A Materials World - Hacks & Gizmos with Jud Ready

How do you invent a new material? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gary O’Reilly, and Chuck Nice discuss the science of invention, biomimicry, and answer cosmic queries about materials science from our patrons with professor Dr. Jud Ready.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition, and for this installment, we're going to revisit the materials world. Today, hacks and gizmos. I got Gary O'Reilly. Gary, good to always have you here. Hey Neil. All right, everyone should know you by now, but a former soccer pro, pro guy over in the UK, turned announcer, and then we got you over here stateside, so I'm delighted by that. Gives authenticity to this Sports Edition identity. And Chuck, nice, Chuck.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening Neil?

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I do, dude. Never did any sports ever.

• 0:51Chuck Nice?

  No, but I once, I once kicked something.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and you joked about sports, so there you go. So, just consider what role innovation, which leads to inventions, and how they have influenced everything we do in this world, especially sports. And so, our guest, this is a second or third time on StarTalk, Dr. Judd Reedy. Judd, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Thank you Neil. Great to be back. I'm really making a play to be part of your StarTalk All-Stars here, so I don't know what the minimum number is to get there.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is a minimum number, that's right, that's right.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  Speaking of sports, yes.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, above, above, if you, above a certain number of parents, we, you have a punch card.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  It's gotta be double digits, I'm sure.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get a free, you get a free something.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that Chuck, you were saying?

• 1:49Chuck Nice?

  No, I was saying, it's All-Stars, that's, can't get more sports than that, man.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, All-Stars, exactly, exactly. And so, and also in our third segment, we're gonna have Judd answer some of your cosmic queries that you sent us from the... The Patreoniverse.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Bring them on. Let's see what we got.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just created that word. I like that. So you're down at Georgia Tech? And did you, are you the founder or just simply the head of the Institute for Materials?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Actually a deputy. I was been around since the founding of the Institute for Materials. We're on our second director. Uh, now Professor Eric Bogel, a good friend of mine as well. Um, so we've been doing materials. As the Institute for Materials now for close to a decade, but materials research at Georgia Tech, it's been going on since it was founded in eighteen hundreds. Uh, when it was metallurgy.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eighteen hundred. You're not that old. Okay. So, so material science is one of the most important yet uncelebrated branches of physics and engineering that there is. You guys come up with stuff and then it just works its way into our environment. And then we're there and we're using it, we're, uh, we're enjoying it and somebody came up with the idea. Somebody thought it up and they're hardly ever celebrated or heralded. So how come you all are just so behind the scenes on this? What's going on?

• 3:06Chuck Nice?

  You guys are the Obamacare of science.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  We are to, we are totally everywhere, everywhere. I mean, if you look, look.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everywhere.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Look through history. You got the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. All of these are dictated by the, the key material that was militarily useful. And shortly after that, it became uh, sociologically useful for, for us to do things. Now, um, we're less, less concerned hopefully about fighting wars with each other, that many of the materials are now rapidly progressing into today's society, whether it's, um, silicon chips in our computers that allow us to do these things. Titanium and bicycles. I mean, there's a variety of different, uh, materials that were built originally for defense applications that are now uh, able to be used, uh, by, by men, women and children across the world.

• 3:55Chuck Nice?

  So would you say that, would you, would you say that because this is considered the age of information? That we're truly the silicon age?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would. Definitely the semiconductor age. Um, it's, you know, every, everything around.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it can't be so, but we're talking about natural materials now. Bronze Age, Stone Age, this age, that age. So following Chuck here.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Bronze is not natural. Bronze is not, does not.

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, true.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Doesn't occur eventually.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, that's copper and zinc.

• 4:23Chuck Nice?

  Copper and zinc.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Copper and zinc, damn.

• 4:26Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Busted on that one.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I'm gonna bust you again, I'm sorry, it's actually copper and tin is bronze and copper and zinc is brass. The Z and the S are switch, just that's how material scientists keep you on your toes to not let you remember those things easily.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, I did a double, I should just shut up right now.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  You can cut that, you can trim that.

