Ant Scans, Lunar Chickpeas, Hidden Galaxies & Superconductivity (EP 40)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this rundown episode covers four new science stories at a high level: a huge new 3D ant imaging database built with synchrotron X-ray microtomography, a lunar agriculture experiment that grew chickpeas in simulated moon soil using fungi and worm waste, AI-assisted discovery of strange objects in the Hubble archive, and a new programmatic roadmap for room-temperature superconductivity. There is also another round of Are You Smarter Than a Scientist? in the middle. Summary Particle accelerators meet biodiversity — researchers built a massive high-resolution ant imaging resource, covering nearly 800 species and thousands of specimens, with AI-assisted 3D reconstruction. Moon farming gets weird — chickpeas were grown in lunar regolith simulant with help from mycorrhizal fungi and worm-derived compost, a first step toward sustainable off-world agriculture. AI found hidden anomalies in Hubble’s archive — AnomalyMatch sifted through roughly 100 million source cutouts in just days and surfaced new candidate lenses, mergers, and other rare objects. The superconductivity long game — a new PNAS perspective argues that room-temperature superconductivity is not ruled out by physics, and calls for a coordinated push to get there. Support the show Donate: FFPod.com/donate Follow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook Show Notes High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity — Nature Methods Bioremediation of lunar regolith simulant through mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbioses enables chickpea to seed — Scientific Reports Identifying astrophysical anomalies in 99.6 million source cutouts from the Hubble legacy archive using AnomalyMatch — Astronomy & Astrophysics The path to room-temperature superconductivity: A programmatic approach — PNAS

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

• 0:00Krishna Choudhary?

  They identified 1,300 objects that have an odd appearance, right? And more than 800 of these objects have never been identified in scientific literature before.

• 0:10Lester Nare?

  The secret to farming on the moon is worm poop and fungus.

• 0:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 0:14Lester Nare?

  Quite exactly what NASA put in the brochure, however, could be the future of a permanent lunar presence.

• 0:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, that could transform our society more than I think any other technology that I can really think of.

• 0:28Lester Nare?

  Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. This is a rundown episode. We will be covering four stories at a high level. If you're interested in our deep dives, check out the previous episodes from this week. We may even, in fact, have another round of Are You Smarter Than a Scientist? So in this week's rundown, first of the four stories, 3D scanning of ants, thousands of ants with a particle accelerator, published in Nature Methods, fascinating story. We're following that up with growing chickpeas on the moon

• 1:11Lester Nare?

  with fungus and worm poop, the good stuff. Scientific Reports brings us that one. We will follow that up with some discoveries from the Hubble Archive and that Hubble Archive discovery of cosmic hidden anomalies. But we used AI to discover them. That was in astronomy and astrophysics. And we will end with an LK99 throwback about the state of room temperature superconductivity, where we may have a roadmap that was published in PNAS. We are going to learn about the science from the ground up today because this is from First Principles.

• 2:02Lester Nare?

  So for our first story, we are going to be talking about ants, like the movie, the Pixar movie. 3D scanning of thousands of ants with a particle accelerator, a team led by researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, used a psychotron particle accelerator to create detailed 3D micro CT scans. I've gotten a couple of CT scans, but not a micro one, of a 2100 ant farm colony with nearly 800 species. And this was published in Nature Methods, because the method is what is interesting here.

• 2:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. So for the longest time, if we want to find, if we want to make like a 3D version of these really tiny insects, and we want to do it to super, super high resolution, you use something called a micro CT scanner. This thing is going to send out X-rays, and then those X-rays are going to scan and allow the scientists to examine like the physical structure, the stuff inside, without actually like destroying the specimen. Each of these scans takes about 10 hours for a single specimen. So it's not very high throughput, right? And we want to be able to do a lot in parallel. And so that's what these researchers did. They employed the Carlsberg Institute of Technology,

• 3:22Krishna Choudhary?

  which has a giant synchotron particle accelerator, X-ray imaging. It's also got robotics. It's also got artificial intelligence. And what they're able to do is generate interactive digital reconstructions of 800 ant species. It's pretty incredible. If we, if we look at the headline, right? And if we look at this animation, look at the detail that we're getting this ant.

