer to the Sun is the northern hemisphere. The spin lets

• 5:05Daniel Whiteson?

  you define a northern and a southern hemisphere. Then the northern hemisphere is closer to the Sun during the summer and the southern hemisphere is further from the Sun during the northern hemisphere summer and the southern hemisphere's winter. It's not actually accurate to say that the northern hemisphere is any closer to the Sun. It's just more exposed to the Sun because it's leaning that direction.

• 5:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. And you know, I've got to admit that every once in a while, when I talk to like the few friends I have in Australia, I still forget that they're experiencing the opposite season that we are up here in North America and we regularly have a disconnect.

• 5:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And so if we didn't have a tilt, for example, if the Earth's axis of rotation was perfectly perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, then you wouldn't have any seasons. You just always have, I guess, spring or fall, right? The days would be the same length all year round. Going around the Sun wouldn't change your experience at all.

• 5:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  No seasons, totally boring, just like living in California. You knew where that was going halfway through the sentence.

• 6:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. We'd all be happy all year long, right? It'd be amazing.

• 6:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  So dull.

• 6:13Daniel Whiteson?

  And there are other tiny factors that also affect the weather and the seasons. Things like the elliptical orbit, right? The Earth doesn't orbit in a perfect circle around the sun. It's an ellipse, which means sometimes it is closer to the sun and sometimes it's further from the sun. But this is a smaller factor than the tilt, which really dramatically changes how many hours of sunlight you get every day. The Earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest from the sun in July. So actually, that counters the effect. It makes the summer slightly less severe and the winter is slightly less severe.

• 6:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is that why the year starts in January? Or did that have nothing to do with the calendar?

• 6:51Daniel Whiteson?

  No, that's totally random. Yeah.

• 6:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 6:53Daniel Whiteson?

  That's totally random. And also, the Earth's tilt processes a little bit. It's not always in the same direction. It itself rotates a little bit, like a wobbly top. These are small factors, and that's affected by like the pull of Jupiter and all sorts of other stuff. So mostly, the Earth has seasons because it's tilted. So the northern hemisphere is getting more light and the southern hemisphere is getting less light during the northern hemisphere's summer. All right, but that's a simple system, a single planet going around a single star. So what about a binary star system in Ada's mind?

• 7:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can I back you up for a second? Are most planets tilted? So like, the moon has a very little bit of a tilt. Is Earth weird, having a 23.4 degree tilt?

• 7:34Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not weird to have a tilt. Like Uranus is tilted much more dramatically, 97 degrees, basically totally on its side. Other planets are tilted more or less. The tilt, we think, comes from being hit. Like, everything in the solar system formed together from a big swirl. That's why everything is rotating in the same plane. And most of the planets are spinning in the same direction. They move around the sun, which is the same direction that the sun is spinning itself. The whole solar system is one big swirl, which then coalesces into a star and planets, which all have the same swirl. But then you can get hit by something from outside the solar system, and it can knock you off axis a little bit. So we think that's probably the source of the Earth's tilt and other planets' tilt as well.

• 8:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  With all the stuff that's colliding, would it be reasonable to expect that having no tilt would be rare? Because there's so many collisions that probably knock you off angle?

• 8:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, as the solar system forms, it's a little chaotic and things hit each other. So the average tilt is going to be zero, but it's unlikely for everything to have exactly zero tilt.

• 8:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it.

• 8:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Just the same with it, like all the solar systems in the galaxy, on average, have zero tilt relative to the plane of the galaxy, but most of them are tilted relative to the plane of the galaxy. They're not all aligned with the actual rotation of the galaxy.

• 8:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so let's move on to systems with two suns.

• 8:50Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so system with two suns sound exotic, right? You're like, ooh, wow, two suns, how cool. But the truth is that they're not actually that rare. Binary star systems are all over the galaxy. It's a significant fraction of the stars in our galaxy have a partner star. And the reason is that that big cloud of gas that collapses to give you a star, usually it's part of a much bigger cloud. So stars are born together. Often you have two, three, four, five stars all born together, which begin a complicated swirl as they're forming. So you have these nurseries. We have a lot of star forming happening at the same time. And so stars are born with partners. And the reason we have a lot of binary star systems is that it's basically the most number of stars you can have in a system

• 9:34Daniel Whiteson?

  and have it be stable. Like you can have two things orbiting each other and have that be stable, like the earth and the sun, or a star and another star. But you add a third object and it becomes chaotic. It becomes really complicated and unstable. So if you have three stars, for example, what's very likely to happen is one of them is going to get ejected and you're going to end up with a single star and then a pair of stars. So you have a lot of binary star systems out there. Not very many trinary systems or quaternary systems, or I don't even know the description for five or more stars.

