Earth’s 1-ms Day, Baby Solar Systems, Record Black Hole Crash, CRISPR Cancer Hack & AI Indiana Jones (EP. 1)

Last week the Earth finished a full rotation one millisecond early – but that’s just the opener. In this week’s From First Principles we dive into six mind-bending headlines with our trademark mix of hard science and light-hearted banter: Earth’s fastest spin ever recorded – what shaved a millisecond off the day and why your chakras are still safe. ALMA spots a “baby Earth” forming 1,300 light years away – the first direct look at rocky planets in the making. Biggest black-hole merger on record – 15 ☉ of mass vaporized into pure gravitational waves, detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA. CRISPR reveals a vitamin-D “kill switch” for tumors – how silencing one gene in pancreatic & colon cancers triggers 4,000 downstream changes. A star that died… then died again – the first confirmed “double-detonation” white-dwarf supernova. DeepMind’s Aeneas AI deciphers broken Latin tablets – giving historians new text, provenance and dating in seconds. 👋 Hosts • Lester Nare – storyteller & professional curiosity machine • Dr. Krishna Choudhary – Princeton-trained physicist & cosmic tour guide 👍 Like what you hear? Hit Subscribe, ring the bell 🔔, and drop your questions for next week’s episode.

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  So we're gonna do the rundown. Uh, first story of the day, Earth just had one of its shortest days ever. So the summary on this headline is yesterday, July 22nd, 2025, Earth completed a rotation in less than 24 hours.

• 0:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 0:17Lester Nare?

  Uh, it was shorter by like

• 0:19Krishna Choudhary?

  A millisecond. A millisecond, but you know, the news people need some, something to write about in science, so.

• 0:26Lester Nare?

  So is this the end of the world or what?

• 0:28Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, it's, it's really not. Um, even if you believe in auras and chakras, right? It's a millisecond out of a 24 hour day. That's 86, 400 seconds in a day. So 86 million milliseconds in a day. So it's one part in 86 million. So your chakra has changed by one part in 86 million. So it's really, it's really not that bad.

• 0:54Lester Nare?

  So what's interesting about this is there's actually some interesting fundamental science going on.

• 0:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 0:59Lester Nare?

  Like, like, why is that happening?

• 1:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So that is actually a really cool fundamental physics question.

• 1:05Lester Nare?

  Cause I thought it was just 24 hours and that's it.

• 1:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, if the earth was in a void all on its own and there's nothing around it, then if it spins for 24 hours, it'll spin at exactly that speed because of the conservation of angular momentum and the conservation of energy. Basically, it's got some rotational energy. It's got some angular momentum. It's not gonna go anywhere, right? But we live in the real world where we've got the moon going around the earth. We've got the sun tugging on the planet. We've got Jupiter tugging on the planet. So we have all of these like little forces that are tugging on it, right?

• 1:39Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:39Krishna Choudhary?

  And so what's gonna end up happening is you have something called tidal friction, right? The moon creates tides. What are those tides? Those tides are basically like friction from the ocean. As the ocean moves around the earth as it's pulled by the moon.

• 1:55Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 1:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Does that make sense?

• 1:56Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you're losing energy to that friction, right?

• 1:59Lester Nare?

  Because the moon is pulling you.

• 2:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the moon is pulling the earth.

• 2:02Lester Nare?

  While we're trying to go this way.

• 2:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you have this like, this like, kind of this, this tidal friction happening. And that friction means you're losing energy to heat. And if you're losing energy to heat. You're, the energy has to come from somewhere and so that slows the, the rotation of the earth a little bit, right? Like way before, earth used to have a day of about nineteen hours. Now it's twenty-four, yeah. Way, way, way back, like millions of years ago.

• 2:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:29Krishna Choudhary?

  But now it's like, now it's like twenty-four hours and it's gonna keep growing. Now this particular one, it's a little like unclear what it is, okay? This one, it could be the tidal friction.

• 2:40Lester Nare?

  What do you mean unclear?

• 2:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, it's, it's a millisecond, right? And, um, which is, which is really small.

• 2:48Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:48Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not just the moon that's doing that. For example, like a lot of things on earth can change its rotational capability. Like dude, like, like China, okay? China on its own changed the rotation of the earth, okay? Back when it made, yeah, back when it, okay, I, I guess that's not a single entity. It's like a billion people, but like when they made the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

• 3:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 3:13Krishna Choudhary?

  That was a massive, massive dam. It creates a reservoir, right? It creates this massive water lake.

• 3:21Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 3:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And what does that do? Just like, um, just like when you have a figure skater that's like, like twirling and then when they like put their arms out, they slow down. When they, when they put their arms in, they speed up, right? That's because of, um, again, conservation of angular momentum. What you're doing is you're, you're decreasing what's called a moment of inertia or increasing it. And when you do that, it's kind of like an inertia of rotation. So the bigger you make yourself in terms of the radius, the slower you'll go, right? And so when, when, when China dammed up this river, the earth made itself a little bigger. Because there's like all this water now at this high elevation, right?

• 4:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:02Krishna Choudhary?

  And so all of this water that used to just keep flowing now becomes a lake that it's kind of like the earth as a figure skater went like this. And then it, it slowed down the rotation of the earth, but that was only by like a microsecond.

• 4:15Lester Nare?

  That's fascinating.

• 4:16Krishna Choudhary?

  So this is a millisecond, which is like a thousand times bigger.

• 4:19Lester Nare?

  Which, so the idea.

• 4:20Krishna Choudhary?

  But the thing is, like, things happen. The Sumatra earthquake in two thousand four, also a microsecond. Because the earth's plates shifted just enough that it changed the moment of inertia of the earth. And then, and then, you know, the day changed.

• 4:32Lester Nare?

  This is, this is so crazy because. I never in a million years thought about like the 24 hour day being a dynamic variable.

• 4:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and it dude, I was actually doing, I went on a deep dive on this. And it was actually like kind of crazy because now you start asking yourself, you know, on first principles.

• 4:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 4:52Krishna Choudhary?

  You start asking yourself, well, how do we measure a day?

• 4:55Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, how do you measure a day? It used to be that you could just like measure, okay, the sun is gonna be here. And then like 24 hours later, it's gonna be back at the same spot. In the sky, right? Like if there's like, imagine there's a mountain in the distance.

• 5:08Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 5:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And you're at exactly the spot and then like the sun like grazes the mountain.

• 5:12Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 5:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the next day, it's gonna graze the mountain 24 hours later.

• 5:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 5:16Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's not quite right because in those 24 hours, if the sun is here, the earth has moved a tiny bit.

• 5:21Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 5:22Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's a little bit shorter because the earth has moved. And so you're looking at the sun from a different angle. So it's actually like a little bit less than 24 hours by almost six minutes. So then you're like, okay, so how do you?

• 5:33Lester Nare?

  Wait a minute, first it was a millisecond.

• 5:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:36Lester Nare?

  Now it's six minutes.

• 5:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because the earth to, to, to point at the sun, the earth doesn't have to do a whole rotation if it's going along.

• 5:45Lester Nare?

  If it's moving, yeah.

• 5:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Lester Nare?

  Right? Because it's rotating around the sun at the same time that it's itself is rotating. Your angle, like your, like your line of sight.

• 5:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:54Lester Nare?

  Like, like, like in terms of being directly in line with the sun is constantly shifting.

