New Supernova, Virus+Bacteria vs Cancer, Electron Spin, Bee Superfood (EP. 6)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, Episode 6 of From First Principles covers four groundbreaking stories in science—from rare cosmic explosions to synthetic biology breakthroughs that could save our food supply. This week, we dive into a never-before-seen type of supernova, explore a surprising alliance of viruses and bacteria against cancer, unpack how scientists are turning electron spin into power, and highlight Oxford’s CRISPR-based superfood for honeybees. Summary A naked supernova reveals the inner layers of a dying star Viruses and bacteria team up to fight cancer with Trojan-horse biology Harnessing electron spin for ultra-efficient future tech Scientists engineer bee superfood to save pollinators and agriculture Show Notes CNN — New Supernova Discovery Nature — Virus+Bacteria Therapy Phys.org — Spintronics Study BBC — Bee Superfood

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, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. This is from First Principles. We have a great episode this week. We're going to cover four new breaking research science stories. Starting off with move over Taylor Swift tour tickets because this cosmic event just sold out the night sky as scientists just caught a brand-new supernova in action. Followed up by, unlike Ryan Reynolds and Robert Downey Jr. On set of the new Avengers movie, who can't stop fighting. Viruses and bacteria apparently are teaming up to battle cancer. This is an interesting one.

• 0:42Lester Nare?

  Our third story, politicians keep spinning the news, as we know, but scientists have figured out how to spin electrons. And it could power the next generation of tech. And we will end our story with forgetting about billionaires and the race to Mars. Because the real heroes are scientists who are racing to save the bees, because no bees means no breakfast. Let's get after it. This is from First Principles.

• 1:24Lester Nare?

  Hello, my friend. How are you?

• 1:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Pretty good, pretty good.

• 1:27Lester Nare?

  We are back for episode six.

• 1:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Lester Nare?

  Still here.

• 1:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:32Lester Nare?

  Still cooking.

• 1:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Still going.

• 1:34Lester Nare?

  Still cooking. And we have a couple of interesting stories. We'll dive into the first story here, which I made a Taylor Swift reference.

• 1:44Lester Nare?

  I think this is going to sell more tickets.

• 1:46Krishna Choudhary?

  It's definitely going to sell more tickets.

• 1:48Lester Nare?

  And this.

• 1:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Across the universe.

• 1:50Lester Nare?

  Across the universe. Headline from CNN, new type of supernova looks like nothing anyone has seen before.

• 1:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:59Lester Nare?

  Astronomer says.

• 2:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's pretty insane. It's an unprecedented discovery. It's a new type of supernova that's super rare. I'd like to call it a naked supernova, because we're seeing the guts of a star before it explodes. It tells us everything about how supernovas form and also like how we form, you know, the atoms that make us up. This is, this is pretty cool.

• 2:23Lester Nare?

  We're going to rate this episode MA because we're talking about naked supernovas. The byline on this CNN article, again, the story is coming out of a combination of institutions.

• 2:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Lester Nare?

  Uh, we have Northwestern, Caltech, and the Wiseman Institute. And the byline goes astronomers have observed what they are calling a new type of supernova, which has provided an unparalleled glimpse into what happens deep within a star just before it explodes. Right?

• 2:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Lester Nare?

  This is like Taylor Swift's first album.

• 2:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:55Lester Nare?

  We're looking deeply in.

• 2:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is like the first album. Yeah, not the, not the, not all the random modern nonsense that she's doing. Sorry, I'm a huge fan of Taylor Swift.

• 3:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:06Krishna Choudhary?

  But like, when I was in high school and college.

• 3:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:10Krishna Choudhary?

  The, the, the new stuff, not, not so much.

• 3:12Lester Nare?

  So we've talked about this before, and I think I have a little bit of an understanding. You know, supernovas are when these stars just explode.

• 3:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, at the end of their life.

• 3:21Lester Nare?

  At the end of their life.

• 3:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Lester Nare?

  But tell me more about what this story means, uh, this research and, and why it matters.

• 3:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so studying supernovas is extremely important for understanding, not just like, how stars live their life, but also like how we get the atoms that make us up. Okay, because, um, stars like our sun only create atoms up to the element iron.

• 3:48Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 3:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, but you know, the periodic table has a lot of elements after iron.

• 3:52Lester Nare?

  It's very.

• 3:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Every single element after iron was created in a supernova explosion.

• 3:57Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 3:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And so understanding supernovas at a, you know, granular level tells us something about like how these higher order elements formed.

• 4:07Lester Nare?

  We're trying to figure out all the ingredients.

• 4:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Lester Nare?

  And supernovas help us figure out a large set of those.

• 4:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 4:13Lester Nare?

  Ingredients after iron.

• 4:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, supernovas are like the crucible for finding, um, elements like gold, nickel, zinc. Um, all of these things that are like pretty important for daily life on earth, but also just for like making us.

• 4:28Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 4:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, um, and there are these cause, stars are these cosmic crucibles, right? Like in the beginning.

• 4:34Lester Nare?

  In the beginning.

• 4:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in the beginning after the big bang, there was only really two elements, hydrogen and helium.

• 4:40Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, but clearly we're made out of a bunch of other stuff. Okay, now, um, every element up to iron can be made by smaller stars like our sun. Okay, the sun can make stuff like oxygen, carbon, um.

• 4:56Krishna Choudhary?

  In very trace amounts, to get the real kinds of abundance that we see on earth, you need bigger stars to make those kinds of elements.

• 5:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 5:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And then to get anything above iron, you need the star to explode, okay? That's because there's something fundamental about the nuclei of atoms, okay? Fusion, which is the process of taking lighter nuclei and fusing them to make bigger nuclei. So you know, the fundamental form that's happening in our sun is hydrogen. Four hydrogens fusing to make a helium.

• 5:27Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and then helium can fuse to make carbon, three of them. Um, that process requires the energy of the nuclei to be lower than the constituents that made it up.

• 5:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 5:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Because of the second law of thermodynamics, right? The energy of the stuff that was making up the product has to be higher. That way, like it's thermodynamically more favorable to make that.

• 5:54Lester Nare?

  Makes sense.

• 5:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Does that make sense?

• 5:55Lester Nare?

  You lose a little bit of energy when you make stuff.

• 5:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you wanna, and, and the universe wants to dissipate heat because of the second law of thermodynamics. And so this process actually dissipates heat, which is fine.

• 6:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 6:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Great, the universe is like, you guys do that all you want.

• 6:09Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 6:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Once you get to iron, fusing elements higher than iron means that you need to inject heat. Okay, so, and that's something that the thermodynamics doesn't let you do, right? Because second law of thermodynamics says that like the energy should, should go off everywhere, not concentrate into a single spot, right? The entropy should increase, not decrease.

• 6:29Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:29Krishna Choudhary?

  But this requires a decrease in entropy. And in order to get anything higher than iron, the energy per nucleon is actually higher, which means that you need a giant, like, event, giant energetic event, to actually start fusing stuff from iron to make zinc and gold and copper and uranium and all this other stuff.

• 6:50Lester Nare?

  This is why the explosion matters.

• 6:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, and this is why the explosion matters. Now supernova, we've, we've, we've characterized supernova all over, all over the universe, okay? The usual supernova is either a big star collapses, um, it can no longer hold its own weight, so it collapses. It collapses, it explodes, and then you get this kind of stuff, right? Um, and usually with supernova, you get to see the, the star as a whole collapsing. Okay, this one is pretty crazy because like there were these intermediate stages where the star sort of shed its outer layers.

• 7:24Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 7:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And you got to see the real core of the star. Right? And we got to see like the inside and we got to confirm a lot of these models that we have about stellar evolution.

• 7:35Lester Nare?

  This is a really important point because you know, our models are only as good as our observations.

• 7:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:40Lester Nare?

  That provide, you know, quote unquote, the training data for the models we create. And so as we start looking at stuff that we haven't seen before.

• 7:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Lester Nare?

  It allows us to refine our understanding of the universe.

• 7:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Lester Nare?

  Even more each time we see these new novel use cases.

• 7:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. The, the, the prevailing model, um, and it's, I guess, been confirmed by this particular, um, supernova. Is this, this thing called the onion skin model of, of big stars. Okay. What ends up happening is you got a big star. Every star basically starts off with about seventy-five percent hydrogen, twenty-five percent helium. Okay. Um, once you start off with that, the, the first thing the star does is the cheapest thing to, to burn is hydrogen. Okay. It's super easy. It wants to turn into helium. You just give it a little pressure and a little bit of heat and it's like, all right, I'm going to go into helium. Now, um, pretty soon the hydrogen starts running out for these big stars within like tens to hundreds of millions of years.

• 8:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and then what's going to end up happening is the core is going to run out of the hydrogen. So it's going to start contracting because there's not enough hydrogen to push out. There's not enough fusion happening to push out the gravity pressure. So it's going to start contracting. As it contracts, the heat is going to go up, the pressure is going to go up and all of a sudden helium burning is going to turn on.

• 8:59Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 9:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. So now the helium is going to start burning into carbon and oxygen and things like that. Right? And when that helium burning starts, the outward radiative pressure is going to get really big.

• 9:10Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 9:11Krishna Choudhary?

  So then the, the outside is going to expand and that's when you get these red giants like Beetlejuice.

• 9:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Or even the, the sun is going to end up doing this at some point.

• 9:19Lester Nare?

  Some French people were, uh, commenting on our pronunciation of.

• 9:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, um, I don't, I don't.

• 9:25Lester Nare?

  Metal geese.

• 9:26Krishna Choudhary?

  I, I don't, I don't respect the French.

• 9:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Lester Nare?

  So whether you say Beetlejuice or Betelgeuse, we won, so we can decide how we say it.

• 9:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And you surrendered, sorry.

• 9:37Lester Nare?

  Zebra, not zebra.

• 9:40Lester Nare?

  But this this onion model, celestial onions.

• 9:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Lester Nare?

  And so this this expansion of the outer shell.

• 9:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so you you start expanding the outer shell and you become this like red giant, right? And then and then and then the core has like contracted though. And now it's starting to burn helium. Well, pretty soon it's gonna run out of helium too.

• 9:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And then it's gonna go into this thing called the CNO cycle, which is the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen cycle. Where this like cycle between these three elements, that's gonna like start burning helium because carbon is a 12, oxygen is a 16.

• 10:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 10:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So you're gonna go from carbon, you're gonna add a helium and then you're gonna go to oxygen, but like iteratively.

• 10:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 10:18Krishna Choudhary?

  And so it it becomes this like sort of like cycle of like trying to burn the fuel that you have. So the carbon is gonna go, but then like that's gonna start running out and you're gonna start making silicon. And like burning the silicon and then there's gonna be this iron core. So you have this onion skin model of all of these different processes.

• 10:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 10:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Happening in a star where the the center is this iron that's not doing anything. Right outside you have the silicon that's like burning. Right outside you got carbon, nitrogen, oxygen that's burning. Right outside you got helium that's burning and outside you got hydrogen that's burning. That's been the model that we know can happen from fundamental physics, right? We we understand nuclei very well. We understand the atom really well. We understand the strong nuclear force really well. So we can like say, okay, these are the energy scales where these things happen. If I were to simulate this in a star, then it would happen at these radius because that's where the pressure and temperature is ideal for this kind of stuff. So this is the onion skin model, right?

• 11:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 11:18Krishna Choudhary?