• 10:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  So why is it more likely to get ejected than to get pulled into one of the other two stars and then just make like, I don't know, a big star? A big explosion?

• 10:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, that could happen also, but you know, stars are small compared to the distances between them. And so actual collisions are pretty unlikely. But they can spiral in and combine. That certainly does happen as well. But there's just many more outcomes where they get ejected. And just like in our solar system, there's been chaos. We think probably there was another giant planet which got ejected from the solar system because of the interaction between all the planets. So you have a lot of binary star systems out there. And then you have to think about the planets around those binary stars. And it becomes tricky already, because now the planet is sort of like that third object. So you might wonder like, hey, isn't the planet just going to get ejected the way like a third star would get ejected? And the answer is yes, it's not easy to have planets around

• 11:00Daniel Whiteson?

  binary stars in a stable way. There's two ways to do it, and both of them basically make it look more like a binary star system. So one solution is you have the two stars near each other and the planet is far away. So it's sort of like, yeah, there are three objects there, but really it's sort of a nested set of binary systems. You have like the stars on one side and the planet that are orbiting each other. And then inside the sort of star system, you have two stars moving near each other. That's one situation. Basically, like replace the sun with two stars close to each other, or closer to each other than to the planet. The other possible configuration is you have a star and a planet like the earth and the sun, and then you have another star that's much further away.

• 11:41Daniel Whiteson?

  So like, put a star near Pluto or something, much further from the earth than the sun. And then it's far enough away that it's not unstable. Then you have like, again, a nested set of binary systems. You have three objects, but really it's like, two objects acting as one, and then in a binary system with the third object.

• 12:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So then let's talk about seasons in the first scenario, where you have two stars that are right next to each other. Do they act like one just mega star when you sort of aggregate their effects?

• 12:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, they act like one mega star. It's gonna be very similar to as if you had one bigger star. It's gonna be different and more dramatic in terms of like sunrise and sunset. Sunrise will be longer and sunset will be longer, and there'll be times when Have like one star above the horizon and one below. So you could have effects like you could have a sunrise where there's already a star in the sky. And you have basically two sunsets, one more dramatic than the next. So that would be really cool, but it wouldn't really affect the seasons very much, right? Because the planet's relationship to the star is basically the same. If you have a tilt and you have an orbit, that's going to determine your seasons. So in that situation, we have a planet around a binary star system where the stars are close to each other and further from the planet.

• 12:56Daniel Whiteson?

  The seasons are going to be very much like here on Earth.

• 12:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like it would be amazing to wake up to a sunrise with two stars in the horizon. That sounds really cool, but all right. So then our second scenario, you said there's one sun that's kind of close to the planet and another sun that's super far out. Is it far enough out that it doesn't really impact climates and seasons anymore?

• 13:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Unfortunately, yeah. So the boring answer is for there to be a planet in this situation, that star has to be kind of far away. The closer you get it, the more dramatic the impact on seasons and day night stuff, et cetera. But also the more unstable it is, like if you have the planet be the same distance from both stars. So it's like very dramatic, then that system is totally unstable and it's not going to last for very long. So you got to push that second star kind of far away, which means really it's going to be in the sky more like a bright star than a real sun. And not really going to affect your seasons. You're going to have one totally dominant star and then a second star. That's going to sometimes make the night a little brighter or even the day a little brighter, but it's not going to have that much effect.

• 14:02Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, in a science fiction sort of inspiration, we can move that second star in as much as possible and pretend that it does have some impact because there's some crazy dynamics that happen in that scenario.

• 14:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, let's go for it. What is that like? Super winter.

• 14:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. If you think about the periods when you have sunlight, that really is what determines the seasons, right? In a single star, single planet system, it's the number of hours per day of sunlight you get that determine the seasons. And in the summer, you're getting more sun. In the winter, you're getting less sun. Now, put that second star around, say, we have a second star, you know, in Mars orbit or something crazy, then you're going to be getting sunlight in all sorts of weird configurations. Like, there can be parts of the year where each star is illuminating a different side of the planet. Put the planet between the two stars, right? They're all in a line. You have star, planet, star. Then every part of the surface is seeing a star, right? It's like the whole world has noon at the same time, right?