• 5:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 6:00Lester Nare?

  As you rotate.

• 6:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, isn't that crazy?

• 6:02Lester Nare?

  It is.

• 6:03Krishna Choudhary?

  So like, so like you can't actually reliably say, so there's a difference between the solar day, right? And the real day.

• 6:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so now, okay, what's the real day?

• 6:12Lester Nare?

  Or, or is the solar day the real day and we're living in fake news day?

• 6:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, where the earth is flat and the sun is revolving around us. That's certainly um, not what is happening. But it's, it's certainly uh, it's cool to think about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could like in terms of, you know.

• 6:32Lester Nare?

  This is.

• 6:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Just shooting the shit.

• 6:33Lester Nare?

  This is actually kind of mind blowing because I just. It's so, there's so much detail about, because I remember seeing this, this like little animation. Because when we were growing up as kids, they showed the solar system as a flat plane.

• 6:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Lester Nare?

  Sun in the middle and everything just doing.

• 6:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Lester Nare?

  Is this an orbital?

• 6:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can call it, yeah, it's an orbit.

• 6:58Lester Nare?

  An orbit around on a flat plane.

• 7:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but no, really, we're doing this.

• 7:03Lester Nare?

  As if it was also static in space.

• 7:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Lester Nare?

  We're like flying.

• 7:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Lester Nare?

  And we're actually like going around it all like this while we're going that way.

• 7:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and it's, and that actually causes the next problem, right? Because you could be like, okay, so before we were like, okay, the sun goes to the same spot in the sky.

• 7:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:20Krishna Choudhary?

  But now we, we've just figured out that the earth is moving.

• 7:22Lester Nare?

  Because we're moving.

• 7:23Krishna Choudhary?

  The sun is moving.

• 7:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Krishna Choudhary?

  So like, if we were to say, okay, what if like we pick a star that's far away?

• 7:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And then we ask, okay, when is the star gonna come back to the same spot? Well, that's better than the sun, because the star is like many light years away. Whereas the, the sun is only like eight minutes, eight light minutes away. So sure, that's better, but still, the sun is moving through these stars. The stars themselves are moving. So to really like, so dude, as humans, we're incredible. Like, we are so incredible with precision and accuracy. What we've done is what, so what we do is we point radio telescopes at quasars.

• 7:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Quasars are like these incredibly distant objects, okay, like, like, edges of the universe.

• 8:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, we're, we're talking edges of the universe. They release these massive radio, um, signals. So you can point a radio telescope at it and reliably be like, oh, the quasar's in the same spot.

• 8:17Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And because it's so, so, so far away, you can, you, that's like our best metric of, yep, the earth has spun a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

• 8:25Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 8:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Because if we, if we use anything local to our galaxy, then the sun's movement and those movements get confounded.

• 8:32Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:33Krishna Choudhary?

  So you want something so far away that it's literally infinity.

• 8:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then, and then, you know, for all intents and purposes.

• 8:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:40Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, so that's what we actually do. And that's where we can measure something as small as a microsecond. And be like, yeah, the earth literally slowed down by a microsecond when the Three Gorges Dam went up. Or when the Sumatra earthquake happened.

• 8:54Lester Nare?

  And it's gonna continue to do so.

• 8:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Lester Nare?

  From non-man-made.

• 8:59Lester Nare?

  Like like impacts, which is kind of why, at least until proven otherwise, July tw- cause to go from the Three Gorges Dam.

• 9:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Lester Nare?

  Level of impact, which is.

• 9:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, which is a microsecond to a millisecond here.

• 9:13Lester Nare?

  A thousand X.

• 9:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:16Lester Nare?

  We don't probably don't have, it's probably not us.

• 9:18Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, this is probably like either like polar ice caps melting or something.

• 9:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Or like the interior of the earth is rearranging itself, like, cause the interior of the earth is liquid. It's like a very viscous honey like liquid.

• 9:33Lester Nare?

  Great word.

• 9:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So it it could be like rearranging itself in some way that like then makes the rotation change.

• 9:41Lester Nare?

  This is, this is, this is really fascinating.

• 9:43Krishna Choudhary?

  It's incredible that we can measure like that.

• 9:45Lester Nare?

  To that level, to that degree of accuracy, that's also like verifiable by other people. But it's also a reminder that we know so much and so little at the same time.

• 9:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Lester Nare?

  It's really incredible.

• 9:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Lester Nare?

  So for our next story, um, so we just talked about, uh, we're gonna stick with space.

• 10:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Lester Nare?

  We just talked about the earth's fastest spin, uh, on July twenty second.

• 10:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 10:09Lester Nare?

  But now, uh, a baby shower, no gender reveal, but astronomers apparently have witnessed a baby solar system.

• 10:18Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 10:19Lester Nare?

  Forming, and is that like a, a first time thing?

• 10:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 10:23Lester Nare?

  Like, what is the significance here?

• 10:24Krishna Choudhary?

  This is, so we've seen stars being born before and we've seen.

• 10:28Lester Nare?

  Stars.

• 10:29Krishna Choudhary?

  We've seen stars being born before. We've seen solar systems sort of being born before, but this is the first time that we're seeing earth-like planets form. Okay.

• 10:37Lester Nare?

  Ooh, okay.

• 10:38Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the big one.

• 10:38Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 10:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, earth-like planets are really hard to image because they're small.

• 10:42Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And, um.

• 10:44Lester Nare?

  And far away.

• 10:44Krishna Choudhary?

  You gotta get like really the right conditions in order to image this thing, okay? And so what, what these scientists did was they used the ALMA, which is the, um, Atacama, um, Large Microwave Array.

• 10:56Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:57Krishna Choudhary?

  It's basically like high on top of the Atacama Desert in Chile, seventeen thousand feet above sea level, so there's barely any atmosphere. You've got this array of telescopes that measures in the microwave, a little bit shorter than. Microwave wavelength and they observed um the star called hops three fifteen.

• 11:17Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no hops.

• 11:20Lester Nare?

  Not a local brewery.

• 11:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, although that's a great name for a IPA that I'm never gonna drink. But you know, for for there's a lot of scientists who are like, yeah, you tried the IPA, it's fucking amazing. Okay anyways. This this star is thirteen hundred light years away. And what's

• 11:38Lester Nare?

  Closer or farther than Andromeda? Farther.

• 11:41Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no, no, way closer.

• 11:42Lester Nare?

  Way closer.

• 11:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Way closer. Andromeda is like, like millions of light years.

• 11:46Lester Nare?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 11:46Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like two million light years.

• 11:47Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 11:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, anything that's a hundred thousand light years or less is within our galaxy.

• 11:52Lester Nare?

  My fault.

• 11:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Milky Way is like, yeah, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand.

• 11:55Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 11:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you got the Andromeda.

• 11:57Lester Nare?

  It's in the neighborhood.

• 11:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Lester Nare?

  It's not from the other block.

• 11:59Krishna Choudhary?

  No, it's not from the other block. This is our, this is our star. It's it's a star kinda like our sun.

• 12:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 12:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And this thing was imaged around two hundred thousand years old, okay?

• 12:10Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 12:11Krishna Choudhary?

  This the star system is two hundred thousand years old, which sounds like a lot.

• 12:14Lester Nare?

  For I was gonna say for reference, how old is the earth?

• 12:17Krishna Choudhary?