  And we've confirmed sort of the outer layers of that onion skin. But like the deeper part, that silicon and the iron part, like that stuff's been elusive and it's sort of, we're we're just going off. Well, we know how

• 11:30Lester Nare?

  The other stuff is.

• 11:31Krishna Choudhary?

  The stuff works and we know how the nuclei work, so it's probably right.

• 11:35Lester Nare?

  Right. But now we've made this observational.

• 11:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Lester Nare?

  Confirmation that this model that we have of the onion of of how stars create these layers.

• 11:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Lester Nare?

  It has now been experimentally.

• 11:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because we've gone to the deepest parts of the onion. Somehow this particular star, it's called supernova twenty twenty one Y F J, because it was discovered in twenty twenty one. Somehow this particular supernova shed its outer layers through a process that we we might get get to later on.

• 12:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 12:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And and so what we could see is the the inside, that silicon part that we'd never seen before. Yeah, and when when they first discovered this this supernova, they were like, wha- what are those lines? What what silicon? That's crazy.

• 12:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 12:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And immediately they knew that they had like a candidate for an extremely rare event. Right? And it was really exciting when they when they caught this in twenty twenty one.

• 12:28Lester Nare?

  So the idea here in part is that timing kind of matters. Like like we caught it timing wise, when it was at that stage when we made the observation, it was in this state that allowed us to see that.

• 12:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Lester Nare?

  That that that more.

• 12:44Krishna Choudhary?

  But the thing is, we've seen supernova with this timing before.

• 12:48Lester Nare?

  Oh, so this one is special.

• 12:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Rare. This is like special.

• 12:51Lester Nare?

  This is.

• 12:52Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a special supernova. They actually um.

• 12:55Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 12:55Krishna Choudhary?

  They actually calculated the event rate of this thing, and they said it was thirty per cubic giga parsec per year. And um, that didn't mean anything to me because I don't really know, like, I don't have an into, I know what a giga parsec is, right? It's ten to the big parsec, which is like something to do with the parallax between the Earth going around the sun. And I was just like, okay, so how does this work? Um, so I I looked it up. The universe, the the observable universe is thirty giga parsecs in diameter.

• 13:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 13:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so let's assume it's a sphere. So we'll say the radii is fifteen giga parsecs. That's the observable universe, right? Volume of a cu- volume of a sphere is four thirds pi r cubed. So fifteen cubed is like three thousand. Three thousand times four thirds times pi. Let's say the three and the three cancel. We're we're gonna be engineers now. Right? The pi pi is three, like the engineers like to say. So then that's, you know, that's about three thousand times four. It's about twelve thousand. Um, gigaparsecs and then and then you've got this event rate which is thirty gig, thirty per gigaparsec per year. So that that gets you to about three hundred thousand per year in the whole universe.

• 14:12Lester Nare?

  That that.

• 14:12Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's actually insane. Dude, three hundred thousand, that's like, that's a countable number of zeros. There's only five zeros. After the three. You know, like, the universe is like, what, billions of billions of trillions of stars and all this other stuff? Like, there's only three hundred thousand events in the entire observable universe in a single year. That's like actually extremely rare.

• 14:38Lester Nare?

  And so the the idea is we really caught a needle in a.

• 14:42Krishna Choudhary?

  No, this thing is, yeah, this thing was, this thing was insanely hard and insanely rare. And we caught it because of some of the efforts that we've done in astronomy when it comes to this time domain astronomy. We had a previous episode where we were talking about the Vera Rubin.

• 14:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Observatory.

• 14:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:59Krishna Choudhary?

  The Vera Rubin is gonna catch more of these things, right?

• 15:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 15:02Krishna Choudhary?

  This one was caught not by the Vera Rubin Observatory. It was caught by the Zwicky Transient Facility.

• 15:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 15:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, um, this is a facility that basically commandeered one of the, um, observatories on Palomar. Mount Palomar, which is, um, just south of us.

• 15:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Near San Diego.

• 15:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, it's a Caltech Observatory. The the Zwicky Transient Facility uses a telescope that's much smaller and a camera that's much smaller than the Vera Rubin.

• 15:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:29Krishna Choudhary?

  But it was kind of a precursor to understand what are the challenges gonna be when we make the Vera Rubin, right? You you wanna do, in science, you wanna do baby steps. You wanna be like, okay, let's start with, in this case, a forty-eight inch telescope, which is just like a little bit more than a meter.

• 15:46Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 15:46Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like one point three meter telescope.

• 15:49Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 15:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Compared to Vera Rubin's eight. And then the camera is way smaller. This thing started in twenty seventeen.

• 15:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 15:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and it's, and it does something very similar to the Vera Rubin, which is like, go through the northern sky because it's in the northern hemisphere. It goes through the northern sky every three days. Okay, every three nights, I should say. Um, so it's doing sort of the same thing, so so we could have. A dry run on what the challenges would be for the Vera Rubin by operating this Zwiki transient facility.

• 16:18Lester Nare?

  In in our in the in the tech world, we always love to say, let's have a crawl, walk, run approach.

• 16:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 16:24Lester Nare?

  To this problem.

• 16:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 16:25Lester Nare?

  And this is a very similar idea.

• 16:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly that, yeah.

• 16:27Lester Nare?

  You gotta crawl first, okay. What is the challenge to be able to walk?

• 16:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 16:30Lester Nare?

  We walk and now.

• 16:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And now we're running with Vera Rubin, yeah.

• 16:34Lester Nare?

  But but there's some there's an important point that the crawl or walk stages still have value.

• 16:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:41Lester Nare?

  Um, in and of themselves, independent of the fact that we've continued to increase our capabilities and other tools.

• 16:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's I mean, we always do this in science, right? We've got limited funding, so we better get it right. So you always want to beta test before you actually launch the product.

• 16:56Lester Nare?

  Right, right. We're gonna spend billions and billions.

• 16:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Lester Nare?

  We want to make sure that it makes sense.

• 17:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah. So so the Zwiki transient facility, it's been online since 2017, and this was caught in 2021. Okay, it was caught on September 7th, 2021 at like 9:56 UTC. And as soon as it was caught, um, they knew this was this was this was a candidate for something big. Okay, um, so immediately afterwards, that night, um, the Keck telescope, which goes online right after California, because Hawaii is like, you know, basically downstream in terms of the night sky from us. Um, the whoever was in charge of the Keck telescope, um, got the telegram or whatever.

• 17:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And was like, oh, mm, maybe my research can take a hold for a bit. He pointed the test Keck telescope there and he got the spectra. Okay, because the Zwiki transient facility at Palomar, it's only looking for changes in brightness. Okay, so it caught this supernova, which is basically, oh, there's a bright star that appeared there that wasn't there before. The Keck telescope was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna point there and it got the spectra. And the spectra was unlike anything you've ever seen before, okay? It had lines of ironized silicon, sulfur and argon. These are pretty heavy elements, okay? Still lighter than than iron.

• 18:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:19Krishna Choudhary?

  But pretty heavy.

• 18:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and this is something that we've like never seen before. The main thing was it also didn't have any hydrogen lines.

• 18:28Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 18:29Krishna Choudhary?

  That's weird.

• 18:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that is.

• 18:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Every star has hydrogen.

• 18:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's going on there?

• 18:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Every star has hydrogen, but this guy had like sulfur and like argon, but no hydrogen. So then they were immediate like, oh, this is weird.

• 18:43Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Krishna Choudhary?

  This is weird. So then there were a bunch of telescopes that worked together for a hundred and twenty days after this explosion.

• 18:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Krishna Choudhary?

  To just keep monitoring it. We had the CAC, we had the V L T.

• 18:55Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Down in Chile. We had the Lick Observatory, which is right outside San Jose in California. We had the Liverpool Telescope in England.

• 19:02Lester Nare?

  Liverpool!

• 19:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Lester Nare?

  Little Scousers look too.

• 19:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And then, and then we had the Nordic Optical Telescope as well in Norway.

• 19:10Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:11Krishna Choudhary?

  So we had all of these telescopes working in conjunction to keep track of this thing for a hundred and twenty days. It was, it was an incredible effort across the globe.

• 19:19Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 19:20Krishna Choudhary?

  To try to just have like, you know, full surveillance on this guy.

• 19:24Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 19:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Because, because immediately from that very first spectra that CAC took, it was like, this is something new. This is something crazy.

• 19:33Lester Nare?

  Everyone drop your pen.

• 19:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, everyone was like, okay, this is, and it turns out it's a new type of supernova.

• 19:40Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:40Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, we thought we had categorized the supernova. There's like the supernova where the star explodes. There's the supernova where a white dwarf starts um siphoning mass from another binary star that we've talked about in an earlier episode. And then that white dwarf reaches a mass limit and then that explodes. So there's all these other types of supernova, but this had a signature that was unlike any other.

• 20:01Lester Nare?

  It was like a rare Pokemon.

• 20:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude.

• 20:04Lester Nare?

  On Zapados.

• 20:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Lester Nare?

  Mew, Mewtwo.

• 20:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And as soon as, as soon as we say, every human was like, okay.

• 20:09Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Krishna Choudhary?

  We gotta track, we gotta track this guy. We gotta see what he's doing.

• 20:14Lester Nare?

  I think one thing that's so interesting about this is, is it's a great reminder of the inherently collaborative nature of science.

• 20:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Lester Nare?

  Because.

• 20:21Krishna Choudhary?

  In astronomy especially, dude.

• 20:23Lester Nare?

  Because, because we have to make observations and necessarily because of planet Earth and that we have different tools on different points.

• 20:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Lester Nare?

  On the sphere.

• 20:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and, and the Earth is rotating, so I only got like eight hours of good, good nighttime.

• 20:38Lester Nare?

  Right. And then it's like, hey, you call you call up the Liverpool folks like, hey, it's coming your way.

• 20:42Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, click.

• 20:43Lester Nare?

  And they're like, yeah, okay. This is really, okay, this is really, so, so the, I mean, this is, this is a pretty, you know, given we already have a really robust, you know, and starting point in terms of already having theoretically and experimentally or observationally captured, you know, a whole catalog of types of supernovas. The idea that we found a supernova that's like this three hundred thousand per year in the universe.

• 21:12Krishna Choudhary?

  In the uni- in the observable universe.

• 21:14Lester Nare?

  Observable universe.

• 21:15Krishna Choudhary?

  That's insane.

• 21:16Lester Nare?

  Which, as we've talked about previously, is very large.

• 21:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:22Lester Nare?

  Very, very, very large. Um, the, the opportunity, again, this is rarer than Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's engagement.

• 21:33Krishna Choudhary?

  This is much more rare.

• 21:34Lester Nare?

  This is rarer than.

• 21:35Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't know how many Taylor Swifts are out there in all the galaxies.

• 21:38Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 21:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 21:39Lester Nare?

  Could be quite a bit.

• 21:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, there's billions and billions of galaxies.

• 21:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Billions of billions.

• 21:44Lester Nare?

  Billions of billions.

• 21:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, and then ten to the nine, times ten to the nine.

• 21:47Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then, but here, there's like three hundred thousand of these.

• 21:51Lester Nare?

  Right, which I, I know what three hundred thousand means.

• 21:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's, like, I can visualize that.

• 21:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 21:56Krishna Choudhary?

  I can't visualize the universe.

• 21:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:58Krishna Choudhary?

  But I can visualize that number.

• 21:59Lester Nare?