• 3:47Lester Nare?

  This is, this is crazy.

• 3:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. This is at micron resolution of an ant, right? And

• 3:55Krishna Choudhary?

  This is rendered using AI because a lot of times we get little slices when we do a CT scan, we get like little slices or like different sort of configurations of what the ant is in, depending on the specimen, but you can use AI now to reconstruct that 3D version of the ant. It's it's really quite amazing with that setup. They've scanned 2,000 species, sorry, 2,000 specimens in a single week, 800 different ant species. The effort is called AntScan. They've got a free public website called antscan.info and it's kind of like a Google Maps for ant anatomy. The data is also synchronized with genome sequencing projects.

• 4:35Lester Nare?

  That's really cool.

• 4:35Krishna Choudhary?

  So you've got 585 of those scans linking to the genomic data of about 186 different species. I think it's a really cool application of particle physics and like particle accelerators that we don't really think about. It reminds me of a very old story that we did on this podcast about the T-Rex bone.

• 4:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Remember that?

• 4:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Where it was like they found blood clotting in a T-Rex bone and showed that, you know, the T-Rex was capable of rapidly healing its bones after some kind of, you know, I think it was a fight with another T-Rex probably, but it's just, it's a really cool application of particle accelerators that doesn't have anything to do with fundamental physics. It's just leveraging it as a tool to do very high resolution 3D imaging of biological specimens.

• 5:29Lester Nare?

  Which if you asked me before, I, you know, we did the original T-Rex story.

• 5:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Lester Nare?

  Which my reaction was like, this is unbelievable because we're sort of repurposing this very expensive, large scale device.

• 5:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Lester Nare?

  To become multi-purpose beyond its sort of initial mission or context.

• 5:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and the scans are like so detailed that they can be used for further training of machine learning systems to recognize ants in the field. For example, you know, I'm out in the field, I get some specimen, now I have a pre-trained network, a machine learning model that is trained using this really high fidelity, really high resolution data, and it can immediately tell me what kind of species it is, or at least what species it is most related to, if it's a new species, right? It's also something that can be used for like if Disney or somebody wants to make What is it called? The visual effects?

• 6:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Like with like a giant ant. You know, remember that that one movie where like it's like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids?

• 6:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 6:32Krishna Choudhary?

  You want to make like a, you know, a giant ant visual effect for that. Now you can be really, really biologically accurate.

• 6:39Lester Nare?

  So if you want to be as precise as Interstellar was in their replication of the physics of a black hole.

• 6:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Lester Nare?

  And the amount of science that went into creating so. Now particle accelerators can give us animated 3D ants that are giant at very high fidelity.

• 6:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:59Lester Nare?

  It kind of is a little bit, the example you just brought up, sounds a little bit like a Pokédex. You can tell if it's a caterpie.

• 7:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Lester Nare?

  Or a beedrill, or a wheedle.

• 7:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Lester Nare?

  Or any of these butterfree. I'm trying to flex my Pokemon knowledge.

• 7:12Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't know any of the, I just know Pikachu. And Charizard.

• 7:16Lester Nare?

  Charizard, classic, classic. Always interesting to see the intersection of different disciplines.

• 7:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Lester Nare?

  And how, again, past work can inform new work. And so this was again, a method story.

• 7:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Lester Nare?

  Fascinating and published in Nature Methods. We have this coming out of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. And I'll let you, you had the good pronunciation on the second institute.

• 7:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh yeah, that's the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. And Okinawa Institute of Technology of Science and Technology, OIST, is what we used to call it. I actually did a summer workshop there for like computational neuroscience.

• 7:54Lester Nare?

  That's so sick.

• 7:54Krishna Choudhary?

  It's an amazing like place.

• 7:57Lester Nare?

  That's amazing.

• 7:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's on a hill in Okinawa in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Beautiful, beautiful spot. A lot of bugs, I have to say.

• 8:05Lester Nare?

  A lot of bugs.

• 8:05Krishna Choudhary?

  A lot of bugs, but you know, it's a tropical island.

• 8:08Lester Nare?