• 15:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Which would be crazy. So you have periods where the whole planet is seeing star. And then other scenarios where, like, in a line, it goes star, star, planet, where half of the planet is seeing both stars at the same time. And if they're both pretty close, that's going to be super day. That's like super noon, right? And that's going to be very intense, super duper hot. And also, you'll get a weird effect there where potentially the stars eclipse each other. So like, you know, we have solar eclipses and lunar eclipses. This would be like a stellar eclipse where one sun is behind the other sun briefly. That would be awesome.

• 15:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Don't look at either.

• 15:42Daniel Whiteson?

  But I actually looked up a simulator to try to figure out exactly what would happen through the year. And it depends crucially on the orbit of that second star. If that second star has a period of about a year, like the same as the planet's orbit, then you're going to have a regular cycle. But you're going to have times in the year where even at the equator, you have no darkness. Like, you see one sun, and then the planet spins, and you see the other sun. And so that's going to be very summery, right? Because it's all about the hours of sunlight you get. And other parts of the year where you're seeing both suns at the same time, so you're getting fewer hours of daylight, but they're more intense, they're brighter. So you're going to have these really weird periods. I don't know how the plants would respond to that or how you would evolve in that kind of configuration.

• 16:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Circadian rhythms?

• 16:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm-hmm. It would be a total mess, but it would be regular. You know, and if, for example, the second star has a longer period, it takes longer to go around that first star and the planet, then its effects can slide through the year, right? It's not like every June, we have double sun, every January, we have one sun. It can slowly offset, and that must really affect like the development of a civilization. You know, because we use the regular seasons and the regular day night cycle really is a way to tell time. So either you have to have much more complex mathematics before you can even begin to use a calendar and develop it, or maybe you get smarter quicker because the calendar is more complicated and it inspires more interesting mathematics.

• 17:10Daniel Whiteson?

  But the short answer is that the seasons are going to be intense and complicated, and it depends on a lot of the details, exactly how fast that second star goes around the first star.

• 17:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I wonder if it would hinder the establishment of civilizations because like being able to plan things like when you plant your crops seems really important. I wonder if we'd all be like wanderers because planning just isn't worth even trying, but really fun to think about. You know, there's got to be a couple sci fi novels in there.

• 17:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And you know, there's the famous book, The Three Body Problem, where they had essentially this question, except it's actually the Four Body Problem because they have three stars and a planet. I don't know why they like couldn't figure out how to count to three. It's already complicated enough with two stars. You don't need a third star.

• 17:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Well, when Ada's done with her math homework, we'll have her listen to this explanation and hear what she had to say.

• 18:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe we should have her on in real time for a follow up.

• 18:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's do it.

• 18:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi Ada, thanks very much for your question. I was curious what you thought about our answer and if you have any follow up questions.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  I understood like what I heard when I listened to the podcast. And I do have one follow up question.

• 18:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, goodie. What is it?

• 18:33Speaker 04

  So was our sun in this, our solar system, like part of a different solar system? And then was it ejected out? Or was it just not like that?

• 18:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's a great question. Unfortunately, we don't know the answer. Most stars are born with other stars nearby. There's like sibling stars, sometimes two, three, five, seven, as part of a big nursery, and then they're separated as, you know, gravity slings them around. But we don't know the history of our star that far back. So probably it was born with other stars, but we don't actually know. Maybe one day we'll figure out some way to figure it out. But for now, we don't know the answer.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 19:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks so much for your question.

• 19:30Speaker 01

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• 20:00Speaker 05

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• 20:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So now for something absolutely totally different. We have a fantastic question from listener James Palmer. And it is a question about meat bees, otherwise known as vulture bees, which I had not heard of, but is absolutely right up my alley. So let's hear the question.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  Hey, Kelly and Daniel. I have a burning desire to know everything about meat wasps. I just heard about them and I feel like there's a lot to discuss here. Like apparently they're carnivorous and they eat on like flesh and like maybe it's rotting. Then they use that to make their honey and stuff like meat honey. Hmm hmm hmm hmm. Please tell me everything.

• 21:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm, meat honey. Daniel, you're dying to know about meat honey, right?