  The earth is four point six billion years. The sun, you would say, let's say five, let's say five billion years, okay? So if we wanna compare two hundred thousand

• 12:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:26Krishna Choudhary?

  To five billion, I did a, I did a real quick back of the envelope calculation. So if the sun were a year old.

• 12:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Krishna Choudhary?

  This is us taking a photo at twenty minutes.

• 12:37Lester Nare?

  Oh, shit, okay.

• 12:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, okay.

• 12:39Lester Nare?

  This is, this is

• 12:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Like this is January first, twenty minutes after New Year.

• 12:44Lester Nare?

  We're still in the hospital.

• 12:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like we're, we're like, like, we're still like panicking about, is everything okay?

• 12:50Lester Nare?

  We haven't been discharged, right, right?

• 12:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, why did she leave the room? Kinda, you know?

• 12:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, so, yeah, this is twenty minutes old compared to the sun's one year.

• 12:59Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 12:59Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. Extremely, extremely new solar system. Um, what they did was, and what's exciting is they, they observed traces of silica. Okay, silicon and silicate minerals.

• 13:12Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Like rocks.

• 13:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, like rocks are made out of silicon.

• 13:16Lester Nare?

  No, they're only made of, anyway.

• 13:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, we, well, we'll talk about that.

• 13:22Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so they, they, they found these traces of silicate, which means that, you know, there's a rocky planet forming.

• 13:29Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 13:29Krishna Choudhary?

  In this protoplanetary disk.

• 13:31Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the region that they found it is like, basically somewhere, if like the, the sun is there, then it's like Mars and Jupiter. Some, some region between Mars and Jupiter, which is like where the asteroid belt is, right?

• 13:43Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:43Krishna Choudhary?

  So, you know, getting farther inside that orbit is really hard because the sun, the, the new star has a lot of radiation that's, that's being pushed out and there's a lot of like gas that absolutely obscures you.

• 13:54Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, this thing was like, the reason why we could see this is because that star was at exactly the right angle and there was exactly the right hole in the, the protoplanetary cloud for us to see inside. Again, it's like with astronomy, there's this game of like, there's so many things to see, but they're like not the right condition for our particular planet on Earth to see. Like we're just not at the right angle to see it. And we can't really move where we are to see it because we're stuck on Earth.

• 14:26Lester Nare?

  We're bounded by this rock.

• 14:27Krishna Choudhary?

  The farthest we've gone is like Pluto.

• 14:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is really not that far compared to like a thirteen hundred light years, right?

• 14:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Pluto's like, maybe like some hours.

• 14:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Compared to years.

• 14:37Lester Nare?

  Years.

• 14:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, so, yeah, so we're stuck on this planet and so every once in a while, we get really lucky, right? And we, we see a star that at exactly the right angle, at exactly the right time, with exactly the right telescope to be like, oh shit, like there's an Earth forming there, right? And like, so that's why this is the first time that we've seen something like a rocky planet form in, in like a inner part of the solar system.

• 14:59Lester Nare?

  It, in, so not only is it close, not only is this newly forming solar system close to us.

• 15:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:06Lester Nare?

  It is also forming rocky planets.

• 15:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Lester Nare?

  And. By an act of who knows whoever, we just happen to be pointing in the right direction.

• 15:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Lester Nare?

  In the vastness of space.

• 15:20Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 15:20Lester Nare?

  At the right time.

• 15:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Lester Nare?

  In the vastness of time.

• 15:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:24Lester Nare?

  To, to see through a, a, a pinhole.

• 15:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Lester Nare?

  And it's like, oh, look.

• 15:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Lester Nare?

  Baby Earth.

• 15:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. That's, it's insane.

• 15:33Lester Nare?

  I think.

• 15:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the, the luck that we get, you know?

• 15:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 15:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and like, yeah, we, we just, we need to, we need to like, put out more telescopes to see more of the sky. And there's, there's, there's efforts, right, going into doing exactly that. But, you know.

• 15:47Lester Nare?

  You know, but, but NASA's being defunded.

• 15:50Krishna Choudhary?

  NASA's being defunded, and Aseph is being defunded. The new telescopes are being defunded.

• 15:57Lester Nare?

  But Golden Dome.

• 15:58Krishna Choudhary?

  But, but, but Golden Dome.

• 16:00Lester Nare?

  That's, that's, it's golden.

• 16:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, yeah, so.

• 16:03Lester Nare?

  And it's a dome like, like a rocky planet.

• 16:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 16:06Lester Nare?

  Thirteen hundred light years away.

• 16:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so.

• 16:07Lester Nare?

  So it's the same thing.

• 16:08Krishna Choudhary?

  It's this, yeah, let's just point my binoculars at it, and then maybe we'll see some aliens.

• 16:15Lester Nare?

  Fascinating.

• 16:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 16:17Lester Nare?

  Our next story, we're gonna stick with space. Uh, this one has a BBH. It's the biggest black hole.

• 16:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, got it, okay.

• 16:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 16:30Krishna Choudhary?

  I was like, yo, this is not in my notes.

• 16:33Lester Nare?

  This is not in the show notes.

• 16:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:34Lester Nare?

  So we have a BBH, uh, biggest black hole collision ever.

• 16:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 16:40Lester Nare?

  Uh, so this is like when you have a crossover episode, you know, with your classic TV show, the most recent one's probably, uh, Always Sunny in Philadelphia and A- Abbott Elementary, that's a, it's a big.

• 16:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Did they do a crossover?

• 16:53Lester Nare?

  They did a crossover because they're both in Philly.

• 16:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, right.

• 16:55Lester Nare?

  Right, it was.

• 16:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, I gotta watch that, I love both of those shows.

• 16:58Lester Nare?

  It's actually pretty funny.

• 16:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, yeah.

• 17:00Lester Nare?

  So, this is the, the deep space version of that crossover, so the headline reads, "Two monster", because monster's a scientific term. "Two monster black holes collided, and physics is nervous." Uh, detected by LIGO, Virgo.

• 17:19Lester Nare?

  And CAGR, I'll let you correct me. Uh, this merger involved black holes of fifty to ninety-six solar masses.

• 17:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:30Lester Nare?

  Much larger than typical stellar remnants, raising questions about how they formed. It sounds like an immigration conversation.

• 17:37Krishna Choudhary?

  It does, and we are experts at those kinds of conversations. So, um, stay tuned, folks.

• 17:46Krishna Choudhary?

  But i- i- it actually is causing a stir in the physics community.

• 17:50Lester Nare?

  Okay, so this is not just headlines.

• 17:51Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not just headlines. This is actually a really cool story. There's, there's a lot going on and, um, you know, we still don't know exactly how this event happened. Okay, so here's what's going on.

• 18:03Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 18:04Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a, there's a solar mass, one hundred and forty solar masses. So this is a black hole that's a hundred and forty times the mass of the sun. It combines with, um, something like a hundred solar masses. There's a giant airbar with these things because they're.

• 18:18Lester Nare?

  Is an airbar a chocolate?

• 18:20Krishna Choudhary?

  An airbar is kind of like a chocolate that tells you, um, how off you can possibly be in your number. Like I said, a hundred and forty solar masses, right? That means it could be like eighty.

• 18:32Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 18:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Or like ninety, or it could be like a hundred and eighty.

• 18:36Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 18:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's like, I'm not sure.

