Octopus Camouflage, Orcas vs. Sharks, Civet Coffee & Sub-Diffraction Telescope Tech (EP. 16)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this super-episode spans four wildly different frontiers: bioengineers hijacking bacterial evolution to mass-produce octopus camouflage pigment; orcas developing cultural hunting strategies against great white sharks; the bizarre chemistry behind civet-processed luxury coffee; and a UCLA breakthrough that pushes telescope resolution beyond the classical diffraction limit. Summary UCSD’s biosynthesis breakthrough — how researchers engineered a growth-coupled, plug-and-play metabolic pathway to mass-produce xanthomatin, the cephalopod pigment behind octopus camouflage. Orca vs. shark culture wars — first-ever documentation of coordinated predation on juvenile great whites in Mexican waters, plus how whales transmit learned behavior socially. The paradox of civet coffee — wild civet gut chemistry, medium-chain esters, and how microbial fermentation creates the world’s most expensive “biologically processed” coffee. UCLA’s telescope hack — a mode-sorting instrument that extracts phase information from starlight, enabling sub-diffraction-limited imaging and revealing asymmetric hydrogen disks around distant stars. Show Notes UCSD — Nature Biotechnology (xanthomatin biosynthesis) Orca Predation Study — Frontiers in Marine Science Civet Coffee Chemistry — Nature Scientific Reports UCLA Sub-Diffraction Telescope Method — ApJ Letters

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Walk on, internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We have a fantastic, super-episode this week with four stories. Quick breakdown, we're gonna start out with, we may have figured out how to mass-produce the camouflage that octopi use in their predatory adventures. This is out of UCSD. The second story is about a new beef in the ocean. There's, there's a little bit of beef happening between orcas and sharks. Yeah. And the paper sort of understands or breaks down this new hunting technique that orcas are participating in. That one's out of an institution we'll talk about in a second.

• 0:45Lester Nare?

  The third story, out of the University of Canada, is about some shit. Yeah. That they're gonna start charging $80 for you to drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At Starbucks. Mate, yeah. I'm not being facetious. It's coming to Beverly Hills Starbucks. Uh, civet coffee. Yeah. Civet-shitted coffee. Yeah, yeah. Again, not a joke. Not a joke. And we'll wrap it up with a fascinating story out of UCLA, where we, it's, I'm not saying we're defying physics, but there's some new technology that we're using that makes our telescope see what we didn't think was possible. That's right. This is gonna be a great episode. As always, this is From First Principles.

• 1:42Lester Nare?

  My friend. How's it going? How are you? Welcome back. Yep, thank you. Uh, we have a couple of housekeeping items. So, number one, the engagement continues to be unbelievable. If you're watching this on YouTube, which is probably one of the only ways you're hearing me say this part of the show, there's gonna be that little bell icon where you can subscribe. It's hugely helpful. We need to get the billionaires to get us in the algorithm. So if you hit that subscribe button, that's gonna really help get this science education podcast to more people. We also are gonna have our new website up soon, which will have all of the research paper links, all of the episode links. We may be launching some leaderboards.

• 2:23Lester Nare?

  We'll see, but we're gonna get that ready for the holiday season, so keep an eye out for that. But we're gonna dive in and start with our first story.

• 2:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 2:33Lester Nare?

  Out of UCSD, which is a biosynthesis story.

• 2:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 2:38Lester Nare?

  About mass producing what octopi or octopus use for camouflage. And this was out of nature biotechnology.

• 2:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:48Lester Nare?

  A lot of people love talking about like octopi are super intelligent.

• 2:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 2:54Lester Nare?

  And everyone's like, oh, that's like an alien intelligence in the ocean.

• 2:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:57Lester Nare?

  And this is, I think, been something we've known about, but have just now made this next step of like, how can we replicate? So let's talk about.

• 3:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The idea is that we want to mass produce something called Xantho matin. Okay, it's nature's master of disguise. It's a pigment that is responsible for cephalopod camouflage. Okay, cephalopods are your octopus, squid, cuttlefish. There you've got a photo. I can't see the octopus. The octopus are incredible at camouflage.

• 3:28Lester Nare?

  Oh, there's, there's an octopus in that photo?

• 3:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in that red circle, there's an, there's an octopus in there.

• 3:32Lester Nare?

  That's incredible.

• 3:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but it's, it's not only matched the texture, but the exact color characteristics of the coral reef or the ocean floor that's behind it.

• 3:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 3:42Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's, it's honestly like defying any reason how good it is. The same, the same pigment is also found in the coloration of butterflies and dragonflies in the eyes of flies. So it's a ubiquitous biopigment. It's got a really high value because it's optoelectric, which means it can change its color with a response to electrochemical potential. So that's how the octopus can sometimes become super vibrant. And then also at the same time, become this, they look like a rock, right? They can, they can be like pulsing with like strobe lights and at the same time do all of these other things. If we can, if we can replicate this biosynthesis.

• 4:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Then we can go to next generation electronics, like electrochromic displays. The main thing that's nice about this is it's biocompatible. So, I mean, one thing that I was thinking was like, what if you had like color changing tattoos?

• 4:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Where like if you flex, then like. It like just changes, it's, you know, yeah, yeah, like it's like Avatar, dude. You know?

• 4:43Lester Nare?

  It is like Avatar.

• 4:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:45Lester Nare?

  That's a great, that's a great reference.

• 4:46Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so it would be really cool, right? If we could make a bunch of this.

• 4:50Lester Nare?

  So when you say it's biocompatible, it means that it could interact with our, as, as biological beings, our, our system.

• 4:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Lester Nare?

  Directly.

• 4:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and it's not like toxic.

• 5:00Lester Nare?

  Hmm, got it.

• 5:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because, because it's already a sort of organic compound.

• 5:03Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 5:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the other things like it could be used in cosmetics. If you have like multifunctional ingredients or like health and skincare. It's very UV protectant. These, these coatings. So if we can mass produce a lot of it, that would be really helpful for all sorts of industries. The bottleneck is a supply challenge, okay? You can't just go into biology and try to extract it. Like, how many butterflies are you gonna kill? Right? Or like octopus, it's just not, it's low yielding, it's labor intensive and it's not ethical, right?

• 5:30Lester Nare?

  It's not like mining.

• 5:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 5:32Lester Nare?

  Which you could argue is also not ethical.

• 5:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:34Lester Nare?

  For different reasons.

• 5:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. So this breakthrough here reports the first successful industrial gram scale biosynthesis. Okay?

• 5:42Lester Nare?

  Understood. Got it. Yep.

• 5:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And the way that they did this scaling and this production is actually what I think the story is about, the real science is about. Because the way that they produced this is kind of a plug and play type pathway that you could use to then manufacture other challenging biochemicals.

• 6:04Lester Nare?

  The analogy that this makes me think of is kind of like how CRISPR like was a platform, for lack of a better term, that had multiple use cases or functions that you could use it with. And so there's a kind of a similar platform level discovery happening here.

• 6:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 6:19Lester Nare?

  It's not specific to just this.

• 6:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is kind of like a, yeah, exactly. This is kind of like a proof of concept that it can be done. But the way that they did it.

• 6:28Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Is what's, is what I think is like really, really cool.

• 6:31Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Cause here's the core challenge, okay? Whenever you want to install, let's, the Xanthomatin comes from some genomic pathway, right? There's some biochemical pathway in the octopus that creates Xanthomatin. Okay? The, the standard approach is to take that gene or take that bunch of genes that all contribute to this, stick that into a bacteria and then have the bacteria produce it, right?

• 6:55Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 6:55Krishna Choudhary?

  You install a foreign gene and that's what you do.

• 6:57Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 6:58Krishna Choudhary?

  The problem is there's a metabolic burden. Okay? Because. If you've got this new pathway that's taking up a lot of energy, it's taking up a lot of the ATP, a lot of the carbon atoms even, and it confers no survival advantage, the bacteria doesn't want to do it, right?

• 7:17Lester Nare?

  Kind of sounds a little bit like the AI thing happening right now.

• 7:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, like we, exactly. And, you know, you can, you can actually, in terms of AI, you can use an analogy where it's like the, all of the energy budget and the carbon budget of an organism is very strict. Okay, it's had billions of years of evolution to figure out this carbon atom has to go there, this carbon atom has to go there, this amount of ATP needs to be used for this, and so on and so forth, right? It's had billions of years of evolution to figure that out. And now, all of a sudden, you install on this electrical grid like a giant server farm, right? With no advantage.

• 7:58Krishna Choudhary?

  The bacteria is not gonna reroute all of its electricity, all of its energy, to make this server farm when it, when it makes no sense, right?

• 8:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:07Krishna Choudhary?

  In fact, if you have a bacterial population, you've got an evolutionary conflict. Because let's say a bunch of these bacteria are there, there's some mutation that cuts off supply to that server farm, that bacteria is gonna grow faster because it's not wasting all that energy.

• 8:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And then in a population, it's kind of like antibiotic resistance, where you've got a population that sort of, there, there's, there's some bacteria that use up the resistance and, and actually are resistant to the antibiotic and some that aren't, right?

• 8:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And those are the ones that are gonna go ahead. But in this case, it's like those that have budgeted well and have cut off this useless server farm are gonna grow faster and then they're gonna dominate the entire population.

• 8:48Lester Nare?

  That makes total sense.

• 8:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 8:50Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 8:50Krishna Choudhary?

  So that's the problem is like we're, we're going against evolution. We're trying to engineer something.

• 8:54Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:55Krishna Choudhary?

  But there's all these cheaters around that are just gonna do what they want to do.

• 8:59Lester Nare?

  Because we're trying to use literal biology as the platform by which we generate. This this organic compound.

• 9:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Lester Nare?

  Like, we're not using machines.

• 9:09Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 9:09Lester Nare?

  And a factory.

• 9:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Lester Nare?

  It's we're literally using biology.