• 4:46Chuck Nice?

  That's okay, that's alright. I don't mind looking bad. The brass age is still going, that's in New Orleans, that's New Orleans. The brass age is still happening.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, fine jazz, definitely. That's one of the, that's one of the, that's the next course I want to create here at Georgia Tech is Material Science and Engineering of Music. Cover woodwinds and brass and all sorts of stuff, but let's talk about sports today, for sure.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, sports, yeah, thank you. So, right now, you couldn't get back to your office, where are you reporting from now?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so lecture just ended 10 minutes ago, and so we're, today, for Material Science and Engineering of Sports, we were doing basketball. So we're here at Zelnak Practice Center, McCamish, our basketball pavilion is literally through this door right here. And so we're covering basketball, so talking about shoes and uniforms, the floor itself. We're also gonna introduce a study on rim rebound elasticity, the measure of which, it's coefficient of restitution, basically, for the rim, how much energy is...

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I want a dead rim so that my bounce doesn't bounce out, it absorbs the energy and falls in.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's regulated by the NCAA, needs to be between 0.35 and 0.5, which is a huge range, frankly, and as long as your school falls in there, it's fine. Even the ones on either end of the court don't have to be the same, they only have to be within 15% of each other, yeah.

• 6:07Chuck Nice?

  That's tricky, that's tricky when you, when you, when you're very...

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I got one for you, Jed, what the rim you really want is a black hole.

• 6:17Chuck Nice?

  Anything that crosses the event's horizon is

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Anything that gets close to it. I need, I need a black hole like that big.

• 6:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Can you imagine how many balls you could lose a game?

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many trick shots? Well, that's like baseball. They lose 20 balls a game. No. So, so you teach class on location?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we go.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At these places.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Georgia Tech's really unique in that our athletic association's embraced innovation. And when I was on the board of trustees, I proposed this course and they said, great, but the coaches will work with you without asking the coaches first. And then I asked the coaches. And they, and they said.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you do that. That's how you do that.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  And they agreed. And so we cover all of them. We, we, on Monday, we did track and field. We've done baseball. We've done softball. We'll do volleyball later on. We'll do swimming and diving, which was one of our episodes before.

• 7:05Gary O'Reilly?

  It's such a great way to learn, Jack, to see the thing that you've, you've kind of seen on a screen come to life.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  It's a clandestine way of teaching material science to non-material science major. I've got a lot of biomedical engineers, some management majors, other people that have never heard of a dislocation or a body center cubic, or it's a triangular structure or anything like that. And I can show them, you know, 3D printed butterheads and how, how we make.

• 7:28Chuck Nice?

  What, what's, what's a butterhead? What's a butterhead?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Putter. Putter.

• 7:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, a putterhead. Okay. Sorry.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I heard butterhead too, Chuck. And that wasn't just you. Wait, before we get to the putter, this is, I'm fascinated by this origin story. One of your students took your class, right? And, um, came to you with the idea of a concept that you use the, the LZRD?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Lizard.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would pronounce that lizard.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Lizard, right?

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lizard sleeve. And that person is now CEO of their own company?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're the chief technology officer. So your student is now your boss. Okay. First, what the hell is a lizard sleeve? And secondly, I think it's great. You now report to your students.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ultimate revenge. Depending what's what the what grade the student got.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Mike got an A and he's graduated now, so he's he's he's no longer my student. But yeah, so he came. He was a wide receiver in high school. And he came up with this idea of a compression.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wide receiver in in American.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  American football, yes, sorry. As opposed to Gary's football. And and and so you'll see a compression sleeve like.

• 8:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. I see all these guys all the time where he so just for the listeners, Judd has put on what looks like a compression sleeve.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  But you you'll see that there's there's a difference. All the compression sleeves out there right now are the same all the way around. It's the same material. So it's tends to be slippery, which is really bad for a football player. You don't want slipperiness. Better to have died a small child than fumble the football like. That's what Coach Heisman said.

• 9:05Chuck Nice?

  Can you tell him that? Can you tell he's down in Georgia right now?