  And you know what does not have bugs? This podcast. And if you've been listening or watching, or if you're a new listener or a new watcher, we're grateful for you joining us today to learn more about the universe around us. A like, a comment, a share, a follow on any of the platforms helps us reach more curious people and helps us continue to do this podcast and deliver the best science podcast on the planet, in our opinion, every week, day in and day out. And we're going to now transition into our second story. Which is about growing chickpeas on the moon. Now, we are from California, but this story comes out of Texas.

• 8:48Lester Nare?

  Not only just out of Texas, but from researchers at UT at Austin and Texas A&M, published in Scientific Reports, where they demonstrated that they can successfully grow and produce seeds in soil that is very similar to the soil that we know exists on the moon. And if we ever want to expand the human experience beyond our local Gaia on planet Earth, being able to do agriculture in space is valuable. And it seems like we may have an interesting finding in this recent paper.

• 9:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 9:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Trying to establish a permanent presence on the moon will require probably, you know, doing some form of agriculture there. Light is pretty easy to come by, but soil is pretty hard to come by because moon regolith, which is the name for lunar soil, is very, very different from Earth soil. Earth soil has an entire ecosystem inside, right? There's bacteria, there's fungi, there's all sorts of creatures living in there. And so soil is not just like a bunch of like, you know, small particles of rock, which effectively is what the, you know, the abiological part of soil is.

• 10:05Krishna Choudhary?

  You need a lot of these helper agricultural necessities to actually create an environment to grow crops. In The Martian with Matt Damon, right? He grew potatoes, I think, but he supplemented it with his own poop, right? This is trying to get that dream a reality.

• 10:27Lester Nare?

  Without the poop or with?

• 10:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Without the poop. In this case, it's not human poop. They're actually going for worm poop.

• 10:34Lester Nare?

  Ah, I see.

• 10:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So what they're saying is, we can take lunar regolith, which is this super, you know, kind of dry, dead substance. We can supplement that with both fungi, which are going to help the plants, and also poop from worms, where the worms eat like sort of biological matter and trash and other kinds of stuff that comes out of the human.

• 11:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Presence there, right? Because we're going to have a lot of like biological waste. The worms can subsist on that, create organic material. We supplement that organic material into dead lunar regolith, and then we grow chickpeas, and it actually worked.

• 11:22Lester Nare?

  That's incredible.

• 11:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and one thing that they actually did test was without the fungus, the plants did not produce any seeds. So it's really important that we have the fungus and we have this biodegradable waste that comes from the worms.

• 11:37Lester Nare?

  And so part of the idea here is, is like, we know we can't, we can't grow in a completely dead substrate. But we do need some biological ingredients.

• 11:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 11:49Lester Nare?

  Mixed in to make the recipe work.

• 11:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and they simulated the lunar regolith, because obviously you can't like, get the little bit of lunar soil that NASA brought back from its space missions. And now other people have also brought back with their non-human space missions there. But I mean lunar soil is very hard to come by, okay? I don't think you're going to convince anyone, hey, I want to grow chickpeas in your lunar soil, right? That's going to completely contaminate lunar soil. So they simulated lunar soil, and then they made sure that that sort of composition closely reflected the stuff that actually came back. And then they, you know, did this experiment with creating better soil with worm compost and fungi.

• 12:33Lester Nare?

  The secret to farming on the moon is worm poop and fungus.

• 12:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 12:37Lester Nare?

  Quite exactly what NASA put in the brochure, however, could be the future of a permanent lunar presence in better understanding how we can sustain, particularly on the ability to have a food supply, when we might not be able to send starship rockets or whatever the defense prime rocket of the day is that can carry humans to the lunar surface.

• 13:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and one thing I do want to mention is that we don't quite know whether these grown chickpeas are safe to eat.

• 13:10Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 13:10Krishna Choudhary?

  We just know that they've been grown and they look like chickpeas.

• 13:13Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 13:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? In every sense of the word. So there's still more testing that needs to be done to make sure that these plants don't absorb like harmful metals that are in the soil on the lunar surface, and they actually provide the nutrients that the astronauts would need. So there's still more to the story, but it's a great first step.

• 13:33Lester Nare?

  We will one day traverse the stars. And one of the key aspects to us being able to do so is being able to survive. And food is a key aspect of that. An early first step, are you gonna be the first to try to test the lunar chickpeas?