• 21:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you know, we have lots of different kinds of honey here in California. And often it's sold to us by promoting the kind of flowers that the bees visit. Like, oh, this is lavender honey or wildflower honey. And you're supposed to imagine that you can taste the lavender as you're eating the honey. And so I'm wondering now, meat bee honey, is it going to taste like pepperoni? Or what's going on?

• 21:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Gosh, you know, to be honest, I would never try it. But there's not a lot of honey that is meat honey. So there's a lot of bees that make something called honey. But there's only three species that do this meat honey thing exclusively. So I think maybe we should start with how honey is made.

• 22:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cause I actually didn't understand this very well.

• 22:16Daniel Whiteson?

  I have this naive understanding that like bees eat pollen and then do something internally and then vomit up honey. How wrong is that?

• 22:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I thought that too.

• 22:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 22:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Totally, like almost 100%. Okay. So that was my thought too. Okay. So let's start with the European honeybees as an example.

• 22:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 22:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  So this is Apis mellifera. And what they do is they go out and they go to flowers and the flowers produce both nectar, which is like sugar water and pollen, which has a lot of protein. And so these fill two very different roles for the bees. So they get their carbohydrates from the nectar.

• 22:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 22:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that's going to become honey. And then the pollen is their protein source. And sometimes the pollen like gets in the honey. It almost sounds like it's accidental, but mostly the honey is from the nectar, not from the pollen.

• 23:02Daniel Whiteson?

  But the bees also eat the pollen? I thought the pollen was incidental and going along for a ride. And it was part of the plant's deal with the bees. Like you can eat the nectar, but then I'm going to get the pollen all over you and you're going to drop it on another flower and help us reproduce.

• 23:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, they eat it too.

• 23:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no.

• 23:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  They eat it and they feed it to like the baby bees. And so it's like a very important protein source. I didn't know that either. And actually, there's four different kinds of bees. There's the honeybees, the orchid bees, the bumblebees, and the stingless bees. And they're all categorized by having what are called corbicula. And these are like chunky thighs with like a way to like stick the pollen on there. And so like I saw a bee on one of our flowers the other day and I was like, what is this orange? Like, it's like they've got bling on their hips. I know, as an ecologist, I should have been like mortified that I didn't know what this was already. But anyway, those are like for carrying pollen around so they can bring it back to the hive.

• 23:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. And so do the plants get anything out of it? I thought bees were pollinators.

• 24:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I think some of it still like falls off and lands in the right place. So the pollination still happens, but the bees aren't moving the pollen around as a favor. It's more like incidental, because that's how nature.

• 24:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  No one helps anyone out in nature unless they have to.

• 24:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so bees drink pollen and then they use that to make the honey. How do they actually make the honey? Is that inside the bee? Or is that in one of their little hexagonal cooking vats?

• 24:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bees drink nectar. They don't drink the pollen.

• 24:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, sorry. Right, yes. Okay.

• 24:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's okay. Or they sometimes drink a honeydew, which is this like sweet fluid produced by insects. It has like a way to attract organisms that like protect them from natural enemies. They collect it in this special organ where they collect all of this sugary water. And you know, they can use it a little bit for like their flight to get from place to place. But they're, you know, trying to bring it back to the hive. So they fill up this organ and I think that something like half of their body weight can end up being this sugary water. But the sugary water is nowhere near concentrated enough to be honey. So what they do is they bring it back to the hive and they regurgitate it to bees whose job it is to try to get some of the water out and concentrate the sugars more.

• 25:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so those bees, they like start kind of partially regurgitating it and blowing these like bubbles that increase the surface area. So some of the water evaporates off. I didn't know that.

• 25:23Daniel Whiteson?

  The physics of honey. Look at that.

• 25:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. And I hadn't imagined that so much of honey involved vomit. But there you go. It's so much fun hanging out with biologists.

• 25:34Daniel Whiteson?

  When I'm vomiting, I'm not busy also trying to concentrate it and evaporate it. So I have like gooey or vomit. I guess that's what a bee does.

• 25:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, you're not so great at multitasking, I guess.

• 25:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Too bad.

• 25:46Daniel Whiteson?

  I'll work on that. I'll work on that. Yeah. Good to have goals.

• 25:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So bees vomit up the nectar and then other specialized bees help evaporate and concentrate it into honey. So does that mean that honey is just nectar that's been concentrated down? Or is there some fermentation that also happens?