• 9:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better to have died.

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  As a small child.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Coach Heisman was coach at Georgia Tech, and that's where he said that. And it's totally true.

• 9:18Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 9:19Chuck Nice?

  We'd rather see you. We'd rather see you drop a baby than drop a football.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so so wait, so these compressive sleeves, we've seen many athletes use them, and they usually they go over their limbs and go across a joint typically.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so those are the same material all the way around. What Mike said was, hey, what if we made the outside still slippery so that I could shed a defender, but the inside more sticky, a higher coefficient of friction, so that I could hold the ball better. And so with it's what's known as a warp knit. It's a combination of polyester, nylon, and polyurethane fibers. Polyurethane is commonly known as spandex.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  That spandex fiber comes to the top of the inside part. And so it's sticky. It's got a higher coefficient friction, but it is not like a coated on material. It doesn't launder off. It's not like a stick on like you have with wide receiver gloves. And so we generated these sleeves. Mike's selling them right now.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Judd, I have to go to my panel on this. Gary, Chuck, like, should this even be legal?

• 10:29Gary O'Reilly?

  It is.

• 10:29Chuck Nice?

  You know.

• 10:30Gary O'Reilly?

  We wrote.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I didn't ask you, Judd. Judd, I didn't ask you. I got this is my people here.

• 10:35Gary O'Reilly?

  I get the rebuttal. If, if, if, yeah, okay. If no one objects, then go for it. If there's nothing already in the rulebook that says you cannot, then you go for it. Now, if they like that, the sort of swimwear that they started to use it and everyone went, ah, ah, ah, you're too good, take it off.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is that different? It's some, it's some.

• 10:57Chuck Nice?

  It's an advantage.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an, it's some kind of exoskeleton skin, exoskin.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That changes the dynamics of your play. And it's not you. You're not a better athlete for it.

• 11:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Can I say something?

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Judd.

• 11:13Gary O'Reilly?

  You're not resisting. Shush.

• 11:15Chuck Nice?

  This guy, this guy invents something and then thinks he can just take over.

• 11:19Gary O'Reilly?

  My wife says.

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 11:20Gary O'Reilly?

  My wife says I interrupt all the time. But it's open to everybody.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, Judd, Judd.

• 11:25Gary O'Reilly?

  The technology, Neil, is open to everybody. This isn't exclusive to one team only. This is being sold over the internet to people who want to use it. So I think the advantage.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why don't we just create glue man as receivers and send them out there? And if it touches any part of their physical body, it sticks like Velcro.

• 11:43Chuck Nice?

  They used to have that. They used to have that. It was called stickum. And, and they, they, they stopped players from using it because they started slathering it all over everything their entire.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's wrong with that? So what's wrong with that?

• 11:57Chuck Nice?

  That's nasty. That's why.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's the nasty rule.

• 12:00Gary O'Reilly?

  It's sticking to each other.

• 12:01Chuck Nice?

  That was the nasty rule.

• 12:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So Judd, I have to ask, in the development of this material, are you stealing a play from Mother Nature's playbook here? Is it biomimicry or is this a very clever use of?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a couple of things. So I didn't talk about that. The outside part of the sleeve does use biomimicry. It's a special type of fabric that promotes wicking. So the capillary action that you see in trees, for instance, that pulls moisture away. So it pulls the moisture from my skin, brings it out to the surface where it evaporates and cools me. So that.

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, I've never seen capillary action in a tree. You mean, we know that that's what trees do?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Yep. The way you could see it would be to take a very small straw and put it in a glass of water and you would see it rise up the water. So the level inside that straw would be a little bit higher than.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you said, I just wanted to clarify, when you say we see capillary action, you mean, we know that that's what they do by looking inside, not that we just, you know.

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  You can't go look at a tree.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Can't see the transpiration.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joyce Killmore was not seeing capillary action when the famous poem was composed about trees.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Yep. You can occasionally see it if you just cut the tree and the water continues to flow out of it like freshly cut wood. But I completely.

• 13:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So you mean capillary action because trees have to bring water from the ground upward against gravity. So.