• 18:38Lester Nare?

  But not zero.

• 18:39Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's not zero, right? It's, it's, and those airbars are quite big because like, you know, the, like, let's be honest here. What, how are we, how are we, how are we seeing this?

• 18:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 18:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 18:51Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a black hole colliding with another black hole. So there's no light.

• 18:55Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 18:55Krishna Choudhary?

  There's no light coming from these things. What's happening is they're spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning. They crash into each other and become a bigger black hole. That spinning stretches the fabric of spacetime, stretches and squishes the fabric of spacetime.

• 19:11Lester Nare?

  I've watched Interstellar.

• 19:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly that. And so like literally when that happens, you get these waves in spacetime called gravitational waves.

• 19:21Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 19:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And they literally like, they, they make a meter or a foot a little bit longer and a little bit shorter and a little bit longer and a little bit shorter.

• 19:29Lester Nare?

  For these periods of time.

• 19:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And they make, and they make the clocks go a little bit faster and a little bit shorter. Like time itself is distorted, right? Like the, the fabric of spacetime, meaning like both of these things are interrelated and they're both like getting kind of. Wiggled.

• 19:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But how how much are they getting wiggled? It's like one part in like ten to the twenty two. So one divided by one with twenty two zeros. To to tell you how. So in order to observe this, we have these observatories called LIGO. They were funded by the NSF back in the nineties. It was our big like, you know, high risk, high reward. And let me tell you, it was a really good reward.

• 20:07Lester Nare?

  I was gonna say, back when we used to fund fundamental science.

• 20:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, this was this, this was, this is such an amazing like story of American exceptionalism. Um, the NSF was like.

• 20:18Lester Nare?

  National Science Foundation.

• 20:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's the National Science Foundation, which just got gutted, by the way.

• 20:23Lester Nare?

  I want to note that the National Science Foundation is the number one resource for investment and funding towards basic and fundamental science research. That is not like, uh, it does not need profit in order to.

• 20:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Lester Nare?

  To be successful.

• 20:39Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 20:40Lester Nare?

  And it's it's the substrate by which the government really does a lot of these basic science and and early frontier research things. And then they hand it to the private sector to go make billions of dollars.

• 20:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because because the the frequently fundamental science, like you can't have a horizon of like ten, twenty years, even fifty years sometimes.

• 20:59Lester Nare?

  Or quarterly, for that matter.

• 21:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you can't like, you can't expect corporations, like way back in the day, like if you if you told like any of these pharma corporations, like, hey, why don't you go, um, put in some research to like, discover how bacterial immune systems work? Like, how does a bacteria defend against viruses?

• 21:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Any of these pharmaceutical companies, these private sector.

• 21:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Would be like, no, because I don't know, why would I do that?

• 21:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:27Krishna Choudhary?

  The NSF said, yeah, that sounds pretty interesting. Why don't you do it? Out came CRISPR, out came all of the gene technologies that we have today.

• 21:34Lester Nare?

  Which are gonna literally revolutionize every aspect of human life.

• 21:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, save millions of lives, make millions of lives better, maybe also be kind of bad, but like, that's what science is.

• 21:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And and you have to, like, the the point is, like, in order to. Like, in order to actually have the ability to ask these questions, and, and say like, okay, how are we gonna apply this technology? We need to have the technology in the first place. And the NSF is incredible. And it's like, it's like America's secret weapon for why we've been ahead since post-war.

• 22:07Lester Nare?

  And this is, and this is-

• 22:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And post-war, like, World War II.

• 22:10Lester Nare?

  Whoever wins physics wins, wins the planet. That's a whole nother conversation.

• 22:13Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a whole nother conversation we can have.

• 22:15Lester Nare?

  But what's interesting is, the only part of the reason we're even able to have the story we're talking about here about the biggest black hole collided, collision ever, is because we have these tools,

• 22:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we have this-

• 22:26Lester Nare?

  that, that were funded by these programs.

• 22:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, we have, we have these two observatories called LIGO, Large Interferometer Gravitational Observatory, something like that. Um, maybe it's Light Inferometer, I'm not sure. But, um, it's, it's basically these, these giant, giant, um, underground facilities, and, one in Washington State, one in Louisiana, that measure the distortion in length of a three-kilometer-long tunnel. Okay? So you got a tunnel that's three kilometers long, and we wanna measure whether that tunnel shrunk by ten to the minus eighteen kilometers. So, we got a three-kilometer tunnel, and we wanna see if it got shorter by a little bit bigger than a proton.

• 23:13Lester Nare?

  This is so interesting.

• 23:15Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, just imagine, it's not even a little bit bigger than an atom, right? The, the, the thing is, the tunnel is made out of atoms.

• 23:23Lester Nare?

  Right, and we're trying to measure if it's off by one atom.

• 23:27Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, it's like, we're making like, a thing out of Legos.

• 23:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then we're trying to, and then we're trying to measure like, way smaller than, I don't know how to say it, way smaller than a Lego? Yeah, like, like, the thing is made out of atoms, and we're measuring less than, like, like, a thousand, thousandth of an atom.

• 23:45Lester Nare?

  And whether it's moved or not. And I guess the idea here is, is- gravitational waves impact us on earth at that small of a like that's

• 23:55Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah because these things are like at the edges of the universe right like this collision is happening at the edge of the universe and um when these collisions happen so this particular one right 140 solar masses

• 24:06Lester Nare?

  yes

• 24:07Krishna Choudhary?

  plus 100 solar masses

• 24:08Lester Nare?

  yes

• 24:08Krishna Choudhary?

  the remnant was 225 solar masses so let's do it

• 24:12Lester Nare?

  after they collided

• 24:13Krishna Choudhary?

  after they collided they became a 225 solar masses now

• 24:16Lester Nare?

  I can bench 225

• 24:18Krishna Choudhary?

  right uh solar masses

• 24:23Lester Nare?

  I might need to hit back

• 24:24Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah yeah yeah yeah you might need to well you need to become a black hole

• 24:28Lester Nare?

  I'm halfway there

• 24:30Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah yes you got the first part

• 24:31Lester Nare?

  I just need the whole part

• 24:32Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah yeah um but 140 plus 100 is 240

• 24:36Lester Nare?

  yup

• 24:37Krishna Choudhary?

  and then you're left with 225

• 24:38Lester Nare?

  where did the other

• 24:39Krishna Choudhary?

  the 15 go the 15 became pure energy in these gravitational waves okay and to tell you like 15 solar masses just gone in the fraction of a second okay that I actually did the calculation here that is 250 times the brightness of all the stars in the universe the power output

• 25:03Lester Nare?

  bro no

• 25:04Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah

• 25:05Lester Nare?

  we're not doing this

• 25:05Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah no no no no in a second that's what this thing that we captured with ligo like we're seeing an

• 25:11Lester Nare?

  oh we have the data

• 25:12Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah we have the data to show that like that happened we measured it as human beings we could

• 25:20Krishna Choudhary?

  we we we could say that that happened

• 25:23Lester Nare?

  this is so

• 25:23Krishna Choudhary?

  in the universe isn't that like it's it's like it's like godly power and knowledge to be able to like say yup it happened and it happened over there and it happened this far away and

• 25:36Lester Nare?

  we're literally looking back in time and like someone turned the lights on really quick on the whole universe

• 25:42Krishna Choudhary?

  like that

• 25:43Lester Nare?

  and we and it's like it's like when they said Muhammad Ali could turn the lights off and get into bed before the lights turned off

• 25:47Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah and it's just

• 25:49Lester Nare?

  this puts that to shame that's an incredible amount of brightness

• 25:55Krishna Choudhary?

  yeah which means like part of the thing to our point earlier when we were talking about how we have

• 25:59Lester Nare?

