3rd Interstellar Visitor, Rubin’s Sky Camera, AI CRISPR Boost & T. rex Blood Vessels (EP. 4)

Interstellar visitor #3 is here. We unpack 3I ATLAS (why it’s moving so fast, why we finally saw a tail, and how Hubble/JWST—and maybe even Juno—could nail down its makeup). Then we dive into the Vera Rubin Observatory, the 32-gigapixel camera that will turn the entire sky into a time-lapse movie and supercharge discovery. Next: AI just boosted CRISPR by predicting and guiding DNA repair (Pythia), making edits cleaner—especially in non-dividing neurons. And we close with a crossover of dinos + particle physics: preserved T. rex blood vessels revealed by a synchrotron. Mystery Box: the viral “Black aliens” meme.

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare. I am joined, as always, by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. This is From First Principles. We have some great stories for you this week, starting off with the third interstellar object to pass through our neighborhood, Three-I Atlas. Is it an alien spacecraft? We'll soon see. We'll follow it up with a story about the Varisirubin Observatory, which is related to our initial first story on the third interstellar object. We will follow that up with moving into AI. AI meets CRISPR for precise gene editing. Maybe it

• 0:40Lester Nare?

  can fix my knees a little bit, a little rusty. And we will end with a great story. Shout out to Jurassic Park for a rare T-Rex blood cell vessel found in fossils that show that dinosaurs had the ability to heal their own injuries. And we will end with a mystery box. This is From First Principles.

• 1:16Lester Nare?

  How are you, my friend?

• 1:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Doing pretty good.

• 1:18Lester Nare?

  Episode four.

• 1:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yay, yay!

• 1:20Lester Nare?

  We're still here. Shout out to everybody who's tuned in on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.

• 1:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we really do appreciate it.

• 1:26Lester Nare?

  It's been a great, great commentary, great discussion. And we're going to start off with a story that's near and dear to my heart, which is about this interstellar visitor.

• 1:38Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:39Lester Nare?

  So just to kind of set the table for context, because there's a certain Harvard physicist who has been used in a lot of the headlines around this story, Dr. Avi Loeb, who is the professor of astrophysics at Harvard. And funny enough, for those who might not know, I am the director of operations at a nonprofit called the UAP Disclosure Fund, where we are actively working with members of Congress and the executive branch to push for disclosure around these weird things that are flying around. And it just so happens that our favorite Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, is one of our advisory board members. So as soon as I saw the headlines of Harvard astrophysicist says... I knew it was Avi.

• 2:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Lester Nare?

  Um, and I know.

• 2:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And you've met him.

• 2:25Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Lester Nare?

  He's extremely, he's hilarious.

• 2:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Lester Nare?

  He's just so funny, witty, charismatic. It's not a surprise he's been as successful as he has.

• 2:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Lester Nare?

  Because in, in, you know, in the industry, it's both. You have to do the work, but also be able to sell it.

• 2:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 2:39Lester Nare?

  Um, but I think what's been interesting is how this story has cascaded.

• 2:44Krishna Choudhary?

  All over the place.

• 2:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Uh, it started with an initial observation and it seems like we've had some follow-up observations from, you know, things like the Hubble Space Telescope. So I'm really excited to kind of get your perspective on, what, what exactly is going on here?

• 2:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So, um, I hate to break it to you, man, but it's probably not aliens. I tell you this every time. We've known each other for a while and every time it's been like.

• 3:12Lester Nare?

  Not this time.

• 3:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, not this time. Um, not this time again. It's probably an interstellar comet.

• 3:18Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 3:19Krishna Choudhary?

  But it is still really, really, really cool.

• 3:22Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 3:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And I want to see more pictures. Okay? Putting it out there could be other stuff, but it is very likely just an interstellar comet.

• 3:32Lester Nare?

  And so I think what's interesting about this whole concept of interstellar objects.

• 3:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Lester Nare?

  You know, coming into our, you know, into a near earth or into our solar system. It's a relatively rare, at least from our ability to track it.

• 3:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Our ability to track it, that's the thing.

• 3:48Lester Nare?

  It is, it is.

• 3:49Krishna Choudhary?

  The first one was, um, Omu Amuwa, I believe it was called.

• 3:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:53Krishna Choudhary?

  That was in the late 2010s.

• 3:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:55Krishna Choudhary?

  So just maybe five, no, like probably less than 10 years ago.

• 3:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the next one that came out was 2I Borisov.

• 4:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 4:04Krishna Choudhary?

  And then this is the third one.

• 4:05Lester Nare?

  Both of which, uh, Avi was, you know, one of the first early movers.

• 4:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:10Lester Nare?

  Uh, on really working on them. And so we don't really have a lot of context or data.

• 4:15Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 4:15Lester Nare?

  By which to sort of do analysis on this, which is why it's so important that we've had astronomers using Hubble.

• 4:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Lester Nare?

  To, to sort of point at it and say, hey, what data can we gather around this?

• 4:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. This one is, this one is really nice because we caught it on its way in.

• 4:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 4:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Omu Amuwa, we caught it on its way out.

• 4:34Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:34Krishna Choudhary?

  So we can't get good data anyways. The data has really high air bars where we don't know if what we saw is like, if the number that we got is the true number, if it's plus or minus some big thing. Um, now. We see it coming in. So it's really nice that we can chart its trajectory.

• 4:51Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 4:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And we can like schedule observations.

• 4:54Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 4:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and that's I think gonna be key to really understand what this thing is because. You know, this thing is most likely an interstellar object that is just like going through the Milky Way at an incredible speed.

• 5:08Lester Nare?

  That's one of the things I think that's been pointed out in a lot of the news stories is that it's moving so quickly.

• 5:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Lester Nare?

  Uh.

• 5:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Moving extremely quickly.

• 5:16Lester Nare?

  And it I I I guess one of the one of the questions becomes. You you how how do we do analysis on you you or or or what are the characteristics that we would look for? In an observation like this to distinguish it from just saying like or what are the attributes that make you sort of make that conclusion to say? This has attributes that are similar to comets or other sort of rocky uh objects that we've seen.

• 5:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Lester Nare?

  Even locally.

• 5:45Krishna Choudhary?

  No, that's that's a good question. Um to to really get into that, let's talk about sort of the history of how we.

• 5:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Found this thing, right? So we found this thing back when it was about four or five astronomical units away from the sun. An astronomical unit is the distance from the sun to the earth.

• 6:01Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:01Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's like four or five radii away from the earth.

• 6:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:04Krishna Choudhary?

  That's when we first spotted it. It was like out at near the orbit of Jupiter.

• 6:08Lester Nare?

  So real, I mean, we spotted it relative in.

• 6:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Relatively close, relatively close, yeah. Um it's moving extremely fast, fifty eight kilometers per second. So that's one um earth orbit, like one, yeah, one earth orbit radius a month.

• 6:24Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is like really fast, dude.

• 6:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Like it takes us years to get to Jupiter and this thing is gonna be here in like four months.

• 6:30Lester Nare?

  And and I wanna be specific, when you say orbit, you mean orbit around the sun, not the rotation of.

• 6:35Krishna Choudhary?

  No, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the radius of our orbit around the sun. It's take it's it's doing that in a month.

• 6:41Lester Nare?

  So what would take us twelve?

• 6:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, what would take us like years, yeah.

• 6:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, makes sense.

• 6:45Krishna Choudhary?

  To get from here to Mars usually takes us a year.

• 6:47Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 6:47Krishna Choudhary?

  This thing is gonna do it in like.

• 6:49Lester Nare?

  Cause you're talking about traveling through through through through space at a target.

• 6:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and this thing is just coming at us like in a month. So this thing is incredibly fast. Okay, um when it was really far away and it was first spotted, um. We thought it was like twenty kilometers big.

• 7:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 7:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is massive.

• 7:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that's like a big, big comet, big asteroid.

• 7:10Lester Nare?

  I think in the movie Deep Impact, uh, the, the, the asteroid that was hitting Earth or whatever was like one, one to three kilo- I think it was significantly smaller.

• 7:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Significantly smaller and that thing did damage, right? So this thing, this thing is like a, a, you know, a, at least it's a life killer. It's a mass extinction type thing.

• 7:28Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 7:29Krishna Choudhary?

  If it came, um, especially at that speed, like.

• 7:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah, no chance.

• 7:32Krishna Choudhary?

  We'd just be wrecked. Um, so it's incredibly fast and we thought it was incredibly big. The other thing that we thought was, um, you know, it was really far away. We couldn't see any gas coming out of it. Like what normal comets do when they come out from way out there, they usually have a buildup of ice. And then when they get closer to the sun, they should like, you know, start having this tail.

• 7:55Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 7:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is from all the, the, all the, all the ice.

• 7:58Lester Nare?

  Famously known as the, the commentary tail.

• 8:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Lester Nare?

  Which was what was originally interesting about a moon, moon was, and the problem was we were catching it late, so we couldn't have enough data to tell. But the lack of a commentary tail was one of the reasons by which it was like, well, it doesn't look like the other rocks that we've seen fly through space.

• 8:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so this one, it, it was similar, right? And, um, that's when Professor Loeb came out and was like, you know, this could be something weird. Uh, we should take a closer look. It could be, um, it could be aliens. And, um, a lot of astronomers at the time came out and said that, well, it's like too far away. For us to really get good data. Okay, with astronomy, that's always the name of the game. Like, it's like, it's hard to get data on these things. Um, now I think it's been a month since, since then.

• 8:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 8:41Krishna Choudhary?

  A month or two probably since then. It's come closer. Now we see a tail.

• 8:45Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 8:46Krishna Choudhary?

  We do, we do, we do see a tail.

• 8:47Lester Nare?

  We do see a tail.

• 8:48Krishna Choudhary?

  We see, um, we also see a sun facing tail.

• 8:53Lester Nare?

  How, how do you mean?

• 8:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so if there's the sun.

• 8:56Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 8:56Krishna Choudhary?

  The comet is moving like this.

• 8:59Krishna Choudhary?

  You'd expect there to be a tail that's going in the back, right?

• 9:01Lester Nare?

  Behind it.

• 9:02Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, like leaving stuff.

• 9:03Lester Nare?

  Yep, behind.

• 9:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Going behind. There's also a tail facing towards the sun.

• 9:07Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 9:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And that is something that we know comets do.

• 9:10Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Because of something called sublimation. If you've ever seen dry ice.

• 9:14Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, dry ice just goes straight from solid to vapor carbon dioxide.

• 9:20Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 9:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It doesn't go in, there's no liquid CO2, right? Because the, the air pressure is actually just too low to, to have that. So the phase changes go straight from solid to gas.

• 9:30Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, same thing is happening on this comet.