  I, look, there.

• 22:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That's insanely small for the universe.

• 22:02Lester Nare?

  Houses used to cost three hundred thousand dollars. Right?

• 22:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And they still do in some parts of America.

• 22:08Lester Nare?

  That's true, that is true.

• 22:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Not in LA, I'll tell you that.

• 22:10Lester Nare?

  Southern California is not a beneficiary of, of that level of cost of living.

• 22:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Lester Nare?

  Um, but exceptional, um, discovery, again, Northwestern.

• 22:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Lester Nare?

  Caltech, Wiseman Institute, uh, so a little bit of everything, you know, America heavy.

• 22:26Krishna Choudhary?

  America heavy, yeah.

• 22:27Lester Nare?

  You know, but a little international collaboration.

• 22:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. There's also like a Chinese group because the, a Chinese group actually had access to kek at the time.

• 22:34Lester Nare?

  Uh huh.

• 22:35Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and we, we were like, yo, this is dope. And they were like, yeah.

• 22:43Lester Nare?

  Look, even, even given the geopolitical.

• 22:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Even the, no, dude, everyone knows when, when you see like a supernova, it's like, let's just check its lines. And once they checked its lines, it's like, oh, this is. This is, this is, this is a good paper. I'm gonna be on it.

• 22:56Lester Nare?

  It, it reminds me of like, kind of how like, anytime we talk about space, it sort of melts away the like.

• 23:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because we're on a single planet and we're trying to make sense of what the, whatever the hell is, is out there. Yeah, right? Yeah. I think, uh, yeah, everybody who's an astronomer understands the speck of dust that we're on. And the insignificance of all of these geopolitical conflicts.

• 23:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 23:19Krishna Choudhary?

  When it comes to understanding a universe that is giga parsecs on giga parsecs big.

• 23:24Lester Nare?

  The, I think the first time I heard the word giga par- or parsec in general was Star Wars. Uh, that's how they talk about going, traveling in between. It's da-da-da-da-da, five parsecs.

• 23:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Lester Nare?

  Let's do a jump drive.

• 23:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Lester Nare?

  Um, great story on the new supernova.

• 23:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's an amazing dude. And, and I think it tells us a lot about like, first of all, like, how we get.

• 23:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:49Krishna Choudhary?

  The elements that we have, right? It also tells us a lot about this un-unskin model, the fact that we're right.

• 23:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Because it turns out like, so one of the questions is like, why do we, why are we seeing only sulfur and silicon, but we're not seeing hydrogen?

• 24:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:03Krishna Choudhary?

  It could be because like, what's, what's ended up happening is this things, the star has been like pulsing, right? And as it pulses, it removes these outer layers, right? So that when it finally like exploded, the only layers that were left were these silicon layers, right? And so the light that we're seeing is coming through these silicon and sulfur layers, and then that's what we're seeing. Yeah, there's still actually a mystery in this, in this discovery. There were faint lines of helium and carbon, okay? Which is weird because helium and carbon should be like, out there.

• 24:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:37Krishna Choudhary?

  But we don't see any nitrogen, which should have been inside, right? So like, if we don't see nitrogen, that means the nitrogen layer is already gone.

• 24:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:45Krishna Choudhary?

  But like, there's still helium.

• 24:46Lester Nare?

  So how did the?

• 24:47Krishna Choudhary?

  So how did, yeah, like, how did the?

• 24:49Lester Nare?

  Nitrogen dissipate without?

• 24:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and there's, it's still a mystery. Um, people think that it's probably like, the, this thing is part of a binary star system.

• 24:57Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 24:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the star system, the other star, has a bunch of helium that like, we're like, seeing through, right? Because because what we're seeing through is like like the the the light coming from the supernova is like effectively like white light.

• 25:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's just it's just pure energy.

• 25:13Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 25:13Krishna Choudhary?

  From this collapse into an explosion, but like what the the the lines that we're seeing are are are the stuff that's getting in the way.

• 25:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so helium might be like this this thing that's coming from the binary star. There's still a lot more that we can do from finagling the the the data.

• 25:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:31Krishna Choudhary?

  But um yeah, it's super exciting because it's a totally new type of supernova, right?

• 25:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 25:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Um extremely rare. It's like nothing we've ever seen before. And it's great that it like confirms these models that we have just built on fundamental physics.

• 25:44Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? These are these are models based on just what we know about nuclei from experiments that we've done on Earth.

• 25:52Lester Nare?

  And may.

• 25:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And and it's insane that we can extrapolate from what we understand from the strong nuclear force and how protons and neutrons interact. From what we've done on Earth to like then go all the way and see this thing that's like, you know, half a megaparsec away. A hundred and twenty days of data.

• 26:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 26:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's it's it's really cool, the success. And that's what I mean when I say like, you know, we're pretty good at physics.

• 26:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Krishna Choudhary?

  This is what I mean.

• 26:21Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, we're we're pretty good at like making a model of a giant star that's sixteen to fifty solar masses. And be like, okay, it should be like a shell thing because the gravity here and the pressure here. Means that the temperature is gonna be at this much and the pressure is gonna be at this much, which means that what I know about nucleosynthesis means that these are the kinds of elements that should be there, right?

• 26:43Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 26:44Krishna Choudhary?

  We we can we can trace all of these things just on a chalkboard.

• 26:48Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:48Krishna Choudhary?

  It's it's it's really incredible.

• 26:51Lester Nare?

  We we we love a good story that uh takes.

• 26:57Lester Nare?

  Rare space-based events connects it to the history.

• 27:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Lester Nare?

  Scientific discovery that we've already established on our little third rock that goes around the sun.

• 27:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:11Lester Nare?

  And no, oh yeah, we've been right.

• 27:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's it's really cool. We've been right. And then there's some enigma. And that's probably because there's there's like some other thing that we're not seeing, you know?

• 27:20Lester Nare?

  And and we have the tools.

• 27:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Lester Nare?

  To to see it.

• 27:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:24Lester Nare?

  Um, great. Ah, I love I love our space stories.

• 27:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and I can't wait to to see how many Vera Rubin is gonna catch.

• 27:33Lester Nare?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right now that it goes online, like.

• 27:35Lester Nare?

  Check out our our episode three or four, because we do a deep dive on it and and I I.

• 27:42Krishna Choudhary?

  The greatest observatory.

• 27:43Lester Nare?

  Ever created by humanity to date, to date. And I I just I think about it a lot, actually. Every day I'm like, oh, did another.

• 27:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and you can just go online and check like, what did it find?

• 27:54Lester Nare?

  The the explore, the online explore is incredible. Uh, the data access, which we talked about is incredible. Um, it's for everybody. Uh, and and so we've started like we always do. Or regularly do something very big. We're now going into the opposite direction. And our next two stories are going to be stuff that's very, very small.

• 28:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh.

• 28:17Lester Nare?

  There's been all this news or or rumors and gossip that there's been turmoil on the set of the new Avengers movie.

• 28:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I saw a lot of memes about it, yeah.

• 28:27Lester Nare?

  And the details are a little fuzzy.

• 28:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:29Lester Nare?

  But apparently, uh, Robert Downey Jr., RDJ, Iron Man, who is the tent pole of the whole franchise, the only reason it exists. Has been having some conflicts with one of the more aggressive characters in the Marvel Universe Deadpool, AKA Ryan Reynolds.

• 28:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 28:49Lester Nare?

  Who apparently can't stop fighting each other on set. But weirdly, how this connects to our story is our story number two is that apparently a virus and bacteria are teaming up and are able to battle cancer as if it's Thanos in Endgame.

• 29:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Lester Nare?

  Uh, there are no five rings on the thingy.

• 29:09Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 29:09Lester Nare?

  But.

• 29:10Krishna Choudhary?

  But this team up could actually change the game for cancer therapy.

• 29:15Lester Nare?

  So this story is coming out of Columbia Engineering. Researchers at Columbia Engineering byline is uh. Researchers at Columbia Engineering have built a cancer therapy that makes bacteria and viruses work as a team. It was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Um, and it the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab shows how their system hides a virus inside a tumor-seeking bacterium and smuggles it past the immune system and unleashes in it inside this cancerous tumors unleashes the force.

• 29:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, it's insane.

• 29:53Lester Nare?

  So there's, there's, there's a, there's an immigration story here.

• 29:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:56Lester Nare?

  We love, there's a smuggling story here.

• 29:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Lester Nare?

  Uh, Columbia was obviously the center point for a lot of controversies relates to.

• 30:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. No, they're doing good work.

• 30:06Lester Nare?

  Science and research and funding, but tell me, you know, this sounds like a great buddy cop movie.

• 30:12Krishna Choudhary?

  It is. It is exactly that.

• 30:13Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 30:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it is exactly that. It's like, um, it's like two, two cops that are, that are teaming up.

• 30:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:20Krishna Choudhary?

  To, to take care of a bad guy. It's almost like, um, what's the, what's the one movie where they, they take the criminals? And then they, and then they're like, uh, Suicide Squad.

• 30:30Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Where they're like, they take the criminals and then they're like, okay, we're gonna make you good now. And then you're gonna get the even worse bad guys. That's what this is.

• 30:39Lester Nare?

  Okay, got it.

• 30:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? You know what I mean?

• 30:40Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Because it's like bacteria. We don't like that.

• 30:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Viruses, we don't like that. But the two of them together are now fighting cancer, which we really don't like.

• 30:50Lester Nare?

  It's a super evil duo to fight the even more.

• 30:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Even more evil duo. Yeah. It's that, it's that, it's that, um, the, the meme with, um, Thor being like, I know I can't.

• 31:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:02Krishna Choudhary?

  But, but she can. You know what I mean? But it's like, it's like this virus bacteria chimera.

• 31:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That, that, that they've created. It's, it's an incredible paradigm shift in cancer treatment.

• 31:14Lester Nare?

  So what I understand about cancer treatment, which is very little.

• 31:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Lester Nare?

  Is, is fundamentally, it's very like, the existing options we have for the patients, whether it's chemo, all the, it's, it's like very hard on the body.

• 31:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's very hard on the mo- body and it's also very nonspecific. That's the main thing.

• 31:32Lester Nare?

  It's, it's a shotgun approach.

• 31:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It's just like, it's just like, it's just like, with chemo, all you're doing is targeting, um. Cells that replicate really fast, okay? So you're getting rid of the cancer cells, but you're also getting rid of hair cells because they hair follicles because they replicate really fast. Bone marrow, they replicate really fast. Um, digestive cells that replicate really fast. That's why you get nausea, anemia, hair loss, you know?

• 31:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:58Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's non-specific.

• 32:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:00Krishna Choudhary?

  And then with radio, radiotherapy, it's like, sort of like, you know, you're just sort of blasting some location. And sure, you can get specific with like, like proton therapy and things like that. But at the end of the day, it's not like targeting from a biological sense. Only the cancer cells, right?

• 32:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:19Krishna Choudhary?

  So over the years, we've had these things called adaptive therapies. Okay, and adaptive therapies, what they've done is sort of target only the cancer cells and leave everything else alone.

• 32:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, there's been, there's been sort of a bunch of approaches. There's been this thing called CAR-T therapy, which is where you take the body's own immune cells. And then you engineer those immune cells to then target the antigen, which is like sort of a marker on these cancer cells. So you train the body's own immune system to then target these cancer cells and recognize these cancer cells. The problem with that therapy is, okay, it's, it's got to be extremely specific to the patient. You got to literally extract immune cells from the patient and then you've got to engineer those.