• 13:48Krishna Choudhary?

  I won't be the first. I'll tell you that.

• 13:51Lester Nare?

  You sound like Elon. He's not gonna be the first to Mars either. Now, I'm very excited to transition to one of my favorite parts of the show.

• 14:10Lester Nare?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Are You Smarter Than a Scientist? And the quizzical look on Krishna's face is how he's going to attack this question on this week's rendition. Name the 10 deadliest animals to humans. As you know, are you smarter than a scientist? We have a question. We have 10 answers. We have three strikes. You at home, you might have some ideas in your head. Our resident PhD has some ideas in his head. And we are going to see how many of the 10 deadliest animals to humans.

• 14:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Interesting.

• 14:45Lester Nare?

  That Krishna can name in this round. The floor is yours, good sir.

• 14:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Man, I don't think I'm gonna do well on this, but let's give it a try. You know, the first thing I can think of is mosquitoes because of malaria.

• 15:01Lester Nare?

  It is a very good guess.

• 15:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 15:05Lester Nare?

  And mosquitoes is number one.

• 15:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, 750,000 per year. Wow, that's a lot.

• 15:09Lester Nare?

  It's not a small amount, and it's incredible that such a small thing can kill so many of us.

• 15:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, okay. Let's do, okay, in that vein, let's do like insects that carry disease. So like, what about like fleas?

• 15:24Lester Nare?

  Fleas.

• 15:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Or ticks? Can you give me that?

• 15:27Lester Nare?

  Fleas or ticks?

• 15:30Lester Nare?

  Impacts dogs a lot, but it is not.

• 15:32Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not for us. Okay.

• 15:34Lester Nare?

  It is not on our list.

• 15:35Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm already on a strike. All right.

• 15:37Lester Nare?

  This was a tough one. This is outside of your purview.

• 15:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Definitely. I hear about bears. No, I'm not gonna say bears. Nobody interacts with bears. Sharks are probably also overborne, overblown.

• 15:55Lester Nare?

  I will note that some of them are classic.

• 15:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, they are. Let's go with bears.

• 16:02Lester Nare?

  Well, that's not what I expected you to say, unfortunately.

• 16:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, no. It's not even. Oh, my God. I'm gonna be so bad at this, guys.

• 16:09Lester Nare?

  We're on strike two. I will note that Christian is a biophysicist, so this is.

• 16:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is zoology and like society. Oh, my gosh, I'm doing so bad. I'm already on two strikes.

• 16:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Some of them are classic.

• 16:23Lester Nare?

  Maybe, maybe I should not. Maybe I should not reference that because I don't want to throw you off.

• 16:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, okay. Can you give me a hint? Because I'm only on one left.

• 16:32Lester Nare?

  So, so many of us may be familiar with a gentleman who, rest in peace, was really impactful for us when we used to watch things about animals.

• 16:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, or a manta ray.

• 16:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Not what I was.

• 16:46Lester Nare?

  Oh, I think you said Steve Irwin.

• 16:48Krishna Choudhary?

  I was talking about Steve Irwin.

• 16:50Lester Nare?

  Was it not a stingray?

• 16:51Krishna Choudhary?

  But it was not a stingray.

• 16:52Lester Nare?

  Oh, it's a crocodile. All right, okay. Just, all right, now let me just see how many I can get. Come on. I got one, bro. So, crocodile is number nine on the list. We will have one lifeline again. We're very new to this.

• 17:05Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, how about?

• 17:05Lester Nare?

  So I'll give you one extra strike, which is against the rules, but we will have one mulligan in this exception. So we have number one mosquitoes, number nine crocodiles. This is, this is a tough one.

• 17:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Hippo?

• 17:22Lester Nare?

  Do we have hippo on the board? Number 10 hippo, we have. I have one. We have a lifeline. We have a lifeline.

• 17:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Damn.

• 17:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, I'm like, like, I guess I'm so sequestered in like, you know, normal society, I have no idea. Sharks, let's go with sharks.

• 17:43Lester Nare?

  Sharks, is that on the list? I don't have a four strikes, but I do have the sound effect and that is not.

• 17:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Not correct.

• 17:51Lester Nare?