  Tools, but we have to kind of get lucky because of the vastness of space. But this is one of those things.

• 26:05Krishna Choudhary?

  This is where, yeah, this is where the gravitational wave just comes and we will see.

• 26:08Lester Nare?

  We will see it. Like, it's, we're not gonna miss this one.

• 26:11Krishna Choudhary?

  We're not gonna miss this.

• 26:11Lester Nare?

  We don't need a pinhole and to be looking at the right place at the right time.

• 26:14Krishna Choudhary?

  No, yeah, this one is like, it's coming from everywhere. This thing's gonna stretch.

• 26:17Lester Nare?

  And it hits us.

• 26:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, unless, even, actually, no, no, there's, it's not possible for us to miss this, really. Right? It could, like, if we only had one, then if, if the gravitational wave is coming this way, then like, both arms would stretch the same amount and then cancel each other out. But the earth is curved, it's not flat.

• 26:37Lester Nare?

  And we have.

• 26:37Krishna Choudhary?

  So we've got two at two different angles, so we'd see it, yeah.

• 26:42Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's incredible that we get to, we get to like, observe these things, right? That are, like, it just makes you feel so, so good that like, humans were able to do this.

• 26:52Lester Nare?

  One of the things I find so interesting about this is, as you're like, talking to me about these things, this is kind of feels a little bit left field, but like, these are, when people talk in religious contexts about God, or any derivative, any other version of the naming convention you want to put on it based on what book your parents read, like, this is the power.

• 27:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Lester Nare?

  The level of literal pow, like, literal.

• 27:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Lester Nare?

  Measurable power.

• 27:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Lester Nare?

  That we like ascribe to these concepts of a deity that's higher in the higher.

• 27:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, this is that.

• 27:23Lester Nare?

  This is that.

• 27:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Two hundred and fifty times the brightness of all the stars in the universe. That's the amount of energy that was released.

• 27:31Lester Nare?

  Let there be light.

• 27:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 27:33Lester Nare?

  It's insane.

• 27:33Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, that's literally, like, that's, that's. In this case, it's like, let there be gravity, like gravitational waves, yeah.

• 27:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 27:42Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's still energy at the end of the day. And like, in the language of physics, they're kind of the same.

• 27:47Lester Nare?

  Which, again, you know, like, tune in next week.

• 27:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Lester Nare?

  For the.

• 27:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's insane.

• 27:52Lester Nare?

  So this, I think one of the things that's so interesting about all these stories is, every single one of these stories is like, based on instruments. I think people miss, like, sometimes, uh, forget that, uh, the tools, because we have the ability to create tools, that, that is kind of the mechanism by which we are acquiring knowledge.

• 28:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Lester Nare?

  Over time. And we get better at making tools, we get more precise, we get more clever, and we come up with better experimental design. And then we get these interesting science headlines. I mean, as a perfect example of us building tools.

• 28:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Lester Nare?

  Sometimes they're like. Really big tools and physical and we're measuring. Sometimes they're really small tools and we use them to like do stuff.

• 28:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Lester Nare?

  And this next story is, uh, we're, we're gonna have a, the, the pronunciation brigade decide. Is it CRISPR or CRISPR?

• 28:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I don't actually, I, I say crisp R.

• 28:50Lester Nare?

  Right, cuz it's crisp.

• 28:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And then cuz then there's a dash with a capital R, so then I'm like.

• 28:55Lester Nare?

  But then people, cuz you have an accent.

• 28:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and I'm brown, it's like, ah, you're wrong.

• 29:00Lester Nare?

  You're wrong.

• 29:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Lester Nare?

  But what's, what's interesting, so there's, the next headline is about, um, CRISPR uncovers, CRISPR uncovers anti-cancer vitamin D gene. So the sort of, the title is, uh, the gene that supercharges vitamin D and kills tumors found. Now, I know there's a lot of people here in LA who are big vitamin D supplement, uh, uh, advocates. And have really been pushing for this, uh, but the, the, the, the story goes, apparently, CRISPR screening revealed a gene that boosts vitamin D's ability to suppress tumor growth,

• 29:45Lester Nare?

  especially in pancreatic and chlor- uh, chloretical cancers. Colon cancer?

• 29:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:54Lester Nare?

  Um, but I don't know what any of that means.

• 29:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, okay, so CRISPR is this technology that we've built.

• 30:04Lester Nare?

  Another tool?

• 30:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's another tool. This was built with NSF funding. It started out being like, people were like, hey, how does a bacteria defend against viruses? Basically, what's the bacterial immune system? Seems kind of like a random research question.

• 30:20Lester Nare?

  Why would he spend money on that?

• 30:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Why would we spend money on that? A lot of people are asking, why do we spend money on fundamental science? Well, this is why, because out of that bacterial immune system came CRISPR, which is this gene editing mechanism. What it can do is basically snipe DNA at any custom point that you give it. You can program a scissor to search for a specific um sequence of DNA, cut it at that point. And then we've got other types of of enzymes that'll actually stitch it back together. So now you can just play God and like take DNA and be like, I don't like this part, cut it out, put something else in, stitch it back together.

• 30:57Lester Nare?

  I would I would love some some uh some uh, I don't know, maybe like two inches of height. Uh, a little bit more intelligence.

• 31:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's too late for us.

• 31:06Lester Nare?

  Oh, that's unfortunate.

• 31:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Lester Nare?

  But the kids.

• 31:08Krishna Choudhary?

  But the kids.

• 31:09Lester Nare?

  Maybe.

• 31:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the kids love it.

• 31:11Lester Nare?

  The Chinese are doing it.

• 31:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they already have.

• 31:14Lester Nare?

  Yeah, literally.

• 31:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, literally.

• 31:15Lester Nare?

  Literally.

• 31:16Krishna Choudhary?

  That's another.

• 31:17Lester Nare?

  Start for another day.

• 31:18Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a whole, yeah.

• 31:19Lester Nare?

  So we figured out how to cut. The the gene sequence.

• 31:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Gene sequence with CRISPR. And so what what they did was they targeted this particular gene called SDR forty two E one. Okay, it's a gene that basically um lets um cells use vitamin D to create. Um, this these hormones, hormones like um. Cal calcitral, sorry, yeah, calcitriol, that's the hormone. It's it's a cholesterol type hormone. Um, this is super important for like bones. It's how they reuptake calcium, potassium. It's really important for our immune system, basically all the things that vitamin D is important for. This particular gene helps vitamin D do that.

• 32:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Now, what people have noticed earlier is that this particular gene is really active in cancer cells.

• 32:13Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, like cancer cells like make a like express this gene a lot.

• 32:17Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so perhaps it's important for cancer cell survival. So what these guys did was they they went and they got a a culture of these cancer cells. They went into with CRISPR and they said, I'm gonna cut these. This gene out.

• 32:30Lester Nare?

  The gene out that does the.