• 9:32Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 9:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, the water ice is getting bombarded by the sun's rays. And then it's just boiling off. There's no, like, so it's, it's called sublimation. And that creates this, like, gaseous sort of water vapor halo around the comet. Um, the Hubble Space Telescope made an observation of it, not too, not too long ago.

• 9:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And it updated the size of this thing.

• 9:55Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:55Krishna Choudhary?

  The size of this thing, we thought it was twenty kilometers, it's now something like zero point three to five kilometers.

• 10:01Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 10:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Significantly smaller.

• 10:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 10:03Krishna Choudhary?

  And it is most likely smaller than one kilometer.

• 10:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 10:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Now, you, also, what's interesting is the airbar is so massive. It's going from zero point three kilometers to five kilometers, right?

• 10:15Lester Nare?

  Wide range.

• 10:15Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a pretty wide range, it's almost tenfold.

• 10:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 10:18Krishna Choudhary?

  In the, in the variation. And that's just because, like, with comets, the nucleus is shrouded now.

• 10:24Lester Nare?

  In this.

• 10:24Krishna Choudhary?

  In, like, if you look at that photo, right?

• 10:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 10:26Krishna Choudhary?

  The nucleus is shrouded by this gas now.

• 10:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:29Krishna Choudhary?

  So now, it's really hard to resolve, like, what's happening on, on the very inside.

• 10:34Lester Nare?

  It's a force field, I promise.

• 10:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, it's something like that. It could be.

• 10:39Lester Nare?

  But I think what's interesting here, I mean, this, this kind of goes to why the instruments we use for detection, uh, really matter. Uh, because it's what allows us to get sort of a high fidelity data set.

• 10:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Lester Nare?

  To then be able to do analysis, and also being able to do so repeatedly over time, such that we can continue to refine.

• 10:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:57Lester Nare?

  What that analysis is.

• 10:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And as it gets closer and closer, we're gonna be doing more and more. Because this is, I, I mean, at the end of the day, this is an incredibly interesting object, okay?

• 11:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 11:05Krishna Choudhary?

  If we were to run back the clock on where this object came. Came from this three I atlas, okay, it's an interstellar object and if we were to run back the clock on where it came from. It would come from the depths of the Milky Way and especially in this region of the Milky Way. That's like right above our disk.

• 11:22Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 11:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's called like the thick disk. Okay, so the Milky Way is like this, right, you've you've seen the the Milky Way across the sky.

• 11:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 11:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Most of that stuff is in the thin disk.

• 11:32Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 11:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that's where the like stars and the and the gas sort of is. So when you look up at the night sky in the national park or in a really dark area, you'll see it going across. The night sky, that's usually just the thin disk, right above that thin disk is something called the thick disk. Okay, and this has an old population of stars.

• 11:52Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 11:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Really old.

• 11:53Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 11:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, like older than our solar system and if this object came from up there. And it's like sort of, you know, crossing down into our neighborhood.

• 12:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 12:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Then it came from those objects, which means that, you know, we're estimating this thing to be seven billion years old.

• 12:09Lester Nare?

  Wow, okay.

• 12:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is older than our solar system.

• 12:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:12Krishna Choudhary?

  So this is actually the oldest object that we that we've seen in our solar system.

• 12:17Lester Nare?

  Which is.

• 12:18Krishna Choudhary?

  It's older than everything else.

• 12:19Lester Nare?

  Else, that's around, it's it's basically like it's, you know, a quarter of the age of the, no, about half.

• 12:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Half the age of the universe, yeah.

• 12:27Lester Nare?

  Uh, which is fascinating, I mean.

• 12:29Krishna Choudhary?

  We're about a third, right?

• 12:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:30Krishna Choudhary?

  But like, yeah, this thing's like half.

• 12:33Lester Nare?

  Look, I'm not saying it's aliens, but they've had time.

• 12:36Krishna Choudhary?

  They have had time and they they might live up there, you know, so but we definitely know that it's old. Like if it's a naturally occurring rock and it came from up there, it's probably really old, right?

• 12:46Lester Nare?

  Fascinating.

• 12:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, the other thing that's kind of kind of crazy is like how fast it's going, so how do we explain that?

• 12:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, that can be explained by just close encounters of the gravitational kind.

• 12:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, um.

• 12:59Lester Nare?

  So it was passing through, you know, through from the thick disk through the thin disk and at some point it passed a very, very massive object.

• 13:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it passed a very massive object in exactly the right, I mean, this thing's been around for seven billion years, right? So, and if it's like out here, who knows how long it's been roaming the cosmos.

• 13:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so, um. You know, in in the three body problem, if you remember, right, like tiny little deflections can cause something to just shoot out, right? You can imagine the same thing here, like spacecraft NASA uses these things called gravity assists to boost the speed of spacecraft all the time. This thing could have had a very close encounter with a massive object, let's say another star, and it was just like shot.

• 13:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Out.

• 13:41Lester Nare?

  And then ended up being shot out in our direction.

• 13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  In our direction. Now, the direction that it was shot out in is very peculiar.

• 13:49Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 13:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Because um, the sun and the planets form an ecliptic plane.

• 13:54Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 13:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Where we all sort of like, this is the primordial angular momentum of the solar system coming to fruition as like one plate where all this, all the planets reside. And this thing is coming in at like a really shallow angle. Right? Of all the angles that it could have chosen, it did choose this weird shallow angle.

• 14:13Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 14:13Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a little weird.

• 14:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 14:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Um.

• 14:16Lester Nare?

  I'll take it.

• 14:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Awomwa did not do that.

• 14:18Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 14:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So it's, you know, you could say, well, you, you didn't use it for that one. And then now you're using, you know, so like it, it, it, again, it could just be coincidence. This is the first three that we've done, and this is one that like, it's um, as as people are saying, it's like taking a tour of the solar system, right? It's going through Jupiter, it's gonna visit Jupiter, it's gonna see Mars and Venus, it's not gonna see Earth. We're actually gonna be on the other side of the sun.

• 14:44Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 14:44Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's gonna like, if the sun is here and we're here, it's gonna like move over there.

• 14:48Lester Nare?

  It'll pass through generally where our orbit would be, we're just in the wrong place.

• 14:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're in just a little wrong place at that time. Um, but, but then it's gonna go see Jupiter. Um, later. And actually, there's a, there's a proposal out in astrophysical letters.

• 15:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:03Krishna Choudhary?

  I think by Professor Avi Loeb that um wants to get the Juno spacecraft, which is around Jupiter.

• 15:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:10Krishna Choudhary?

  They, they just wanna like boost it a little.

• 15:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And they calculated how to do it. You boost it a little, you get it in a higher orbit around Jupiter, and then it'll make a really close encounter.

• 15:19Lester Nare?

  And, and.

• 15:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it'll make a real close encounter. I think that would be really cool, actually. Personally, I think that would be a great use of Juno.

• 15:25Lester Nare?

  What's so, I mean, it, it seems like, and this is a call to those who may be watching that are in the annals at NASA.

• 15:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Lester Nare?

  Making decisions. Uh, given we don't have.

• 15:38Lester Nare?

  A lot of historical data about interstellar objects passing through our solar system. It seems like, and the fact that there are always chance opportunities.

• 15:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Lester Nare?

  This seems like an incredible opportunity with relatively low lift.

• 15:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Lester Nare?

  We've done the math.

• 15:54Krishna Choudhary?

  We've done the math, yeah.

• 15:55Lester Nare?

  It can be done. Do we want to waste the fuel? Hey, look, when's the next time we're gonna get a chance to capture an interstellar object at that proximity?

• 16:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Lester Nare?

  Especially given where our orbit is. That means like on earth observatories.

• 16:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're not gonna be able to, because we can't like point at the sun, right? It's gonna be behind the sun. So like, what are we gonna do? Um, already though, like so many people have like imaged it. Hubble Space Telescope imaged it, the Very Large Telescope, the V L T that we talked about in one of the previous episodes, that imaged it. Um, Gemini North, another telescope that we've talked about in previous episodes, that imaged it, um, in Hawaii. So we've had like tons of interest in this thing because it's obviously interesting. It's a seven billion year old object that's coming to visit us.

• 16:40Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 16:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That's, it's incredible.

• 16:42Lester Nare?

  We want to, we have to have the doorman to check to make sure our security is tight, you know?

• 16:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Lester Nare?

  Hey, what, who are you and what, uh, intentions do you have with our daughters?

• 16:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Lester Nare?

  Um, and it appears that it's going to be making its closest sort of approach to us in the late October, early November, twenty twenty five.

• 17:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Lester Nare?

  Timeframe, which is why everyone's freaking out that there's an alien invasion.

• 17:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Lester Nare?

  In November.

• 17:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if, if, if we find out it's, it's aliens, then the stock market crashes. I don't know what happens to Bitcoin.

• 17:14Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 17:14Lester Nare?

  But we will find, we will find out soon. It's not too long away.

• 17:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's not too long away. And actually, you know what's hilarious? Sixth of August, what's today's date? The twelfth?

• 17:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Krishna Choudhary?

  So six days ago, the James Webb Telescope imaged it.

• 17:26Lester Nare?

  Oh, interesting.

• 17:27Krishna Choudhary?

  But they haven't released the data because there's a three month embargo on whoever gets the time. Like, so whoever, whoever like had that time was like, I'm gonna point it here and then like imaged it. And I'm sure that if like, so like, that's another thing that gives me like some security is like, I'm sure if that dude like saw something weird.

• 17:46Lester Nare?

  It would have.

• 17:46Krishna Choudhary?

  NASA would have been like, mm. Okay, we're, yeah.

• 17:49Lester Nare?

  It would have, it would.

• 17:50Krishna Choudhary?

  We would have, we would have like, someone would have said something by now. So it's been six days. It's probably something extremely interesting and this guy's scrambling to get his paper out before the public gets the data.

• 18:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 18:03Krishna Choudhary?

  But it was like six days ago and it's also gonna image it again in December. So it's actually scheduled in December to do it.

• 18:09Lester Nare?

  Perfect, perfect. So, so.

• 18:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause that's when the earth is gonna be at exactly the right spot to like see it again. Cause James, James Webb is also, it's still tied to earth.

• 18:18Lester Nare?

  Ah, right, right.

• 18:19Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not like just out there, so.

• 18:21Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, it's out there, but, but.

• 18:22Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's like now and then we're gonna have like a few months where we can't because we, we'd have to point it towards the sun.

• 18:28Lester Nare?

  Which is why Juno is so important.

• 18:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Lester Nare?

  NASA, send Juno out there. Let's take some pictures. We wanna see it. It does look really beautiful and brilliant in the, in the imagery we do have from Hubble.

• 18:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Lester Nare?

  Um, and, and it's also.

• 18:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can see it's clearly moving, right?

• 18:43Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 18:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Because like the streaks that you see there?

• 18:45Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Those are stars.

• 18:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 18:47Krishna Choudhary?