• 9:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Lester Nare?

  And there are these inherent properties underlying the evolutionary process of biology.

• 9:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Lester Nare?

  That are preventative factor from just being like maximize the app what we care about.

• 9:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Lester Nare?

  Because it's not purely create, the system is not purely controlled by like human engineering input.

• 9:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So, so we need to figure out a way to to make the bacteria do what we want to do.

• 9:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 9:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and run this server farm. That like gives us Xanthomatin and like makes us have this octopus superpower, right? And the strategy that they're using is this plug and play strategy. It came out in Nature Biotech, growth coupled biosynthesis. That's what they're calling it. Okay? What they're doing is actually quite a, quite a simple thing. They're creating a fitness advantage. They're creating an evolutionary advantage for those that are using the server farm. But, and what they're doing is they've created what's called an oxotroph. It's an organism that has, through some kind of mutation, lost the ability to synthesize some essential ingredient.

• 10:17Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 10:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And the only way it can get this essential ingredient is if it runs the server farm. It runs this mechanical, biomechanical pathway that we've installed that gives it that ingredient to let it grow.

• 10:31Lester Nare?

  That's, that's.

• 10:32Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's like, like if the, if, if bacteria had ethics, this would be very problematic.

• 10:37Lester Nare?

  Very.

• 10:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure there's people out there that are making that argument. And, I mean, I don't, I don't have good arguments about that. Okay? That's, that's not my.

• 10:46Lester Nare?

  That's not the scope of this, this, this episode. Uh, the ethics of oxotrophs.

• 10:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but it's, it's pretty insane. Like, it's, it's called synthetic oxotrophy, okay? So the idea is, you have a pathway, right? And on the, on the bottom, you've got your central pathway that grows the cell, that does metabolism and all that other stuff. And usually the input comes in, the input comes in from this side. And then it, it, it can fork into two paths. You've got, let's say, a bunch of carbon atoms. The carbon atoms can go to make more bacteria or it can go to do this, um, Xanthomatin production.

• 11:21Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 11:21Krishna Choudhary?

  This engineered production.

• 11:24Krishna Choudhary?

  If you've got a choice, the bacteria is going to always pick grow myself.

• 11:28Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 11:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Evolution dictates that. But if it doesn't have a choice, it has to go through the server farm in order to get the carbon to grow itself.

• 11:35Lester Nare?

  Necessary to grow itself.

• 11:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Then it's then then actually those that are better at doing that artificial pathway are going to have an evolutionary advantage. We've actually used evolution to our advantage now by creating a foreign Xantho mountain production pathway that puts out a byproduct that it needs.

• 11:56Lester Nare?

  This is interesting. We've we've we've hijacked our understanding of evolution.

• 12:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Lester Nare?

  To know that we need to create basically a need for the system to go down the path we wanted to in order for it to be more evolutionarily advantaged against others and and that it's it's a little bit it's it's interesting.

• 12:16Krishna Choudhary?

  It's interesting, dude. At least it's bacterium, man.

• 12:20Lester Nare?

  Let's hope they don't scale it up to larger you carry on.

• 12:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:24Lester Nare?

  But anyway.

• 12:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so they're using they're using this this bacteria called pseudomonas putida. It's a it's a soil bacterium. It's got a robust chassis that has a lot of metabolic versatility, meaning that it can it can like eat a bunch of different things. It's not like, you know, there's not one pathway that it can go through.

• 12:45Lester Nare?

  It's not vegan.

• 12:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even though it's like mostly glucose, it can like eat glucose in multiple different ways. Okay? And good natural tolerance to substrates and products, like anything that's coming out of that factory that we just installed.

• 13:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:01Krishna Choudhary?

  It's got a good tolerance for all sorts of stuff. So they're using this soil bacterium. And what they're doing is they're taking a molecule as hostage. It's the 510 MTHF. It's basically a C1 carrier. It's a carbon carrier.

• 13:17Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 13:17Krishna Choudhary?

  For DNA and RNA. And for proteins, it can't make methionine without this thing and it can't make the A and the G that's in our DNA. Okay, so without this pathway, it can no longer grow because it can't make DNA and it can't make proteins.

• 13:34Lester Nare?

  This is, we're creating almost this like artificial famine at the cell level.

• 13:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 13:40Lester Nare?

  And requiring it to go through this pathway that will generate an output we care about in order to be able to literally feed itself.

• 13:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, and then comes the production line. So now, how does it actually make the food that it needs, right? What we do is we put a bunch of genes on a plasmid. A plasmid is a circular bit of DNA that we can use to change what the bacteria is producing. It's just foreign DNA that we can like plug in. Now, these bacteria are already stressed out because they can't eat. So they're just trying to take in whatever, whatever help they can. We put in this plasmid that has genes on the plasmid to create this artificial pathway. Okay, where on its way to creating xanthomatin, what it's gonna do is create formate, which is a precursor for tryptophan and all of the, all of the other things that the bacteria needs.

• 14:32Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 14:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And the ultimate goal is you've got like a sole carbon source, which is through the factory.

• 14:40Lester Nare?

  You have to go, you have to, you have to pay the cost to be the boss. You literally, you have to go kiss the ring to survive.

• 14:47Krishna Choudhary?

  To survive, yeah. And, and even then, it wasn't so simple, okay?

• 14:51Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 14:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Because you have that single carbon source, but the bacteria still, the initial bug was it still needed supplemental glycine and L-tryptophan, which is two kind of expensive ingredients that you need to give the bacteria in order to survive. You can't just give it glucose. So then what they did was they had another evolutionary lab.

• 15:13Krishna Choudhary?

  In their little lab, okay, what you do is you say, okay, I need you to make glycine, right? I'm gonna give you a bunch of glycine at first, and I'm gonna slowly wean off your entire population of glycine. And you're hoping that the bacteria just learn through some mutations because of this pressure, they're gonna learn how to make their own glycine. Either learn how to make their own glycine or live without it. Okay? And that's exactly what ended up happening. They, they, they, the bacteria had a single amino acid change in the met K gene. And then, all of a sudden, they didn't need glycine.

• 15:48Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 15:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Supplemental glycine.

• 15:50Lester Nare?

  You were sort of basically through this providing withdrawal mechanism, driving evolutionary progress to basically fulfill the gap of the withdrawal of providing it directly to.

• 16:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Interesting.

• 16:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And it worked, right? What's, and what's cool about this is like, this entire pathway, right? You've got the factory that's going in.

• 16:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:14Krishna Choudhary?

  It, the factory that they're using, that, that they've put in through this plasma, through this foreign DNA, the stuff that they got from the octopus and whatever, that can't just be the native factory, because it has to have a byproduct that encourages the bacteria to actually work, right? So it has to be leaky in some sense, right? Not all of the carbon can go into the xanthomatin production.

• 16:37Lester Nare?

  It's not 100% efficient.

• 16:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Some of it has to go out, yeah, some of it has to go out in order to create formate and then become this like sole carbon source.

• 16:44Lester Nare?

  Yep, that makes sense. So the, the factory has sort of two functions, both creating what we care about, and also providing enough for the cell to continue to propagate.

• 16:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then those that ran the factory more actually had an advantage because they're the ones that could actually grow.

• 17:00Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 17:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 17:02Lester Nare?

  That's really crazy.

• 17:03Krishna Choudhary?

  It's really crazy. And one of the ways that they actually showed that this was happening is an old school technique where you take, you take an isotope of an atom, in this case, instead of carbon 12, they used carbon 13. And they, and they fed it glucose with carbon 13 in a specific part of the glucose molecule, second from left or whatever.

• 17:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can trace because this carbon is a 13 instead of a 12, it's a little bit heavier. So you can trace how this carbon 13 goes through that entire chemical pathway, right? Because some of those molecules are going to be a little bit heavier than the other ones. Right?

• 17:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 17:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause it's got one extra neutron.

• 17:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 17:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And what you can, what you can show is atom by atom, the carbon traveled along this xanthamatin pathway. So through the factory, you can see, okay, now it's on the floor. Now it's there, now it's getting this, you know?

• 17:55Lester Nare?

  There's an indicator that allows us to see the, the through line of the entire process to know that we're actually routing through the factory.

• 18:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can confirm that this is what's happening, right? There's nothing else that's weird. And then finally, you know, you get this optimized E Puma xanthamatin strain that in 72 hours, you get a bunch of your pigment, a thousand times more than what you were getting earlier for a lot less work. I mean, obviously a lot of work into doing this, but now that you can do it.

• 18:24Lester Nare?

  Created the system.

• 18:25Krishna Choudhary?

  2.4 grams per liter of xanthamatin powder. So this is, this is, you know, it's not only going to transform, let's say, the camouflage and the cosmetics.

• 18:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:36Krishna Choudhary?

  But I think what, to me, what really struck was the way in which they did this, right? This biosynthetic hijacking of the metabolism.

• 18:48Lester Nare?

  Right. We now have sort of this plug and play platform. Again, I don't mean to bring up the CRISPR analogy again, but it's, it's similar in the sense that other research teams are going to be able to take the insight from how you can basically facilitate biosynthesis.

• 19:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Lester Nare?

  By this sort of like, uh, this pathway that advantages those that go through the factory that produce what you want it to. And you can apply that to any number of other of biosynthetic. Outputs that you're looking for.

• 19:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:21Lester Nare?

  And like that's.

• 19:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the, that's the key insight for me.

• 19:23Lester Nare?

  No, which, yeah, obviously.

• 19:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I think, and, and you know, you can accelerate production of antibiotics, plant alkalides, polychetides, all sorts of.

• 19:33Lester Nare?

  That's fascinating.

• 19:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Biochemical things. And you can make the, the factory itself be different, right? Because all you need is something that releases a C1 molecule. It's a molecule with a single carbon. So it can be a for, the formate pathway, the formaldehyde pathway, who knows, even like CO2, you could, you could hijack respiration itself in the mitochondria, right? It, it just leads to, I mean, that's probably a lot harder because there's so many more steps, but, you know.