• 26:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's just one of the stages of evaporation. That gets a little bit of the water out. And then when they store it in the combs, like the, you know, honey combs, I'm under the impression that some more evaporation happens there. So bees produce a little bit of heat by like, you know, shaking their wings really fast. That also produces some airflow over the honey combs and that combination of heat and then air moving throughout the colony and then sort of back out of the hive. That finishes evaporating off the water until you get to a point where you've got enough concentrated sugar that you've got honey.

• 26:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Fascinating.

• 26:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. I didn't know any of that. That was awesome.

• 26:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So then it makes sense that if I'm eating the honey from bees that visited lavender, it should taste like lavender because it really is like concentrated lavender nectar.

• 26:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  If lavender nectar smells like lavender, I don't know that it does. And I'm one of those people who has had honey from different places and been like, it's all honey to me. I don't have a delicate palate.

• 26:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. So now tell us about meat wasps. Where do they get their supplies to make honey?

• 27:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so.

• 27:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm terrified of this answer, by the way.

• 27:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. All right. So the best honey makers are the European honeybees, the best in terms of like producing honey that humans like. But a bunch of other kinds of bees, they make similar honey, but often their honey is nowhere near as like concentrated with sugars. It's more watery. And there's a group of bees called the stingless bees. And now we're getting closer to the vulture bees.

• 27:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 27:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the stingless bees, they make honey, but their honey tends to be more watery. And instead of storing it in those combs, they make these little waxy pots. And it's harder to get it out of those waxy pots. And it's like more watered down when you do. So people did still keep these bees for sugary fluids. But as soon as honeybees came along, a lot of the stingless bees that do this more watered down harder to get honey, they became less popular to culture. But so these stingless bees, they also get their nectar from flowers. But there's a group in the genus Trigonae. Where they seem like they're less interested in flowers.

• 28:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  So instead of going to flowers for nectar, they get their sugars from things like rotting fruits. They'll like, take the sugars from that. And instead of getting pollen, they get their protein from dead animals, dead vertebrates in particular.

• 28:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. So that's why they're called vulture bees, because vultures are scavengers. They don't kill anything. They eat already dead stuff. So these vulture bees will get their protein, not from pollen, but from dead animals, you're saying?

• 28:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And they'll get their sugar, which they use to, you know, like, make their honey stuff. They get that from things like rotting fruit or fruit they find. Okay. So then the question is, do they make meat honey? This is important. And the answer, I think, is maybe?

• 28:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, really?

• 28:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  So there's only three species of these vulture bees, and they're all in the same genus. They're all closely related. It does turn out that there's a fair number of stingless bees that where like, if meat is left out, they'll go ahead and get some protein from it, but they're not required to get protein from it. So they're called facultatively necrophagic, which means they'll like, eat dead stuff when they've got the chance, but they don't have to. But these vulture bees are obligantly necrophagic, so they have to eat dead stuff. And apparently, they're really good at it. Like, they've got ways to sort of attract other members to come so that they can, like, very quickly, with these specialized mouthparts, scrape a bunch of, like, rotting flesh.

• 29:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my god.

• 29:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Your face is, like, priceless.

• 29:30Daniel Whiteson?

  They should be called nightmare bees. Yikes.

• 29:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. It's intense, pretty metal. So then it's a little bit unclear what happened. So I found a 1982 paper that described what they were doing, and it said, "The bees masticate and consume flesh at the feeding site. They do not carry pieces of flesh to the nest, but appear to hydrolyze it with a secretion produced by either mandibular or salivary glands, which gives the feeding site a wet appearance." Side note, ew.

• 30:01Daniel Whiteson?

  That means they're slobbering, right? They're slobbering, they have meat slobber.

• 30:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  They've got meat slobber, and their saliva is starting the process of breaking down the meat. That's what that means. And then it says, "Individual bees captured while feeding, then forced to expel the contents of their crop." So essentially, they made these meat bees throw up. "were carrying a slurry of flesh, measuring between 37 and 65% dissolved solids by volume." So...

• 30:26Daniel Whiteson?

  A slurry of flesh. Isn't that like a Nine Inch Nails album title or something?

• 30:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like we have to get in touch with Trent Reznor now and find some way to convey this to him.

• 30:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy.