  That are not moving. So the, the telescope had to like track it?

• 18:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And then as it was tracking it, the stars were like making streaks.

• 18:54Lester Nare?

  Nice, nice space long exposure.

• 18:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Lester Nare?

  So while it may not be aliens yet, it will give us more data to, it's sort of like that in the sort of AI analogy. It's like that training data set of what we know as sort of prosaic data and such, it gives us a better way to then tune for future potential visitors, uh, if they're not already here.

• 19:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And it's, it's gonna be really interesting to see like, once it gets closer and we take more data, it'll be really cool to see what this object is made of.

• 19:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 19:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Cause like, we know what solar system comments, comets are made of, but like, are these older solar systems somehow different? Do they have different characteristics? We've already found water on it, which is very characteristic of a comet. Um, so, you know, in that respect, it's very similar and we're expecting to find CO2 and carbon monoxide. But it'll be interesting to see what else comes out, right? Like maybe there's like some other exotic chemical that we didn't even think a comet would have.

• 19:56Lester Nare?

  This actually ties to the story we previously covered about the importance of discovering the first molecule in the universe. And how that then has this sort of butterfly effect in terms of how everything forms downstream. And this would be great insight to understand those earlier solar systems. And what's kind of going on there. This also makes me think we should do another episode on the idea of panspermia. Where it's the idea that life is seeded from these comets that are traveling interstellar. And carrying things like water.

• 20:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like that'd be, I mean, this thing is carrying water, right? What else has it got? It'd be so interesting to see. And like, you know, the other thing I want to talk, say is.

• 20:42Krishna Choudhary?

  We've only seen three, right? And the reason we've only seen three is probably our inability to see the rest.

• 20:48Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 20:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? This is, might be super common. We've only had like. A giant network of telescopes doing this kind of stuff for not very long.

• 20:57Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 20:59Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's not like, you know, all of a sudden someone turned on the interstellar. Button, like in 2015 and now we're just starting to see stuff. And for that, we need like telescopes. That are dedicated to just like finding this kind of stuff.

• 21:15Lester Nare?

  Which means we need to fund science.

• 21:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes. And. For that, we actually have a telescope now.

• 21:23Lester Nare?

  Right, and this is our second story, which is, this is an NSF, National Science Foundation. And DOE, Department of Energy, collaboration. For the Veracie Rubin Observatory. So the sort of headline on the NSF.gov website is, beginning in 2025. NSF DOE Rubin Observatory will embark on the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. A 10-year survey of the night sky using the biggest camera ever made. Capturing an ultra-wide, ultra-high definition. Time-lapse record of the universe.

• 22:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Lester Nare?

  Which sounds incredible. And so tell me, let me, help me understand. The importance of, of this new observatory and what it actually is.

• 22:11Krishna Choudhary?

  You know that previous story we were talking about?

• 22:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:13Krishna Choudhary?

  With Three Eye Atlas?

• 22:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:17Krishna Choudhary?

  If Verisim Rubin Observatory had gone online a month ago, a month before it did.

• 22:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:23Krishna Choudhary?

  It went online in July. If it went online in June, it would have found this object within three day, within three days.

• 22:31Lester Nare?

  That's incredible.

• 22:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that's what this observatory is doing. This observatory is American exceptionalism at its finest.

• 22:39Lester Nare?

  Hoorah!

• 22:40Krishna Choudhary?

  It really is. Uh, nice shirt, nice jersey.

• 22:44Lester Nare?

  Good, good. You see, you see these four stars?

• 22:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Lester Nare?

  That, that means we're winners.

• 22:49Krishna Choudhary?

  How do we, how do we get four, wait?

• 22:51Lester Nare?

  The, the women's team.

• 22:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, got it. Alright, well, hey.

• 22:55Lester Nare?

  We'll take what we can get.

• 22:56Krishna Choudhary?

  We'll take what we can get. Um.

• 22:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this, this observatory is, yeah, it's, it's like one of the greatest observatories that mankind has ever built.

• 23:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, it is very different from other observatories. Very, very different. In that traditional observatories, the whole point of the observatory is like, like the way it works is you're an astronomer. You got some idea for a bit of research that you wanna do. So you write to the observatory funders or like whoever's in charge of like allocating time. And you say, this is what I wanna look at. This is how many nights it's gonna take. Um, this is why it's important for science research, blah, blah, blah. And then they get a bunch of proposals. And then they allocate the yearly time budget to whatever you wanna see. This observatory has no such thing. Okay?

• 23:45Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:46Krishna Choudhary?

  There's astronomers can't bid for time. And yet astronomers are super excited about it. Okay? This observatory's only job is to take a picture of the night sky, the entire night sky, every three nights.

• 23:59Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:00Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's it.

• 24:00Lester Nare?

  That's it.

• 24:01Krishna Choudhary?

  That's it. Like robotic clockwork.

• 24:04Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, the, the, it's, it's almost like just a robotic telescope.

• 24:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:08Krishna Choudhary?

  It takes a picture of the entire night sky.

• 24:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Every three nights. Now, that is impossible with other telescopes.

• 24:15Lester Nare?

  It, it, it, what's it?

• 24:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, this thing had to be engineered specifically for that task.

• 24:22Lester Nare?

  It, it seems like a brilliant use of time and money because, you know, the, it, it creates this baseline data set that's very robust, that creates a treasure map effectively. For people to then say, okay. If I look at what's gonna come out of the Rubin Observatory, you can get a baseline reference point and say, hey, this looks interesting over here.

• 24:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Lester Nare?

  And then we can zoom in with other tools that are maybe more specialized for any number of different types of observations.

• 24:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's and it's not just a baseline, it's like.

• 24:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's actually gonna find new things.

• 25:00Lester Nare?

  Out of, out of the box.

• 25:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Actively.

• 25:02Lester Nare?

  So people can just look at it and be like, oh, that's new.

• 25:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and in fact, I mean, it's gonna have so much data that like people can't afford to look at it.

• 25:09Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:09Krishna Choudhary?

  There's just too much data, where they're actually gonna have artificial intelligence looking through and combing through the data. Okay, so let's get into it, cuz there's, there's so much. This thing started fifteen years ago, fifteen to twenty years ago. There's these things called decadal surveys in astrophysics, okay? So, I mean, you know, people might think that like scientists are just like, they just have like ideas. And then the government's like, oh, okay, here's like four hundred million dollars. Right, that's, that's not how it works. A bunch of scientists have to come together, cuz this is a lot of money. Observatories are incredibly expensive, right? Every little thing you're doing is at the cutting edge of science and technology.

• 25:48Krishna Choudhary?

  You're making the biggest camera, you're making the biggest lens, you're making the largest system for like distributing data. And like finding stuff in data, right? All of this stuff is at the cutting edge, right? It's gonna employ like hundreds and hundreds of researchers, right? Sometimes thousands. So, in order to justify this kind of spending, there has to be consensus in the community to actually say, look, this is the total budget the NSF and the government is giving us. How are we gonna make use of it with big projects? Because this stuff is big, okay, this is hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 26:28Lester Nare?

  And I wanna make the note that.

• 26:29Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't know if it's hundreds, I don't know, I don't know how many million this is actually.

• 26:32Lester Nare?

  This is also work that the private sector won't do.

• 26:36Krishna Choudhary?

  No, why would they?

• 26:37Lester Nare?

  Because there's, there's no clear profit, you know, immediate profit value to investing that amount of capex.

• 26:44Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this one, this particular one was really nice because, you know, Congress has a mandate that I think by twenty.

• 26:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Twenty thirty. They want to catalog all like ninety percent of all near earth objects that are bigger than a hundred and forty kilometers. Okay, they wanna just. Get a catalog of them all and NASA was like, alright, well, if you want that. We're gonna need money to make an observatory exactly like this. This thing is gonna catalog something like sixty five percent of it.

• 27:17Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 27:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, um. And. What was funny about this particular project is in twenty eighteen, Congress actually gave them more money than they asked for. Because they wanted it done faster.

• 27:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Krishna Choudhary?

  But at that point. They weren't limited by money. They were just like, no, we got the best people here. There's not anyone else who can do what we're trying to do like like ma- making a thirty two gigapixel camera takes time. Grinding this lens takes time like you you this is not a throw money at the problem. Kind of problem.

• 27:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 27:52Krishna Choudhary?

  This is now, we have the money, but it requires time to get this right so that like when we see first light with this telescope, it's gonna be banger. And it's so funny because there's the one time Congress was like at four scientists, they were like, you know what? Yeah, here have more and. And it's the one time that we we were like, oh, I wish you there's so many other.

• 28:13Lester Nare?

  I think what's interesting about this is is this idea, you know, how times change, right? You know, it's not a guarantee that the funding. Will always be there.

• 28:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And this is twenty eighteen, so this is during the first Trump administration.

• 28:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 28:25Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's not like, you know.

• 28:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 28:27Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not a party type thing. It's just some like some sometimes we we really like science and then all of a sudden, I don't know, something happens.

• 28:34Lester Nare?

  Covid in this case, I I will note that on the nsf.gov website, they they mentioned the amount of data gathered. By the Rubin Observatory in its first year alone will be greater than the collect uh the data collected by all other optical observatories. Combined.

• 28:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Lester Nare?

  Uh, which is a massive.

• 28:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Massive.

• 28:56Lester Nare?

  Massive amount. It goes on to say countless discoveries in improving our understanding of the nature of dark matter, dark energy. And other longstanding cosmic mysteries.

• 29:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got, it's got ma- it's got four mandates. Okay, the first thing is so okay, first, actually, let's get into, let's get into what this thing is doing.

• 29:15Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so this this Vera Rubin Telescope, it's um. It's an eight meter telescope.

• 29:21Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:22Krishna Choudhary?

  It's it's not like the Keck or the James Webb where it's a bunch of segmented mirrors. This is a single solid mirror.

• 29:30Lester Nare?

  Wow.

• 29:30Krishna Choudhary?

  On the bottom, okay?

• 29:31Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:31Krishna Choudhary?

  It was made in the University of Arizona.

• 29:33Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:33Krishna Choudhary?

  University of Arizona, there's a um a lab there that is the world's best at making single big mirrors.

• 29:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and so when time came to make this, it's like, okay, we all know University of Arizona is gonna do that. That's your job, you do it. Okay, they they made this massive mirror. This mirror is extremely wide, right, eight meters, but it's also like

• 30:01Krishna Choudhary?

  the the field of view of the camera, the the way the mirror is shaped means that the field of view is extremely large.

• 30:09Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, what does that mean? That means like so most telescopes when they look at the night sky, they're looking at a patch of the sky that's smaller than the full moon.

• 30:16Lester Nare?

  They're looking at a very narrow.

• 30:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Very, yeah, very like like, you know, you hold your thumb out and it's like that big.