• 19:58Lester Nare?

  Knowing that there's a stage one entry point to utilizing this as a methodology.

• 20:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Lester Nare?

  For biosynthesis means that there are any number of other use cases that with some amount of additional research are going to be unlocks. I mean, this is actually really.

• 20:14Krishna Choudhary?

  It's really cool. I thought it was really.

• 20:16Lester Nare?

  Really fascinating. Um, so, so we're going to be able to have a, a makeup that's color changing. We're going to be able to have, uh, uh, uh, all, your vehicle is going to be laced with.

• 20:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 20:29Lester Nare?

  Octopi camouflage. So if you're driving at night and you want to go night mode.

• 20:34Krishna Choudhary?

  You have a plant-based display? I don't know, like all sorts of stuff, dude.

• 20:38Lester Nare?

  That's, that's actually, okay. So this is, this is out of UCSD.

• 20:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Lester Nare?

  They've, they've now sort of created a platform for mass producing, uh, octopus camouflage.

• 20:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:48Lester Nare?

  But it is a platform that can now be extrapolated into other arenas.

• 20:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:52Lester Nare?

  Uh, this is a paper out of Nature Biotechnology. Uh, that's a great, that's a great story.

• 20:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that was cool. I thought that was really cool.

• 20:59Lester Nare?

  Fascinating story. We're going to move on to our story number two. And our story number two, now I'm going to, I'm going to do my best.

• 21:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Lester Nare?

  Our story number two is out of, uh, an institution called the Protección y Conservación Palagacia Asociación Civil A.C. as well as, uh, CSU Monterrey Bay.

• 21:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 21:18Lester Nare?

  And this is about the new hunting techniques of orcas. Like we said, there's, there's a beef in the ocean.

• 21:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 21:23Lester Nare?

  And so this research study is looking at these new hunting patterns of orcas. Um, and you thought this was interesting and I'm curious why, why you put this in the show notes.

• 21:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:34Lester Nare?

  I want to know about the, because we've seen the story about orcas attacking yachts.

• 21:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:38Lester Nare?

  In the Mediterranean or on the Amalfi Coast, wherever. Um, but it does seem like, again. We're in the ocean for two of our stories back to back, which is funny, but the intelligence aspect of this is interesting to me.

• 21:52Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly right.

• 21:53Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay.

• 21:53Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly right. It's the intelligence aspect that's interesting to me. And more than even the intelligence, it's culture, I think, that we're getting at. Okay. And I'm going to get into that a little bit later.

• 22:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:05Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's the key word that why I got interested.

• 22:08Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 22:08Krishna Choudhary?

  To me, I'm fascinated with human culture.

• 22:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 22:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And it seems like we are, there's a few papers that we're going to go through that talk about animal culture.

• 22:16Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 22:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And I find that just extremely fascinating.

• 22:18Lester Nare?

  So the culture wars are not human specific?

• 22:20Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no. In this case, they probably have a gentleman in his culture compared to ours. But actually, no, that's, that's not even true. Even the orcas have dialects among their populations, which is fascinating to think about.

• 22:32Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 22:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That like different populations of orcas might not understand each other.

• 22:36Lester Nare?

  If you're not on the side of the equator.

• 22:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like the Pacific ones and the Atlantic ones are going to be like, why do you talk funny? He looks like me, but he talks really funny. You know? It's a groundbreaking paper, I think, from Higuera Rivas, published in November this year, Frontiers in Marine Science. The idea is they've, it's the first ever recorded orca predation on young great white sharks in Mexican waters off the coast of Baja California.

• 23:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's actually the second time that we've seen orcas attacking great whites. The first time was off the coast of South Africa. So it's pretty far away. But the technique is remarkably similar.

• 23:16Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, which is kind of weird.

• 23:18Lester Nare?

  That's meaning it's transcends.

• 23:19Krishna Choudhary?

  It might be. Yeah, yeah. We're not, I'm not going to say that it does. And the paper does not claim that it does.

• 23:24Lester Nare?

  Fair enough.

• 23:25Krishna Choudhary?

  But I just find it kind of funny.

• 23:26Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 23:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But that's, that's a tall order to make. But I will show later on that whales have done this.

• 23:33Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. So the first encounter was on August 15, 2020. They found a pod of five female orcas, one adult and four sub adults. And what they did was the one orca pushes the shark up to the surface. Then another orca just like punches it. Okay, causing bleeding. And then there's two others that swim around the shark to make it go upside down. And then once the shark is upside down, you get this thing called tonic immobility, where the shark can't really move. And then while that shark can't really move, the other orcas then eat out its liver. And like they bring out its liver and that photo had the liver there and then they share it with the kids.

• 24:17Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 24:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:18Lester Nare?

  That are kind of in the waiting in the wings.

• 24:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That have sort of been like a part of this, but not really.

• 24:23Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 24:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then they had a second encounter two years later at the same exact spot, which suggests that it's predictable, it's seasonal hunting pattern. This time it was an adult male, adult female, two sub adults and a calf. And this time the kid did nothing, just like wait until juvenile white shark again, much smaller than the orca, gets wrecked and then shark starts bleeding, liver is exposed, they eat the liver and only the liver because the liver is super nutrient rich and has a bunch of like, you know, bang for buck.

• 24:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah, and it's in.

• 24:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Per pound, it's like.

• 24:56Lester Nare?

  It seems like they're trying to give it for the young.

• 24:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they're saving stuff for the young. I thought that was really cool.

• 25:02Lester Nare?

  That's really interesting.

• 25:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty cool toolkit. I mean, they, they obviously they're on boats, but a lot of the video and a lot of the analysis comes from the video from DJI Phantom four Pro, which is one of the, one of those drones. So drone photography has really revolutionized marine ecosystem behavior.

• 25:23Lester Nare?

  Behavioral monitoring, right, and sightings. Cause it looks like this is, it was a multi-platform observation system, there were surface, aerial, underwater and photo identification.

• 25:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:33Lester Nare?

  It's a multimodal.

• 25:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and the, the trick that they're using is kind of interesting. They're using, they're weaponizing tonic immobility. If you've seen like the shark, you know, people who like go in the middle of sharks and they're like, nothing's gonna happen because I'm gonna poke its nose. What they're, I think a lot of times what they're trying to do is like turn it upside down and then it just like freezes.

• 25:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, there's like tricks, but it's cool that like orcas have like figured this out.

• 25:58Lester Nare?

  Like organically.

• 25:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they're both apex predators, right? The, the juvenile sharks and the orcas.

• 26:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 26:05Krishna Choudhary?

  But because they're competing, one could argue that like they're just trying to take out. The other guy who's trying to compete for the same resources.

• 26:12Lester Nare?

  Pay for the same food supply.

• 26:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 26:14Lester Nare?

  If you're eating my food, like you're you're now my enemy.

• 26:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and these these orcas only go after juvenile white sharks.

• 26:20Lester Nare?

  I mean, I was actually gonna ask that because like clearly they're like going after the little ones.

• 26:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, because the older ones, when they see an orca, they just get the hell out of there.

• 26:27Lester Nare?

  They're like, I'm out.

• 26:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because they I guess they know they they've got some learning capability and they don't return. We've seen white sharks see an orca and then they don't return for like two or three years.

• 26:37Lester Nare?

  Oh, wow.

• 26:38Krishna Choudhary?

  They'll just leave.

• 26:39Lester Nare?

  They're like, I'm good.

• 26:39Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're like, oh, so that's a bad neighborhood?

• 26:42Lester Nare?

  I'm not gonna spin the block here.

• 26:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll find I'll find my seals elsewhere.

• 26:48Lester Nare?

  That's actually really interesting.

• 26:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and so now, I mean, there there's reports in South Africa where the the original report happened. The seal population there has gone a little bit out of control because there's the the great white sharks just like avoid that area.

• 27:02Lester Nare?

  Because the orcas kind of.

• 27:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and the orcas, you know, they swim around all over the ocean.

• 27:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 27:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And so there's not a constant supply of predatory pressure.

• 27:09Lester Nare?

  If that makes sense.

• 27:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And the seals have have have kind of.

• 27:12Lester Nare?

  Exploded.

• 27:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, which is which is crazy to think about. And the the the reason why I was talking about this being something that reminded me of culture is because it reminded me of a study that came out like a long time ago. There used to be the so culture is something that we know animals do. What does culture mean? Culture means that you've got effectively some type of strategy that is conferred through behavior and through social constructs like groups of individuals. It's not something that is innate.

• 27:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 27:51Krishna Choudhary?

  It's something that's learned from your peers.

• 27:53Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 27:53Krishna Choudhary?

  So you get the benefit of their experience, right?

• 27:57Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, you don't have to live through an orca attack, for example. If you're a juvenile shark and you can learn through culture, I don't know if sharks can, but I'm just giving you the

• 28:06Lester Nare?

  Example.

• 28:07Krishna Choudhary?

  The example here.

• 28:08Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 28:08Krishna Choudhary?

  You don't have to go through that firsthand experience.

• 28:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Right of like, oh, that was bad.

• 28:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:13Krishna Choudhary?

  No, your your parents tell you that was bad, don't do that. Sometimes we're just like, eh.

• 28:18Krishna Choudhary?

  But but there's other things where like, okay, clearly that's like that, right? So. Um, there's, there's examples of this. For example, Shark Bay bottlenose dolphins. They use a sponging techniques where they carry around a sponge, like one of those uh, like SpongeBob, like the natural sponges, right? And they use that to probe the sea floor and that protects their bottlenose. Oh. Right? When they're like foraging the sea floor. Yeah, cuz it's almost like a cushion. Yeah, and it's passed from mother to calf. So it's a vertical cultural transmission. Okay. Right? Yep. And then we've got Japanese macaques. They wash their sweet potatoes. A little macaque. Yeah, they wash their sweet potatoes before eating it. And that's something that's culturally passed down because like the youngsters see the elders doing it.