• 13:22Chuck Nice?

  So that makes it slick on the one side and sticky for the receiver's side because receivers often have their hands, the inside of their forearms exposed to receive a ball.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Right. And you would not want that covered with sweat, for instance. It would be slippery. Now, getting back to this rule situation with stickum was ruled out, but wide receivers do have gloves currently allowed. And we submitted this to the NCAA rules guru czar kind of guy. And we got our letter back on official NCAA stuff that said, hey, this is approved for competition. So which, because it's approved at NCAA, high schools tend to also follow that. But not necessarily in NFL. So we'll approach NFL later. But really, our largest market right now is actually delivery, warehouse and farm where like anybody that needs to carry like boxes or sacks of fertilizer or whatever. This is really helpful.

• 14:16Gary O'Reilly?

  So they're not throwing the packages?

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you don't want to drop it.

• 14:20Gary O'Reilly?

  And the guys were dropping, the guys were dropping lots of them.

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want to drop the eggs.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  I don't want to drop the tomatoes. That's the lower end delivery services. That's, that's not UPS or FedEx or anything like that.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. Okay, I just want to, I have to put a nuance in our vocabulary here. Because I think when you use the word sticky to people, they think of something tactile, uh, sticky and glue-like, as opposed to something that's simply rougher and has just simply higher friction. But it's not, it's not stuck to the surface in the sense we think of glue or Scotch tape sticking to a surface. Is that distinction fair enough to make?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  That is, it's not an add-on at all. It's just that the spandex fibers come to the top of the weave so that it's, uh, higher coefficient of friction here, but not on the inside so that you can slide it on and off without it, you know, grabbing your arm.

• 15:12Chuck Nice?

  Wow, okay.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now all you have to do is design a new pigskin that sticks to the fabric on your arm and then it'll be like a Velcro kind of thing.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  We'll put that in front of the rules committee and see what they say.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I knew you guys had questions for him. Uh, Chuck, Gary, what do you have?

• 15:32Gary O'Reilly?

  So, okay, Judd. We've talked about products like this before with, with glove designers at one of the major sports brand. And one of the issues they had was durability. So if you're bringing these spandex fibers to the surface and you're getting a lot of contact friction, does this damage?

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  Wear and tear.

• 15:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Or is it durable? Yeah. Is this, is this product durable or is it over-engineered? Do you know, do I have to, do I buy one sleeve for, for life? Or have you built in something or, or what is the deal?

• 16:01Chuck Nice?

  I was going to say before you answered that, uh, Judd, the fact that you're actually making these yourself, I hope they're not durable.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Fortunately, we've got a, we've got a, got a production partner that makes these, you know, by the hundreds and thousands of yards of fabric at a time. So, so they're commercially viable, commercially, commercially scaled. Um, the-

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus, Judd, if I, if I remember my friction physics, where you have high friction, you're guaranteed to have a higher, um, rate of, of, um, what do you call it, erosion? A high, a higher rate of wear and tear. That almost has to be the case, isn't that right?

• 16:40Speaker 02

  It's a fiber. It's a polyurethane fiber, spandex. It comes, comes to the surface and is, is more, um, provides a higher coefficient friction. It's not an add-on material. It's been, um, just a-

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but it means, all I'm saying is that if things are sort of stuck to it, it doesn't slide, that means whatever urge it might have had to slide is being, is being grabbed by the material. And that's got to create a higher wear and tear than something that's smooth, doesn't it?

• 17:10Chuck Nice?

  It stresses the material more.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would see- Stresses, that's all I'm trying to say. Thank you, Judd.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Based on our, our, our testing so far, not an issue. We've done these industrial laundering because, um, some of the, um, the major delivery firms have uniforms and they go through much more aggressive laundering than what you and I have at our, um, do our laundry. And they've survived thousands of cycles of, of being laundered. And again, because it's not a add-on liquid or anything like that, that's secured on there, it, it stays. So it, it-

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  What we do notice, we do notice that our logo peels off, that after a thousand or so, that- That's been, that's been about the problem. So we'll work on that.