• 30:21Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 30:21Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're looking like that, okay, so even sometimes smaller. Um same thing with James Webb, the Keck telescope in Hawaii, Hubble, same thing. This thing is gonna move is gonna look at um a spot in the sky that's like forty five full moons.

• 30:38Lester Nare?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:38Krishna Choudhary?

  At the same time.

• 30:39Lester Nare?

  Several hours of magnitude.

• 30:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's it's almost like a palm.

• 30:42Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 30:42Krishna Choudhary?

  As big as a palm.

• 30:43Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Um it's a thousand times the field of view of Hubble.

• 30:48Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, now, if I wanna look at something really close for a really long time, this isn't the thing to do it. But if I wanna see the whole night sky in three nights, this is the thing to do it. What this thing is gonna do is thirty seconds, then it'll take five seconds to move, thirty seconds, then it'll take five seconds to move, thirty seconds, five seconds to move, thirty seconds, and it'll map out the entire night sky every three nights.

• 31:15Lester Nare?

  So it's.

• 31:16Krishna Choudhary?

  In all of the filters.

• 31:17Lester Nare?

  It's making almost this giant, panorama is not the right word, but this giant mosaic of these thirty second snapshots that ultimately will create this sort of three D.

• 31:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it'll be like the the. Biggest sphere.

• 31:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:32Krishna Choudhary?

  But like every night.

• 31:33Lester Nare?

  Every night.

• 31:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's sixty petabytes of data over ten years.

• 31:38Lester Nare?

  I was literally gonna say I don't envy the data.

• 31:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Terabytes of data, um, like every night, it's gonna, it's gonna be making like incredible, incredible discoveries. Because it's observing the whole night sky.

• 31:50Lester Nare?

  Which is something we've never done in this way before.

• 31:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, and each of these, each of these pictures is gonna be thirty two gigapixels. Right, so that's thirty two thousand megapixels in my palm, right? That I'm like with a giant eight meter aperture.

• 32:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, the camera, actually, the camera was built by Slack. Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab.

• 32:11Lester Nare?

  Different Slack.

• 32:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, not, not, not the, not the.

• 32:15Lester Nare?

  Not the, not the works, workspace management software company.

• 32:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, again, the private sector isn't gonna do this, right? But the government and Slack, Slack is part of the DOE, so Slack made this camera, the camera is like gonna fit in this room. Okay, it's like as tall as you or you or I.

• 32:30Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's like as, as wide, you can imagine, like the, it's the world's largest camera.

• 32:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Thirty two gigapixels.

• 32:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? I mean, in thirty seconds, we want an exposure on this small patch of the sky. It's incredibly detailed, dude, you see like galaxies you've never seen before, in the first two days. It discovered like thousands of galaxies. Right, in the first two days, it discovered two thousand asteroids that we've never known existed. And it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, like.

• 33:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 33:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Those are asteroids, like that could, that could be bad. But in the, in the first two days, two thousand asteroids that we should definitely know about. And we don't, there's a million known asteroids right now. This thing is forecasted to get five million more in the next ten years, so over the past two hundred years. We've observed a million.

• 33:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And now in the next ten, we're gonna observe five million because of this thing, cuz all it's doing is taking a picture of the entire night sky every, every night.

• 33:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And then it's gonna look for, I, it'll be super obvious.

• 33:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:35Krishna Choudhary?

  When an asteroid moves, right, when a point in the, when a small point of light moves. We can literally track it over the whole year.

• 33:42Lester Nare?

  This, this seems like a perfect use case for.

• 33:47Lester Nare?

  You know, AI detection and anomaly detection algorithms because we have a decent amount of data to create sort of structured algorithms as a starting point. That will identify things like asteroids, et cetera, et cetera. And then we'll put them in buckets.

• 34:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And AI is really good at that kind of stuff, right? Anomaly detection is like huge.

• 34:04Lester Nare?

  And so we'll have these buckets of stars, asteroids, galaxies. And then there'll be this fun other bucket where it'll just see, I mean, it's like, it's like putting on glasses when you're like really blind. Or turning on the lights further, further down into a room where it's like, we've, we've seen some stuff.

• 34:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Lester Nare?

  But we've not really seen it all.

• 34:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:25Lester Nare?

  And i- i- it is going to be in an incredible amount of, the fidelity to me is what's crazy.

• 34:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and, and the clarity of the images and the amount of light gathering power that we have here is gonna be insane. Like, the first thing that, like, there have been, um, surveys in the past.

• 34:43Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 34:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, like, uh, the Harvard, Harvard has like a Harvard Plate Archive, which is like back when there were photographic plates.

• 34:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Palomar has one, Mount Palomar.

• 34:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, you know about that one?

• 34:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:54Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, um, the most famous one before this was the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. That was in, in New Mexico. And back then, like, you know, um, there's no, I mean, there's internet, but for this amount of data, there isn't. And so like dudes literally had like, dudes literally had to like fill up luggage with like the data and then bring it to the university, like physically.

• 35:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Now, this thing takes a photo, within a few seconds, it's to California, to France.

• 35:23Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And then within another few, within another like few seconds, it's gonna be checked across every other photo that we've taken of that spot in the sky, because the telescope's tracking where it looked.

• 35:34Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then maybe Hubble looked there, maybe VLT looked there like five years ago or 10 years ago. You check around there, and then if there's anything different, it's gonna flag and go across to all the astronomers everywhere being like, hey, there's something cool here.

• 35:46Lester Nare?

  I wanna be on that email thread.

• 35:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Every, every like minute that it's observing, we're gonna be, we're gonna be seeing these things. And the cool thing about this is there's no embargo on the data.

• 35:57Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 35:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, you know how I was saying, saying about like, uh, the James Webb Telescope?

• 36:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 36:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Three months, right? You get three months to massage your data, get your paper out. Here, it's like it's out. It's, it's out like that night.

• 36:09Lester Nare?

  It's not only a, a, a new technical innovation. In and of itself, it's the first of its kind observatory. But also the workflow that is accompanying the observatory in terms of. Data access to a, you know, wide community of scientists is is also fundamentally different.

• 36:24Krishna Choudhary?

  It's fundamentally different and it's like it took like the software. The the kind of software that was required to do this and the kind of electrical.

• 36:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Experience and and all of that stuff that could only happen in America. Like the the amount of cloud computing. That is happening because of this thing is like something that it's actually being handled by Fermilab and the University of Illinois. Because like particle detectors. They have experience with like ridiculous amounts of data and how to make sense of it.

• 36:58Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 36:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, this is a great. Problem that now they can solve, so the University of Illinois is actually in charge of. This whole data pipeline that's that's happening and they're still um massaging it out right now like the the telescope is live.

• 37:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:11Krishna Choudhary?

  But like this is a part of the pipeline that they couldn't really test.

• 37:14Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 37:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Until they started getting the photos, right?

• 37:16Lester Nare?

  It's still in beta.

• 37:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like so every everyone was focused on, okay, let's just get the photos.

• 37:20Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 37:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Now it's like, okay, how do we get the photos to everyone?

• 37:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's it's slowly coming about now, you know, I I said something about how um the. There's no embargo on these on this data, so the telescope takes a photo tonight. It's out.

• 37:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Now we have public access to this data.

• 37:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Through the Vera Rubin um website. There's actually like citizen science efforts going on because as you said, right? Machine learning is going to be really, really powerful.

• 37:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:47Krishna Choudhary?

  For detecting anomalies and detecting new objects. In this data, but what does machine learning need? Training data.

• 37:55Lester Nare?

  Training data sets.

• 37:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Training data.

• 37:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And so how do how's the like all of the all of the training data like you know, you know, the L L Ms.

• 38:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 38:03Krishna Choudhary?

  The training data is coming from humans writing on Reddit and all this other crap, right?

• 38:07Lester Nare?

  The internet, right.

• 38:08Krishna Choudhary?

  The internet, yeah, right, so like there's all this text on the internet. That's your training data, but that text fundamentally had to come from human beings. For it to learn how to speak like a human being and like language and logic and all that other stuff.

• 38:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:19Krishna Choudhary?

  This, we're gonna have citizen scientists. Doing like. Training annotations.

• 38:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:27Krishna Choudhary?

  On the data, so already something like a hundred thousand images, it's only been like. Less than a month.

• 38:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Krishna Choudhary?

  But already a hundred thousand images um have been. Looked at and labeled for comets.

• 38:40Lester Nare?

  Yup.

• 38:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because comets look a little bit different from asteroids.

• 38:43Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 38:44Krishna Choudhary?

  So, there's a bunch of people on their, and you guys can like go and like be a part of this effort.

• 38:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Like you basically identify, is it an asteroid, which is just a point like thing that is moving? Or does it have a little bit of fuzz around it?

• 38:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and that's your job.

• 38:59Lester Nare?

  We need more reinforcement learning from humans.

• 39:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Lester Nare?

  And so, I actually didn't know that, that's, that's fascinating.

• 39:06Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so these guys are just, this is just, uh, yeah, classic data annotation.

• 39:10Lester Nare?

  Yup.

• 39:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then we can then train the machine learning algorithm and the AI for the future.

• 39:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And then we won't need, we can, we can have them like do other stuff.

• 39:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, okay, is this a spiral galaxy or an elliptical gal-, you know, all sorts of stuff.

• 39:25Lester Nare?

  This is, I think one of the things that's so fascinating about that part of the story is that it is this reminder we always talk about, which is that science is, is for everybody.

• 39:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:33Lester Nare?

  Right, and it should be accessible for everybody. So it's actually really heartening to hear.

• 39:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this one, I, I really like that, that like, you know, they, they got all this funding from the American taxpayer, but they're giving it back.

• 39:43Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Not just to the American taxpayer, but to the world.

• 39:45Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 39:46Krishna Choudhary?

  It's kinda cool.

• 39:47Lester Nare?

  Very, very.

• 39:48Krishna Choudhary?

  I think, I think it should make us very proud as Americans that we are still at the forefront of astronomy.

• 39:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:53Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, ever since the nineteen twenties.

• 39:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, we built the biggest telescope in the nineteen twenties and we haven't stopped.

• 40:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah, one day, the biggest, the best.

• 40:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that, I think we really do understand that adjective, biggest.

• 40:07Lester Nare?

  Biggest.

• 40:07Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, okay.

• 40:08Lester Nare?

  Bigly.

• 40:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're gonna make, we're gonna make the biggest. Although we didn't understand that when we tried to build a superconducting supercollider in Texas. We almost built it and then.

• 40:17Lester Nare?

  Then CERN.

• 40:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then, no, and then we ran out of funding during the Clinton administration.

• 40:22Lester Nare?

  When we had the crazy budget surplus.

• 40:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 40:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, like Reagan actually like gave money for it. But that, okay, fine, that was during the Cold War, so maybe, you know, one can, but basically, once the Cold War ended.