  That is not correct. Unfortunately, we have mosquitoes at one, crocodiles at nine and hippos at 10. If you're at home, make your list now for what you think two through eight is. I purposely threw you a curve ball. I gave you two easy ones.

• 18:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Lester Nare?

  The first two episodes, I had to, had to curve. Number two, you could argue this was not going to be easy to get, but the answer is humans.

• 18:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh.

• 18:18Lester Nare?

  Are the deadliest animals to humans.

• 18:20Krishna Choudhary?

  That's fair.

• 18:21Lester Nare?

  We know that very well here in the United States. Number three was snakes.

• 18:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, why didn't I guess, yeah, duh, okay.

• 18:29Lester Nare?

  Very poisonous animals. If you're a black mamba, R I P Kobe or others. Number four, it might not have been your corgi.

• 18:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Really?

• 18:38Lester Nare?

  But some dogs are our fourth. My fear of dogs as a child is now reignited.

• 18:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Is cats on here?

• 18:46Lester Nare?

  So unfortunately cats are busy taking over the world intellectually.

• 18:51Krishna Choudhary?

  So they're not killing people.

• 18:51Lester Nare?

  They're not killing people. They're smarter than that. Number five, there was no way you were going to get this one. Free water snails, which was news to me.

• 19:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Freshwater snails, wow.

• 19:03Lester Nare?

  So this is our number five. Number six, in our order, assassin bugs.

• 19:09Krishna Choudhary?

  I've never heard of that.

• 19:10Lester Nare?

  So I just had.

• 19:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Assassin bugs, I gotta look this up later.

• 19:13Lester Nare?

  So we may do now an episode on assassin bugs.

• 19:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Lester Nare?

  Number seven. The T T fly.

• 19:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, I've heard of that.

• 19:21Lester Nare?

  And the continent of Africa, and it's interesting.

• 19:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I've heard of that.

• 19:23Lester Nare?

  Research has been around this, this area.

• 19:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, okay.

• 19:25Lester Nare?

  Diseases, a big one. Another funny reference to a family story, which we'll talk about in a future episode, about how someone ended up in the hospital for 21 days is scorpions. So our top 10 deadliest animals to humans, mosquitoes, humans, unironically, snakes, dogs, freshwater snails at five, I think I said something else earlier by accident, six assassin bugs, T T flies, scorpions, crocodiles and hippos.

• 19:57Lester Nare?

  This was.

• 19:58Krishna Choudhary?

  This was a bad one, guys.

• 19:59Lester Nare?

  This looked like Ferrari at F1 two weeks ago. Yeah. Not, not a good start to the season.

• 20:04Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this looked like Aston Martin.

• 20:07Lester Nare?

  What's the other one? Haas? Is Haas doing anything?

• 20:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Haas is doing okay. They've got a Ferrari engine.

• 20:11Lester Nare?

  They're doing okay?

• 20:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they're doing okay.

• 20:13Lester Nare?

  Okay, so it is simply, it is simply the Ferrari. This is something again, we're trying to see if you all enjoy. Let us know in the comments. How many you got? Are you smarter than scientists?

• 20:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Probably on this one.

• 20:26Lester Nare?

  And we'll bring you back, we'll bring it back for next week's rundown. If you want it more, you gotta let us know you want it more. But in the meantime, before our next episode game show, we are gonna go to our third story, which is about hidden cosmic anomalies in Hubble's archive discovered by A I. Researchers at the European Space Agency, E S A, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, a new A I system called Anomaly Match, very on the nose, that scanned approximately 99.6 million images, cutouts from the entire legacy Hubble archive in two to three days,

• 21:11Lester Nare?

  which is an unbelievably short period of time.

• 21:15Lester Nare?

  And what did we find?

• 21:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so for background, machine learning and AI systems are very good at something called anomaly detection, right, which is something that is out of the ordinary, just because of the way that they learn data and they learn the data space. There's ways that they can group similar items together in their latent space and they can figure out outliers. It's kind of a, I mean, if you think about like rudimentary clustering algorithms where, you know, you project your data into some kind of subspace. And then, in this case, let's say, oh, normal spiral galaxies are over here. Normal barred galaxies are over here. There's going to be little tiny sectors where you find extremely rare objects and machine learning algorithms can do this very, very efficiently.