• 29:02Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're like, okay, that's the way to eat this thing, right? Very, yup, yup. So, orca pods, they've, they've shown to have cultural things. Yes. For example, complex, stable vocal dialects that I was talking about. Yes. Almost like languages where different geographic populations will have different dialects. Yeah. And those are obviously learned socially. There was one paper that is honestly one of my favorite papers um, in animal behavior. Okay. It was in 2021 out of the Royal Society. What it did was analyze 19th century American whaler logbooks in the North Pacific Ocean. Okay. Okay? And these whalers kept meticulous lab notes when they went out in the field to try to kill sperm whales. You'd love to see it. And back then, I think sperm whales were used for all sorts of stuff.

• 29:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Not only their meat, but this was before electricity. Right. So all of the oil was being used to light up our streets and that actually caused one of the big epidemics of near extinction for these whales all across the ocean. Right. Um, and the process was whaling was as follows. In the 1819 century, you'd go, you'd, you'd go with your ship, which was um, powered by sail. You'd spot some whales and then you'd go out down in these duffys and try to harpoon them. The whales. Yes. And then if you harpooned one, you'd bring it back to the ship for extraction. Yes. Okay. What they noticed was whenever they went to a certain spot, the success rate plummeted from when they first got there.

• 30:31Lester Nare?

  Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:34Krishna Choudhary?

  So they go to a certain spot. On the top, you've got a map of, of all of the spots that they've been in the North Pacific. This is between Japan and America. And there you've got the rate at which you're, you're able to kill whales.

• 30:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 30:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And the rate was diminishing. Now, there's four hypotheses. Okay, there's four, there's four ways we can think about it. One is just the first guys who went to that particular spot were just good at it.

• 31:01Lester Nare?

  They were LeBron and you're not LeBron.

• 31:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And so everyone, that doesn't make sense because we have the logbooks from the same whalers that go to other spots like the North Atlantic and they get the baseline rate. Okay, the fact that this is new, right? This is the North Pacific. So this has, this is a harvesting ground for whales that it hasn't been extracted before. Right? Whaling has been around for, for centuries in the North Atlantic, right? Europeans have been at it forever.

• 31:25Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, so that's the first hypothesis. The first whalers were good. It's not the case.

• 31:29Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 31:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Second one is, um, the first whales that were taken out were these juvenile sort of slower, let's say, or, or they, they weren't, they weren't very good at getting away.

• 31:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Krishna Choudhary?

  That also is something that we can model, right? We can model, we can, we can have some type of population model that says, okay, like the, the slower whales in a population die out, how would the rate decrease then? If, if it's some sort of random strategy.

• 31:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 31:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 31:56Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 31:56Krishna Choudhary?

  The third one is the whales learned from personal experience. Meaning I'm part of a pod that had this crazy thing happen to me where a bunch of our pod got shot.

• 32:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:09Krishna Choudhary?

  In the ocean and then, and then got extracted. And so now I'm never going to have that happen to my pod again.

• 32:14Lester Nare?

  This is literally, I think, the plot of the second or third Avatar movie.

• 32:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, one of those.

• 32:19Lester Nare?

  Well, like it's one of them where the, the ocean thingies.

• 32:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Lester Nare?

  And then they were getting hunted and then they didn't go back to the spot.

• 32:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 32:25Lester Nare?

  Because that's where we lost all our people.

• 32:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And then the fourth one is the, is the best one.

• 32:31Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:31Krishna Choudhary?

  That I want to be true. I'll just be honest.

• 32:33Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's that the whales learned between unit learning, meaning there was a pod that I ran into yesterday.

• 32:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Krishna Choudhary?

  That had that experience. They told me about it and they told me how to get away.

• 32:45Lester Nare?

  The idea is you're on the block, your, your, your block is block two, but the, but the cats from block one pull up and they're like, yo, yesterday. On block one, this happened. So y'all watch out.

• 32:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Lester Nare?

  And so there's, there's a transferring.

• 33:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 33:01Lester Nare?

  Socially of learning without having to physically or literally experience.

• 33:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's the culture part.

• 33:06Lester Nare?

  That's the culture.

• 33:07Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the culture part, right? So the question is, do the whales have culture? Is the fourth hypothesis true?

• 33:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 33:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Or any of these? And what they did was modeling, they did mathematical modeling.

• 33:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:17Krishna Choudhary?

  To see how that rate would decrease based on these three hypotheses.

• 33:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:21Krishna Choudhary?

  And the one that had the best fit was the one where the whales adapted, learned and shared defensive knowledge. Too rapidly for genetic evolution.

• 33:30Lester Nare?

  The point is the, the rate of decrease of efficacy of the hunting was so steep. That it couldn't have just been from personal experience because there wasn't enough volume.

• 33:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Lester Nare?

  For personal experience to, to be the, the, the trigger. There's not enough juveniles in the population spread of whales. For it to just be the juveniles.

• 33:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Lester Nare?

  And it can't be that they're just that good because in other areas they were doing just fine.

• 33:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:51Lester Nare?

  And so like these other three things don't account for the rate of decrease.

• 33:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And it's, and, and so the entire population in the Pacific learned.

• 33:58Lester Nare?

  Crazy.

• 33:59Krishna Choudhary?

  That, okay, when you got these whales, and here's what they would do. Um, usually they do defensive huddling. Okay. So if orcas come up.

• 34:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Krishna Choudhary?

  What you do is like kind of what elephants do where you huddle around, you're young.

• 34:10Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And you try to bite the, the people around. That slows you down and that is super effective, ineffective against boats.

• 34:16Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 34:17Krishna Choudhary?

  You come up on a boat, they're already slowed down. Great. Just, you know, go at it. So pretty soon they realized that's not gonna work.

• 34:23Lester Nare?

  That's interesting.

• 34:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And in their whaler journals, they showed that the whales abandoned that traditional defensive huddling and they went for new tactics. For example, if they know which way the, the wind is, just swim opposite direction of the wind.

• 34:35Lester Nare?

  Oh, cause they know we can't.

• 34:38Krishna Choudhary?

  They figured out that these guys, that these guys can only go in the direction of the wind with their big ship. Right? And so they just like swim in the other direction, evasive deep diving, resurface like many miles away.

• 34:51Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 34:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Away from the ship.

• 34:53Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 34:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And some people just started doing aggressive defencing. If like they were cornered, they would just like start attacking. You know, the best defense is the attack.

• 35:02Lester Nare?

  You know what's funny is the social learning from this era might still be persisting, which is why the yachts are getting attacked.

• 35:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, I was gonna say, and that's the final, that's the final photo that we have. It's like, it's like now we've got, we've got this thing coming back where the orcas are now all around Spain and Portugal. They're just like attacking yachts. Right? And it's become like kind of an epidemic of orca on yacht violence.

• 35:26Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 35:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 35:27Lester Nare?

  Yep. And we don't have harpoons on those yachts.

• 35:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And that also looks like it's a cultural thing because it started one day and then everyone started doing it all across the North Sea, all across the Portugal, through the Straits of Gibraltar. I wouldn't be surprised if now all of the Mediterranean is starting it, you know?

• 35:45Lester Nare?

  And what's interesting is at the time of when whaling was happening, you have sort of a, a reason for the behavior change that's identifiable.

• 35:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Lester Nare?

  It's not necessarily obvious, clear in this recent.

• 35:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's not necessarily obvious. There was, there was one hypothesis that was saying that like, oh, because we have like so much tuna in the ocean now, because we've curbed fishing, that the orcas are just getting bored. And so with their time, they're doing this. I don't buy that. I think that's a fisherman lobby. Like paying some special interest group to be like, hey, we have too much fish. And so we can just like start fishing again. Another one that I thought was pretty likely was that like they've recognized that boats are fishermen boats. And the same reason why you go after the shark is why you go after the boat. It's a competing predator. That's like depleting my resources.

• 36:32Lester Nare?

  That makes.

• 36:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Like I was going up against a school of tuna and now half of them are gone. And there was a boat right there.

• 36:37Lester Nare?

  Yeah. So like, screw that.

• 36:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

• 36:39Lester Nare?

  No, that makes a lot of sense.

• 36:40Krishna Choudhary?

  That, that makes a lot more sense to me. But I, I just think like these kinds of stories are so interesting.

• 36:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And so capable of sorting, sort of putting humans in their place when it comes to.

• 36:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Uniqueness.

• 36:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, we always think that, like, oh, culture is very unique to us, right? Cognition, cognition is not unique.

• 37:04Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 37:05Krishna Choudhary?

  More and more, I, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that consciousness is not unique to humans. I think a lot of people out there agree. And now, culture is not unique, right?

• 37:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Feelings are not unique. We can see animals in pain.

• 37:17Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:18Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, yeah, it's, it's quite humbling that like, a- and we've got now scientific backing.

• 37:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right, right. For, for that. I mean, it, this is the whole, there's a whole sort of culture of no longer eating, like, calamari. Because it's like, the idea is like, you have this highly intelligent, conscious.

• 37:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Lester Nare?

  Creature.

• 37:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Lester Nare?

  And there's now this, like, ethical, sort of.

• 37:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Lester Nare?

  Piece to this, like, well, like, you know, we don't eat other humans.

• 37:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:44Lester Nare?

  Generally speaking.

• 37:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Generally speaking, yeah. Um. I mean, dude, it's, it's interesting to me. I mean, I, I'm, I'm a selfish person, so I will eat the calamari. Cause it tastes so good. But at the same time, I will acknowledge that, like, yeah, it's, there's, it's iffy here.

• 37:59Lester Nare?

  And, oh, it's, it, but this is, I, I think what's interesting is, like, we're now getting more research studies, particularly because we also, like, again, have, like, this multimodal.