• 33:07Lester Nare?

  On a per patient basis.

• 33:08Krishna Choudhary?

  On a per patient basis. And then also, at the end of the day, a lot of these cancers are clever, dude. They're gonna, they've created methods to actually create cold tumors. It's what we call when they suppress the immune response. Okay? Even, even with the CAR-T and all this stuff, like they're suppressing the immune cell response actively because they're secreting stuff that confuses the immune system.

• 33:32Lester Nare?

  It's like, it's like you say, oh, we're gonna build a wall and they're like, we have ladders.

• 33:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, and it's like, or like, we're making the wall invisible. And then it's like, oh, okay, now I can't, I can't, the, my immune system can't actually see everything, right? So, um, over the years, we've shifted towards something called adaptive. Therapies, which are these like, single agent biotherapies, where we're now actually leveraging um biology itself to attack biology, okay? So there's two approaches. One approach is to use bacteria, okay? What we do is we we take um some bacteria and um we try to get that bacteria to attack cancer.

• 34:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? There's some advantages to this. The advantage is um there's certain types of bacteria like Salmonella that like anoxic environments. So environments that don't have a lot of oxygen. Tumors tend to have not a lot of oxygen, especially at their core. Because the blood vessels are on the periphery and at the core, the the oxygen is getting to it. So the bacteria naturally are like, ooh, I like that. And then they get to the core and then they start sort of, you know, destroying the cancer from within. Um, the problem with that is they get to the core, but they're not really attacking the periphery and they're not attacking like maybe a metastasis that happened somewhere else, right? And the other problem obviously is like, okay, back to like, you're literally giving me Salmonella, right?

• 34:58Krishna Choudhary?

  You can like, you can, you can genetically engineer and everything, but like.

• 35:03Lester Nare?

  It's still bacteria.

• 35:04Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, you're giving me a pathogenic bacteria, right? And there there's a risk of um systemic infection and dose-related toxicity and all this other kind of stuff, okay? The other problem, the other way to approach this problem is with viruses, okay? You have something called oncolytic virotherapy, where you take viruses that attack cancer cells and you inject that into the patient, right? Now, with oncolytic virotherapy, there's two problems. Um, one is the delivery challenge, okay? You gotta really get into the tumor and like, and like, put that in there, okay? Inject direct. So if there's a tumor that's very, very deep or if there's like some random tumors elsewhere that haven't been identified.

• 35:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Out of luck.

• 35:50Lester Nare?

  It's not like a systemic approach.

• 35:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and the, yeah, and the other thing is, um, the immune system of the body has already been primed with a bunch of viruses that you've seen over the years, right? So the immune system itself is gonna be like, you're not getting in, what are you doing? And then, and then the, the immune system is gonna attack that virus, right?

• 36:08Lester Nare?

  Makes sense.

• 36:09Krishna Choudhary?

  So this particular therapy called the CAPSID, C A P P S I D, right? With two Ps.

• 36:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 36:17Krishna Choudhary?

  This particular therapy is getting the best of both worlds, okay?

• 36:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 36:23Krishna Choudhary?

  It's combining the virus, which is really good at killing the cancer cells.

• 36:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 36:29Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's hard getting in, it's got a tough time getting in.

• 36:32Lester Nare?

  It can't get past the, the security at the door.

• 36:34Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, yeah, so it's, it's, the, the virus is becoming like the Greek soldiers inside the Trojan horse.

• 36:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:42Krishna Choudhary?

  And the bacteria becomes a Trojan horse, okay? Because the bacteria has an easy time getting into the center of the tumor, right? And it knows where to go because of the anoxic environment. It's seeking this place without any oxygen, so it goes to the center of the tumor. So what, what this team at Columbia Engineering is doing is combining both of those therapies.

• 37:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:02Krishna Choudhary?

  To give this like two-pronged approach, it's, it's a synergistic.

• 37:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Biotherapy.

• 37:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That combines the best of both worlds.

• 37:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:11Krishna Choudhary?

  To target the tumor.

• 37:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:14Krishna Choudhary?

  And then infect the tumor with the viruses.

• 37:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And then also have that viral, um, infection spread to other tumors in the body.

• 37:24Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 37:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, it's, it's like, it's almost out of science fiction. I can't, like, the amount of stuff that needed to happen.

• 37:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:33Krishna Choudhary?

  For this to be a reality, right? Where we're now manipulating viruses, bacteria, together.

• 37:39Lester Nare?

  In combination.

• 37:39Krishna Choudhary?

  In combination, where they're both running together. Yeah, dude, it's, so it's actually insane.

• 37:44Lester Nare?

  It looks like this, so CAP, CAPSID, it looks like it's short for coordinated activity of prokaryote and.

• 37:52Lester Nare?

  Picorona, Picorona virus?

• 37:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Lester Nare?

  Uh, of safe intercellular delivery.

• 37:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, prokaryote means um, a type of life that doesn't have a nucleus, so that's bacteria.

• 38:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and Picorona virus is the particular type of virus that they've used to genetically engineer to create this kind of viral therapy.

• 38:10Lester Nare?

  Not coronavirus.

• 38:11Krishna Choudhary?

  No, not coronavirus. Yeah, this is um, this is like a type of, it's a Seneca virus.

• 38:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Seneca virus A.

• 38:20Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes. This is, this is.

• 38:22Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's dude, it's a game changer and there's, there's a lot of like hurdles that you have to get through.

• 38:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 38:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Because like, okay, for example, um, one thing would be like, okay, I've got this bacteria and it's got a viral DNA inside. Like, what's to guarantee that the viral DNA isn't just gonna like, express itself not in the tumor? Wha- what I'd like?

• 38:45Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Is for the virus to only target the tumor, right? I don't want it to, I got a bunch of healthy cells.

• 38:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? I don't want a viral infection everywhere.

• 38:53Lester Nare?

  Then we're back to the same issue with the chemo and radiotherapy.

• 38:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 38:56Lester Nare?

  Which is it's nonspecific.

• 38:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It's nonspecific, so how do I make this specific, right? So, they engineered a way such that the viral DNA would only be expressed once the bacteria was inside the tumor.

• 39:09Lester Nare?

  That's sick. Once it's in the club, then.

• 39:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Once it's in the club, then, then that's when it does all of its shit.

• 39:14Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And, and the way they did that was they attached it to a promoter.

• 39:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we talked about.

• 39:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, the, the gene expression.

• 39:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That's happening would only be expressed once the bacteria was in its environment where it wants to be pathogenic.

• 39:27Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 39:28Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then once it did that, the viral DNA now starts transcribing. The other thing that was really cool that they did was they included um, a T7 um, RNA polymerase. So, you've got this DNA that is really the viral DNA inside the bacteria, right?

• 39:46Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 39:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And um, what you wanna do, usually what you wanna do is viruses, they, they hijack the host cell, right? And then they replicate DNA using the host cell.

• 39:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:56Krishna Choudhary?

  This thing's got, it, it's got its own machinery to replicate the viral DNA.

• 40:01Lester Nare?

  That.

• 40:02Krishna Choudhary?

  So it doesn't need to require the whole cell because the whole cell is cancerous. It could be doing all sorts of

• 40:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Random crap.

• 40:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like it's it's like replicating like crazy.

• 40:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:10Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's doing all sorts of crap.

• 40:12Lester Nare?

  And and so it's maybe not as dependable.

• 40:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. We don't. We don't want to depend on this dysfunctional machinery of cancer cells in order to replicate the virus that is going to destroy the cancer cell.

• 40:23Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 40:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So we've created our own little polymerase that will do that.

• 40:28Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is which is which is really cool.

• 40:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Lester Nare?

  Yes. I want to make a quick shout out to, uh, Charles M. Rice, who is an expert in virology at the Rockefeller University, who was a part of the study and collaborated with the Columbia team. So I want to make sure we give.

• 40:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right across the island of Manhattan.

• 40:46Lester Nare?

  Oh, there you go.

• 40:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Rockefeller and Columbia, their east side versus west side.

• 40:50Lester Nare?

  A little quick yacht trip across across there. So just making sure that we give, uh, Charles a shout out there. Uh, as well as again, the team over at Columbia.

• 41:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, it was insane. And dude, you want to you want to hear the the the experiment?

• 41:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Like nail in the coffin.

• 41:06Lester Nare?

  Cause we love talking about experimental design.

• 41:08Krishna Choudhary?

  The experimental design here is is amazing. So they got these, um, they got these mice models.

• 41:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Again, uh, transgenic mice models that sort of mimic, um, the small cell lung cancer. Okay? Hundred percent survival rate.

• 41:23Lester Nare?

  Jesus.

• 41:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Here's what they did. And this is and not just that. Okay, here's what's crazy. Okay? So this mouse mouse model has a tumor in each of its lungs.

• 41:33Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, right flank, left flank. What they did was they, um, they injected this therapy into the right flank.

• 41:40Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And the therapy killed the cancer in the right flank and then it went to the left flank and killed it there too, right? Because the virus inside the the right flank lung. Does the infection, creates these antibodies, right? And, and these viral particles. Those viral particles then travel through the bloodstream and start targeting the cancer in the other, in the other location as well, right? And the whole point was, now we've, the, the immune system is now overrun. Because before, if we just inject the viral particles, the immune system's gonna be like, that's not enough.

• 42:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:16Krishna Choudhary?

  But now we have this full-fledged viral inflection.

• 42:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:18Krishna Choudhary?

  But all this virus is targeting are cancer cells.

• 42:21Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 42:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It just wants to eat cancer cells. Because that's what the particles are sort of lock and keying into.

• 42:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 42:28Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 42:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:29Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so, so now, you can, you can put this into one part. And as long as, if, if it's the same cancer that's spread to other parts of the body, it'll target those other cancers.

• 42:40Lester Nare?

  This, this is so important.

• 42:41Krishna Choudhary?

  It's so cool!

• 42:42Lester Nare?

  This is so important. Because this goes back to what we talked about at the beginning of the story, which is, it's, it's no longer nonspecific. And not only is it nonspecific, you can, uh, insert it into the sort of body in a singular location, and it will independently

• 43:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Lester Nare?

  locate and then also kill other similar cancer locations for that exact same targeted focus.

• 43:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:10Lester Nare?

  Which, again, for patients, like, like this comes back to like, what is the impact for, you know, research like this on real people? It's like, these therapies can become much more, can be more effective with less of an impact on the body.

• 43:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 43:26Lester Nare?

  In these like, other ways in which the nonspecific therapies.

• 43:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Lester Nare?

  Which we have available to us now.

• 43:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like CAR-T therapy is a specific therapy that happens like patient by patient.

• 43:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 43:35Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's got problems, right? Like, um, the, the CAR-T therapy, these immune cells, for example, they can't get to the, the, the, the center of the tumor.

• 43:44Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Because, because the tumor has these natural mechanisms where it wants to fight off the immune cells.

• 43:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? On the other, on, and then also, um, You know, it's CAR T therapy, you gotta train these immune cells to identify specific antigens. But cancer is just like such a to to work with because cancer is always mutating.

• 44:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So, okay, you don't like this antigen, I'll give you another one. And then the CAR T therapy is not gonna work because it's only trained on a single antigen. Right? And now I've just changed the shape to how you recognize me and like my ID is now different. And so you'll just let me go, right? And so here with with the viral DNA is constantly evolving as well, right? So it can mitigate this heterogeneity.

