Pod Insights Science Friday Tomb Of Egyptian King Unearthed | Why The Internet Was Captivated By A Hideous Fish About this episode Finding the original tomb of the royal is one of the most significant developments in Egyptian archeology in recent history. Also, a video of a gloriously creepy anglerfish inspired tears and poetry online. But why was this deep-sea dweller near the surface at all?
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Flora Lichtman? This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman. This week, archaeologists report one of the biggest Egyptian archaeological finds in modern history: the tomb of a pharaoh, King Thutmose II. This is the first pharaoh tomb find in over 100 years. The last one was King Tut's in 1922. Joining me to sift through the details of this story and other news from the week is Maggie Kurth, science writer and editorial lead of Carbon Plan, based in Minneapolis. Welcome back, Maggie.
0:33 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
0:35 Flora Lichtman? All right, let's talk about this very cool discovery. Who was buried in this tomb?
0:40 Speaker 01 So this is the tomb of Thutmose II. He's actually a dynastic predecessor of King Tut in common. So he died around 1479 B.C., which is about 150 years before King Tut took the throne. So this tomb was found in 2022. And at the time, archaeologists actually thought it might be a queen's burial, because it was really close to some other queenly tombs, including the wife of King Thutmose II, Hatshepsut. But there was a ton of ancient flood damage in this tomb. And it had destroyed a lot of the interior, and it had also cemented dirt and debris in front of the door.
1:25 Speaker 01 So it actually took a really long time to get in there and start figuring out whose tomb it really was. What's really interesting about this, though, is that his body was not there. So what they found was this kind of empty tomb. There are relics that have his name on them that kind of tie this to King Thutmose. But his body was actually discovered back in the 19th century in an entirely different location, far away.
1:53 Flora Lichtman? Why?
1:54 Speaker 01 Well, so the floods. So the archaeologists say that this tomb showed signs that it was severely flooded out shortly after it was completed. And there's also evidence that most of his burial goods and his body were moved shortly after that. So this was the tomb that was dug for him, that was made for him, that he was originally buried in. And then it just got flooded out, and he got moved elsewhere.
2:20 Flora Lichtman? Why did it take so long to find this tomb?
2:22 Speaker 01 There's just a lot of things buried out there. And they, from what I can tell, they just discovered the stairs of this while they were doing other excavations in the area.
2:33 Flora Lichtman? Hmm. Let's move on. A lot of listeners are living in a world right now that is covered with regular old ice, earth ice. There's a new finding about some weird alien ice. What's that about?
2:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, so they're calling this plastic ice, but it's not really plastic. It just has plasticity. So this stuff has a crystalline molecular structure like ice, but the individual molecules in that structure are able to kind of rotate around in a way that's more like how molecules in water move. So plastic ice could be molded or deformed. And the descriptions that scientists gave to reporters at Science News make it sound a little like those gushy gel packs you kind of sometimes get with flowers at the grocery store. Do you know what I'm talking about?
3:23 Flora Lichtman? Yes, of course. Yes.
3:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, right. Nobody's actually touched it, though. So getting plastic ice to form in a lab for the first time required temperatures higher than 300 Celsius and a pressure of nearly 900,000 PSI. And for context, the bottom of the Marianas Trench is about 16,000 PSI.
3:48 Flora Lichtman? Wow. So high temperature, high pressure.
3:51 Speaker 01 Right. Yes.
3:53 Flora Lichtman? That's interesting. I think of ice as cold.
3:55 Speaker 01 I do as well, but it turns out that there are weirdly a lot of different forms of ice, at least 20 of them. And they all have different crystalline structures that form because of different temperature and pressure combinations. So the natural ice that you and I are most familiar with, you could call it natty ice if you wanted to. That has
4:19 Flora Lichtman? I will. Thank you.
4:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, thanks. They has a kind of honeycomb lattice. Ice seven, in contrast, has this dense cube structure like a Rubik's Cube. And this newly observed ice is actually a plastic form of Ice Seven. So same cube structure, more molecular wiggles.
4:42 Flora Lichtman? Would it clink in a drink? That's really my, my burning question about this.
4:46 Speaker 01 That is an interesting question. They did not say, but the regular degular Ice Seven, that has been found on Earth, inside of diamonds.
4:58 Flora Lichtman? Whoa. Where might this plastic ice be found?
5:02 Speaker 01 Well, so up until recently, it was only theoretical. Scientists think it might have once existed inside of the high-pressure centers of icy moons like Europa, back when they were still forming.
5:16 Flora Lichtman? Wow. Let's head back to Earth. There's some troubling news out of the Southwest. Tell me about this measles outbreak.
5:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's bad. Cases more than doubled over the last week. So as of Wednesday, there were 58 cases, 13 hospitalizations across five West Texas counties. And most of them are in this one very rural county called Gaines County, south of Lubbock. So this is a county with a population density of like 14 people per square mile, which is lower than average in the US for even unincorporated areas. And the fact that measles is spreading this fast in a place that's that isolated tells you a lot about measles and about the drivers of this outbreak.
5:58 Flora Lichtman? Yeah, well, what is, what does it tell us?
6:01 Speaker 01 Well, so measles is really good at spreading from person to person. It's one of the most contagious viruses out there. You know, people who aren't vaccinated, 90% of them who get exposed will get measles. And Gaines County has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the entire state, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune. So the outbreak has been centered in the county's Mennonite community, and they tend to mostly avoid the healthcare system in general.
6:28 Flora Lichtman? How can people protect themselves from measles?
6:31 Speaker 01 So the big thing is just get vaccinated and vaccinate your kids. You know, a lot of people can recover safely at home from measles, but babies and younger children are really vulnerable. Kids can end up so dehydrated, they can't even cry. It's pretty common for it to lead to pneumonia in younger children, and it can cause more rare lethal complications like brain inflammation. It's also able to suppress the immune system for months after infection, which is a big deal when we're also in the middle of one of the worst flu seasons in recent memory.
7:03 Flora Lichtman? Hmm. Let's move on to a more hopeful health story. There's a new study about a man who seemed almost certain to develop Alzheimer's because of his genes, but he's symptom-free and he's in his 70s. Tell me about this.
7:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. So there's this really cool story in life science this week, and the man is Doug Whitney. His family had had multiple cases of a rare form of genetically linked Alzheimer's. His mother had it, 11 of her 13 siblings had it. They were all experiencing symptoms by the time they were in their 50s. And 14 years ago, Whitney enrolled himself in this large trial at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He was 61 at the time. He had no symptoms of the disease, and he sort of assumed he had managed to just like not get the genetic mutations that had harmed so many of his family members. But from the studies that he enrolled himself in,
8:02 Speaker 01 it turned out that he actually had at least one of these mutations. And the brain scans showed that his brain was full of the kind of amyloid beta plaques that are usually the first step to developing Alzheimer's. But he was fine, and he continues to be fine.
8:22 Flora Lichtman? Wow, so what's, do scientists understand what's happening?
8:25 Speaker 01 There's still a lot they're trying to figure out, but though he had like these amyloid protein plaques in his brain, Alzheimer's patients usually have these tangles of a different kind of protein called tau, and the interaction between the two proteins might be what hastens cognitive decline. So one of the things the scientists are trying to figure out is why he has plaques but no tangles, and they still aren't sure. One really cool hypothesis about why he doesn't have these tau tangles is that he was a shipboard mechanic in hot boiler rooms as a job for many, many years. And it turns out there are changes in the cerebral spinal fluid that happen when the human body is
9:09 Speaker 01 protecting itself from extreme heat that can also protect itself from misfolded proteins like tangles. So the scientists are speculating that it might turn out that his job ended up protecting him from Alzheimer's.
9:31 Flora Lichtman? Wow. Does this point to any new avenues for, for treatment or prevention?
9:35 Speaker 01 It's all really still in very early stages of research, so it's not really leading to treatments yet. But studying Whitney is really helping researchers understand how Alzheimer's works. And eventually, it might also tell us a lot about how the process of the disease could be slowed.
9:52 Flora Lichtman? Okay, last story. We now know that coral can go for a walk?
9:58 Speaker 01 [laughing]
9:58 Flora Lichtman? I need every detail.
10:00 Speaker 01 So this is not like big reef corals that live in huge stationary communities. This is a species of coral called a mushroom coral. They're kind of roundish, they're squishy, they have like that stone-like structure, but it's on the inside of their bodies. So they look a little bit, like the videos I watched, they look a little bit like a, a living muffin top.
10:22 Flora Lichtman? Sounds familiar.
10:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. But the scientists have known for a very long time, these things can move in so much as that they're not in the same place where you left them from day to day. And in the 80s, Japanese scientists caught it on camera for the first time. But now researchers are using better equipment to really measure and sort of see and understand how that movement happens. And it's weird little hops.
10:49 Flora Lichtman? That's what I was gonna ask. What does it look like?
10:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, they hop. They kind of like gear their bodies up and just sort of like throw themselves forward just a tiny bit. And then they just do that again, over and over and over. And in about six hours, a mushroom coral can cross a piece of paper the short way.
11:08 Flora Lichtman? Oh, I love it. I love it so much. The mushroom coral and the hair is what it's serving for me.