• 30:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so then the question is, how do they store it when they get back? So I read this paper from 2021 and they were laying out some different hypotheses for what happens. It looks like that meat slurry gets stored in pots. Maybe it gets mixed with some of the sugary stuff they collect. I think at the end of the day, it's not really clear what they do, how it's stored, how long it's stored. But you probably could say they make something called meat honey. Like they're taking that flesh slurry, they're storing it in these pots. It looks like it quote unquote matures for about two weeks into a paste that is also a little bit sugary. So they do appear to be making something like meat honey. Let's go for it. It looks like part of this process, and if your wife were here, maybe she'd be excited about this part.

• 31:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Part of it appears to involve the microbiome. So these vulture bees have microbiomes that include acidophilic bacteria, so bacteria that do really well in acidic environments. And you find similar categories of bacteria, they're not the exact same species, similar categories of bacteria in the guts of like vultures. So it seems like there's some kinds of bacteria that team up with organisms that eat dead flesh to sort of help process it and maybe also help make it safer because bacteria that get to the flesh first start producing like toxins, maybe to ward off these competitors. And these acid-loving bacteria sort of help make it all happen. And your face is just priceless right now.

• 32:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm so glad I don't eat breakfast because I'd be throwing it up into breakfast slurry right now and some bees could come along and make breakfast honey.

• 32:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Meat honey. And so, James, I have to thank you. I had never heard of these before and let's go ahead and hear if you learned everything you wanted to know about meat honey.

• 32:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And if you're ever going to eat honey again. I think it's safe to say that you taught me everything I asked for and a lot more. So thanks so much for that, guys. I appreciate it.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 33:10Speaker 07

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

• 33:50Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, our last question comes from Hans in the Netherlands, who has a nephew in Perth, and they've been disagreeing about which direction the Earth is accelerating and how gravity actually works. Let's hear the question from Hans.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  I have a question concerning free fall. As I understand it, when you're in free fall, you don't move at all. Instead, the Earth is racing towards you. Now, my question is this. I live in Gouda, which is in the west of the Netherlands. I have a nephew in Perth, Australia, which is roughly the opposite side of Earth. When we decide to jump out of an airplane at the same time, which way is the Earth moving? Thank you very much for your answer.

• 34:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so you know, maybe first we should start with the disclaimer that you shouldn't do this unless you're a professional. Have you ever done sky jumping? Or have you ever jumped from a plane?

• 34:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I one time did skydiving. Yes, I jumped from an airplane exactly one time. And I did it one time because I did my homework and I looked up how often people die skydiving. And it turns out it's very, very rare to die the first time you jump. And it's very, very rare to die after like 10 jumps. But there's a danger zone between like two and nine jumps. And my understanding is that the first time you jump, you're very careful. You're freaked out. You check all the straps. You're like following all the safety videos. And when you survive that first time, you're like, oh, maybe it's not so dangerous. And then you get sloppy. And when you get sloppy and you're like feeling confident, that's the danger zone. And then if you survive like nine or 10 jumps, you become really good at it. And then you're back in the safe zone.

• 35:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So I did it once, I survived, and I'm never doing it again.

• 35:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, you controlled your own parachute and everything when you jumped?

• 35:30Daniel Whiteson?

  I got to pull my parachute, but it was a tandem jump. I was strapped to another dude who was there to like make sure I did it right. But yeah.

• 35:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  When I did it, there was a dude on my back.

• 35:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 35:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, did you ask the guy on your back? Is this your second to ninth jump? That's the guy you need to ask, I think.

• 35:44Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. It might be his second to ninth jump that day. I think these guys go up all the time.

• 35:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I think so, too.

• 35:52Daniel Whiteson?

  But it was sort of terrifying because they told us, hey, you can change your mind at any moment. And the friend I went with, she was standing at the edge of the door, ready to jump out. And she was like, yeah, no, I can't do it. And they're like, no, you're doing it. And she's like, you said I could change my mind. And they're like, we were lying. Nobody changes their mind. And then they pushed her out the door.

• 36:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  I had brought a boyfriend who I, you know, didn't end up marrying, maybe not surprisingly, after you hear this story, for his birthday. And he got to the door and he said, I don't want to do it. And the guy strapped to his back looked at me and I said, no. And I pointed out, and the guy jumped. And, you know, my boyfriend was happy afterwards that he did it. But he had also tried to back out at the last second.

• 36:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So folks, when they tell you you can back out, don't believe them. If you don't want to jump, don't go up in the plane.