• 22:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, what these scientists did from the ESA was apply that method to the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is over the past 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has just been taking image after image, right? And one of the great things about the Hubble Space Telescope is all of their images are now public access. Okay? If you're, you know, taking something today, then perhaps it's not public access. You've got like six months or something to like grind out as many papers as you can, but pretty soon it's going to go into the public archive. So all of these images were cut out into 100 million different little image cutouts

• 22:43Krishna Choudhary?

  that are measuring just a few dozen pixels on a side. And from those hundreds of millions, from those 100 million image cutouts, they identified 1,300 objects that have an odd appearance, right? And more than 800 of these objects have never been identified in scientific literature before. Most of these anomalies are just like galaxies going through mergers or interactions, and so they're going to look weird.

• 23:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:09Krishna Choudhary?

  But every once in a while, there was some pretty cool stuff. So if we go to our next photo,

• 23:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:15Krishna Choudhary?

  you'll actually see some of the very cool stuff. So on the upper right-hand side, you're seeing galaxy mergers, but the lower two on the right, you can see one galaxy that's kind of curving around another.

• 23:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:28Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a weird gravitational lens.

• 23:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Where because of Einstein's relativity. The gravity from the foreground galaxy is bending the light from a galaxy that's behind it. And so these are very, very cool gravitational lenses of a background galaxy that's sort of twisting its light around the foreground, which is in the front. We've also got really weird ring shaped galaxies, like the one on the upper right. And these are all like completely new. I think that's so cool.

• 24:00Lester Nare?

  And just real quick, the ring shaped galaxy on the upper left.

• 24:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, sorry. Yeah, the upper left. Yes, you're right.

• 24:04Lester Nare?

  Yeah, got it, got it, got it.

• 24:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And I just think that's so cool that like a machine learning algorithm can go through these within two and a half days and figure out all these new galaxies that now we can maybe get our other telescopes to look at, right? Take a look, get some spectra, figure out if maybe there's a supernova that's happening in one of these like lensed galaxies that we can spot at multiple different times because maybe the light is taking longer on one end than the other end. If it's multiply lensed, you can do all sorts of very, very cool science by looking at these new objects, right? It's again, one of these examples of a news story about AI helping out scientists.

• 24:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:49Krishna Choudhary?

  That again, makes me very hopeful in all of the drab that we're getting about how AI is going to end the world. I mean, I think we are very much in danger of that as well. Don't get me wrong, but there's also hope. And I think if it's in the right hands, tools like artificial intelligence and the anomaly detection that comes with it can be very fruitful for the pursuit of fundamental science.

• 25:12Lester Nare?

  That is always the question is who controls the button? But the anomaly match, I'm sure, I mean, part of the Verissimo Rubin already has this built into its existing architecture.

• 25:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's going to generate like unprecedented volumes of data. So an anomaly detector is going to be very crucial for analyzing that data just to begin with.

• 25:32Lester Nare?

  And look at the fact that we're still discovering new stuff today.

• 25:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Lester Nare?

  For so, for this archive that's, you know, over, you know, had that has been gathering for over 30 years.

• 25:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And the Hubble only looked at a small patch of the sky, right? In, in all of its 35 years of history, it didn't like tile the entire night sky like the Vera Rubin will. So it's. Very, very exciting time in astronomy.

• 25:54Lester Nare?

  And you know what that means? There's a chance I will see these.

• 25:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Lester Nare?

  One day. One day. We haven't looked. This is the analogy I always bring up is we're looking out our front window at a house. And we're saying, there's no one in the street. But we haven't looked out the backyard. We haven't hopped over the fence. We haven't driven around the neighborhood. But we're just looking out the front window. It's like, oh, we're all alone here. And it might just be, it might be, there might be some roadblocks, right? Maybe they're doing construction on the interstellar highway. I kid.

• 26:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Maybe.

• 26:23Lester Nare?

  Maybe. Our last story, one of my favorite, almost things that happened that did not happen.

• 26:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 26:31Lester Nare?