• 38:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Lester Nare?

  Systems that are able to sort of track in ways where we get a more robust data set. Where we can now draw more deeper conclusions.

• 38:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Lester Nare?

  Because of that. And it's, it's not surprising to anyone who watched Free Willy, um, that, uh, orcas are incredibly intelligent.

• 38:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly right.

• 38:26Lester Nare?

  And potentially have culture.

• 38:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:27Lester Nare?

  Uh, it's why, uh.

• 38:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Or if you've seen that documentary, um.

• 38:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:31Krishna Choudhary?

  About the SeaWorld orca.

• 38:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:33Krishna Choudhary?

  That's just, like, grueling.

• 38:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:34Krishna Choudhary?

  I haven't visited a single aquatic theme park after watching that.

• 38:38Lester Nare?

  You, you know how they're solving.

• 38:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Messed up.

• 38:40Lester Nare?

  You know how they're solving their, uh, because there's, they're clearly struggling for business, but, um.

• 38:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Lester Nare?

  The, uh, the SeaWorld, the SeaWorld or a J, whatever the brand is in San Diego. This summer, they had a summer series of concerts with, like, Bow Wow and Lil' Ca- like, all these OG.

• 39:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 39:01Lester Nare?

  So you have, like, these rappers, like, on the stage that's on the water, like, at SeaWorld.

• 39:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, God.

• 39:08Lester Nare?

  Sold out.

• 39:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Lester Nare?

  On, but walk a flock of flame, like, it was. It did look

• 39:13Krishna Choudhary?

  They're trying.

• 39:14Lester Nare?

  And so, look, if you want to change the venue from holding animals in captivity

• 39:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:18Lester Nare?

  To a concert venue.

• 39:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah, then, okay, I thought, I thought they were doing it with

• 39:21Lester Nare?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 39:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I was like, cheese. Walka flaka, I know you got

• 39:26Lester Nare?

  Orga flipping over.

• 39:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Lester Nare?

  Because they have no, they're not getting

• 39:30Krishna Choudhary?

  That's good, good.

• 39:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah, no, do that.

• 39:31Krishna Choudhary?

  I'll come to those.

• 39:32Lester Nare?

  I think that's a great off ramp.

• 39:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Lester Nare?

  We would love to see more summer series and converting these places into concert venues. Fantastic. Story number two, that was a great one.

• 39:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it was cool.

• 39:42Lester Nare?

  Uh, frontiers in marine science. We're moving on to our third story, which is about civet shitted coffee.

• 39:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no, literally.

• 39:51Lester Nare?

  Literally.

• 39:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Shit out coffee.

• 39:53Lester Nare?

  If you go to Starbucks and you think inflation has made your coffee expensive now, there's eighty dollar cups of coffee.

• 40:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Lester Nare?

  It's shit coffee.

• 40:02Krishna Choudhary?

  It's shit, no, literally. I don't know about the taste, but it's literally shit coffee that's coming from the shit of something called a civet.

• 40:11Lester Nare?

  This is out of the University of Carolina. And it was in Nature Scientific Reports. I, when you put this in the show notes, the like title was, you know, Copi Luwak, the paradoxical luxury of biological processing.

• 40:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Lester Nare?

  And I had not yet.

• 40:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no, and then I had a footnote. Civet shitted coffee, and they're like, is that shitted like, like shit? And I was like, no, no, like the biological term.

• 40:37Lester Nare?

  So tell me about, I mean, so I think I've literally seen this on some billionaire podcast about how they've moved to civet coffee because it's exceptional.

• 40:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, apparently it's, apparently it's exceptional. It's a bizarre luxury drink, costs thirty to seventy five dollars a cup.

• 40:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Thirteen hundred per pound. You, you see the, you see their coffee and it's all agglomerated, you know, in a little clump. That's because it came out of, of the, of the anus of a civet. Okay, I, I'm sorry to our listeners, but I really, I saw this and I was like,

• 41:08Lester Nare?

  We try our best to be a PG thirteen rated on the show.

• 41:14Krishna Choudhary?

  This is biological.

• 41:15Lester Nare?

  It's literal.

• 41:16Krishna Choudhary?

  It's literal, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not comparing something

• 41:20Lester Nare?

  poop

• 41:20Krishna Choudhary?

  to shit. It's literal, yeah. It's literal feces. It's literal feces, okay. All right, all right, let's get serious.

• 41:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:27Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, so the market value is seven billion dollars for this. Civic coffee, the real chemistry behind this bizarre luxury drink. And that's what this paper is about.

• 41:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 41:36Krishna Choudhary?

  It's about describing the chemistry behind why, when coffee beans go through the gastrointestinal tract of this animal, they taste better when they come out of the other side. Okay, it's a, it's, it's a coffee called Kopi Luwak. It began in the 18th century because classic colonialism, okay? The Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia, they had coffee plantation workers. The plantation workers were forbidden from drinking the coffee that they were collecting.

• 42:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 42:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 42:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 42:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Because, you know, white people.

• 42:10Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so, so instead they collected the undigested beans from the droppings of Asian palm civet to, to drink those. And then, when the, when the white plantation owners found out and they tried some, they're like, oh, this actually tastes really good. And it became a new expensive export for the Dutch because the Dutch, back then, were always after getting rich.

• 42:33Lester Nare?

  This is so funny because there's so many, like so many things on like, like oxtail being 30 bucks a pound or whatever now. It's kale salads being $20.

• 42:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Lester Nare?

  Like oxtail and kale were eaten like when we were growing because it was cheap.

• 42:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Lester Nare?

  And it was the stuff no one else wanted.

• 42:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Lester Nare?

  And now it's been repriced.

• 42:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, I think it's the same with like IPAs.

• 42:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Honestly, there's no one who actually enjoys IPAs. All right? No one can convince me in a blind tasting that they like IPAs, okay? But they need everyone else to know.

• 43:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:02Krishna Choudhary?

  That they drink IPAs. Anyways, so I first actually heard about it in the Bucket List movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. This is one of the things that, that he wanted to drink before he died of cancer. So the, the civet is this Asian common palm civet. It looks kind of like a raccoon to me.

• 43:22Lester Nare?

  It looks like a hyena mix with a raccoon.

• 43:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's, yeah. And it consumes the ripest berries and the beans pass through in about 12 hours and, and they become 10 times the value somehow. And the digestive process, it's thought that the digestive process modifies the bean's chemical composition, refining flavor precursors, and giving a je ne sais quoi. And they're another awesome civet dropping.

• 43:50Lester Nare?

  This is funny that this episode, we did our first story on biosynthesis.

• 43:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. This is another kind of biosynthesis. Exactly. Yeah. And you know, it's actually led, jokes aside, it's led to a lot of unethical cage farming of these civets, because obviously, if you have something that is a commodity that is highly valuable, and it comes from an animal, humans don't care about the animal's welfare. And so it's, it's led to like cage farming driven by the demand. So there's cage, there's demand in Japan, South Korea and USA. And the cage farming has happened in places like Vietnam and those Southeast Asian countries. So it has become a real problem.

• 44:31Lester Nare?

  I mean, this is literally what we just talked about, about the ethical issue of doing biosynthesis with bacteria.

• 44:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Lester Nare?

  But like, this is now like, you're scaling it up and it's the same problem.

• 44:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, it's the same problem set, right? And this particular paper focused on wild civets, wild civets, not in captivity, in the Western Ghats, which are these mountain ranges on the western side of the Indian peninsula. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. One day we will go.

• 44:57Lester Nare?

  We'll go.

• 44:57Krishna Choudhary?

  With, with our wives and whoever else. And it's in nature scientific reports. It's wild, meaning that there's coffee plantations there, but then there's wild civets that go and eat some of the berries. And you can collect the droppings.

• 45:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 45:14Krishna Choudhary?

  And what they wanted to figure out was what, what actually is going on here chemically?

• 45:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 45:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Is there anything going on or is it just placebo? Okay. So first thing what they did was they actually, you know, what, what you can do with coffee is you can roast it. And when you roast it, you get this thing called a Mylard reaction, which generates that final aroma and taste profile. They wanted to look at the coffee bean before the roast, right? Cause you, you don't want anything that is volatile or anything that requires some kind of heat. You want to look at the raw naked chemical composition, right? Before you treat it to, to that heat. And so that's exactly what they did. They figured out that there's, in the civic gut, there's, there's a bioreactor. There's, just like we have gut bacteria, the civets have gut bacteria.

• 46:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 46:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And We're pretty sure that gluconobacter, which is highly abundant in the civet gut, that's linked to some kind of fermentation. It metabolizes like sulfur containing amino acids. It metabolizes hydrogen sulfide. So that could be some kind of chemistry that's leading to this unique taste that happens in the civet, right? One thing that they did notice was that the beans that came out of the gut of the civet were significantly larger than the manually harvested beans.

• 46:33Lester Nare?

  Really?

• 46:33Krishna Choudhary?

  And that might be because the civet has some natural way of like picking which ones to eat.

• 46:39Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 46:40Krishna Choudhary?

  You know what I mean?

• 46:40Lester Nare?

  It's not necessarily about what's happening.

• 46:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've just, they're selective. They're selective about it. The other thing they realized was caprylic acid methyl ester and capric acid methyl ester. These are two types of medium, um, medium chain fatty acids. Their name is derived, the capric and the caprylic. Their name is derived from the Latin term for goat or capra. And they're basically these chains of carbon compounds that impart a desirable dairy or milk like aroma.

• 47:11Lester Nare?

  Oh, okay.

• 47:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And, and the compounds that came out of the civet gut had a higher concentration of this.

• 47:18Lester Nare?

  So we're saying civet shit coffee is the goat.

• 47:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. Very nice. Very nice. Apparently it is. Yeah. Um, so there's two things that can happen with the study. One, you can, you can, um, target fraud. You can test for these compounds and be like, this is not, ah, this did not come out of a civet's ass.