• 40:35Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Even, even the Democrats were like, oh, I guess, I guess we don't need science anymore. You know?

• 40:42Lester Nare?

  It's, it's unbelievable.

• 40:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Like now there's just a giant tunnel underground in Texas. There's a giant tunnel with graffiti and stuff.

• 40:51Lester Nare?

  Don't tell Elon.

• 40:52Krishna Choudhary?

  We bored, we bored a tunnel, but we just didn't put the detectors in, cause like we ran out of money. It's this, it's, it would have been bigger than CERN. You understand? Yeah, it would have, dude, we would have found the Higgs like twenty years ago or something.

• 41:06Lester Nare?

  This is why we need to fund.

• 41:08Krishna Choudhary?

  It's in it's incredible and like it would have it would have been a larger search search space. Like we would have answered questions about supersymmetry, the fact that it doesn't like isn't there in in these. Like we would have answered all that because the luminosity for that Texas superconducting supercollider was higher than CERN's is right now.

• 41:26Lester Nare?

  Which when it's been ramped up.

• 41:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Like when we do stuff, we we planned to like it was gonna be bright and it was gonna be big.

• 41:31Lester Nare?

  Big.

• 41:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And then and then and then and then money ran out and then we didn't give the money. And then that's when I think we learned our lesson and that's when NSF was like, no, we're gonna do with whatever limited budget we have. We're gonna take big risks and get big rewards and that's when LIGO sort of got in the mix and that's when people started asking, okay. Can we make this gravitational observatory?

• 41:54Lester Nare?

  Right, well, this is the gravitational wave.

• 41:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Gravitational wave observatory and and finally LIGO got LIGO got funding like. I think it was sort of a backlash from like that failure.

• 42:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That we had as American scientists.

• 42:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we were just like, ah, like we really dropped and like now, you know, at CERN, we're kind of like second class citizens because.

• 42:14Krishna Choudhary?

  To be like part of the fold, you have to contribute something like one percent of your GDP, which is fine for something like the Netherlands. But like, well, like the US is all of Europe plus more. It's like you want one percent of our GDP. No, you know? But it's like, but they need our magnets, like CERN couldn't work without our magnets and like a lot of the tech. And a lot of the like big electronics was coming from America. So, yeah, I I think that we we didn't we didn't really like that and then like we made LIGO. I love that in astronomy, we're still like at the forefront, like we're making James Webb.

• 42:47Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 42:47Krishna Choudhary?

  We made Vera Rubin.

• 42:48Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 42:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, like we're we're we're still going at it. Um. There's a new one that's like planned, it's called the uh the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Um that's gonna be in space, it's gonna be very similar to the Vera Rubin Telescope. Um because it's gonna have a really big field of view. Um but unfortunately, I think that one is has been put on pause because it hasn't been launched yet.

• 43:15Lester Nare?

  Right, and the funding.

• 43:16Krishna Choudhary?

  And the funding has stopped, so so that's something that like we clearly should like really like, you know.

• 43:23Lester Nare?

  Invest in.

• 43:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Invest in, yeah. Oh, you're looking at the the photos.

• 43:26Lester Nare?

  I want I want people to understand and we'll we'll.

• 43:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, look at I look at like all of those dots, like like all of those dots are previously unknown galaxies.

• 43:34Lester Nare?

  It is incredible and it's it's what you can see.

• 43:37Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a single like that's that's a single night.

• 43:39Lester Nare?

  And the the it's it's basically this map view. Uh with part of it filled in from where the photos have been taken and you it's just gonna continue to expand and expand over time.

• 43:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Lester Nare?

  And you can just zoom in and it's pixelated for a little bit and then it gets hyper and you just keep zooming in.

• 43:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and then finally you get to the signal the noise of the detector.

• 43:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Lester Nare?

  But I mean, there is an incredible amount, there are incredible amount of objects in this in this view.

• 44:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like you see you see some of these like diffuse galaxies here.

• 44:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 44:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Those like were so diffuse that they weren't even caught in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

• 44:14Lester Nare?

  This is incredible.

• 44:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, but that's like an the the some of those are totally new galaxies that are pretty close to us.

• 44:20Lester Nare?

  And we just didn't even.

• 44:20Krishna Choudhary?

  That we didn't even see because like they were they were just sort of like blobs of get like, you know, particle particulate stars.

• 44:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 44:27Krishna Choudhary?

  With no real structure, so they weren't bright enough. But now this thing, this thing is incredible and the thing is it's gonna take pictures of the same spot in the sky, right?

• 44:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:35Krishna Choudhary?

  At the end of the day, it's ten over ten years.

• 44:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:37Krishna Choudhary?

  You can start averag- and and not even looking at the movie aspect of this, right, like the the time lapse aspect of it. You can start averaging the same spot.

• 44:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 44:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and then get insane signal to noise.

• 44:48Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 44:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And then start seeing really faint stuff.

• 44:52Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 44:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 44:53Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 44:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And so and this this is it's only been a month and already we have like thousands of new asteroids, thousands of new galaxies.

• 45:02Lester Nare?

  This is incredible, I mean, this imagery is is unbelievable.

• 45:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's un- unbelievable and the amount.

• 45:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 45:08Krishna Choudhary?

  That we're getting, the sheer amount like, you know, it's doing it's doing a whole night sky. And then the other thing we gotta remember is like, you know, let's say the sun is here.

• 45:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, yeah, let's say the sun is here and the earth is over here.

• 45:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's in the southern hemisphere.

• 45:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 45:25Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's only gonna be able to see like this part of the sky in one night, right? And then as the earth rotates, it's gonna basically see all of this, all of this down here. So there's gonna be parts like near the equator that we're gonna have like a movie for like, we're we're gonna have all the photos for five months. And then we're not, cause it's gonna be on the wrong side. And then it'll be back. So then like, you know. We'll see like, but then there's parts near the the south pole that are just always gonna be visible. So we'll just have like a ten year full on movie time lapse.

• 45:58Lester Nare?

  Of the universe.

• 45:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Of like the universe in this in this like s- down here.

• 46:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 46:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause we'll, it'll always be nighttime down there.

• 46:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 46:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so that'll be really cool.

• 46:06Lester Nare?

  That's gonna be, I I I mean, the image like even already.

• 46:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Lester Nare?

  It this is.

• 46:11Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be so awesome dude.

• 46:12Lester Nare?

  This is incredible. I wanna end this story with this little bio snippet that the NSF put out on.

• 46:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Who was?

• 46:20Lester Nare?

  Vera Rubin.

• 46:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Lester Nare?

  Um, the Rubin Observatory is named in honor of Vera Rubin, a pioneering American astronomer. Whose observations provided convincing evidence of dark matter.

• 46:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Lester Nare?

  An invisible substance that makes up over eighty percent of all the matter in the universe. Rubin's work in the nineteen seventies showed that galaxies were rotating too fast to be held together by visible matter alone. Suggesting the presence of an unseen mass.

• 46:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Lester Nare?

  Her discovery reshaped our understanding of the universe. Dark matter is unlike any known type of matter and its true nature remains one of the greatest mysteries in science today. Inspiring generations of researchers and science lovers and one of the greatest observatories that humanity has ever.

• 47:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Ever created.

• 47:09Lester Nare?

  To date. Uh, and so in honor of Vera Rubin, a a woman in science.

• 47:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, she was snubbed for the Nobel Prize.

• 47:15Lester Nare?

  Which is incredible.

• 47:16Krishna Choudhary?

  She should've gotten the Nobel Prize. That, it's an incredible discovery. She did these on gal- ga- what what they're referring to is galaxy rotation curves.

• 47:23Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 47:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it was the first sort of real inkling that, okay, there's something real wrong. Like where, where is that? Where, why can't we see it? Basically, what she, it's a very simple, very simple observation, okay, that she was making, which is that like, stars that are like farther away from the galaxy center should be moving slower. Right? Jupiter moves way slower than Earth. Mercury moves really fast around the sun, because the closer you are, the stronger the gravity, and so the stronger the acceleration, which means you're gonna move faster. Okay, fine. What she noticed was the galaxy rotation curves, instead of doing this, instead of trailing off as you go farther out, they remain constant. So what does that mean? It means one of two things. Either Einstein is wrong.

• 48:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Unlikely.

• 48:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Or, there's a bunch of mass there that is contributing to this gravitational pull that we're not seeing.

• 48:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 48:17Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's where sort of the dark matter debate started.

• 48:20Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 48:21Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, is it dark matter, or is Einstein wrong? The Vera Rubin Observatory, which is named after her, one of the, one of the key like pillars of its creation is this idea of answering that question, okay? It's like, it's, you know, I mean, you saw those photos, right? Galaxies upon galaxies of stuff. What it's gonna be able to do is map out the entire universe from extremely large distances.

• 48:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 48:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And what we're looking for is, um, structure. Large scale structure. What that means is like, so it turns out the universe is not like completely isotropic. In that it's not completely the same everywhere.

• 49:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 49:00Krishna Choudhary?

  There's clumps of stuff. There's clumps of galaxies, and then there's giant voids that are like millions of galaxies big where there's nothing. Okay? Not, you know, you know what I mean, low density, high density. And so, if we can map out that structure of like where the high density is, that's, that's where the dark matter is, and then where the low density is, then we can start figuring out how much dark matter there is. And

• 49:29Krishna Choudhary?

  How that dark matter evolved from the beginning of evolution, we can start making mod- not evolution, from the beginning of the big bang, from the evolution of the universe, from the big bang until now, like how that dark matter evolved, how it shaped the creation of this large structure?

• 49:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 49:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And all this other kind of stuff, right? That's one of the things it's doing. The other thing it's doing is because it's like just going through galaxy after galaxy, it's gonna catch a lot of gravitational lensing.

• 49:53Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 49:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's gonna catch these like instances where the light is bending.

• 49:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 49:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Because of the mass in front of it.

• 49:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 49:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, once we have that, we can have a better estimate on how much mass there is.

• 50:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:03Krishna Choudhary?

  To bend that light, and then we can start discovering things about dark matter. The more data that we get, the more closely we can start scrutinizing stuff like Einstein's general relativity, which we sort of take for granted, but you know, we'd need something like thousands of galaxies. I think it might honestly be, somebody did the calculation, it's like on the order of millions of galaxies worth of data.

• 50:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:26Krishna Choudhary?

  To really start honing in on this question. And Vera Rubin.

• 50:30Lester Nare?

  It's gonna give us.

• 50:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Given that it's doing this.

• 50:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:32Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna be able to do that.

• 50:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna be, it's gonna be awesome.

• 50:35Lester Nare?

  Un- unbelievable. Um, I, I, we're gonna come back to this.

• 50:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh yeah, this, this thing is gonna be in, in our zeitgeist for the next ten years.