• 44:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:30Krishna Choudhary?

  This like difference.

• 44:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:31Krishna Choudhary?

  That's happening with these rapidly mutating cancer lines, right?

• 44:36Lester Nare?

  Which is one of the key aspects of why cancer is such a pernicious issue to deal with.

• 44:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, it's so hard because it changes so fast. But this, we're like harnessing the fact that viruses also.

• 44:46Lester Nare?

  Do that.

• 44:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Do that. And they and they create like all of these different versions.

• 44:51Lester Nare?

  And then when one works.

• 44:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And then that'll go and then and then like it'll find another version that'll work, you know? It's it's like synthetic biology, which is crazy to think about. Like, we're literally engineering.

• 45:02Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 45:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Like little tiny micro molecular robots to now just target these bad guys, these cancer cells, right? I mean, we're we're far away from like FDA approval.

• 45:13Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 45:14Krishna Choudhary?

  There there's lots of concerns, obviously, like the I I talked about mutation just now, right? Like, what what what what's stopping this virus from mutating into like its original version of where like I hate it?

• 45:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So, um, yeah.

• 45:29Lester Nare?

  It's like we've created our own micro molecular suicide squad.

• 45:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 45:34Lester Nare?

  But we haven't like there's still the concerns, but they are still the suicide squad.

• 45:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they're still the suicide squad. So like, in order to get to actually like human trials, because right now they've done it on mice and they've done it on in vitro sort of human cell lines and things like that. In order to get it to sort of FDA approval, we have to, first of all, um, mitigate the risks.

• 45:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 45:53Krishna Choudhary?

  One of the ways that they're actually doing it, and they described it in this paper, is instead of a single nucleotide mutation that will take the virus and put it back into its wild type, which is the part that we don't like, they made it two mutations. Okay, so. What that means is now like, you know, if the probability of like going to a mutation was one over one hundred, now it's geometric. So it's one over one hundred squared. So one over ten thousand, which is like obviously way better than one over one hundred. You can imagine like doing this for for for multiple single nucleotide mutations. We also need to um test it on um higher order organisms, right? Right now we did it on mice. We need to like start graduating and slowly going towards human human beings.

• 46:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 46:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but I think it's I think it's extremely promising. The other thing is like this thing, like it's currently been targeted for neuroendocrine like cancer cells. So it's like like, you know, small cell lung cancer and things like that. But one can imagine this is a modular thing, right?

• 46:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 46:52Krishna Choudhary?

  The bacteria could have any sort of virus.

• 46:54Lester Nare?

  Exactly.

• 46:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And the bacteria could be any other kind of bacteria that we sort of engineered to to get in here. So it's this like, you know, Lego block.

• 47:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 47:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Thing that we talk about all the time where it's like it's like we can have different types of Lego blocks that we put in here and here. It's this modular thing that we can adapt to different kinds of viruses. I think it's I think it's extremely special.

• 47:14Lester Nare?

  Adaptive biotherapy?

• 47:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Lester Nare?

  Was what you sort of started with?

• 47:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:18Lester Nare?

  I mean, the the there's a key insight here fundamentally.

• 47:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Lester Nare?

  That has so many uh different paths that it can now go down because it's a key. It's similar to how CRISPR was a key insight.

• 47:30Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 47:31Lester Nare?

  That had then multiple of these like.

• 47:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because it was modular at the end of the day.

• 47:35Lester Nare?

  At the end of the day.

• 47:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Lester Nare?

  It's not just an acute, specific, singular insight.

• 47:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Lester Nare?

  And like that's what's again so fascinating about this study in particular in terms of the now instead of there being one door, two doors, three doors.

• 47:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, now it's like we can just like mix and match and get a bunch of doors. Every door you want.

• 47:53Lester Nare?

  Is is is is a potentially available.

• 47:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Lester Nare?

  Obviously with the caveats of, you know, downstream research.

• 47:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and obviously we need to make sure it's safe, but I think this is really promising, you know?

• 48:04Lester Nare?

  Fascinating. We're we're we're, you know, we're moving into a place again, we always we talk about this a lot between the fundamental research stuff in sort of this, you know, biotech arena.

• 48:17Lester Nare?

  And then you add, you know, the ability to then sort of rapidly iterate with things like AI. Progress is gonna continue to be.

• 48:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna be really cool. Yeah.

• 48:25Lester Nare?

  Fascinating.

• 48:26Krishna Choudhary?

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

• 48:27Lester Nare?

  And while we have a lot of progress uh in some of these biomolecular research areas, one area we don't have a lot of progress is in politics, where politicians.

• 48:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Never.

• 48:37Lester Nare?

  Continue to like to spin the news. Uh, but our third story is that scientists have figured out how to spin electrons.

• 48:46Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 48:46Lester Nare?

  And it could maybe power the next generation of tech. This next research paper is out of the National Research Council of Science and Technology in Korea. Uh, most famously known right now for K-pop Demon Hunters and Squid Games.

• 49:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Lester Nare?

  But Korea has a huge technical.

• 49:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. That's where Samsung is.

• 49:09Lester Nare?

  Right, like a huge in terms of.

• 49:11Krishna Choudhary?

  They're one of the big fabs in the world.

• 49:13Lester Nare?

  In the world, like they have a huge uh population of like highly technical people. And this study is fascinating. So uh this was a little bit different for me. The so the the headline here is turning spin loss into energy. New principle can enable ultra-low-power devices. So one of the things we've talked about in a previous episode is if we look at all the technology revolutions that are currently happening.

• 49:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Lester Nare?

  The num- the one underlying thing that's true and is a part of the part of the great power war that all these nation-states are having is uh we need more power.

• 49:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Lester Nare?

  If we wanna have all this AGI.

• 49:45Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 49:46Lester Nare?

  Artificial general intelligence, all these things, we need a lot more power.

• 49:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Lester Nare?

  Uh, the Chinese are solving it right now by building nuclear at levels we've never seen before. But this maybe has sort of some impacts in this power generation problem set, so.

• 50:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it lets us, I mean, it lets us do more with less.

• 50:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:05Krishna Choudhary?

  At the end of the day.

• 50:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It lets us compute more with less. If this becomes um an economically viable and a commercially viable product.

• 50:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So I will give you that caveat, but it's a proof of concept of something that people have been after for quite a while. Okay? Um, in order to get into the idea of spintronics, which is this new paradigm of electronics.

• 50:30Lester Nare?

  I think Spintronics was just actually performing a Burning Man.

• 50:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh, is there, is there a band that does that?

• 50:36Lester Nare?

  I'm pretty sure Spintronics is an EDM DJ, literally.

• 50:39Krishna Choudhary?

  That's hilarious. I hope he's good, because Spintronics could be the future of electronics. Um, so in order, in order to really understand the story, I think I've got to tell you about a little bit about spintronics, which is different from electronics.

• 50:54Lester Nare?

  We've, we've, the only context I have is upspin, downspin.

• 50:58Krishna Choudhary?

  That's good. Yeah, that's already plenty. Okay, that's already plenty because it turns out the electron has both a charge.

• 51:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 51:05Krishna Choudhary?

  A negative one, let's call it.

• 51:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 51:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's got a spin, but the spin can be both positive one and negative one. It could be spinning this way or it could be be spinning the other way. Um, so conventional electronics, like the ones in your lights, in this computer, everywhere else, right? Most of that is exploiting the charge of the electron.

• 51:25Lester Nare?

  Only.

• 51:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's only exploiting the charge of the electron. Um, current, for example, is the flow of charge where physical electrons are flowing, right? And, um, memory, for example, is the, the storage of charge, like a one means that your capacitor is charged and a zero means your capacitor is discharged. That's how you get memory. Um, and that is pretty soon going to run into some problems. Okay? Because Moore's law is not forever. You know about Moore's law, right?

• 51:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 51:56Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, like everything doubles every two years. Yeah, whatever it is. Um, well, we're, we're, we're pretty soon getting to that limit where, um, Moore's laws is running into fundamental physics.

• 52:08Lester Nare?

  It's slowing down. We can't get, we, because the idea of that you, you doubled the amount of transistors on a chip.

• 52:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Lester Nare?

  Every eighteen to twenty-four months, we're already at like three nanometer chips with like TSMC and Apple.

• 52:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Lester Nare?

  But we can't.

• 52:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And the problem, yeah, yeah. It's hard to get much smaller and the problem we're starting to have is power dissipation. Okay. Because like if we have capacitors that are that small, then now we're starting to get into like, we can't store charge for that long on such a small capacitor. Pretty soon we're gonna have to keep like, um, you have to keep charging up the capacitor to keep it at that. Otherwise it's going to decay and then you're going to lose memory. Right? So, so that's, that's one of the things, right? Silicon chips consume an insane amount of power.

• 52:54Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 52:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Which is why everybody's like, oh, like one query in ChatGPT costs this many gallons of water. Okay, yeah, like, yes.

• 53:01Lester Nare?

  Crypto has the same problem.

• 53:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, crypto has the same problem. Yeah, the other, the other um, big thing is called the Von Neumann bottleneck, named after John Von Neumann.

• 53:10Lester Nare?

  Oh, he did, he did the probes and the bottleneck?

• 53:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh dude, Von Neumann did like.

• 53:14Lester Nare?

  Everything.

• 53:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Von Neumann was um, Von Neumann was one of those few individuals where um, other people like Fermi.

• 53:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 53:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Would be like. How, what, what do you, how did you do that?

• 53:30Lester Nare?

  Was he a magician more than he was a sage?

• 53:32Krishna Choudhary?

  He, he was. He was a magician more than he was a sage. But um, you know, he, he had his caveats. Um, and we can get, get into that in another episode. There was, there was one thing where he, he like proved that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was the only interpretation of quantum mechanics. And because it was Von Neumann who proved that, everyone else would just not question it. Like if somebody were to question it, they'd just be like, yeah, but Von Neumann proved that Copenhagen interpretation is the only interpretation of quantum mechanics and that would just settle the debate.

• 54:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Which is why it took like thirty years for someone like um, like Bell's inequality.

• 54:13Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And for, for someone with different versions, like the, the pilot wave theory and all this other kind of like, all these other different versions of quantum mechanics. Because literally Von Neumann had an incorrect proof to prove that, anyways, the Copenhagen interpretation was correct. Anyway, but he, he was an incredibly smart guy and he actually um, he, he characterized this thing called the Von Neumann bottleneck now, which is this difference between how memory and processing units work. Okay? Because um, fundamentally, you know, before we had solid state drives.

• 54:47Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:47Krishna Choudhary?

  We had this, the, and even now that we have solid state drives, we have this separation between RAM.

• 54:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 54:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And hard disk.

• 54:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 54:54Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And the, the hard disk is where you store your permanent memory. The RAM is where you're doing the computation.

• 55:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Of whatever the thingy that you're doing.

• 55:02Lester Nare?

  So for example, if I want to have a local, if I want to take OpenAI's open source model.

• 55:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Lester Nare?

  And run it locally on my computer, I need a Mac that has a lot of RAM.

• 55:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:14Lester Nare?

  Not necessarily a big hard disk.

• 55:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, not necessarily a big hard disk, but like, like something that will compute efficiently.

• 55:20Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 55:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Like currently now.

• 55:21Lester Nare?

  Now.