• 47:38Lester Nare?

  Anyone who's branding $80 cups of coffee in LA and San Francisco. That's really just selling off the shelf Colombian coffee beans. You can actually have like a.

• 47:47Krishna Choudhary?

  You can actually have a test. The other thing that I'm, I'm more, um, excited about is, you know, you do have this ethical crisis with the, um, caging and mistreatment of these animals.

• 47:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 47:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, if you could like. Identify the key microbial players and the chemical output. You could make fake ones of this, just how we make fake diamonds now, so we don't need blood diamonds. And you could, you could then sell these for a lot less and without the ethical dilemma.

• 48:15Lester Nare?

  Without caging.

• 48:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Knowing humans, they'll still play the, pay the premium.

• 48:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Krishna Choudhary?

  For the real shit.

• 48:20Lester Nare?

  For the real, the real stuff.

• 48:21Krishna Choudhary?

  As they say.

• 48:22Lester Nare?

  The real stuff.

• 48:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Lester Nare?

  The literal real shit.

• 48:24Krishna Choudhary?

  The real, the literal real shit. That's what I mean. Yeah. And, uh, but, but I think, I think it's still pretty cool.

• 48:29Lester Nare?

  No, that, that, that is, so I, again, I think I'd only ever heard of this one time. And I was like, I think coffee's terrible. I mean, I was from a colonial country, so tea.

• 48:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Lester Nare?

  Is my.

• 48:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, same, same chai.

• 48:39Lester Nare?

  Is my thing.

• 48:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Lester Nare?

  A little chai tea. I'll take a little Earl Grey, a little oolong. However, um, I understand, uh, coffee is what most people like to drink.

• 48:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:51Lester Nare?

  Uh, as their hot drink.

• 48:54Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 48:54Lester Nare?

  Or their cold drink.

• 48:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Lester Nare?

  Uh, a nice iced chai tea latte is, is quite nice. But this, this is, this is, it's good to know because I will never be buying a cup of civet coffee.

• 49:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I don't think it's needed.

• 49:06Lester Nare?

  Um, but we now have like the path.

• 49:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Lester Nare?

  To move from this.

• 49:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Maybe if they make the fake one, I'll, I'll get it.

• 49:12Lester Nare?

  I'll get it. Right, right. And, and also being able to call out frauds. Uh, funny, great, great heartwarming story.

• 49:19Krishna Choudhary?

  I thought that was funny.

• 49:20Lester Nare?

  Just make sure.

• 49:21Krishna Choudhary?

  This is out of nature, uh, scientific reports.

• 49:23Lester Nare?

  Look, look.

• 49:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Even they were like, yeah, this is pretty good.

• 49:25Lester Nare?

  Pretty good.

• 49:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Pretty good coffee. Yeah.

• 49:28Lester Nare?

  We're gonna wrap up with, uh, a nice physics defying story out of our local favorite UCLA. We literally can almost not go through one week without the UC system being one of our stories. This week it was two of our stories.

• 49:44Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 49:44Lester Nare?

  Start with UCSD. This story is about new tech that's making our telescopes see things.

• 49:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:53Lester Nare?

  That really shouldn't be possible.

• 49:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Lester Nare?

  And this is out of the astrophysical journal letters. Um, I'm super excited about this story.

• 50:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is, this is a pretty, pretty crazy story. It's out of the UCLA astrophysics department, along with a bunch of other institutions.

• 50:12Krishna Choudhary?

  What they've done is hack the telescope and have sharper views into the universe. Okay. And they hacked it to the point where even I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. They have, they have a line that I'll get, get to in their paper that I was like, what are you talking about? Okay. So the goal is always higher angular resolution. You want to be able to resolve smaller and smaller things. The epitome of that is the Event Horizon Telescope, which gave us that beautiful view of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the black hole in M86, which is a far, far away galaxy. You're looking at a, a thing that's about the size of a solar system, maybe several solar systems, but it's millions of light years away. Right? It's insane.

• 50:57Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's not. Yeah, it's not close. It's something like, I mean, I think somebody was saying something like the head of a pin or they're resolving a quarter on the Empire State Building if you're looking from Los Angeles. Right? Resolution is what, what that means. How, how fine detail can you resolve something in the night sky? And we want to always push this as far as possible. Right. This is new work that came out of the UCLA Astrophysics Department. What they've done is demonstrate sub diffraction limited astronomical measurement. Okay. And that key thing is what got me sub diffraction limited. So what does that mean? Okay. There is a limit when it comes to the resolution that you can have with light.

• 51:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. It's dependent on the wavelength and it's dependent on the size of your aperture. It's called the Rayleigh limit. If you've got two points of light that are really close together as they are on the right hand side. Yes. Then they're going to look like one point of light and I won't be able to resolve them differently. On the other hand, if I have two points that are a little bit farther apart, then I can resolve them because they're Gaussian peaks, the sort of like envelope of stuff. It's not technically Gaussian. It's like this other function called the area function. But in any case, if they don't overlap enough, I can resolve the two as separate things. Separate things. Right? Yes. How far apart they need to be in angle, it's not actually distance, right? Because if something's closer, then they need to be closer away. If they're farther away, then they could be really far. It's the angle that matters.

• 52:24Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like the angle between them, right? And how far away they can be in terms of angle is determined by something called the Raleigh Criterion, which is what we just saw. It's it's a ratio between the wavelength and the diameter. Okay, wavelength divided by diameter times some constant, which has to do with the the shape of your aperture. Usually it's 1.22 because your apertures are usually round.

• 52:47Krishna Choudhary?

  So the bigger the wavelength, the larger this angle has to be.

• 52:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 52:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And that makes sense, right? Because if the wavelength is really large, then, you know, we've we've looked at large waves that try to go across a rock.

• 53:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:00Krishna Choudhary?

  They get unbothered.

• 53:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Because the large waves will just go through. The smaller waves are the ones that'll bend.

• 53:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And that bending is what actually gives us any type of information.

• 53:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Also, the larger the diameter of your lens, the smaller you can resolve.

• 53:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That makes sense. That's why we have big telescopes.

• 53:17Lester Nare?

  Why have these giant, massive, massive telescope, big, big mirrors and lenses.

• 53:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the reasons is light gathering, but the other reason is so that we can have a giant sort of diffraction thingy.

• 53:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Krishna Choudhary?

  That like lets us resolve.

• 53:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 53:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:33Krishna Choudhary?

  And the the one that they're doing here, they're using the 8.2 meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii. That thing.

• 53:43Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, if we take if we take the wavelength of light to be around 656 nanometers, the diffraction limit there with the 8.2 meter Subaru telescope is 20 milli arc seconds.

• 53:53Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 53:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And to think about arc seconds, it's like you got degrees from degrees, then you get minutes from minutes, you get seconds, and then from seconds is divided into 1,000 arc seconds. So it goes 60, 60, then 1,000. Okay, it's extremely small. It means if we were to look at Pluto right now from from the Earth.

• 54:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 54:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Pluto would be a fifth the size of that angle. So Subaru telescope could actually tell Pluto and Karen apart.

• 54:19Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:20Krishna Choudhary?

  The Pluto and its moon.

• 54:22Lester Nare?

  Moon.

• 54:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Apart, right?

• 54:23Lester Nare?

  That's, that's.

• 54:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Because, because its resolution is, is smaller than Pluto's.

• 54:27Lester Nare?

  That's, that's.

• 54:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Pluto's about 100 arc seconds and this thing's resolution is 20 milli arc seconds. Point two, point two, times 100, right?

• 54:34Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 54:35Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a fifth of that.

• 54:35Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 54:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 54:36Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 54:37Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a bunch of problems, right? The other problem that gets to us is not just rally, rally thing, which is just physics.

• 54:43Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 54:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Like even the Hubble has this problem. James Webb has this problem. The other thing is we're under the earth's atmosphere and the earth's atmosphere causes the twinkling of stars. It also causes the twinkling of distant lights. If you're on top of a mountain, right? Because all the earth's atmosphere has this turbulent packets of warm air and then cold air and highly dense and then lower dense. So the light is gonna, is gonna start moving around before it gets to your detector.

• 55:09Lester Nare?

  Interacting with the atmosphere on its way to the.

• 55:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 55:12Lester Nare?

  Capturing it with.

• 55:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, and so the resulting disk of your point source, let's say if you're trying to look at a star, it's gonna go up by 500 to, to 1,000 milli arc seconds. Right? It's gonna be 25 to 50 times worse than that theoretical limit. Okay? And so what we can do is we can do something called adaptive optics. We can correct by making a fake star. Here, what you're seeing is the Keck telescope and there's two lasers pointing out at where the telescope is looking and it's creating a fake star there. The trick is the following. You've got a fake star that looks like any other star.

• 55:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 55:52Krishna Choudhary?

  But we know that it came from our laser, so it should be stationary.

• 55:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 55:56Krishna Choudhary?

  The star and the stuff that I'm looking at could be moving and it could have dynamics.

• 56:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 56:00Krishna Choudhary?

  But I know that the laser that I'm pointing is definitely straight.

• 56:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 56:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And the laser is going through the same bit of atmosphere that the starlight is coming in. So if I can change, if I have some kind of deformable mirror, right? That is taking that starlight and right in the middle, I have like little ways in which I can.

• 56:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 56:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Change the shape of that mirror.

• 56:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 56:24Krishna Choudhary?

  In order to keep that laser stationary. That's gonna cancel out the effects of that column of the atmosphere.

• 56:30Lester Nare?

  Makes, makes total sense.

• 56:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 56:31Lester Nare?

  I have to say this because I would be remiss if I didn't. We're in between photos six and seven on the show notes.

• 56:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:37Lester Nare?

  And you literally.

• 56:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And I literally did say, oh, God.

• 56:42Krishna Choudhary?

  But I still don't understand that.