11:16 Speaker 01 Yes, we should all embrace the philosophy of the mushroom coral and just take our time.
11:23 Flora Lichtman? Can they walk away from their boiling ocean habitat?
11:25 Speaker 01 I mean, slowly.
11:28 Flora Lichtman? Thank you so much, Maggie.
11:31 Speaker 01 Thank you.
11:32 Flora Lichtman? Maggie Kurth, science writer and editorial lead of Carbon Plan, based in Minneapolis. After the break, the biggest meme under the sea, the anglerfish. We're going deep.
11:46 Speaker 02 The question that we all kind of wondered is, you know, how and why did the deep-sea anglerfish get so weird?
11:51 Flora Lichtman? That's a question the marine biology community wonders about.
11:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, all the time.
12:01 Speaker 03 Support for Science Friday comes from the Heising Simons Foundation. Unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities. More at hsfoundation.org.
12:18 Flora Lichtman? Last week, a viral video likely floated to the top of your feed, a rare black sea devil anglerfish, which basically looks like a floating head with a frightening amount of teeth and two teeny tiny cloudy beady eyes. It made the news because it was spotted near the surface, close to Spain's Canary Islands, and usually anglerfish reside in the deep ocean. So why was she paddling so close to the surface? Was she sick? How unusual is this? Also, why do these fish even look like this? I have a lot of questions. So we are using this fish hook as an excuse to do an in-depth look at this hideous creature. Here to break down fact from Fishkin is my guest, Dr. Corey Evans,
13:01 Flora Lichtman? Assistant Professor of Biosciences at Rice University, based in Houston, Texas. Corey, welcome to Science Friday.
13:09 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me.
13:10 Flora Lichtman? Corey, as a marine biologist who studies anglerfish, what was your reaction to this video?
13:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, my reaction at first was I thought it was AI. I remember waking up in the morning and just seeing this video posted without any context on Instagram. And I'm looking and I'm like zoom in really, really close just to make sure that, you know, I'm not being fooled. And I'm looking, I was like, man, the fin motion, this looks like a real fish. But what is it doing here? Why is it bathed in sunlight? These fishes live in, you know, the absence of light. They live so deep under the ocean that light doesn't penetrate. So seeing this fish in broad daylight was super disorienting and confusing.
13:48 Flora Lichtman? Why do you think, what's it like for you to have, to see sort of this huge amount of interest that this little fish has generated?
13:56 Speaker 02 It's so exciting. And it's funny because a lot of folks got really, really excited about it. And then they found out the fish was about like four inches long or something like that. And they were so excited about it. And I thought that was really cool. There's, you know, poems being written about, you know, the kind of the sad part about this fish finally seeing the light of day and then dying later.
14:13 Flora Lichtman? Yeah, let's hear one.
14:15 Speaker 04 With her final breaths, her little body swam at the possibility just to say goodbye, proving to the world that beautiful things do come from the darkness in which we cannot see.
14:25 Flora Lichtman? Were you like, my girl is finally getting the attention she deserves?
14:29 Speaker 02 Exactly. That's kind of how I felt, yeah.
14:32 Flora Lichtman? Why was this fish up there? Do you have any theories?
14:35 Speaker 02 So I think the fish might have been sick. Often times when fish get sick, they do kind of exhibit weird behaviors. And it can actually kind of become like a runaway effect as well. You know, as you move from a deep place to a more shallow place, gas will continue to expand, kind of surface faster and faster. I was surprised, A, that it was so intact that close to the surface, because usually if a fish comes up really fast, it'll look all disfigured like our friend, the blobfish. So the fact that this fish was looking good, you know, aside from the fact that it died shortly after, was actually really surprising.
15:06 Flora Lichtman? Let me run another theory by you. Could she have been on a hero's journey to see the light?
15:14 Speaker 02 I would like to believe that she was on a hero's journey. There's been some debate as to whether or not the eyes of the anglerfish can even perceive that much light. But I want to believe that they could.
15:25 Flora Lichtman? So obviously, these are really strange looking creatures. For me, they're hideous, but also like I can't look away, like I'm obsessed. I understand that your research may help explain why anglerfish look this way.
15:39 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah. So I was part of this larger research team that was interested in reconstructing first the evolutionary history of anglerfishes. And then asking the question that we all kind of wondered is, you know, how and why did the deep sea anglerfish get so weird?
15:53 Flora Lichtman? That's a question the marine biology community wonders about.
15:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, all the time. And it's not just anglerfish that are doing this. Like lots of fish go deep and get super weird and freaky. We don't have a clear answer why.
16:05 Flora Lichtman? Well, how did you study that? And what did you find?
16:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, so the first part was building kind of the tree of life or the tree of relationships for anglerfish. And then from there, we asked some questions like, how fast did the traits evolve across this anglerfish group? And one of the early hypotheses was that maybe the deep sea anglerfish just evolved really, really quickly. And that's how they got so weird and freaky.
16:28 Flora Lichtman? Wait, wait. So are you saying that if you evolve more quickly, you're more likely to look freaky?
16:33 Speaker 02 It can certainly, it can certainly help you look freaky. Yeah, it can get you to a freaky place.
16:37 Flora Lichtman? Really?
16:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, especially in fish.
16:39 Flora Lichtman? And you evolve quickly because you're in a really extreme environment? Is that typically why?
16:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, and when you're in a really extreme environment, uh, the, I guess, the, uh, threshold for what works is, uh, really, really tight. So you're really constrained. There are only a few solutions. And if you're not already there, when you're in that extreme environment, you really need to get there fast. Uh, otherwise you go extinct. Um, so when these angler fishes colonized the deep sea, we thought that, okay, maybe we would see, uh, you know, really rapid rates of evolution because this is a really constraining environment.
17:10 Flora Lichtman? Is that what you found?
17:12 Speaker 02 No, actually.
17:12 Flora Lichtman? What?
17:13 Speaker 02 It was crazy.
17:14 Flora Lichtman? This is a plot twist. Okay.
17:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's a plot twist. So the pelagic ones that you, that we saw in the video, they're deep water, but they're not touching the bottom. They didn't evolve quickly when they got there. It just seems like they were able to get away with more things. Uh, so when you think about evolution, you're taught like, oh, it's the survival of the fittest. But for fish, in my experience, what I've learned is it's more the survival of like, they're like fit enough.
17:37 Flora Lichtman? That, that rings true across the animal kingdom, certainly in our species.
17:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's like, I can do this and it doesn't kill me. Uh, so I could just keep, you know, diverging and evolving these weird new adaptations and it, it's, it's not counting against me. Uh, so it looks like there was a relaxation of constraints, especially surrounding their skull shape and their eye shape and their body shape in these, uh, deep sea kind of pelagic angler fishes.
18:01 Flora Lichtman? Cause they're not competing with other animals? Or like, why would there be fewer constraints in that environment versus another environment?
18:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's possible that there's, there's less density of fishes. So there's less competition. Uh, the way that they hunt also changes. So you're not like, angler fishes aren't chasing down prey in the water column. They're just waiting for things to be attracted to their lures and then they'll just grab them. These guys, their whole like life is just bobbing around. So you don't want to expend too much energy because you don't know when your next meal is coming. Uh, so you want to just make sure you have a big stomach, big jaws and, you know, do as little else as possible.
18:35 Flora Lichtman? Sounds like my ideal lifestyle.
18:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that's the game. And it turns out there's a lot of ways to do that. And anglerfishes have explored many of them.
18:43 Flora Lichtman? OK, so I've been watching the TikToks of people crying as they watch this anglerfish video, which may be more of an indication of like how we're all just hanging on by a thread right now. But it sounds like you don't think she was risking it all to see the sunlight. Is there another poetic fact you can share about anglerfish that we can tuck into our tackle box, you know, to draw on during dark times?
19:06 Speaker 02 You want poetic facts? I can give you a poetic fact. So when a male anglerfish is born, they don't grow to be those big, kind of toothy, jawed females that you see. Instead, the males are usually either smaller or like these small, little parasitic tadpoles that attach to them. And when they attach to a female anglerfish, they actually integrate their circulatory system. So the blood that's circulating through the female will then begin to circulate through the male, and they'll basically kind of fuse together. And the female basically uses that male as a sperm sac. So yeah, whenever it's done to reproduce, they don't have to look for males. They have them attached, so they spawn together that way. So that's kind of romantic in a way.
19:45 Flora Lichtman? I mean, they're taking codependency to another level.
19:47 Speaker 02 Exactly. Sometimes female anglerfishes will have like multiple males kind of attached to them as well.
19:52 Flora Lichtman? Oh, good for you, girl.
19:53 Speaker 02 I know, good for her, right? And this is just kind of a way to solve that problem of finding a mate in complete darkness.
20:01 Flora Lichtman? Corey, I love talking to you about this. Thank you so much.
20:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, and he's a-
20:05 Flora Lichtman? Dr. Corey Evans is an assistant professor of biosciences at Rice University. And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped to make this show happen, including-
20:17 Speaker 02 Santiago Flores. Dee Petersman.
20:19 Flora Lichtman? Phyllis Samers. Emma Gomez. Jackie Hirschfeld. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.
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