  Is about room temperature superconductivity. And this is out of the proceedings of the National Academies of Science. From a combination of universities, including MIT, Harvard, Columbia, University of Houston, Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Institution, Graz University of Technology and Intellectual Ventures. And this was a programmatic paper that lays out a roadmap for achieving one of the pinnacles of, I guess, would you say, engineering and science, the intersection of the two? Which is the idea of this creating a room temperature superconductor.

• 27:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right. This is not a, this is not a proper science article that we usually cover. This is in fact, a perspective article. So a lot of times scientists will get together and they will write effectively an opinion piece about where the field should be looking at and how the field should be structured for future advancement. And this is one of those, okay? It's in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's a strategy paper that assesses the current state of research for room temperature superconductors and then sets out future directions. So, superconductors are these materials that have zero electrical resistance.

• 27:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Not negligible, not next to zero, but because of fundamental quantum mechanics, it is literally zero. The resistance of these electrons moving through this material is literally zero because of some very fundamental, very cool quantum mechanics that is going on. Now, that could transform our society more than I think any other technology that I can really think of. A very... Base example would be if we could have room temperature superconductors or high temperature superconductors, we can transfer electricity and power with almost no dissipation, right? The problem with modern day superconductors is they either require extremely low temperatures,

• 28:32Krishna Choudhary?

  so even colder than liquid nitrogen sometimes, or extremely high pressures. If you want to get to high temperature, like room temperature, you gotta like stick it inside a diamond anvil cell where like you're squishing stuff inside of a diamond and then finally you like make something that is superconducting, right? If we want industrial scale applications, we need something to be superconducting like on the table.

• 28:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 28:59Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 28:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 28:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And so there's a prediction challenge, which comes from our ability to predict new superconductors. Now, that has advanced dramatically because we figured out a lot of the material science and the fundamentals of how to, you know, simulate these things in a computer. Now, what this paper is proposing is a shifting of focus towards like thermodynamics and synthesis modeling.

• 29:22Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Because a lot of times when we try to predict new superconductors in our computer programs, those can't be synthesized through the normal processes. It's like you've given me like the recipe, but I have no way of cooking this thing.

• 29:38Lester Nare?

  You've shown me that unobtanium is a thing, but I don't have the root ingredients to create unobtanium.

• 29:43Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, it's like, what are we doing, right? And then there's an engineering challenge because we've got all these different knobs that we can turn in our lab, things like pressure, things like the nanostructure of light. Let me just say that again. So there's also an engineering challenge, right? Because we have these various knobs that we can turn in our lab, things like pressure, things like the nanostructure of the material, light lasers, just like pile a bunch of lasers on it, right? To control that superconductivity, but our ability to predict how each of these knobs affects that material is pretty limited.

• 30:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So what this perspective paper is doing is saying, you know, there's actually no physical law theoretically that is preventing room temperature superconductivity. No one's come out with a like this is impossible paper, right? So it's definitely there. And superconductivity. Superconductivity has been observed in so many different materials, in so many different conditions, and it's almost like a generic property of materials at some point. And if you if you lower the temperature down, if you increase the pressure enough, things are going to become superconducting. So the idea is, we want to be able to now gear our research towards creating something as a community.

• 31:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Rather than just going off in all these different tangents, trying to do our own thing. Let's like have like a sort of Human Genome Project style moment.

• 31:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah, okay.

• 31:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Where all of these different researchers from around the world sort of get together, we plan out, how are we going to get there?

• 31:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And the first task is always to improve computer aided models. So not just like predict random stuff that we can't cook, but maybe things that we can, things where the recipe actually makes sense. We've got the tools to do it. And it's, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

• 31:33Lester Nare?

  In in software, there is this phrase or this rallying cry of it's time to build.

• 31:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Lester Nare?

  It sounds like in the superconductor community, the rally cry is it's time to cook.

• 31:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 31:49Lester Nare?

  It's time to cook.

• 31:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And and and the other thing that they really highlight in the strategy paper is that AI is here.

• 31:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And we need to now start leveraging that.

• 31:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Krishna Choudhary?

  In the way that AlphaFold kind of leveraged AI to solve protein folding, which for the longest time, it was like, oh, this is an impossible problem. Right? There's two to the 300 different configurations. There's more atoms in the universe than they are. There's more atoms in the universe than there are structures that a protein can take. And so it's an impossible problem. Well, AlphaFold is pretty good at like 90% of proteins now. Right? So we need to start leveraging these technologies to our advantage.