• 36:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. But today, we are not giving advice about ways to risk your life and get adrenaline thrills. We're talking about understanding the fundamental nature of Gravity, how does it work? And Hans, I think, has responded to a conversation we had about gravity and free fall and who's really accelerating, in which an explanation I gave is that the Earth is accelerating up and out towards you. You're not falling towards the Earth. And so I think it's worthwhile to revisit that explanation a little bit and then unpack it in the context of Hans's question.

• 37:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, let's go for it. So if you jump out of a plane, what does Newton say is happening?

• 37:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so from a Newton point of view, if you're on the surface and you see somebody jump out of an airplane, you say there's a force of gravity and forces create acceleration. So gravity is accelerating you down towards the surface. And that's Newton's explanation. And from the point of view of the person on the surface, that makes perfect sense because you see somebody has velocity and they're accelerating because their velocity is changing. And so it looks perfectly like there's a force there and the person is accelerating. From the point of view of the jumper, right, they jump out of the airplane, they see the surface of the Earth rushing towards them, right? They see Earth accelerating towards them. Now, velocity is perfectly relative, right? So you might wonder like, well, who's right? Who is actually accelerating?

• 37:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is where Einstein comes in because Einstein tells us that like, velocity is relative, but acceleration is not. So let's unpack what that means for a moment. Like, we say that distance is relative, like Kelly and I are 3,000 miles from each other right now. And when we say distance is relative, we mean that you have to measure it relative to somewhere else. Like, I can say I'm 3,000 miles from Kelly, I can't just say, I am 3,000 miles. That doesn't have any meaning, right? I have to say what I'm 3,000 miles away from. Velocity is also relative. I can say I have zero velocity right now relative to Kelly, but I don't have zero velocity relative to the sun. And I don't have zero velocity relative to some particle that's speeding towards the

• 38:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Earth at almost the speed of light. In fact, I'm traveling at nearly the speed of light relative to that particle, right? And so velocity is only defined relative to other stuff. And that's confusing because when somebody jumps out of an airplane, you wonder like, well, are they moving towards the Earth? Is the Earth moving Towards them, both of those are perfectly valid because velocity is relative. You can't say which one's actually moving. But now you get to acceleration. Acceleration is different. Acceleration is not relative. Velocity is relative. It's a property of a pair of objects, me and Kelly and me and the earth, me and the sun. But acceleration is a property of an object. I can tell if I'm accelerating. You can tell if you're accelerating. How can you do that?

• 39:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, say, for example, you're in a truck and you have a bowling ball in the back of the truck. You can tell when somebody hits the brake on the truck. You can tell when somebody accelerates because the bowling ball in the back of the truck will respond. What happens if you hit the brakes? The bowling ball keeps going and will bang into the front of the truck bed. And if you accelerate, the bowling ball rolls backwards towards the back of the truck bed. So you can measure your acceleration yourself. You don't need to measure relative to the sun or the earth or your podcast co-host or anything like that. So that means you can do something interesting. You can ask like, well, is the guy who jumped out of an airplane, is he accelerating? Or is the guy on the ground on the earth, are they accelerating? Because both of them think the other one is accelerating.

• 40:06Daniel Whiteson?

  But Einstein says, no, you can actually just measure it and you can tell the answer.

• 40:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the answer is that the person who jumped is accelerating?

• 40:13Daniel Whiteson?

  No, the answer is the person on the earth is accelerating.

• 40:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 40:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, absolutely. Imagine you jump out of an airplane and you're holding a box with like a billiard ball in it, right? What's going to happen to that ball? You feel like you're accelerating towards the surface of the earth, but you look at the ball. The ball is not moving inside the box. The ball is going with you. It has exactly the same experience you do. Now, somebody on the surface of the earth, they have a ball in the box. That ball is pulled towards the surface of the earth. That's measuring acceleration. Another way to do this is to have a scale. Say you jump out of an airplane with a scale and now you stand on the scale. Are you going to measure anything? No, because there's nothing pushing you onto the scale. Whereas if you put the scale on the surface of the earth and you stand on it, you're going to measure your weight, right? That weight is actually measuring your acceleration.

• 41:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Einstein says what's happening there is the surface of the earth and that scale are accelerating up and out, right? So a scale is like an accelerometer. And so when you jump out of an airplane, you can measure that you're not accelerating. You're in free fall. There is no gravitational force on you because there is no gravitational force. On the surface of the earth, what you're measuring is not the force of gravity. The weight doesn't measure the force of gravity. It measures the acceleration of the surface of the earth up and out away from the center of the earth.