• 32:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I'm just gonna silence this gene. It's no longer gonna work for these cancers.

• 32:34Lester Nare?

  Censorship regime on the gene.

• 32:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it killed the cancer cells.

• 32:39Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 32:39Krishna Choudhary?

  But it not only did that.

• 32:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, I when I was reading this, it killed the cancer cells, that's great, okay. What was really surprising to me is that it then. Modified four thousand other cancer-related genes that were downstream. So this particular gene acts like a switch that like controls a bunch of other genes downstream. So it's not just like, it's not just doing like one thing, right? It's like this, this kind of like, like overseer.

• 33:11Lester Nare?

  It's an air traffic controller.

• 33:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you cut that off, the cancer cells are nowhere to be found, right? And then they, like, all of these other genes are gone. The cancer cells are basically dead.

• 33:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And now you can have these like targeted immune therapies.

• 33:25Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? These targeted, like, cancer therapies.

• 33:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Where you can like, target a specific tumor.

• 33:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Make the CRISPR go into just those cells, cut those out. And then, you know, you can get rid of the cancer that way.

• 33:38Lester Nare?

  This, okay, um, wow.

• 33:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 33:42Lester Nare?

  That, and again, uh, quick shout out to NSF. We wouldn't be having this as an option for people who are cancer patients and or and or who have family and friends who are cancer patients. This is why fundamental science research investment.

• 33:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Lester Nare?

  Matters because this, I didn't realize that this was what that was about because effectively like, and correct me if I'm wrong, we're not, we're not saying we're cancer experts here. But one of the biggest challenges is how to solve for this.

• 34:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Lester Nare?

  Both from a like a therapeutics, like an after the fact, and also from a preventative context. And this seems to be the case in a most high-impact way, that for people who already have tumors, there is now another, among many research avenues, another option to explore that has a level of precision.

• 34:35Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 34:35Lester Nare?

  That might have been missing from previous iterations of cancer.

• 34:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah. Like, it's not like radiology where you're just blasting that area. With, with radiation, right? Or even chemo, chemo like up to the whole body.

• 34:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 34:47Krishna Choudhary?

  This, you can like target it into a specific area. The other cool thing is like, so here, you know, you want to cut off, um, vitamin D from cancer cells and then basically starve. Cancer cells from vitamin D also make all of these other genes go haywire and then you kill it, right? What you could also do is with gene therapy, now that we've identified this gene that's so important for vitamin D, you can like up it for people who are vitamin D deficient or have like other kinds of disorders that aren't necessarily cancer.

• 35:16Lester Nare?

  Cancer related.

• 35:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It opens up whole new avenues of medical research.

• 35:20Lester Nare?

  And I imagine that there are learnings from this that then can be extrapolated to a variety of other. We're talking about vitamin D in this context.

• 35:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but you can, I mean, you know, genes are in incredibly powerful tools.

• 35:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like the genetic code is incredibly powerful.

• 35:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:43Krishna Choudhary?

  This is one of the ways that CRISPR is being used, but there's like so many other different ways that CRISPR can be used. Not just to like make designer babies, but also like actual like health things, you know?

• 35:54Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:54Krishna Choudhary?

  That are much less, I think, ethically

• 35:56Lester Nare?

  Concerning.

• 35:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Concerning to me, right? Like this is not ethically concerning to me.

• 36:01Lester Nare?

  Right, right. We don't need Birkin babies.

• 36:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but this would be nice.

• 36:04Lester Nare?

  But maybe solving cancer

• 36:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Lester Nare?

  at scale without hair loss, chemo, destroying the body in these other ways. And much more efficient.

• 36:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Lester Nare?

  Potentially, if you scale it up, also much more cost effective.

• 36:18Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right, yeah.

• 36:19Lester Nare?

  Which corporations might not like, but that's a whole nother story.

• 36:20Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's a whole nother story, of course.

• 36:22Lester Nare?

  This is fascinating. Again, the power of our ability to build and create tools and come from first principles.

• 36:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Lester Nare?

  Uh, to understand the fundamentals. And I think again, this is what like, we should never underestimate, right? Like the power of like fundamental knowledge when you can then extract. I mean, this is why the US government has understood, when you think about warfare, that physics is the starting point.

• 36:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, physics is, physics is the starting point and then like getting everywhere, like funding all levels.

• 36:55Lester Nare?

  Levels.

• 36:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Is, is huge, right? Like, it's like a national security

• 36:59Lester Nare?

  Issue.

• 37:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Issue that we're not funding science.

• 37:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I don't understand it, dude.

• 37:04Lester Nare?

  So, so that's, okay, so this is again, that's our fourth story today. With a perfect example of how some of our existing like really deep scientific tools and research are providing like real world value. It might not be making groceries cheaper, but it's gonna help you not get killed by by them. So we're gonna pivot back to space for our second to last story before we end on our wonderful AIs here story of the day. And the title on this article is a star that died and then died again, but not three days later. So this is the second coming of Jesus.

• 37:48Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like a Jon Snow.

• 37:49Lester Nare?

  Oh, Jon Snow.

• 37:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Like a Jon Snow star.

• 37:51Lester Nare?

  Okay, shout out to the Game of Thrones fans.

• 37:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The this is the star, the prince who was promised.

• 37:57Lester Nare?

  The prince.

• 37:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Before they they totally.

• 37:59Lester Nare?

  Totally.

• 38:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Shot the bed with the last season.

• 38:01Lester Nare?

  Look, you know, I don't want to be a TV or movie producer, and I don't envy that job. But basically, the story's saying that we have the first visual confirmation of a quote, double detonation.

• 38:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Lester Nare?

  A type of it's a supernova where a helium shell explosion triggered a core blast in a white dwarf. Now, this sounds like some adult contemporary.

• 38:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, right, right.

• 38:31Lester Nare?

  You know, literature.

• 38:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 38:33Lester Nare?

  Double detonation.

• 38:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Double detonation of white dwarves.

• 38:36Lester Nare?

  No, we're not talking about Snow White. We're talking about deep space.

• 38:39Krishna Choudhary?

  No, we're talking about deep space. We're talking about a star that's about the size of the earth, but has the mass of the sun. Imagine that.

• 38:46Lester Nare?

  Oh, super dense?

• 38:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Super dense. Yeah, so this is what this is what would happen to our sun when it dies in about five billion years, when it runs out of fuel and the gravity just collapses it. The sun is not big enough to become a supernova, which is like when the gravity is so fast that it just goes.

• 39:06Krishna Choudhary?

  It just explodes.

• 39:07Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 39:07Krishna Choudhary?

  This is kinda like the, it's gonna like shed its outer layers and the core is gonna remain and become a white dwarf. It's gonna be about the size of the earth, but about the same mass as the sun. These white dwarfs are the stellar remnants of these stars, right? They're like the corpses, you can say, but sometimes they can come alive again, especially in binary star systems. So if you've got a white dwarf that like, from a star that died, and it's got a companion, get your head out of the gutter, Lester.

• 39:37Lester Nare?

  Binary, white dwarfs.

• 39:40Krishna Choudhary?

  I know, the white dwarf has a companion and it's stealing from its companion, cuz that's what it's doing, okay? The white dwarf is stealing gas from its companion. I'm not making this up, this is what's happening, okay?

• 39:53Lester Nare?

  This is not, we're not here to push the agenda of the alphabet mafia.