• 55:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so there's a need for a new paradigm where perhaps maybe memory and RAM are the same thing.

• 55:30Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 55:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 55:31Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 55:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And with these increasing demands with AI, big data and all this other kind of stuff, we want to have a new paradigm where the, the, it doesn't cost us that much power to upkeep.

• 55:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:42Krishna Choudhary?

  All of this amount of stuff.

• 55:43Lester Nare?

  Makes sense.

• 55:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And so that's where the idea of spintronics comes in.

• 55:48Lester Nare?

  Because there's two paths here. It's just increase the amount of power availability.

• 55:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Lester Nare?

  Like the brute force way.

• 55:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Lester Nare?

  And then it's like be more efficient with the power we have.

• 55:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Lester Nare?

  Is this.

• 55:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And the, and like even if we were to increase the amount of power availability, like we'd have to increase the size of our computers because we've reached the sort of

• 56:04Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 56:05Krishna Choudhary?

  limit of like how dense we can make stuff before the power consumption per square inch goes away.

• 56:12Lester Nare?

  Johnny, I would not be very happy with that.

• 56:14Krishna Choudhary?

  You know what I'm, yeah, but you know what I'm saying?

• 56:16Lester Nare?

  I do know what you're saying.

• 56:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Like it's like, it's like now we've like sort of plateaued in this landscape.

• 56:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 56:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so spintronics is this idea of utilizing the electron's spin in addition to its charge.

• 56:27Lester Nare?

  Because we only use a charge.

• 56:28Krishna Choudhary?

  To store information.

• 56:28Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 56:28Krishna Choudhary?

  And to process information.

• 56:30Lester Nare?

  Right. Okay.

• 56:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 56:31Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 56:31Krishna Choudhary?

  So, um, the first, the first big win for spintronics actually happened, um, way back in like the 1990s. When we got hard disks, the hard disks that, um, maybe we don't use today because we got solid state hard disks. But remember the hard disks like way back when like your computer would do the

• 56:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 56:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Sound?

• 56:51Lester Nare?

  Oh, I remember.

• 56:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, right? But, but there was literally a spinning disk, like it was an electromechanical disk that was spinning, right? And that spinning disk represented the, you know, 126 gigabytes of memory and everyone was like, oh, 126 gigabytes of memory.

• 57:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 57:09Krishna Choudhary?

  But like that was, that was a big deal back in the day, right? And the inventors of this, they actually discovered something called, um, Giant magnor resistance.

• 57:19Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 57:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, giant magnet, giant magneto resistance, okay? And it's this idea that what we can do is just like a transistor. The way a transistor works is you've got, you've got like a state of the transistor that lets current through.

• 57:36Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 57:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And then there's a state of the transistor that doesn't let current through. And that's going to be your zero and one.

• 57:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 57:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's how you sort of represent data, right?

• 57:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:45Krishna Choudhary?

  What, what these guys discovered, they were Albert Furt and Peter Grunberg. Um, what they discovered was this giant magneto resistance.

• 57:55Krishna Choudhary?

  They figured out that if I've got two magnets, okay? That are both oriented in the same direction with an insulator in the middle. Then current will pass through it because of this quantum mechanical thing called tunneling. Where the electron will actually go through a barrier because they're equal magnetization, okay? But if they're opposite magnetization, then it's going to get stopped. And they were like, okay, that could actually be our zero and one. And then what you could do is you could control whether it's a zero and one. Based on the direction of the magnetic field.

• 58:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:30Krishna Choudhary?

  That a particular piece of, of physical thingy.

• 58:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Had.

• 58:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so the way that the hard disk actually works is you've got this reader.

• 58:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so there's a reader that comes down and it's like reading the hard disk.

• 58:45Lester Nare?

  Like a record player.

• 58:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And the hard disk is, yes, exactly. It's a record player that's like coming down and the, the hard disk is spinning. And the reader actually has these two, these two, these two things, okay? The top one is rigid. It's going to stay fixed. The bottom one is going to flip based on the, the way the disk is moving, okay? So if at the time of the disk, the magnetic field is this way, then the bottom one is going to flip this way.

• 59:09Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 59:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's going to let through current.

• 59:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:11Krishna Choudhary?

  But as soon as it moves and the other one is this way.

• 59:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:14Krishna Choudhary?

  It's going to flip this way.

• 59:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:15Krishna Choudhary?

  And then it's going to stop current. So now my little record player can read zeros and ones. And you can pack these little magnetic things super close. And, and have a hard disk that is electromechanical because it's electrical, but it's also mechanical because it's spinning.

• 59:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then that is going to be my sort of memory. And now all of a sudden, we went from like memory being stored and like things that were the size of refrigerators. To like things that could be stored in the size of like a computer, a desktop computer. Right? So that was a big deal. Two thousand and seven, they won the Nobel Prize for it.

• 59:49Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 59:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Well deserved, right? And so that was sort of the first big win for Spintronics.

• 59:54Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 59:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 59:55Lester Nare?

  It was proof that using both um.

• 59:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Charge.

• 59:59Lester Nare?

  Charge and spin.

• 1:00:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And spin of the electron.

• 1:00:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Can have like production, commercial application.

• 1:00:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:07Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:00:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, right? So now it's like, okay, like what can we, can we take this further?

• 1:00:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:00:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because if we could have RAM that was magnetic, right? Then all of a sudden, like you know how like you're working on a Word document?

• 1:00:20Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the power cuts off and you just lose everything?

• 1:00:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Like I had that during finals week, actually. Did junior year, this one time I was working on my, my, my, my paper. Right? And, and I like, like worked, but like an idiot, I didn't save. So it didn't go to the hard disk.

• 1:00:36Lester Nare?

  We still had to manually save.

• 1:00:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, cuz we still had to manually.

• 1:00:39Lester Nare?

  No auto save.

• 1:00:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I didn't, and, and so, and so, and then the power cuts off for some fucking random reason. And then all of my, all of my stuff was, was gone.

• 1:00:49Lester Nare?

  I, I literally like, I'm feel, I.

• 1:00:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because, because the, the RAM didn't store it in the hard disk. But the RAM is a bunch of capacitors, so if you lose power, then the capacitors go. And then, then I lose everything and I log back in, the, the computer's like, do you wanna go back to the previous save? And it's like from like yesterday? You know? And so, so, so, so imagine if we had a magnetic RAM. Where, where the, the, the memory was stored in the polarization of these magnets.

• 1:01:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, if I take out the power.

• 1:01:22Lester Nare?

  It can maintain.

• 1:01:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Magnets are gonna maintain their polarization.

• 1:01:25Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So I could have this like way without like this non-volatile, it's called volatility.

• 1:01:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:31Krishna Choudhary?

  In a memory. But I could have a non-volatile memory.

• 1:01:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Because it's stored in the physical orientation of the magnets, right?

• 1:01:38Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:01:39Lester Nare?

  That, yes.

• 1:01:40Krishna Choudhary?

  So that's a great goal.

• 1:01:41Lester Nare?

  That's very.

• 1:01:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what we want and and and and then and then we can actually bridge this gap between memory and processing. Right? Because now all of a sudden, the same paradigm that we're using for memory, we can start using for processing. And it could be this like bridge between the two. And so now we don't have this von Neumann bottleneck.

• 1:02:00Krishna Choudhary?

  So this is, this is great. We want this. We want this. Okay. Um, there are problems. Okay.

• 1:02:06Lester Nare?

  As there always are.

• 1:02:07Krishna Choudhary?

  As there always are. There are problems when it comes to what we want to do is we want to reliably switch the magnetization state.

• 1:02:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? We wanna, we wanna be able to say, okay, this, this particular unit has a magnetization state of one. We want to reliably switch it to zero. Okay? How do we do that? Well, usually what we do is we use this thing called spin orbit torques, um, which use this thing called the spin hall effect. Okay? And the way that you can imagine this is basically electron spins when you, when you, when you put it through a heavy metal. The heavy metal has a bunch of electron spins that are moving up, moving down, right? Uncorrelated.

• 1:02:45Krishna Choudhary?

  When you put a current through it, the spin up ones are gonna go in one direction and the spin down ones are gonna go in the other direction. The way you can think about this is kind of like the Magnus effect. If you've ever seen the Magnus effect, you, you've got a spinning, there, there's like these videos of like a spinning basketball that's like thrown down. And because it's spinning, the way that it interacts with the air around it makes it move in one direction or the other, right? So if it's spinning this way, it's gonna move in one direction. If it's spinning the other way, it's gonna move in the other.

• 1:03:13Lester Nare?

  You know where I've seen this is in all those Dude Perfect videos where they try to throw a basketball off of like the Hoover Dam. Right? And they spin it to in a particular.

• 1:03:23Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's the Magnus effect.

• 1:03:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So the, the spin orbit torque is literally like the Magnus effect happening with electrons and an electric field, right? You're driving a current this way and the spin in one direction is gonna move it this way and the spin down is gonna move it the other way. So what you can do is you can have like this heavy metal layer where you're putting the, the, the, the current through.

• 1:03:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:45Krishna Choudhary?

  And a ferromagnetic layer, which is where the magnets are. And in a ferromagnet, all of the spins are moving are in the same direction, right? That's what gives it its big magnetic field, like, right? All of the spins are in the same direction, so they all add up to give it a magnetic field. So now, if I, if underneath, I have this like heavy metal layer and I, and I have the spins. The spin going up is gonna go towards the ferromagnetic layer and it's gonna apply a torque on the ferromagnetic layer and it's gonna change the ferromagnetic layer's magnetization. So all of the magnetic fields in the ferromagnet are gonna switch.

• 1:04:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so that's usually how we want to manipulate the magnetic field of these little devices, right? It's like, it's like, okay, you want a one, I want to switch it to a zero. I'm gonna poke it underneath with this current. The current is gonna induce the spin orbital effect and that thing is gonna switch the ferromagnetic layer on top. And then now, all of a sudden, the thing that was a one is now a zero. Okay, the problem with this is there's a lot of dissipation, okay? There's a lot of stuff called joule heating, which is just like the friction, okay? There's a lot of friction that's going on.

• 1:04:53Lester Nare?

  It has nothing to do with vapes.

• 1:04:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:55Lester Nare?

  Nothing to do with vapes.

• 1:04:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Nothing to do with vapes. Joule, meaning J O U L E, like the jewel of energy.

• 1:05:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, although I'm pretty sure the vape is named, you know, it might be. That's something that we should, we should research, yeah. Um, there's also a loss of angular momentum because like, all of this, like, you know, just like joule heating, the friction is gonna lose a lot of the spin, right?

• 1:05:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:16Krishna Choudhary?

  So what these guys did, um, what these researchers from Korea, they actually used the dissipation of spin to their advantage.

• 1:05:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's something that no one really had thought of before. Everyone's trying to minimize the dissipation of friction.

• 1:05:34Lester Nare?

  But they're like, what?

• 1:05:34Krishna Choudhary?

  But they're using the friction to their advantage and they're, they're actually leveraging the friction.