• 50:45Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:45Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna, it's gonna be finding crazy stuff, like, um, yeah, it's gonna be insane, like Ice Cube and LIGO, we've talked about Ice Cube and LIGO.

• 50:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:52Krishna Choudhary?

  On this podcast before.

• 50:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the only time, like Vera Rubin is, it's, it's on a mandate, right? It's doing this.

• 51:00Lester Nare?

  That's it.

• 51:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That's it. It's not gonna, you got something nice to see, go look somewhere else. Except for when Ice Cube or LIGO.

• 51:08Lester Nare?

  Detects.

• 51:08Krishna Choudhary?

  See something crazy.

• 51:09Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? If they see something crazy and Ice Cube is like, yo, there was a massive neutrino that just came out of there.

• 51:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Then Vera Rubin's gonna be like, alright, I'll take a break, point it there, and because of Vera Rubin's like big field of view, because like when, when stuff comes into Ice Cube. We kind of generally know the direction it came from. But it's not like other things where it's like, oh, you gotta go to that star, look a little bit left, look a little bit down, you're good to go. No, this, so Vera Rubin's got this giant field of view, it can just point and like start perusing that path of the sky. Waiting for the signal.

• 51:47Lester Nare?

  It doesn't have to be super, super specific, it can have a general region of the sky to look at, and because it's so high fidelity, i- it's gonna just get everything. Both where those neutrinos are coming from.

• 51:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and it might see like, a- and it'll have, so the neutrino probably came from like a massive supernova, or like, like some giant, you know. Quasar bursting or something like that, um, this thing can look, and it'll have the image from the previous night.

• 52:14Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 52:15Krishna Choudhary?

  So it'll just comple- compare immediately, be like, oh, that's different.

• 52:18Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, ah, yeah.

• 52:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And then it could tell all the other observatories, yo, look over there.

• 52:23Lester Nare?

  Yep, cuz it'll actually get the court, like, it'll have.

• 52:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Lester Nare?

  Basically the direction of like, oh, yeah, we, we have all this historical data from the Rubin Observatory. We, Ice Cube told us to look, something is different, and the different thing is right there.

• 52:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, like if we get, if we, if neutron stars.

• 52:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Create gravitational waves, LIGO's gonna find out. LIGO and CAGRA and Virgo, but you know, their resolution is also based on like. Whether the gravitational wave hit this thing first before this thing, right? Their only resolution of direction is like, the timing difference.

• 52:55Lester Nare?

  Between the two.

• 52:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Between the two, and so, and so they're just like, it's in this general direction. Vera Rubin can go and be like, okay, let's find it. Like, this is, this is, it's a long time coming, that's what I was saying, like in the Decadal Survey, like fifteen years ago, the astronomers came together and were like, we need something. Like, a large survey telescope.

• 53:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Whose only job.

• 53:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 53:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Is to survey the night sky, because we're tired of living in still pictures.

• 53:21Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 53:22Krishna Choudhary?

  We wanna, we wanna upgrade to movies.

• 53:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 53:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Now.

• 53:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 53:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and, and so we need one telescope that does exactly that.

• 53:28Lester Nare?

  That's actually a great analogy, we're moving from photography to videography in space. It's, it's a loose analogy, but.

• 53:34Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no, I mean, a- and so, actually, uh, it was, at first it was called the Large Syn- Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, lame. And then, and then, and then they renamed the observatory Vera Rubin Observatory. And then the, the program now, they kept the L S S T.

• 53:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And they, they called it now the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is sick.

• 53:57Lester Nare?

  That's, that, that is, I love that. Shout, shout out to the acronym creators.

• 54:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, they loved their acronym so much, they kept it, but they just like upgraded like what it stood for. It's a great, it's a great story. I mean, I'm so glad this thing is up. You can go see it, it's, it's up and running.

• 54:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah, like you can go right now to nsf.gov and look at the Rubin Observatory page and literally see the, the, the Field of View Explorer of, right now, they have their first look, first images on there from January twenty third. One day, like, I can't, you guys have to go look at this. The amount of stuff.

• 54:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Lester Nare?

  That it captured in one day is crazy.

• 54:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's the first time the humans have ever seen that.

• 54:38Lester Nare?

  It's crazy.

• 54:39Krishna Choudhary?

  A lot of that stuff, right? There's also another spot, I don't know if you can find it, but like there's an asteroid like explorer, where they map out like all the asteroids that Vera Rubin has seen.

• 54:49Lester Nare?

  That's incre- and, and the.

• 54:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you can just go look, I mean, it's, it's really awesome, like it's, these are your taxpayer dollars at work.

• 54:57Lester Nare?

  You know what it'll be.

• 54:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's, it's an incredible gift.

• 55:00Lester Nare?

  It is. I can't wait for, there's this, um, there's this game, video game, I think it's called Star Citizen. Um, that is a procedurally generated universe, but it's like highly, you know.

• 55:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh dude, I think I've heard about this, yeah.

• 55:13Lester Nare?

  It's super high fidelity and like you travel at real space time, like you know, real, it's, it's a, equivalent to like the actual traveling distances and stuff like that, modified a little bit. But what, what I would love to eventually see is someone take this and then replicate a three D, explorable three D environment.

• 55:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Lester Nare?

  With this as the backing data that.

• 55:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, cause now we have, we'll have five million asteroids.

• 55:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 55:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 55:37Lester Nare?

  And they'll be cool to sort of, anyway.

• 55:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And they'll be like real.

• 55:39Lester Nare?

  Right. Right.

• 55:40Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, with names and shit.

• 55:42Lester Nare?

  Oh god, I wanna name one, let's name one the, uh, Krishna Lester asteroid.

• 55:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the first principles asteroid.

• 55:48Lester Nare?

  The first, F P P A.

• 55:52Lester Nare?

  Um, an amazing story about the brilliance again, a little American exceptionalism in there. We'll give the uh, we'll give the old badge a nice kiss.

• 56:00Krishna Choudhary?

  No, we deserve it. That, that's dope.

• 56:02Lester Nare?

  That, this is, this was, this was a good one. This is a good one. We're gonna go again like we normally do, uh, or regularly end up doing from very, very large and very, very far to very, very small and very, very close.

• 56:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Very, very small now, yep.

• 56:15Lester Nare?

  Uh, with our next story out of the University of Zurich, uh, which is headlined AI meets CRISPR for precise gene editing. And the byline is a research team headed by the University of Zurich has developed a powerful new method to precisely edit DNA by combining cutting-edge genetic engineering with artificial intelligence. And the paper was recently published in Nature Biotechnology.

• 56:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Lester Nare?

  So, we, we've talked about CRISPR before. I think most viewers who have come across this video will be relatively familiar with what CRISPR is. So maybe we won't do a deep dive on the basics.

• 56:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Lester Nare?

  But we can touch on what is the, the insider improvement here that has allowed them to increase that precision of what has been a revolutionary discovery with the underlying CRISPR, uh, sort of, uh, work that has already been done.

• 57:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. Yeah. So CRISPR, it's, it's kind of an old technology now.

• 57:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, it's almost 10 years old and, and, okay, CRISPR, okay? You guys happy? You know, you know, it's a, like, I've, I've been getting all this shit.

• 57:24Lester Nare?

  That's true.

• 57:24Krishna Choudhary?

  From, from, from these TikTok comments.

• 57:26Lester Nare?

  It, it is spelled, you know, with, it was CRIS dash, oh, it's an acronym.

• 57:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's an acronym. It's, it's an acronym that stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. It's, it's not a real word. I can say it however I want.

• 57:41Krishna Choudhary?

  But I, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say CRISPR now.

• 57:43Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, it's.

• 57:44Krishna Choudhary?

  I got bullied into it.

• 57:46Lester Nare?

  The peer pressure worked.

• 57:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the peer pressure works, dude. Um, so CRISPR, it's pretty old technology now, almost 10 years old. Uh, maybe a little bit more. Um, basic idea, you get to cut DNA wherever you want. In, in like the, the spot that you want. Um, before, you could only cut DNA if you looked at certain base pairs and then recognize those, um, with like restriction enzymes. Now you've got a custom restriction enzyme that you can be like, okay, I want you to look for ATCGGA. And then wherever that is, find it and cut it. That's what CRISPR can do. CRISPR only cuts. And. Once it's cuts. Other stuff comes in to repair. Okay? And.

• 58:30Krishna Choudhary?

  So far, it's just been a sort of cut and hope. Okay, you cut it at the spot. And you hope that whatever machinery is in the cell already is gonna come and repair this DNA. And there's not gonna be any, anything weird that happens. Of course, that's not always gonna be the case. Of course, you're gonna get lucky, most of the time you're gonna get lucky if it's a healthy cell. But in certain situations, it's not gonna go well. Right, there's gonna be um, these repair mechanisms, what they're gonna do is sometimes delete. A nucleotide or two, and then your whole gene is completely wrecked.

• 59:04Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 59:06Krishna Choudhary?

  You might be working with something called um. Like non-proliferating cells, so cells that don't actually cell divide, like your neurons. Skin cells cell divide, most of the, most of the cells in your body, muscle cells obviously cell divide. Your neurons do not cell divide. So they don't have half the machinery necessary for DNA repair. That a dividing cell would have. Dividing cells, they're, they're constantly like replicating DNA, checking to make sure the DNA is correct and all this stuff. But in your neurons, it's like, you don't need that. This neuron is gonna live until you die. And it's not gonna make anymore. So for those cells, if we wanna use CRISPR and these new genetic technologies.

• 59:49Krishna Choudhary?

  We're gonna need a more robust way to control for the repair. After.

• 59:56Lester Nare?

  The cut.

• 59:57Krishna Choudhary?

  The cut.

• 59:58Lester Nare?

  No more cut and hope.

• 59:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no more cut and hope, we wanna cut and then engineer.

• 1:00:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:00:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, the cutting was an engineer, before it was like the cutting was a hope too. And then we upgraded, it's like, okay, now we can engineer the cut. Now, this is the, this is like sort of going towards engineering the repair. Okay, they made this AI called Pythia.

• 1:00:18Krishna Choudhary?

  I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Okay, whatever. It's it's um it's named after the oracle at the uh temple of Apollo in Delphi.

• 1:00:26Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:00:26Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, um, have you seen three hundred?

• 1:00:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Remember when he goes to the oracle and he's like, he's like, should I uh should I go to war and then like he's like now you're gonna lose? Or something like that. But turns out he was bribed by the Persians.

• 1:00:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:00:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Anyways, the oracle of Delphi is supposed to tell the future.

• 1:00:43Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:00:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And predict the future. So this thing is predicting how the repair is going to go.

• 1:00:49Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 1:00:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Because rip the repair mechanisms in cells is extremely complicated.

• 1:00:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:58Krishna Choudhary?