• 41:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's counterintuitive.

• 41:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. But it actually makes much more sense. The way to think about forces and acceleration and gravity is to remember that there can be apparent forces. Like, say, for example, you have a merry-go-round and somebody spins the merry-go-round. You feel this force pushing you off the merry-go-round, right? But there's no force there. There's nobody pushing on you. It feels like there's a force. There's an apparent force, what we call in physics a pseudo-force. Because you're accelerating, because you're rotating, creates this pseudo-force. So some things in the universe can create these pseudo-forces that make it seem like there's a force when there isn't really one. And that's what space does. That's what gravity is. Gravity isn't a force.

• 42:17Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just that space is bent in certain ways and objects like to follow the curvature of that space. So, for example, near a huge mass, space is bent and objects like to follow the curvature of space, which brings them towards the center of that mass. You jump out of an airplane, space is curved there because you're near the earth and your natural motion is towards the surface of the earth. And you need acceleration. You need a force to prevent you from moving in free fall, to work against the motion of space and time. So I understand Hans's question. Hans is like, hold on, you're saying the earth is accelerating. How can it be accelerating up in the Netherlands and up from Perth, right? Because it seems like it's going in two directions.

• 43:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's because you're thinking about the earth as a single sphere moving in one direction or moving in the other direction. Instead, imagine it as a sphere with variable radius. Gravity is trying to shrink the earth down into a dot and the structure of the earth is pushing back up and out in every direction. So the answer is that it's accelerating up and out in the Netherlands and up and And out in Perth, both are out away from the center. If there wasn't that acceleration, if the whole Earth was just a bunch of particles following the curvature of spacetime, it would collapse into a black hole. That's what gravity wants to do. It gathers stuff together because it bends space and then the motion of those particles follows that bent space and things fall together.

• 43:41Daniel Whiteson?

  So Earth has to push up and out just to maintain the same distance from the center. So it's counterintuitive because now I'm saying you have to accelerate just to maintain a constant distance from the center of the Earth. That's very counterintuitive, but it's true because their natural motion is to fall in towards the center and you have to accelerate, which means counter your motion relative to gravity to avoid doing that. So yeah, Hans, the Earth is accelerating up under you and up under your nephew in Perth.

• 44:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Who does that make right? That's the important question.

• 44:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's just all sit down over a nice plate of meat honey and work it out.

• 44:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no, let's never do that. Let's never, ever do that. Or at least let's not be told that we're eating meat honey, if that's what we're having.

• 44:29Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, I hope that cleared it up for Hans. Let's send him our answer and see if he's got some follow up questions.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Hi, Daniel and Katie. Thank you very much for your answer. It was very enlightening. It still seems somewhat counterintuitive to me, but I believe I can now understand what you mean. In particular, the idea that you shouldn't see the Earth as a solid object, but as a constant moving against gravity to maintain its shape. Incidentally, this reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, you have to run to stay in place. I hope this makes any sense to you. Thank you very much again, Hans.

• 45:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, thanks to everybody who submitted a question. Please, we want more people to submit more questions. And if you've got a question you want to share, you can send it to us through our Discord and you can find the link to that on our website. Or you can send us an email at [email protected].

• 45:19Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, and if you're still listening, we have one more request for you. We want to know more about you, not just what you're wondering in your questions about the universe, we want to know who you are, what you listen to, where you like to live and what you do in your spare time so we can get to know you a little better. We have a survey for our listeners. If you have a few minutes, we would love to hear some more about you. You can find a link to the survey on our website, www.danielandkelly.org.

• 45:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks, everyone.

• 45:50Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 45:56Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 46:02Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 46:08Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 46:15Kelly 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.

• 46:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 46:29Daniel Whiteson?

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• 47:14Daniel Whiteson?

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• 47:35Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 48:04Speaker 06

  Everyone on board? Yeah, I think so.

• 48:06Daniel Whiteson?

  You can't see it, but everyone in this room is nodding. They all agree the launch plan's perfect. But Julie has an idea how it can be even better. So she asks Copilot Cowork to help her overnight.

• 48:14Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 48:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Get help with complex tasks with Copilot Cowork. Microsoft Copilot: Work Lives On.

• 48:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.