• 1:05:40Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:05:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, they had this, they had this idea of using the intrinsic spin currents of the ferromagnet itself, okay? Because there's two types of currents, okay? There's the electric current, which is literally electrons moving. But you can also have a different type of current, which is a spin current, okay? So a, a normal current is just electrons moving in this way. There's more electrons moving this way than this way, so there's charge transferred. A spin current is where the electrons spinning this way or moving this way and the electrons spinning this way or moving the other way okay so now you have the total electric current is zero because the number of electrons moving left and the number of electrons moving right are exactly the same

• 1:06:23Krishna Choudhary?

  so there's no charge transfer but there's a transfer of angular momentum because the spin up is going this way and the spin down is going the other way right so you can now start affecting magnetization without actually affecting charge

• 1:06:37Lester Nare?

  yes

• 1:06:38Krishna Choudhary?

  right and so what they did was they said okay like what I can do is I can have a ferromagnetic layer in the middle which has all of the spins aligned in a certain direction and I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna run a current through that okay now the spin the the spin up is gonna go one way the spin down is gonna go the other way okay and I'm gonna surround it with an insulator on the top and bottom okay but one of these insulators is gonna be different than the other the one on the top is just gonna be a normal insulator it doesn't like charge it doesn't like spin okay so all of the spin that goes up is gonna just bounce right off okay the one on the bottom is gonna be something called an anti ferromagnet okay so a ferromagnet is when all of the spins are aligned

• 1:07:23Lester Nare?

  yes

• 1:07:23Krishna Choudhary?

  an anti ferromagnet is when all of the spins are exactly alternating okay so it doesn't have a a big magnetization but like it can act like a spin sink you know what I'm saying it can act like an angular momentum sink so now when I put it through the middle and I have all these spins going everywhere the ones that go to the top that are of a particular spin are just gonna bounce right off but the ones that are going to the bottom are just gonna sink into this anti ferromagnet and so the stuff that goes to the top is gonna bounce right back and it's gonna start changing the spin of the ferromagnet in the middle

• 1:07:58Lester Nare?

  yes

• 1:07:59Krishna Choudhary?

  yes so now using spin dissipation which is all of the spins are dissipating at the bottom using this friction we're actually taking the leftover stuff and we're flipping the spin

• 1:08:10Lester Nare?

  yes yes

• 1:08:11Krishna Choudhary?

  it's so it's so interesting dude

• 1:08:15Lester Nare?

  And it was it was a way in which to find these sort of combinatorial dynamics in a way where it's like we're just like now engineering like what happened.

• 1:08:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Lester Nare?

  Such that we get an intended outcome.

• 1:08:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Lester Nare?

  And and the intended outcome now is instead of instead of the spin dissipation just being a loss.

• 1:08:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Lester Nare?

  You now make it a.

• 1:08:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, now the loss is actually the point.

• 1:08:40Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:08:41Krishna Choudhary?

  It's crazy, dude, like the the the loss, the dissipation is actually the point of the whole study.

• 1:08:47Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:08:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And and from this, they've actually made a device that is up to three times more energy efficient. Because they're harnessing the loss as a feature, not a bug.

• 1:08:57Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:08:59Krishna Choudhary?

  It's very nice.

• 1:08:59Lester Nare?

  This is such a good point about um how what why framing and perception matters in terms of like because the initial context is like, oh, this is just functionally a loss in the system.

• 1:09:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:11Lester Nare?

  And there's nothing we can do about.

• 1:09:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And everyone's everyone's worried about minimizing it.

• 1:09:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:09:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Everyone's worried about like, how do we get the jewel heating down? How do we get the dissipation down? And these guys are like, no, no, actually, the more the dissipation.

• 1:09:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:09:23Krishna Choudhary?

  The better the fidelity in my switching from zero to one.

• 1:09:26Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:26Krishna Choudhary?

  It's pretty crazy.

• 1:09:27Lester Nare?

  So it's like it's using the dissipation as almost like this this um not a validation system, but it could create a consistency now. I think what's so interesting about this is this is kind of goes back to why it's important to be able to have so many people attacking the same problem from different directions.

• 1:09:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Lester Nare?

  Because the problems are so open ended and like the blue ocean.

• 1:09:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like it's like there's no like yeah, there's no like playbook.

• 1:09:56Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:09:57Krishna Choudhary?

  For spintronics, right? Because it's such a new concept.

• 1:10:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:10:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Yeah.

• 1:10:02Lester Nare?

  Do you think that this is going to bring a because of the?

• 1:10:05Krishna Choudhary?

  I think this could be big.

• 1:10:07Lester Nare?

  So even if just from the re- so let's take out commercial application for a second. Even just from now inspiring other research institutions.

• 1:10:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. It's a proof of concept that like, okay, this is a total different avenue that we've not even bothered exploring.

• 1:10:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:10:24Krishna Choudhary?

  That now we can start exploring.

• 1:10:26Lester Nare?

  And there's some viability there.

• 1:10:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I can definitely see some like research labs now like starting to to take this more seriously.

• 1:10:32Lester Nare?

  So if you're a future PhD candidate, you know, this is an area that-

• 1:10:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is really cool. And the other thing, I mean, the the commercial applications are actually really cool because like the architecture that they used is super simple. It's a single ferromagnetic layer and a single anti-ferromagnetic layer, which is actually super easy to construct with like normal silicon fabs, right? So so it's not like, it's not like some exotic material that they had to dig out of the ground or something, right? Like this is just like nickel silicon oxide, like stuff that, stuff that normal like chips are made out of. Like, so it's not, it's not that exotic to like try to now replicate this and make this bigger and make this smaller and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:11:13Lester Nare?

  So for to extrapolate from that, so the kind of what you're saying is if I already am TSMC or I'm Foxconn and I'm assembling Apple chips or all these other chips and I have this machinery infrastructure.

• 1:11:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's not too difficult.

• 1:11:27Lester Nare?

  It it I can potentially, there's some reuse of my existing infrastructure from a mass manufacturing scale perspective, where it's like we change order of operations, some of the ingredients.

• 1:11:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like viable in some sense. Yeah, you know, it's like, I mean, there's still a lot more that needs to go on in terms of connecting this to modern infrastructure and like current computing infrastructure and things like that. But the viability of this is not like something that's like really far ahead.

• 1:11:57Lester Nare?

  We don't have to rebuild the entire staff from scratch in order to, that is actually a very important-

• 1:12:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. I think it's an important point, yeah.

• 1:12:05Lester Nare?

  Point. Fascinating. That's not where I thought we were gonna go with our K-pop Demon Hunters.

• 1:12:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Lester Nare?

  Uh, starting point. But using electron spin to an advantage, uh, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

• 1:12:21Krishna Choudhary?

  That's exactly what this is, yep.

• 1:12:22Lester Nare?

  Which is so fascinating. We're gonna go to our last story.

• 1:12:28Lester Nare?

  It's not about billionaires racing to Mars.

• 1:12:30Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:12:30Lester Nare?

  It's not that important. They're not the real heroes.

• 1:12:32Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:12:33Lester Nare?

  The real heroes are the scientists racing to save bees. And the headline on this story coming out of University of Oxford is that scientists make superfood that could save honeybees. Uh, this was in the BBC, uh, from our friends across the pond. Um, and the byline, the scientists have developed a honeybee superfood that could protect animals against the threats of climate change and habitat loss. So all I know about bees is what I see on all these memes and trending stories about we gotta save the bees because they're such a critical part of like the circle, the circle of life. And if the bees go away, there's like a collapse of the ecosystem that arises.

• 1:13:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And agriculture, like human agriculture.

• 1:13:19Lester Nare?

  That sort of arises out of that. So this is like an important, like this is, how does this connect to my everyday life? Like this, this matters.

• 1:13:26Krishna Choudhary?

  This matters a lot, like your food.

• 1:13:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah, like if you like food, uh, you're gonna wanna save the bees. So, so uh, what exactly is going on here?

• 1:13:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Um, bees are extremely important and I think, I think it's, it's urgent for us to address this.

• 1:13:41Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:13:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Because we are facing like uh, a death spiral when it comes to how our agriculture sustains itself. Okay? Um, I have some numbers for you.

• 1:13:52Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:13:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Thirty-five percent of the world's food crops depend on a- animal pollinators.

• 1:13:57Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:13:57Krishna Choudhary?

  These are the things that take, um, you know, the female part of one flower, put it into the male part of another, other, another flower, and then we get fruit.

• 1:14:06Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So anything that has fruit really requires pollinators.

• 1:14:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:14:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Something like one in three bites of human food requires a pollinator. Okay? Um, the economic value is something like five hundred billion dollars. In the US alone, it's something like thirty billion dollars annually. Um, and a single honeybee's co- um, pollination, like a single honeybee col- colonies pollination um, is worth a hundred times more to the community than it is to the beekeeper.

• 1:14:35Lester Nare?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:14:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 1:14:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Like we've seen, you know, when we go out to, um, Los Olivos and all, all these, all these other guys like We we see these bee communities, right? Like, yeah, that that bee colony is worth a hundred times more than it is to the bee.

• 1:14:51Lester Nare?

  So instead of focusing on cutting programs, Doge should have focused on saving the bees.

• 1:14:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, if only, right?

• 1:14:57Lester Nare?

  We would have saved more money.

• 1:14:59Krishna Choudhary?

  If only, yeah. And and those bee populations are declining, okay? Something like forty percent per year.

• 1:15:06Lester Nare?

  It like rapidly.

• 1:15:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Rapidly, dude. It's it's the losses in twenty twenty five are projected to be around sixty to seventy percent. Okay? And this comes from a variety of factors. It's environmental, climate change, like warmer temperatures are not good for the bees. Um, plants bloom at times the bees are not active. And one of the other big ones is a core nutritional gap between when you have these like colonies that are that are um sort of reared by beekeepers. Um, there's a nutritional gap between what the beekeepers can give to the bees and what they actually require. Okay? And um, it's been really hard to actually bridge that gap. Because what what they're really lacking is these things called essential steriles.

• 1:15:52Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like cholesterol and other types of like fatty acids that are really hard to synthesize in a industrial manner. Because a lot of times what the what these beekeepers do is they they're not relying on like the the flowers to feed the bees. They have like artificial, like, you know, feed.

• 1:16:09Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:16:09Krishna Choudhary?

  But um, you're you're not able to fulfill the entire nutritional needs.

• 1:16:14Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:16:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And that is what this paper is addressing. What they did was they bioengineered yeast to make all of the essential oils that bees require.

• 1:16:24Lester Nare?

  This is, okay, fascinating, right? So we have a key issue, the collapse of the bee population, which is fundamental to the entire agriculture and ecosystem infrastructure that enables human life as we know it today to exist. Uh, we currently have a variety of very sort of impactful, like the bee, the job that beekeepers are doing is is is a valuable addition to trying to do something about the problem.

• 1:16:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Lester Nare?

  But they're fundamentally limited because the artificial, the the feed that they are providing is is not sufficient for the needs of these populations. We're trying to continue like sustain.

• 1:16:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And so and so. Again, synthetic biology came to the rescue, okay? What what this team at Oxford did was they they took yeast, um a bio safe yeast, so something that's okay for consumption. Um, and it had um high levels of acetyl CoA, which is acetyl Co enzyme A. It's something that every molecular biology um person is gonna know about. It's something that's used in the Krebs cycle. It's something used like it's like essential for energy in a cell. Um, and what they did was they commandeered this process using our favorite thing, CRISPR Cas 9.

• 1:17:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so they they got CRISPR Cas 9 and what they did was they they got genes from green phytoplankton, tomatoes, potatoes, cuz these are the genes that make these particular steriles, right?

• 1:17:45Lester Nare?

  Beans, potatoes, tomatoes, chicken, turkey.