• 39:57Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no, no, this is, this is science, this is, there's a star revolving around another star, okay? It's just physics, guys, right? Like, there's no, there's...

• 40:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Okay, but, okay, so, so the, the white dwarf starts stealing mass

• 40:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 40:14Krishna Choudhary?

  from its companion, and when it does that, it starts like getting fatter and fatter. And at some point, it's gonna, the traditional thinking is, it's gonna reach this thing called the Chandrasekhar limit. It's named after my boy Subramanyam Chandrasekhar, Nobel Prize winner from India. Um, it's basically the maximum mass a white dwarf star can have before weird physics starts happening. Before the electron degeneracy pressure goes away and like, like it starts collapsing on itself and all this other stuff, so... Usually, the mass grows to that length and then it like explodes, okay? But this one had like a sub-detonation, okay?

• 40:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Where it was like, it was like amassing a bunch of gas and then the helium shell that, that, from all the gas that it was getting, detonated, and then that triggered another detonation inside because the shockwave went inside and outside and then the shockwave detonated the star itself. What's cool about this story to me was how they discovered it. Okay, how do they, how do we know that there was a double detonation, right? What would you expect to see? What you'd expect to see, because this thing would happen like many years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what you'd expect to see is one shell, like imagine a double detonation, right? Out in empty space. There'd be like a shell of expanding gas and then there'd be another shell inside. Right. Right, there'd be a double shell, so to speak. So you wanna, what you need to do is you need to image this double shell.

• 41:39Krishna Choudhary?

  It's incredibly hard to do, okay? Because this is a pretty recent eruption, I think within the last thousand years. So the shell is not that big. Right, so you're, you're trying to image something really small. You, they used the very large telescope, the V L T, which is kinda like the V L A that you visited. Yeah, recently. In New Mexico, except in New Mexico, those are a bunch of radio telescopes. These are for optical telescopes, so it's much harder to synchronize the, um, the. Versus. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And in, in the radio telescopes, like the, the, the frequency of light is pretty slow. Right, so in order to get this giant picture with high resolution, you need to synchronize all of the signals from the radio telescopes.

• 42:21Krishna Choudhary?

  But because the frequency of the light is slow, the clocks are like, the, the, you know, you can synchronize them as long as you're shorter, like much shorter than the, the time it takes for a single. Right, but in optical,

• 42:36Krishna Choudhary?

  the clocks need to be extremely, extremely fast. So building this V L T is like a feat of engineering in its own right. And, and they actually don't even use like digital synchronization. They have like underground mirrors that like manually synchronize all the light. Using light, yeah, because it's, it's pretty crazy. Operates at this, as close as speed of light as fire, like literally as opposed to. So they literally have underground mirrors that are like on like trains that, yeah, it's, it's, it's an insane engineering project. But what they did was they used this V L T in Chile. They pointed it at this system and over two years, they imaged it for thirty-nine nights. And whoever tells you that like science isn't romantic, like this is, this is like, astronomy is probably the most romantic of sciences because you've got to synchronize this

• 43:21Krishna Choudhary?

  so that there's no full moon, there's no moon in the sky. It's gotta be extremely dark to see this thing. It's extremely faint, right, like what you're trying to see. You gotta synchronize over thirty-nine nights, over two years, point this telescope at the same spot to image the same thing over two years, you're like borderline stalking it.

• 43:40Lester Nare?

  You're right, right, right.

• 43:41Krishna Choudhary?

  At this point, right? Hoping that there's no clouds that are in in between and all this other stuff. And finally, you get this amazing picture and hopefully we can put it up.

• 43:50Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah, we'll pull it up.

• 43:52Krishna Choudhary?

  It's an amazing picture of these like calcium shells moving out at near the speed of light away from this explosion, right? And so, yeah, it's it's a very clear sign of this like two like two shells moving out and you can see the double detonation.

• 44:09Lester Nare?

  And it's being captured over time, so you can see that it's movement through space.

• 44:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Lester Nare?

  Such that you can sort of then back calculate.

• 44:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like in ten years, you can go back and like actually see them. And like maybe one of the one of the things is moving faster than the other. And like it's there's there's all sorts of possibilities for how we can like better understand these kinds of explosions. Because understanding this explosion is very important for us from a fundamental science perspective. Because these explosions help us chart out the distances to galaxies.

• 44:40Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 44:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And help us chart out the expansion of the universe.

• 44:43Lester Nare?

  It's we're we're Christopher Columbus, we're building the map of the new world.

• 44:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, we're and this is like our meter stick.

• 44:48Lester Nare?

  Right, this is this is our Maria Pinto, Santa Maria, what were the ships called?

• 44:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, I forget.

• 44:54Lester Nare?

  The the Pinto, anyway.

• 44:56Krishna Choudhary?

  They made me learn this in American school.

• 44:58Lester Nare?

  Someone's gonna put it in the comments and they're gonna be like, you, yeah, America's education system.

• 45:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what's important, apparently, knowing the fucking ship name of Christopher Columbus's.

• 45:09Lester Nare?

  You know, the genocidal maniac who killed all the Native Americans, but like, that's fine. Um, so this is the first time we've seen a double kill in space. Double kill.

• 45:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Lester Nare?

  Shout out to all my Halo people. And like, again, is I just, one of the things I keep wanting to come back to is how extremely clever the humans who build these instruments are. That enable us to gather. Data.

• 45:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:36Lester Nare?

  That then we can make conclusions about the beautiful world around us. And we can't do that without enabling these brilliant people to have creative freedom to like build.

• 45:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Lester Nare?

  And like, again, you're like, imagine someone coming up to, hey, I want to build a giant telescope. And I want to have to build a series of underground mirror systems.

• 45:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and I want to build four of them.

• 45:57Lester Nare?

  But I I'm I'm I tuned out like fifteen minutes ago.

• 46:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Lester Nare?

  It's just, but I it's so, I the wonder, I've always loved space.

• 46:07Lester Nare?

  We know we're so infinitesimally small in a sea of everything.

• 46:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Lester Nare?

  And there's so much interesting stuff going on around and the wonder. I think this is kind of what you were saying that the the romance in astronomy is is uniquely interesting in the sciences.

• 46:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:25Lester Nare?

  Um, you know, in a way where it's like the wonder is constantly there because you kind of never know.

• 46:31Krishna Choudhary?

  What you're gonna find.

• 46:32Lester Nare?

  What you're gonna find. Uh, sometimes you might be looking at the right place at the right time, like several of our stories. I think our last story of the day, and this is one I have no, this is, this is, so we always do an AI story. AI is gonna be something that's gonna impact all of our lives on a daily basis, whether we like it or not.

• 46:53Lester Nare?

  Forever, for the rest of our lives, until the planet ends or we all die or something.

• 46:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:57Lester Nare?

  And so as long as we don't give them the access to nuclear and solar power and they can self replicate, but that's a whole nother story.

• 47:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:04Lester Nare?

  But you have an interesting AI story.

• 47:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, it's an optimistic one.

• 47:08Lester Nare?

  We love an optimistic AI story for our listeners today. So we're gonna have Dr. Krishna Choudhary walk us through the optimistic story of the day on AI.

• 47:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's a it's a new AI from Google's Deep Mind.

• 47:21Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 47:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Called Aeneas.