  But at the end of the day, there is a hidden pattern.

• 1:01:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and that's what AI is all about.

• 1:01:03Lester Nare?

  Like we just talked about.

• 1:01:03Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gotta be, yes, it's gotta be a complicated set of data, but there has to be some hidden pattern and AI is really good at picking out those those hidden patterns. The the pattern could be based on the cellular environment. It could be based on like where along the genome. That this cut is be that you we need this cut to happen. Or like how the chromatin, which is like this, the the proteins that wrap the DNA around, how that stuff works, right? So all of those things are we go into this this AI and what comes out is a way to predict how the repair is gonna go.

• 1:01:39Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Where we should even do the cut so that the repair is best.

• 1:01:43Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 1:01:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And like minimal amount of work.

• 1:01:46Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And the other cool thing is they've made this kind of like um glue, this repair glue. What it does is it's it's it's a custom piece of DNA that guides the cells DNA repair mechanisms.

• 1:01:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Krishna Choudhary?

  To come and do it right.

• 1:01:59Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:00Krishna Choudhary?

  So we're not just like hoping.

• 1:02:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah, it's not hoping anymore.

• 1:02:02Krishna Choudhary?

  It's now, it's like, it's like, nope, it's over here. It's like a runway.

• 1:02:05Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:02:05Krishna Choudhary?

  For the the the enzymes to like come in and be like, oh, okay, cool. I'm gonna I'm gonna do this repair over here. It's it's it's it's gonna be really nice. There's gonna be no more scars. That's what we call them. Like when when when CRISPR like makes a cut and then like some random crap happens, it's called a a scar in your gene. And it's it's not a good thing, right? It'll it might even kill the the whole project itself.

• 1:02:29Lester Nare?

  Uh this makes me think of the scene in Foundation. If there's any Foundation fans out there, the Apple TV show.

• 1:02:35Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a great, yeah.

• 1:02:36Lester Nare?

  Isaac Asimov uh books. Um there's a there's spoiler alert. Uh the one.

• 1:02:43Lester Nare?

  One of the people that serves the the main, you know, royal family is this like sentient robot. And anytime she gets injured, it's just the the healing kind of happens in real time. And just the visual of that makes me think of this, this, this kind of, this new glue, the the ability to basically control.

• 1:03:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, at a molecular level.

• 1:03:05Lester Nare?

  At a molecular level, uh, which is in- incredible.

• 1:03:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Lester Nare?

  In and of itself. In its own right. And and so it's, uh, what we're sort of expanding the toolkit for gene editing to not just be able to, we kind of, we have the map of the, like, we know what different aspects of our DNA do. So we can be like, oh, like, if we were to cut here, certain outcomes are gonna happen. We then created the tool to do the cut. And now we are beginning to develop a a sort of planning tool with the AI, AI system that helps us simulate what are the outcomes gonna be to a cut? And how the body will respond as one aspect. But as a second act aspect, we've also created some helpers to guide that process in addition to being able to sort of look at how that process is gonna transpire.

• 1:03:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Lester Nare?

  Um, so it's it's not only a planning, uh, benefit, but there's also an execution.

• 1:04:01Krishna Choudhary?

  There's, yeah, there's a part of this that is execution itself at the molecular level.

• 1:04:04Lester Nare?

  Which which is, and so now when you can cut and heal and have some level of efficacy.

• 1:04:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm. In the entire top down process.

• 1:04:13Lester Nare?

  In the entire top down process.

• 1:04:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:15Lester Nare?

  Uh, fro- from identification to extraction to repair. Um, obviously, my mind goes to the implications be be, you can now have more consistency in expected outcome to changes made by CRISPR.

• 1:04:33Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly the point, yeah.

• 1:04:35Lester Nare?

  Which obviously makes it more viable as a therapeutic tool or whatever you wanna call it for any number of of reasons.

• 1:04:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Now we can, now we can actually start like really targeting and in in a, in a safe way.

• 1:04:47Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It it wasn't safe before. CRISPR is, I mean, it's. It it obviously has its applications, but if we wanna go into like real clinical therapies.

• 1:04:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Where we're we're we're starting to like now go into trials, like human trials and things like that. We needed this kind of mechanism.

• 1:05:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:06Krishna Choudhary?

  That would control for the aftermath of that DNA cut.

• 1:05:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:05:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:05:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:05:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Not just, because you know, biology, if you if you just do one part, it's biology is a nested. Somebody, somebody in molecular biology once told me biology is nested for loops and if statements. Okay? And you don't know where there's a random break. That's just written, that'll just like crash your whole program.

• 1:05:31Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And so you need to be extremely careful when you start editing this program.

• 1:05:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:05:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? To make sure you like, don't get to that breakpoint.

• 1:05:40Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:05:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so this is extremely important for that reason. It's it's it's paving the way to these targeted gene therapies.

• 1:05:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:49Krishna Choudhary?

  It's paving the way for clinical application. We need it to be safe and this this is, this is definitely like on the road to that, right?

• 1:05:57Lester Nare?

  At least in the US, we can't speak for other massive nation states and their.

• 1:06:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, of course, of course.

• 1:06:04Lester Nare?

  Where the ethical line is.

• 1:06:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:06Lester Nare?

  Start implementing this in humans.

• 1:06:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Lester Nare?

  Uh, but here in the US.

• 1:06:09Krishna Choudhary?

  In this country.

• 1:06:11Lester Nare?

  Where we make big, beautiful stuff.

• 1:06:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Although this was in Zurich, but whatever.

• 1:06:19Lester Nare?

  Well, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're good at borrowing. And we'll make it better, but thi- this is, this is, I think, a really important story though, because. Science always feels to me like, you know, you're you're sort of, it's you're playing with God, right? Like, like you're starting, we're starting to get to a place where we're sufficiently advanced. Um, in what we can, in what we can manipulate and what we can engineer.

• 1:06:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's getting insane.

• 1:06:41Lester Nare?

  It it, we're getting into weird.

• 1:06:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Lester Nare?

  Into sort of weird territory. Um, because again, it's it's, the tool scales, like, once it exists and it gets to that level of efficiency and efficacy. It can be applied to a number of different use cases. This is not like just for X or Y. It's like it is a fundamental concept.

• 1:07:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, actually, on that note, on that note, one of the, so they tested it on three working models. Um, human cell cultures.

• 1:07:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:07:12Krishna Choudhary?

  It worked. So this is in the Petri dish. We we grow human cells. Um, on the tropical frog, which is a model organism, um, I I think it's called Xenopus. Yeah, it's the Xenopus frog. Um, it's a model organism that's used for generational studies.

• 1:07:28Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:07:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so they messed around with the DNA here and then the kids and and it was passed down and I was like, okay, everything's good there.

• 1:07:36Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:07:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, so it's like called Germline Studies.

• 1:07:39Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and then it also worked on non-dividing adult mouse neurons. And from the brain.

• 1:07:45Lester Nare?

  Wow.

• 1:07:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is this thing where like, you know, these these cells don't have that.

• 1:07:49Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:07:49Krishna Choudhary?

  As robust of a DNA repair mechanism.

• 1:07:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:53Krishna Choudhary?

  As cells that do divide and will need that on a day to day. And it worked in those cells as well. So now you can start targeting therapies like in neurodegenerative diseases.

• 1:08:05Lester Nare?

  Which would be an unbelie-.

• 1:08:07Krishna Choudhary?

  That would be unbelievable.

• 1:08:08Lester Nare?

  It would be unbelievable.

• 1:08:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like this is this.

• 1:08:11Lester Nare?

  That's actually a really important small note.

• 1:08:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Lester Nare?

  That it does work on those non non-dividing neuro- uh, neuron cells.

• 1:08:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Like this, the the sort of like guide, this this, you know, scar edit that it does. Where it's like guiding whatever the DNA repair mech- because there's some, obviously. Every every cell has some, it's just not as robust.

• 1:08:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:27Krishna Choudhary?

  But like with this guide, even that can now can now can now do the work.

• 1:08:34Lester Nare?

  That is fascinating.

• 1:08:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Lester Nare?

  Um, really, really important story.

• 1:08:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Just came out.

• 1:08:40Lester Nare?

  Just this is, uh, we're looking at, uh, August twelfth, uh, literally, I mean, today.

• 1:08:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Today.

• 1:08:45Lester Nare?

  It came out today.

• 1:08:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Came out today.

• 1:08:47Lester Nare?

  Um, an unbelievable story that's going to have major implications. Um, it's funny, being a biotech continues to be super fascinating to me. And while.

• 1:09:01Lester Nare?

  Jurassic Park did involve manipulating amphibian DNA.

• 1:09:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Lester Nare?

  In order to bring back the dinosaurs. Our final story of the day is not quite as salacious.

• 1:09:13Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:09:14Lester Nare?

  Um, but interesting nonetheless.

• 1:09:16Krishna Choudhary?

  I think it's cute.

• 1:09:17Lester Nare?

  Um, and, and the story headline here is rare T. rex blood cells found in fossils. Show how dinosaurs healed injuries. The byline, uh, blood, uh, blood vessel structures found preserved in a famous T. rex fossil. Are helping scientists understand how dinosaurs healed from injuries. So there's no InGen involved. There's no Isla Sorna, Isla Nublar.

• 1:09:45Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:09:45Lester Nare?

  We're not sending mercenaries in there.

• 1:09:46Krishna Choudhary?

  There's not, there's not even any, um, dinosaur DNA.

• 1:09:49Lester Nare?

  No dinosaur DNA. This is blood vessels.

• 1:09:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Lester Nare?

  And so, so help, help me understand, it looks like this, uh, study was published in Scientific Reports. Um, from this well-known T. rex, uh, that was unearthed in Saskatchewan, Canada in the nineteen nineties.

• 1:10:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. Um, I liked this story because I really like dinosaurs.

• 1:10:10Lester Nare?

  You and me both.

• 1:10:11Krishna Choudhary?

  One, I really like dinosaurs and I really like physics, particle physics. And this is a combination of dinosaurs and particle physics.

• 1:10:18Lester Nare?

  We'll take it.

• 1:10:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Okay, uh, let's start with the dinosaur.

• 1:10:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:10:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, his name is Scotty. He's the largest T. rex ever found. He was found in, um, Saskatchewan, um, Canada in the nineteen nineties. He's named Scotty because once they found him, the paleontologists opened a bottle of Scotch. To celebrate that they had found, um, this T. rex.

• 1:10:43Lester Nare?

  I thought they were gonna name him Scotty because he doesn't know.

• 1:10:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Don't tell him. Um, he probably died sixty-six million years ago.

• 1:10:51Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:10:51Krishna Choudhary?