• 56:43Lester Nare?

  But the, but the point you're saying is because we have a fixed point from the lasers in the sky that we can then measure and basically remove the impacts of the atmosphere on how we're detecting the other stuff because we have a fixed point that we control.

• 56:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 56:56Lester Nare?

  That then can remove the noise that comes from the atmosphere.

• 56:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And then we can finally get to that diffraction limit.

• 57:03Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 57:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 57:03Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Krishna Choudhary?

  We can finally get to what the telescope is truly capable of.

• 57:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Given Raleigh criterion. And here what we're seeing is the center of our Milky Way in infrared. On the left is without adaptive optics and on the right is with adaptive optics.

• 57:18Lester Nare?

  My goodness.

• 57:19Krishna Choudhary?

  You can see the huge change. So this is why, this is how Andrea Gez won the Nobel Prize.

• 57:24Lester Nare?

  This is crazy. For listeners who are not watching the video, and I encourage you to go to YouTube because we always have graphics for this, on the left, it basically looks like a gradient, a red, orange gradient.

• 57:34Krishna Choudhary?

  With blobs.

• 57:34Lester Nare?

  With just, it's just a massive blob.

• 57:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And maybe 20 blobs.

• 57:37Lester Nare?

  There's no discrete shape of any kind. It's just like a sauce.

• 57:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Lester Nare?

  On the right, you can see very discrete points of light, multiple. There's maybe.

• 57:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Even in the zoomed in version, right? There's an inset.

• 57:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 57:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can see in the inset, there's like.

• 57:51Lester Nare?

  It's incredibly high fidelity comparatively.

• 57:54Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and here, what you're looking, you're looking at something called Sagittarius A star. And the stars around that compact object. And if we were to make a movie out of this, you'd see all of the stars going around, around an invisible point.

• 58:10Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 58:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And that invisible point is our supermassive black hole.

• 58:14Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 58:14Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's, that's, this is why Andrea Gez at UCLA won the Nobel Prize. UCLA has had an incredible history of imaging techniques. Okay, they've, they're really good. They've got like two floors dedicated in the Newton Hall, I think, to just getting imaging to the next level. And this is the next sort of.

• 58:35Lester Nare?

  I mean, LA is the home of Hollywood, so.

• 58:37Krishna Choudhary?

  It is, right? Yeah. So that is, that's pretty funny. So, so you can see now, right? Adaptive optics is insane.

• 58:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 58:45Lester Nare?

  That's a big deal.

• 58:46Krishna Choudhary?

  The other thing that we can do is not just adaptive optics. We can make the telescope size bigger without actually make the tells, making the telescope bigger, the effective size. You've seen this, the VLA, you've been to the VLA.

• 58:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Very large.

• 59:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Array, yeah, very large array in New Mexico, a giant 27 mile long radio telescope made of smaller telescopes that are all coordinated and they can sense the time in which the light came. They can have them interfere and so the light gathering power is not as much. You're not gathering as much light, but your

• 59:21Krishna Choudhary?

  resolution is limited by how far away your telescopes are, right? Yeah. Now with the radio, it's easier to do because the radio waves are slower. Yes. With visible light, it's harder, but actually the gold standard right now is in Mount Wilson. It's called the KARA Array. It's a six, six one meter telescopes all along the mountain that you can see over there. Yes. The baseline is 330 meters, so about three football fields wide. Yes. You've, it's, it's effectively a visible optical light telescope that is three football fields wide. And with that, you can achieve an angular resolution of 0.2 micro arc seconds, which is insane because you can now image other stars like this. Jesus.

• 1:00:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Like this is a, this is a star called Altair. It revolves really fast on its axis, which is why it's got this like really big grapefruit bulge on the equator because it's revolving so fast. And because in the equator, you can also see that it's dimmer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like that gas is farther away from the equator compared to the pole. Yep. So it's, it's a little bit dimmer, right? This is a single star that we're imaging like this. Yeah, that's, that's incredible. It's incredible. We've also with, um, with the KARA Array, we've been able to see sunspots on other stars, so star spots on other stars with the KARA Array. And it was really cool because the last time I went up there was for, um,

• 1:00:48Krishna Choudhary?

  one of these, they have classical music concerts at Mount Wilson in the telescope dome. And I, for the longest time, thought that nighttime astronomy was dead at Mount Wilson because of the. Light pollution from Los Angeles nighttime astronomy had been retired and all they did was solar astronomy. But no, Kara was up there, six small one meter telescopes all along the mountain. They route their light through vacuum tubes. Which is crazy. And then, and then they have a central array where they, where they make them interfere and actually get that resolution. It was, it was cool. Yeah, that, um, you know, astronomy, cutting edge astronomy is still alive and well in Mount Wilson. And, and beautiful sunny Los Angeles.

• 1:01:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Los Angeles, where it all started. Um, so this paper's profound claim. So we've got, we've gone through, you know, rally limit, which is just the physics of light waves. Yes. And we've gone through the atmosphere and so on and so forth. Yes. The core claim that got me thinking about what this paper was, they said, the rally criterion is not fundamental. So it's like Jack Sparrow being like, it's more like guidelines.

• 1:02:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Like not, like, like, I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I thought the rally criterion, I learned this in undergrad and I thought that was it. Yeah, right, right. Insane. So here's the thing. The idea is like, there's previously, this was viewed as a fundamental limitation. Yeah. At a physics. At a physics level, right? Then I started reading. So the rally criterion assumes the following. The only thing that you're sensitive to is the intensity of the light. Okay. Okay. You've got a telescope, you've got a CCD in the back, the telescope creates an image, the CCD then tells how much intensity of light is coming from this direction, this direction, and it creates an image. Okay. But light is an electromagnetic wave and there is phase information. Okay.

• 1:02:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because the electromagnetic wave is coming at you. At some point, it's going to be up. At some point, it's going to be down this way. Right? There's a phase, there's a timing. Yes. That the light is coming through. And if you can extract the timing, then you have both parts of the wave. You have the amplitude, which is the intensity, which you already had. Yes. And you also have the timing in which that wave back it came in. Yes. Right? Yes. And so now it's kind of like with a complex number, right? A complex number, as I said the other day, it's a clock that has a length and it has a phase. Yes. We were only sensitive to the length of this thing with the CCD. What these guys are doing now is they're getting sensitive to the phase of that light, creating much more information out of that single. Resolution. Out of the existing system that's already there. Yes.

• 1:03:30Krishna Choudhary?

  It, which is like a key. Yes, yes, they're adding another little piece of equipment. Right. Instead of the CCD, they have this thing that we're going to talk about. Okay. But that thing is now going to capture all of this additional information. And what's happening is they're dividing up the light into its notes. Okay. Into its musical notes, like when, when you, when you listen to a, a musical note, let's say a chord. Yes. That has a, C and a G. Yes. That's, that's three different piano keys that are put down, right? Yes. How does your ear hear it? Your ear actually hears the three different notes. Yes. The way it's doing it is there's hardware inside of our ear. That's in the cochlea. Yeah. The cochlea is this curled up little thing. Yeah. That's a hardware part of our ear. And what it does is it's made out of cells of different thickness. Okay?

• 1:04:16Krishna Choudhary?

  The lower frequency, the bass notes are going to vibrate the cells with the big thickness. And the higher frequency are going to vibrate the thinner, smaller cells. So where in this spiral, the cells are getting excited, tells you which piano notes are being played. Okay? Our ear has hardware that is breaking down the sound that is coming in into its respective modes. As you would say, into its respective like components. Okay? We're going to do the same thing with the light that's coming through a telescope. Okay. Okay? What we have is we've got a waveguide that takes in the light that's coming in from the telescope. Yes. Okay?

• 1:04:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And then what it's going to do is make it go through this fiber optic sort of chassis. Okay. And all of that multimodal, the, the sound that's coming from an instrument is going to be broken down into these modes. Yes. Into each individual fiber optic cable. Yes. Okay? And so you're decomposing the light field. Yes. Into a basis of what are the notes that make up that light field? Which also changes over time. Yes. And each of those notes has a certain phase to it. Right? Because some of the notes are going to be arriving a little bit later. Some of them earlier, some of them are going to be louder than the others. And so if you go to the next one. We'll have, this is what the light notes look like.

• 1:05:40Krishna Choudhary?

  On the, on the, on the left hand side over here, we've got the actual image. Let's say it's, it's a dot with a ring around it or something like that.

• 1:05:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:48Krishna Choudhary?

  That can be broken up into a dot in the center.

• 1:05:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Then there's maybe two lobes this way, there's two lobes this way. And what we can do is we can say, what are the, what are the modes? Which are these individual notes? How do they add up to make the image that I'm seeing? That's what, that's what that deconstruction is doing.

• 1:06:05Lester Nare?

  You know what this looks like for any video or film editors that are listening? It looks like the color panel on DaVinci Resolve when you're color correcting your video footage. It gives you the color wheels of all these different parameters. It literally looks just like, it's actually.

• 1:06:21Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's, it's kind of similar in that sense, right? It's like, it's extracting this like low information, right? All the stuff that makes it up. This is only really possible if you look at very simple objects. For example, a single star or like stuff around a single star. If you wanted to, you know, image the Eagle Nebula or something, this wouldn't really work.

• 1:06:42Lester Nare?

  That's fair.

• 1:06:43Krishna Choudhary?

  But the mathematics is simple because the source is simple.

• 1:06:45Lester Nare?

  That makes.

• 1:06:45Krishna Choudhary?

  And because the source is simple, I only need to worry about the first like 20 notes.

• 1:06:50Lester Nare?

  I got you.

• 1:06:50Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't need to worry about, because you can, I mean, in theory, you can recreate any image using like just a bunch of like notes like this.

• 1:06:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:06:57Krishna Choudhary?

  But in practice, it's going to get difficult.

• 1:06:59Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 1:06:59Krishna Choudhary?