• 32:28Lester Nare?

  Right, right. And this dovetails with, I mean, it's, we don't look to always cover AI in our stories on the pod.

• 32:36Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 32:37Lester Nare?

  It is just a factual reality.

• 32:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Lester Nare?

  That so many labs and researchers, especially things that are breaking through, happen to have a companion AI component.

• 32:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:49Lester Nare?

  And it's just kind of. The way that it is.

• 32:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:53Lester Nare?

  Um, especially for use cases where it's like protein folding or where you just want something that can go through of like almost like there's a brute force kind of pathway where it's like throw compute at it, you'll be able to get down to a more narrow band of options than we otherwise would be able to without being able to just throw compute with you at the problem.

• 33:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Lester Nare?

  Um, and that's kind of like a very level one implementation and there's also level two, three, four, five. But superconductors are gonna totally change the face of humanity on this planet if we can get to a way to build them in a way that's, uh, scalable, uh, in terms of from a manufacturing capacity.

• 33:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:36Lester Nare?

  We had, we had this whole hype cycle with LK99 where everyone was doing the think pieces of what is this gonna mean for everything?

• 33:42Krishna Choudhary?

  That one, can I just say, I, I looked at that archive paper and I was like, there's no way. Like, we, we, we should do like a joke episode on it sometime of just like how to recognize nonsense.

• 33:54Lester Nare?

  How to sniff the BS. Uh, a bunch of four, again, really fun papers today. You can kind of see how the difference between our deep dive episodes where we really break down the fundamentals. So it's not just sometimes in the rundowns, I can be like, well, this is just what they're saying. This is why we have the deep dives to make sure we can understand the real fundamentals that build up the knowledge base to be able to have confidence in making these conclusions from these studies. So we touched on the 3D scanning for ants, incredible use of a particle accelerator for 3D model generation.

• 34:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Lester Nare?

  I mean, I might want to use that for my 3D gaming. So how, how, how unnecessary it is to use a particle accelerator to do like 3D video game. Yeah, you have a mini particle accelerator in the back. It's helping us model this. We followed up with growing chickpeas on the moon. If you could go to the moon. And know you're coming back and it's fine.

• 34:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's fun. It's like as safe as, um, air travel.

• 34:52Lester Nare?

  As safe as air travel. And you don't have to pay.

• 34:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I'd probably do it. Yeah, if it's as safe as air travel, yes, I think I would do it.

• 35:00Lester Nare?

  I would, I would go.

• 35:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, the earth is gonna be the size of the moon.

• 35:04Lester Nare?

  I'm so excited.

• 35:05Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, imagine looking at the earth and it's just like, oh, I can like, cover it up with my thumb.

• 35:10Lester Nare?

  Hey Jeff, if you want to do another launch, but instead of another identity-based cohort, you want to do people of color, where we are very much.

• 35:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll be your token, you know.

• 35:19Lester Nare?

  Whatever, for the marketing, we'll go.

• 35:21Krishna Choudhary?

  But like, there needs to be like 100 launches before, because I need.

• 35:24Lester Nare?

  We'll start with Orbit. We'll just, we'll just do a little, little small orbit. We're, we're being a little facetious, although he is a Princetonian, so that's part of the connection. We hit the cosmic anomalies. I love these telescopes, both ground-based and space-based, and the whole ecosystem around them. It's always fascinating. The data continues to give us value and room temperature superconductivity, which I was gonna ask you a question about, can you explain resistance? But that's, that's for a deep dive episode. So if you want to know more about superconductors, let us know in the comments, because I want to know more.

• 35:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we could do a deep dive on the history of superconductivity. It's a fascinating tale. BCS theory is what it's called, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, very proud of their work there. They have a little plaque in the physics department, like, this is where BCS theory was.

• 36:17Lester Nare?

  I thought you were talking about college football for a second, but you were not talking about the old BCS Bowl, or whatever it is. I clearly don't watch college football. I am your host. Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. As you can tell, we are having a fun time on this pod. We really appreciate you. We will see you all next week.