• 47:23Lester Nare?

  Aene Aeneas.

• 47:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Aeneas, yeah. Do you know who that is?

• 47:26Lester Nare?

  I need another Aeneas because my current one is struggling a little bit.

• 47:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Lester Nare?

  I'm not familiar, though.

• 47:32Krishna Choudhary?

  This is, uh, Aeneas is basically like the, uh, Roman version of Odysseus.

• 47:37Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 47:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, um, he he apparently like was, he fled Troy with the sword of Troy and then he did a journey very much like Odysseus. And, um, ended up in Rome, founded Rome. So Virgil wrote, uh. A poem called the Aeneid and it's one of the great classical works of literature. And the Google Deep Mind AI is called Aeneas because it is basically a generative AI model that helps epigraphers and like, like is like AI Indiana Jones. It's like basically trying to decipher Latin and date it and tell you where the Latin is from. It's got three jobs. It's gonna, it's gonna decipher Latin.

• 48:21Krishna Choudhary?

  And frequently, a big problem with antiquity, right, is like the incompleteness of what we find. You've seen like the statues, there's an arm missing, there's a head missing and they're still like, a nose missing and like, they're still like in these museums and they're priceless, right? Because they're these incredible works of art. Same thing happens with inscriptions, right? You go to like the Parthenon or like any of these other ancient Greek or ancient Roman temples. The half the marble is gone, so the, the Latin is gonna be like this and then it's gonna be cut off, right? And so we don't know what the rest of the Latin says. Well, this is something where generative AI can do something, right?

• 49:00Lester Nare?

  This actually sounds perfect for LLMs because they're basically next token generation. So it's almost literally the core function.

• 49:06Krishna Choudhary?

  The core function, yeah.

• 49:07Lester Nare?

  Of these models is kind of purpose built.

• 49:10Krishna Choudhary?

  To like fill in.

• 49:11Lester Nare?

  Fill in the gaps.

• 49:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, fill in the gaps.

• 49:13Lester Nare?

  With limited information.

• 49:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Lester Nare?

  Fascinating.

• 49:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So, and that's exactly what this thing does. It's so, it does three things. It fills in missing text. It provides a provenance, which is like where did this thing come from? And it uses basically like context clues or like, did they abbreviate certain Latin terms? To figure out like what the dialect is and then figure out where in the classical, you know, world it came from. And then also it tells you, gives you an estimate of the date based on again, like context and like vernacular, grammar, things like that. So it's trained on a hundred and seventy-six thousand Latin inscriptions. Only some of them have images, okay? But most of them are like, like actually translated like stuff.

• 49:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, anywhere from seventh century B.C. all the way to eighth century A.D. So giant thousand year span of of stuff. Um, and it's it's an incredible tool now because so what they did was they tested it on this temple on some inscriptions from the Temple of Augustus, which is in Ankara, Turkey. Um, it's also called the Queen of Inscriptions because there's so many inscriptions that are on this temple. But again, a lot of these inscriptions are cut off and like they don't have it, right? So, um, they tested it between that. The thing completed it. A bunch of historians actually said, okay, that's actually a pretty good inscription. The inscription itself is from the Emperor Augustus.

• 50:39Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like an autobiography, like I did this, I did this, you know, that's, that's what the I built the biggest and the bestest. Basically, like, yeah, yeah, right after killing Caesar. Oh, no, wait, I don't think he did. He, no, that's, that's a different Augustus. Um, I'm, I'm confusing my Shakespeare with the real world. But and the other thing is it gave, um, it gave like two date ranges. So it was like 10 to 20 CE or 10 to 1 BC. It said that this is the date range that this inscription is on. And that corresponds exactly to what current historians are debating over, whether it's this or that.

• 51:19Lester Nare?

  It was sort of independent because I think part of with AI, people always talk about, well, when you do these AI models and they do these benchmark tests, people are saying, well, if you feed them the test while you're training.

• 51:30Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this is not in the training.

• 51:31Lester Nare?

  It's not in the training data set because it was just those inscriptions without the interpretations of modern day historians as X, Y, or Z.

• 51:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Lester Nare?

  It just had structured data around it. It's like, we know this inscription is from we like that's as a fundamental entry point. But I think that's an important distinction because the natural action will be, well, okay, but it also took all the feedback and interpretation of these historians, and that's why it lined up with what they already said. But the point is that it didn't have that.

• 51:57Krishna Choudhary?

  It didn't have that. This was a completely test case, right? And so it becomes this incredible tool that now epigraphers and historians can use. Obviously it's gonna like make some stuff up, but like this is having this tool is much better than not having this tool, right? Because then you can like reduce the amount of effort that you're doing. You can, you can like cross check, you can verify, there's, there's a lot of.

• 52:21Krishna Choudhary?

  New inscriptions that are coming out as archaeological digs are happening, right? I was just in Pompeii the other day. There's an active dig happening in Pompeii. They're gonna find new inscriptions, right? And then they'll be able to feed it into the Salamit. Obviously, there's gonna be stuff that's cut off because the volcano came and buried the city.

• 52:38Lester Nare?

  Buried everything.

• 52:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So, like, it's, it's, it's, I think, I think it gives a lot of hope for what AI can do for human beings. Like, in this case, you know, a lot of people talk about like AI is a, is a way, we're like losing humanity, right? And into certain respect, I think that is true. Like, if we're not careful, we might lose our ability to be human or like our sense of what it means to be human. But in this case, like, it's giving us more connection to our human past, right? It's telling us like what the same humans were like 2,000 years ago. You know, and so like it's, it's helping us connect in, in, in ways that I think are very good.

• 53:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And so like if AI can be used for more things like this and less for like, you know, surveillance or like trying to like addict me to video games or apps, like, I think that'd be nice.

• 53:37Lester Nare?

  I, I, I, I think what's so fascinating is AI is both a, a lens into our past that allows it to interpret it with greater clarity and like the specter like hanging over the future because it's like, or the guillotine that hangs over our future. Where we actually have the ability to pull it.

• 53:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:58Lester Nare?

  But we don't understand.

• 53:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Lester Nare?

  That we have that ability.

• 54:01Krishna Choudhary?

  That we're constantly like, yeah, like, i- if we go after like what is easy.

• 54:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And what is profitable.

• 54:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Then all we're doing is just like loosening our grip on this.

• 54:10Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 54:10Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 54:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and that's not good.

• 54:13Lester Nare?

  This is why it's so important, I think, these conversations where we try to talk about these topics from first principles. Because the way we can retain our humanity is by always having that frame of reference and mindset. Uh, whether it's from a media literacy perspective, whether it's from a science literary perspective, social interpersonal interaction.

• 54:35Lester Nare?

  It when you're flooded with information everywhere, all the time. Uh, being able to have a framework to build up what the world, the worldview that you have, that is not simply just in taking information and outputting it without processing.

• 54:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Lester Nare?

  Is like increasingly and so, so important. And it's why I love being able to talk to you about these stories.

• 55:03Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's, it's a good time. It's a good time. I also like, thanks for sending me these stories because like the more I, the deeper I don't, it's like every single like science story just has like so many layers to it. And, and you, you, you get such a, a kick out of like knowing how we did things. At least I do.

• 55:20Lester Nare?

  No, I, I do, I do too. And that's why we are very excited for next week's installment of Firm First Principles.