  With a simple objective, which is just, we're looking at a star. We want to resolve the stuff in the star and around the star very, very nicely. That's what we can do. And the key principle is the phase information of that input is now converted into a measurable intensity difference.

• 1:07:14Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:07:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Between all of these different notes, right?

• 1:07:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:16Krishna Choudhary?

  If the star's position, for example, it shifts, then one of those fiber optic inputs is going to be brighter than the other. If it shifts the other way, then another fiber optic input is going to be brighter, right?

• 1:07:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:27Krishna Choudhary?

  And the raw data has gone from being a CCD to now it's not a picture of the star, but it's 38 different spectra in each of these different modes. Okay? So it's like, how, how, how loud was this note at this frequency?

• 1:07:45Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:07:46Krishna Choudhary?

  So to speak. So to speak, right? Right? This is. But but that's the best way that I can describe it.

• 1:07:52Lester Nare?

  We're trying to distill it into an analogy that doesn't require us to go through more.

• 1:07:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, go through all of the all of the data, but it's like it's like they're they've basically got nineteen different nodes and two polarizations because polarization is also important, right? The electric field oscillating this way or this way tells us something about this what the what the thing is that is producing that light. So it's nineteen different nodes all in two different polarizations to get thirty eight different spectra.

• 1:08:17Lester Nare?

  The the idea is before we were looking at just like one box and now we have like nineteen boxes with two flavors to analyze the same object we were looking at before that was just one box.

• 1:08:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And the and the one box, sure, it had the direct information of how bright this thing was, but now we're just sophisticated it, right? We're no longer taking, let's say, just how loud the sound is, but what are the thingies on top?

• 1:08:45Lester Nare?

  The another analogy this makes me think of is like for DJs, you when you get a track, right? The track is like one audio waveform and it has the drums, it has the vocals, it has everything as one waveform.

• 1:08:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:58Lester Nare?

  Now there's all these AI tools that allow you to separate out the drums.

• 1:09:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:09:02Lester Nare?

  From the vocals, from the synths, and now you have it as these and like there is information when you're looking at just the individual instrument that is hard to decipher when you're looking at the single waveform.

• 1:09:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, and this is very similar to that. This is very, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I think I think that's a good analogy, right? It's taking the aggregate light and it's decomposing it into these individual modes.

• 1:09:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yep.

• 1:09:24Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:09:24Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:09:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And what you can do now, the the second thing that you can do is this star, it's

• 1:09:34Krishna Choudhary?

  it's got two different, so this star specifically, what they're looking at is a star in Canis minoris, beta CMI. It's a hundred and sixty two light years away. It's surrounded by a gas of hydrogen. Canis minoris is one of the two dogs that are the hunting companions of Orion, the the hunter. And so. This star specifically, it's got a gas of hydrogen around it. And that gas is spinning so fast that we can see a Doppler shift. Where on one side, there's, it's blue shifted because it's coming at us. And on the other side, it's red shifted because it's going away. Right? So what we want to do is resolve this gas cloud. Okay? There's two ways to do this. There's two steps.

• 1:10:16Krishna Choudhary?

  The first is to say, okay, all of the light, most of the light is coming from the star. Right? Yeah. There's going to be some jitter because of the adaptive optics. Yes. Remember when we talked about the episode about AI being used for LIGO? For the gravitational observatory? Yes. And I told you that when you have these control systems, you can eliminate low frequency noise. Yes. But you're going to inject high frequency noise. Yes. Right? This thing is injecting high frequency noise. Got it. So that there's going to be some jitter of the star there. Right? What you can do is you can capture that response map of a single star. That's basically telling you how the instrument and this modal system that we have

• 1:11:00Krishna Choudhary?

  is responding to that jitter at every single point that the star is at. Okay? So you've got a response map effectively being like, this is what the astronomical jitter from the star is. Yes. Yes. That's from all of the light. Yes. Then what you do is you look at something called the H alpha emission line. Okay? The H alpha emission line is because of quantum mechanics. Hydrogen has discrete levels. Yes. Right? And whenever the hydrogen atom trans, whenever the hydrogen atom goes from the N equals three to N equals two energy, it releases this red light. That's right at 650 nanometers about. So I think 656 nanometers. Okay?

• 1:11:43Krishna Choudhary?

  So if we look only at that frequency of light, we're going to see the gas cloud. The accretion, the disk of hydrogen around the star. So what we can do is we can take an image. Yes. In the H alpha line. Yes. We can take an image with all the light. Yes. Subtract the two. And then? And we'll get a nice. Hydrogen gas cloud.

• 1:12:07Lester Nare?

  That is surrounding the star. And so it's like, not just that. Okay, we're now able to basically make the star's structure and the gas cloud's structure discrete.

• 1:12:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Lester Nare?

  Using this methodology.

• 1:12:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And we can do it because this is sub diffraction, right?

• 1:12:23Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:12:23Krishna Choudhary?

  This is where we're going way inside what Raleigh even thought was possible.

• 1:12:28Lester Nare?

  Yes, okay, yes, that, okay, that tracks.

• 1:12:30Krishna Choudhary?

  It's pretty cool. And, and what they found is with this, with this technique, they found that the, the disk was lopsided. It's not completely like a plate. It's, it's not symmetric. There's like a little bulge to it that they actually saw. And there's a non-zero shift in that accretion disk. And that means that now the modelers can go and be like, okay, how do we, how do we get something like this, right?

• 1:12:52Lester Nare?

  What is causing that non-zero shift?

• 1:12:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it's really cool. It proves that, you know, you've got this compact, it's cost effective. You just like stick it in the back of the telescope.

• 1:13:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:13:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Where the light was coming in. Now, now it goes through this other thing.

• 1:13:06Lester Nare?

  It's a bolt-on, it's like a bolt-on.

• 1:13:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Lester Nare?

  Like you don't have to rebuild any of these systems from scratch. You can add this as a, as a, as an add-on. And it just receives the existing feed and then processes.

• 1:13:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and then process it in its own way. And there's, there's, I mean, there's so much more that we can do with this. You can put this on a space telescope, for example, because those guys are also limited by Raleigh, but maybe not anymore. And, and the last photo that we had, photo 19, I just wanted to.

• 1:13:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:13:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Swell on a little bit. There you can see the gas cloud and you can see the clear Doppler.

• 1:13:39Lester Nare?

  Yes, red, blue shift.

• 1:13:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Red, blue shift, right? Between the part that's coming away from us and the part that's coming towards us. The blue is where it's coming from, towards us, and the red is where it's going away. And that scale bar is one micro.

• 1:13:52Lester Nare?

  Arc second.

• 1:13:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Arc second, right? And I told you before that it used to be 20. Now you've resolved stuff to, to that.

• 1:13:59Lester Nare?

  To one. And you can even see the lopsidedness that you were talking about earlier in this too. This is, this is unbelievable.

• 1:14:06Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, I think it's, it's a new dawn of like, you know, higher than Raleigh resolution.

• 1:14:11Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I mean.

• 1:14:13Krishna Choudhary?

  I think it's gonna be really, really cool.

• 1:14:16Lester Nare?

  Again, this is where we talk about this all the time. There's a compounding happening right now of these fundamental either techniques, methodologies, tools.

• 1:14:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Lester Nare?

  Combination of these things that are now not only allowing us to take our existing tooling and make it better, take our existing data sets and analyze it differently. Yeah. But giving us a totally new way in which we see the world around us. Yeah. This was, this was a good story. I think it's really cool. Now that, that, that's, this is really cool. We covered, uh, this was a super episode. We hit four stories. Yep. I don't think we're gonna hit two hours this episode. No, no. We, we went through it quick. We started with UCSD. We're mass producing camouflage from octopus, octopi. Yeah. This was out of UCSD. By hijacking bacteria. By hijacking the factory, the biosynthesis. We're now telling these organisms, you gotta go through the factory to make what we want before you can make what you want. Yeah. Which is crazy.

• 1:15:11Lester Nare?

  We, this was not, this is not an ethics podcast.

• 1:15:16Lester Nare?

  That was in nature biotechnology. Our second story was about these new hunting techniques in orcas. Both out of CSU Monterey Bay and the Protección Conservación Pelagacia Asociación de Val A.C. That was in frontiers of marine science. That was a cool story because a lot of news, there's been a lot of news about the yachts being crushed by all of the, all of the orcas. But understanding culture might not be specific to human beings. There's this non, you know, this cross pod communication process happening. Yeah. Our third story was about civet shitted coffee and nature, nature scientific reports. Yep. Out of the University of Carolina. Um, that was. That was hilarious. That was fun. I'm never buying $80 coffee. No. I barely buy $9 coffee, which is what it is now in LA. Yeah.

• 1:16:01Lester Nare?

  And we ended with our second UC story of the day out of UCLA. We are now able to take our telescopes and see more and deeper into the universe in a way we have not before. The imagery difference that we showed was, was crazy. Yeah. Cause it's, it's like, obviously you don't have to be someone who knows. You could look at one and look at the other and be like, that was. Oh, wow. That's crazy. That's better. Yeah, that's way better. That's really far away and okay, we can see it that well. Yeah. Uh, I, I know when I'm trying to zoom in on my iPhone and I see all the Samsung Galaxy commercials about how you can go zoom into a skyscraper over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic episode. As always, we appreciate you guys joining us. Please, if you've made it this far. There's very few of you, but if you have made it this far,

• 1:16:46Lester Nare?

  I want you to comment either civet, wagwan, or we love you Krishna in the comments. So we know you've made it this far. Yeah. Please subscribe, share it with a friend. We're trying to really push scientific. The shutdown is over. Yes. Which might mean we'll get some scientific funding back in the, in the mix. Yes. We still need to do more. Yeah. We cannot fall behind. Always. Um, I'm joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. My name is Lester Nare. This is From First Principles. We'll see you guys next week.