• 1:17:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. They they they snipped out these genes using CRISPR Cas 9. They put it inside the yeast. Yep. And then the yeast is now starting to make these essential oils in some sense.

• 1:18:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:18:00Krishna Choudhary?

  For the bees.

• 1:18:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:18:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And then what they could do is they could heat inactivate those yeast, dry it up, and then that would become feed for the bees, right? And it also provides proteins for the bees, lipids, vitamins. It became this like one fits all product for bee feed. And the results are, dude, absolutely insane. The the bees that had this particular feed, fifteen times more viable pupae. Like fifteen times more viable.

• 1:18:28Lester Nare?

  Fifteen X.

• 1:18:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Fifteen X.

• 1:18:29Lester Nare?

  Not a fifteen percent.

• 1:18:30Krishna Choudhary?

  No, not fifteen percent, fifteen X. This is a paradigm shift.

• 1:18:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:18:34Krishna Choudhary?

  This could like save save our ass.

• 1:18:36Lester Nare?

  This is this is a really

• 1:18:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Lester Nare?

  big deal.

• 1:18:39Krishna Choudhary?

  This could this could enrich colonies continued to rear the the brood for like ninety days, up until the the experiment ended. And then they were like, okay, I guess we got our data. Cuz cuz these guys were just going at it, right? And before it's the the pupae, the larval stage was the part that was getting affected. Because they're the ones that as they grow, they really require these

• 1:19:00Lester Nare?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:01Krishna Choudhary?

  these nutrients.

• 1:19:02Lester Nare?

  It's I mean, it's it's not the the baby formula versus breastfeeding.

• 1:19:06Krishna Choudhary?

  No, but but this is even worse. This is like, at least baby formula has all the essential ingredients, right? This this didn't even it's like it's like all you're eating is rice. You're you're gonna get wrecked.

• 1:19:16Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:19:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This this reminds me, or has a little bit of a correlation to what um.

• 1:19:27Lester Nare?

  The, the new company that Friedberg, David Friedberg uh

• 1:19:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:19:32Lester Nare?

  Creating around trying to increase the yield of crops. It's different.

• 1:19:36Krishna Choudhary?

  It's different, but it's, it's similar. Yeah, yeah. It's precision, sort of nutrition.

• 1:19:40Lester Nare?

  Right, right. At the, at the sort of like, uh, you know, the level of what you're trying to give humans versus in this case bees. But like, we can actually go in, finagle.

• 1:19:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Lester Nare?

  And, and increase outcomes, positive outcomes. Fifteen X is crazy.

• 1:19:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Fifteen X is crazy dude.

• 1:20:00Lester Nare?

  Crazy.

• 1:20:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Like this is, this could be a game changer for bee populations worldwide. And the other big um, advantage is like, you know, when, when you have beekeepers with bee colonies, like they are constantly competing with native bee populations and native pollinators to get the food. Now, if we've got a complete diet for these bee colonies, then the native population that is like there in the ecosystem doesn't have to compete with the agricultural population that is there to pollinate all this stuff, right?

• 1:20:29Lester Nare?

  That's an interesting.

• 1:20:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Like there's an ecosystem balance that is happening.

• 1:20:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:20:33Krishna Choudhary?

  That is like even better, right?

• 1:20:35Lester Nare?

  Because.

• 1:20:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Because then, yeah, it's.

• 1:20:37Lester Nare?

  The, the, the, there, there's a currently this, this uh, resource scarcity.

• 1:20:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:42Lester Nare?

  And, and so the sort of farm raised versus uh, you know, wild have to compete.

• 1:20:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, but now they don't have to.

• 1:20:49Lester Nare?

  That's a big, that's actually.

• 1:20:50Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a really big one.

• 1:20:51Lester Nare?

  That's a really big, no, that's a really big deal.

• 1:20:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, like.

• 1:20:54Lester Nare?

  That's a really big deal.

• 1:20:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Um, I, I think it's really cool. I mean, again, Christopher has nine dude.

• 1:21:00Lester Nare?

  I think this might be the.

• 1:21:01Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's stuff that you'd never think about.

• 1:21:03Lester Nare?

  I think we've covered it in at least half of our stories.

• 1:21:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and every time it's like so cool.

• 1:21:09Lester Nare?

  And it's like, it's also just like one little variable.

• 1:21:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Variable.

• 1:21:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:13Krishna Choudhary?

  In like the, like, the story is something totally.

• 1:21:15Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, but without it, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. And again, this, the compounding value of these like key insights, similar to, I think, what was the first story we talked about? Um, the key insight on, no, the key insight on the second story, the viruses and bacteria. Is gonna have all these tendrils.

• 1:21:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:21:35Lester Nare?

  Uh, that we might hear a story about saving the bee population because we've used the same.

• 1:21:41Lester Nare?

  I'm being a little facetious.

• 1:21:42Krishna Choudhary?

  No, but totally dude, like, like the bacteria virus thing could be like a chimera that could be used for all sorts of random crap.

• 1:21:50Lester Nare?

  So this is a real superfood.

• 1:21:52Krishna Choudhary?

  I think it's really cool.

• 1:21:53Lester Nare?

  We need to save.

• 1:21:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I love the bees, right? Like, I don't like, I don't like getting stung.

• 1:21:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:21:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And when a bee comes near me, I'm like, uh, but I like bees and what they do.

• 1:22:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:22:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:22:05Lester Nare?

  And I understand their importance to the ecosystem.

• 1:22:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 1:22:09Lester Nare?

  Um, it's for, it's for the entirety of the planet that we love. And, you know, I, I think this sort of just brings up a last note we can wrap up with, which is, you know, all of these stories only get enabled, uh, in the world we live in by funding.

• 1:22:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:22:24Lester Nare?

  Likes this stuff costs money.

• 1:22:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:22:27Lester Nare?

  We've sort of had a, a re-underwriting of the importance of fundamental science research, particularly in the US.

• 1:22:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Really bad.

• 1:22:36Lester Nare?

  It's been, it's been tough. Um, as California natives, we are home to the, in the US, large population of Nobel laureates, patents, research institutions. We really are the driver of a lot of, like, a variety. There's other places, obviously, but we are one of the key players in the state of California, uh, to drive this fundamental research. That is, is literally going to be species and individual life and family saving.

• 1:23:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Easily.

• 1:23:06Lester Nare?

  Outcomes in our lifetime, right? Um, and one of the challenges that we've seen is that the University of California, California Research Grant System has, there's been an attempt to gut it from all its funding. And we'll just end on this story that just came out in the last week. You know, the, this has been a debacle in the courts because in the US we're a big legal system. The Ninth Circuit has now denied the federal government's attempt to stop the reinstatement of the University of California Research Grants, at least a third of that funding, which is probably in the order of about hundreds of millions of dollars, that was frozen.

• 1:23:48Lester Nare?

  And was potentially just poof, gone away, that the courts have said that's not gonna happen.

• 1:23:54Krishna Choudhary?

  I, I just, and you know, I mean, if I may, I, I just gotta say like. It this this story actually makes me appreciate America a little bit because I come from a country, right? I I grew up in India for um a minority of my early life, right? Like un- until I was 12 years old and in the in in countries like that. The federal government is basically a a say, I I say what happens and then it happens.

• 1:24:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:24:21Krishna Choudhary?

  But here, because of the the federalism and this distribution of powers that is still somehow intact, despite the president's attempts to undermine it, right? We've got a a judicial system now that can just be like nah, you're not nah.

• 1:24:36Lester Nare?

  I ain't jockeying that.

• 1:24:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you're not doing that and then now and then now it just like got reversed and everyone's like, okay, cool. We get funding back.

• 1:24:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:24:42Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, it's like not the the resilience of the American system to little tiny blips up or down. I think that's great and yeah.

• 1:24:54Lester Nare?

  The um if you've ne- never read the Federalist Papers or you don't really understand.

• 1:24:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Alexander Hamilton.

• 1:25:01Lester Nare?

  If you've never been in the room where it happened.

• 1:25:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Lester Nare?

  Um, there's really interesting intellectual thought that went into the fundamental structures that ultimately created the system we have today. And a lot of it was written down.

• 1:25:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Lester Nare?

  Thank goodness.

• 1:25:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Thank goodness, yeah.

• 1:25:16Lester Nare?

  We can actually see.

• 1:25:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And we take it seriously.

• 1:25:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:25:19Krishna Choudhary?

  As a country.

• 1:25:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:25:20Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, no, you can't. It says right here, you can't do that.

• 1:25:23Lester Nare?

  Right. And and it's gonna continue to be, as always, you know, one of the planet's greatest experiments. It will always ebb and flow.

• 1:25:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Lester Nare?

  Um, but we.

• 1:25:33Krishna Choudhary?

  And of course, like this Ninth Circuit is gonna go up, probably Trump is gonna like.

• 1:25:37Lester Nare?

  Come back.

• 1:25:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Like come back, it's gonna go to Supreme Court and then we're gonna be gritting our teeth teeth again. But like the the process is working, you know?

• 1:25:43Lester Nare?

  Right, right. The inst- you know, I know there's a lot of anti-bureaucracy and anti-institutional thinking nowadays, which there does need to be reform.

• 1:25:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's that's fine.

• 1:25:52Lester Nare?

  And that they're not perfect and they can always be better. But the institutions that are there are preventing this cascade into.

• 1:26:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:26:01Lester Nare?

  Total uh.

• 1:26:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Lester Nare?

  Sort of chaos.

• 1:26:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Imagine if we'd had no checks and balances.

• 1:26:06Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:26:07Krishna Choudhary?

  How far down the rabbit? We would have gone.

• 1:26:09Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:26:10Krishna Choudhary?

  It's insane.

• 1:26:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:26:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Lester Nare?

  Um, uh, just a nice little pseudo mystery box. Um, because we focus so much on like breaking fundamental research.

• 1:26:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but it couldn't be possible.

• 1:26:20Lester Nare?

  It would not be possible, uh, without federal funding because it's not yet commercially viable.

• 1:26:26Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:26:26Lester Nare?

  Private entity, private corporations. Some aspects of this stuff, they will do if it's very specific to their like use case.

• 1:26:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Lester Nare?

  The majority of it, it's too early.

• 1:26:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:36Lester Nare?

  And we otherwise, again, we talked about a story even today where this sort of using electron spin to an advantage.

• 1:26:43Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:26:44Lester Nare?

  Like, that's not getting, you know.

• 1:26:46Krishna Choudhary?

  That's been almost all academic spintronics.

• 1:26:48Lester Nare?

  Meta, Apple.

• 1:26:49Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:26:50Lester Nare?

  Amazon.

• 1:26:50Krishna Choudhary?

  They're waiting for, they're waiting and then they're gonna be like, oh, I can take that.

• 1:26:53Lester Nare?

  Do that and then they're gonna implement it. So it does really matter for all the things we care about. Um, and all the things we're gonna need as life on planet Earth continues to get harder and harder for a number of reasons.

• 1:27:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Lester Nare?

  Fascinating stories. We talked about new supernovas. Uh, an un, an unforeseen buddy cop movie between viruses and bacteria for cancer treatments. Uh, figuring out how spin electrons can power the next generation of tech and saving the bees with superfood. It's just another, again, every week I'm just like mind blown. Uh, and if you love getting into the weeds and talking about stories from first principles, please join us next week. I am your host again, Lester Nare, joined as always by our co-host and resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. This is From First Principles. We will see you all next week.