  So just before the great mass extinction. Um, late Cretaceous era. He was probably about twenty thousand pounds, lived until his thirties, which is pretty old for a T. rex. Um, this guy had a crazy life back sixty-five million years ago, sixty-six million years ago. There's, um, like, all of his bones have like scar tissue, which means he got in a lot of fights.

• 1:11:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, he was pretty big, so you know, he's probably like one of the alphas.

• 1:11:17Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:11:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Lot of injuries. Um, in twenty nineteen, they were doing scans of his bones and they found an anomaly in his ribs. Okay. Okay, where it seemed that something like angiogenesis had happened. Do you know what angiogenesis is? It's um, it's basically the formation of new blood vessels during healing. So if we break a bone or something like that and we're like trying to heal, new blood vessels will form in that spot to bring the repair mechanisms to that spot to create new bone and things like that. So it seems that like in this part of the ribs, maybe fractured a rib and then it healed. Yep. And there was scar tissue from new blood vessels forming within that rib. Um, and that's very interesting.

• 1:12:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Because in the fossil record, it's incredibly difficult to preserve soft tissue. Right. Okay, like the stuff that gets preserved are like shells, teeth and bone. Why? Because they have like these like higher elements, right? They've got like calcium, basically. And calcium is easy to preserve because it doesn't really decompose. The calcium just sort of stays there. And it becomes part of the fossil and then that's it. With soft tissue, you can have like bacteria, fungus, whatnot eating you up. Yep. And so you're not gonna get it. Um, but this was, this was blood, blood vessels. And because the blood vessels have a high bit of iron,

• 1:12:47Krishna Choudhary?

  there's a chance that this got preserved because of that iron. Oh, because of the high level. Because the high level of iron in there. Now, the question is, why, why haven't we seen this kind of stuff before? Well, it was sort of just assumed that blood vessels would not be preserved because they were soft tissue. But this has sort of been encased inside of a bone, right? So it's this rare glimpse into the vasculature of a T-Rex, which I think is like incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so now the question is, this stuff is inside bone, how do we get to it? This is where the particle physics comes in, okay? So this group at um, the University of Regina in Canada,

• 1:13:26Krishna Choudhary?

  they used particle physics to look inside the bone and identify the blood vessels, identify like the kinds of compounds in the fossil. It was through particle physics. It's incredible. So they, I mean, basically what they want to do is they want to X-ray this thing. But you can't use like lab-grade X-rays because X-rays are too dim and this fossil is huge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, it's not gonna like go through that bone. So what they did was they got a Synchrotron from the Canada Light Source, also in Saskatchewan. That Synchrotron is used for like all sorts of stuff, like you know, if you wanna send, if you wanna send like electronics into space, you wanna see that it can handle space weather.

• 1:14:10Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Like space radiation. So you stick it in there, you blow it up, and then see if the electronics last. So, I don't know, I don't know what it must have looked been like when they got a email from like the museum being like, "We wanna, we wanna put a T-Rex bone." And they're like, "What are you, what are you talking about?"

• 1:14:28Krishna Choudhary?

  But yeah, they got this Synchrotron. A Synchrotron is basically, um, it's like a, a way to accelerate electrons really fast. Round and round in a circle, extremely fast with magnets, alternating magnets. Um, and then what you do is when the electron accelerates because of electromagnetism, there's a charged particle accelerating, so it's gonna give off radiation.

• 1:14:50Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:14:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And that radiation is in the X-ray. It can actually be in like a, in very broad range, but you can tune it extremely precisely by tuning the way in which these electrons, the speed and the curvature of the path of the electrons.

• 1:15:05Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:15:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So, this particle detector is really nice because you get like sort of monochromatic X-rays.

• 1:15:13Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:15:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Mono, like the same color in some sense, right? It's the same frequency of light, and it's an incredibly powerful beam. So the first thing they did was they just put it there, they X-rayed it, then you rotate the fossil, X-ray it again, rotate the fossil, X-ray it again. You got two D projections each time, and then with a sophisticated computer algorithm, you put it together and you can reconstruct the, the 3D structure. And you can see inside because this X-ray beam is so powerful.

• 1:15:39Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:15:40Krishna Choudhary?

  That you can actually see inside, and you can actually start like looking at T-Rex blood vessels.

• 1:15:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is pretty cool.

• 1:15:46Lester Nare?

  That's very cool.

• 1:15:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, we're, we're seeing blood vessels from an engineery that happened 66 million years ago, using like electrons and X-rays. It's, I mean, it's a-

• 1:15:56Lester Nare?

  Clever.

• 1:15:57Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a great story.

• 1:15:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah, no, very, very clever.

• 1:15:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Lester Nare?

  Dr. Hammond, uh, the founder and creator of Jurassic Park would be very proud.

• 1:16:04Krishna Choudhary?

  You'd be very proud, yeah, yeah. It'd be like, this is, this is good old fashioned science, you know? Um, and- The other thing that they can do is they can, they can use the x-rays to talk about like x-ray fluorescence. And get into like, what are the compounds that are in there?

• 1:16:20Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:16:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because what you can do is you can tune an x-ray to like, start kicking out, um, whatever, like, let's say there's like some atoms in there, like heavy atoms. You can kick out an electron, it's in its lower shell, and then now you've created a hole in its lower shell. In order to fill that, the atom borrows an electron from the very top and sticks it in there. Now that's gonna release an x-ray.

• 1:16:42Lester Nare?

  Mmm.

• 1:16:42Krishna Choudhary?

  And the, the, the color, or the, the frequency of that x-ray is gonna tell you what kind of element did that. Right? And then from that, you can tell the ratios of the elements.

• 1:16:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:16:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And from that, you can then tell stuff about the fossilization.

• 1:16:56Lester Nare?

  Process.

• 1:16:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Of how exactly this thing got preserved. Because if we can tell that, then when we find new dinosaur bones, right? We can like, be more careful about like, not just like, you know, manhandling it in some way that like destroys this kind of evidence that we could be looking for later.

• 1:17:13Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes, the, the, this is, so there's almost this bumper cars thing where by shooting the x-rays in, we dislodge an electron. And we use that detection of that dislodged electron to understand the underlying chemical composition that makes up.

• 1:17:30Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:17:31Lester Nare?

  What's in, what's in the blood vessels, which I'm assuming is how we understood that it's had high iron.

• 1:17:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and it had a high iron, we also detected calcium, we detected iron and manganese in the blood vessels.

• 1:17:44Lester Nare?

  Mmm.

• 1:17:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, like just, really, really cool stuff, like stuff that we could never have done without this marriage of particle physics and paleontology.

• 1:17:53Lester Nare?

  I was, I was gonna say, this is kind of like a crossover episode.

• 1:17:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Lester Nare?

  Cause I imagine it's not necessarily super frequent that we are utilizing this methodology.

• 1:18:01Krishna Choudhary?

  No, but now it certainly is gonna be used a lot more, you know? And so, I thi- I think, I think it's a really cool story about how we can, we can take techniques that we use for one thing. And then in a completely random scenario, you know, discover stuff about dinosaurs.

• 1:18:16Lester Nare?

  Who said science wasn't created?

• 1:18:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, I thought that was really cool.

• 1:18:20Lester Nare?

  This is really, I, I, as you know, huge Jurassic Park fan. The new one with Scarlett Johansson and Marsha Ali.

• 1:18:27Krishna Choudhary?

  I haven't watched it, I probably will.

• 1:18:28Lester Nare?

  It was, I saw it in theaters.

• 1:18:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:31Lester Nare?

  I love Jurassic Park, it was okay.

• 1:18:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:18:35Lester Nare?

  It was okay. The family was a little annoying, but um, I.

• 1:18:38Krishna Choudhary?

  I love, I love the original Jurassic Parks. The new ones I've just.

• 1:18:41Lester Nare?

  It's, the original's classic. I think Lost World is underrated.

• 1:18:45Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the second one, right? That's an amazing one.

• 1:18:47Lester Nare?

  I think that that one's underrated, but fascinating story. And we're gonna wrap up here uh, with a, a special little mystery box. Which uh, means that one of us doesn't know what the story is. And this is not really a story. It's just the headline.

• 1:19:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:19:02Lester Nare?

  And I'm bringing this up because of our initial first story around Three Eye Atlas, the third interstellar object we've detected. And I thought this was hilarious because uh, I saw this come up on my TikTok. As people making memes about it, and I didn't really understand what was going on.

• 1:19:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:19:21Lester Nare?

  And so the, the headline of the story is NASA scientist. Says he saw seven foot tall, black skin raced aliens. That looked like African Americans stepping out of a mile long ship. So the byline, a former NASA scientist is making explosive claims about an alien encounter at an air force base. He describes a mile long ship landing and hundreds of beings getting off. Who were a black race, looked like African Americans. African Americans. Where's my, there's my African American. He's on a ship. He came from outer space.

• 1:20:05Lester Nare?

  And were around seven feet tall. He said they had an arrogant look. Of conquerors that had never been conquered.

• 1:20:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh my god.

• 1:20:14Lester Nare?

  So the only reason I brought this up is the memes are fantastic.

• 1:20:18Krishna Choudhary?

  I gotta see these memes. You gotta forward them.

• 1:20:20Lester Nare?

  So it's, you're now basically having a bunch of black people like me, right? Acting as if the. The African American aliens are landing and they're usually playing loud music. The sub is just going crazy. The guy in a repair shop like be like, "Come here, come here." You just hear this booming subwoofer music in the background. It's not a real story.

• 1:20:42Krishna Choudhary?

  That's so funny.

• 1:20:43Lester Nare?

  It's the memes are fantastic. Please keep them coming. If you see any of them and you want to send them to me, send them to me. It makes me laugh every time.

• 1:20:54Lester Nare?

  Obviously, uh, this is not an official NASA position.

• 1:20:58Krishna Choudhary?

  No, of course not.

• 1:20:59Lester Nare?

  So NASA did not say that.

• 1:21:00Krishna Choudhary?

  If it was white people though, they'd be like, "Oh, maybe."

• 1:21:02Lester Nare?

  So, so this, the, the, the joke is this is why we can't get disclosure about UFOs.

• 1:21:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's because it's.

• 1:21:08Lester Nare?

  All the aliens are black.

• 1:21:09Krishna Choudhary?

  It's all the aliens are black.

• 1:21:11Lester Nare?

  Look, everybody, we can't get disclosure. The aliens are black. Um, I hate to break it to you. Uh, this, another fantastic episode. Interstellar Objects, the Verarubin Observatory. Another follow-up on CRISPR, which continues to just have updates constantly. Uh, and a little fun with our T-Rex blood vessels and the intersection of paleontology and particle physics.

• 1:21:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:21:37Lester Nare?

  Uh, with this, we will end another fantastic episode of From First Principles. I am your host, Lester Nare, joined again as always by my co-host, fellow Princeton Tiger, and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We'll see you guys next week.