• 17:49Chuck Nice?

  Not, not good marketing there, Judd. Not good marketing. Where can, because you said you can get it if you're a high school player or a college player, where can you get this? Because guess what? I'm betting there's a lot of high school kids who'd be like, let me get on this right now. Hello, scholarship.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Yep. Mamas and daddies would love that too, for sure. Um, yeah, you just go to lizardtech.com. L Z R D tech, T E C H, dot com and order away. Michael love, love to, uh-

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, you guys are all in on that. Listen, we gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk, talk about more innovations that come out of this lab, including, what is it? A, a, a golf putter that is inspired or borrows airplane technology. I gotta see what that one's about when we return on Star Trek.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We've got someone who's becoming a friend of StarTalk, an engineer from Georgia Tech, Judd Reedy. Judd, it's great to have you back, and it's not your first StarTalk rodeo, and I expect to have many more of these, because you work in fascinating fields, not only as they apply to sports, but to military, to all the rest of us who are neither in the military or play sports. So, you're a key source of knowledge and insight into things that are shaping this world. Thank you, Neil. Literally and figuratively. So, and I got Chuck and Gary, too. So, okay, guys. So, let me say, tell me now, what's been going on with golf?

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Golf, it seems to me, you know, as calm as that sport is, people just stand around and they swing, you know, swing at a stationary ball, unlike any other sport. I guess billiards, the balls are stationary when you hit them. But, how and why should that sport be so susceptible to scientific and engineering innovations?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, golf is actually the poster child for sports materials innovation, going back, you know, 15th century when it was created. They originally played with, you know, round rocks and knots of wood, and then they moved to goose organs that were stuffed with feathers. Those were called featheries, those were the golf balls. And then they moved to what are called gutties. Gutapercha is a polymer. And so, just throughout history, now we've got very advanced five-piece balls. When I was thinking about creating my course, I actually went originally entitled it Material Science and Engineering of Golf, but then I decided to broaden it to the rest of the sports as well.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I get it, that's cute. You created a golf course.

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See Chuck, I can be funny too Chuck.

• 20:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no, not, not with that.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn Chuck is cold. Chuck don't play. Chuck don't play.

• 21:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Ice cold.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, you know, so golf has continually just, just innovated. I mean, if, even if you look at the clubs, they're called, used to be called woods because they're made out of wood, irons because they used to be made out of iron. But they're not made out of wood anymore. They're made out of titanium or composite of carbon fiber. The irons aren't iron, they're steel and, and just golf is just.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they're still calling them woods and iron. They should call them, pass me the titanium, right? Why don't they do that?

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Right. Because they're just stuck in their ways, I guess. I don't know.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 21:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So this was, this was another one of your students.

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happened here? What happened with your student?

• 21:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Came to you with an idea, yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  One of my students, Caroline, we approached Bobby Jones Golf Course, which is of course, named that famous Georgia Tech grad, just up, up the road a little bit and said, you know, there's a lot of innovation in golf. I'm a material scientist. We don't want to do me too research. What's some unique research out there? And so they, we began to talk to them about additive manufacturing, ways to make putters instead of just being cast, where that's where you take a shape and you pour molten metal into it or forge, which is where you take a solid piece of metal and smash it and shape it into whatever it needs to be, like a putter head.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just thanks for clarifying that. I guess I never thought about it. So forged is in a mold.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cast is you shape it?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  No, different.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  The other way.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reverse.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. Cast, you pour molten metal into whatever shape you want it to be. And then you may have some post-forming operations or something like that. Whereas forging is you'll take, you know, a billet of material and. Smash it between iron hammers.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. Okay. Just never thought about it. And, and your student is a biomedical engineer.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Yep, Caroline's.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Notes are correct.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Caroline's graduating this, this semester, in fact. Got a good, good job. That's the problem with, that's the problem with my workforce is that they have this nasty habit of graduating all the time. So I'm.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  I know. So I'm always replacing.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just flunk them, you know, and they have to repeat. These are your options available to you.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  They are.

• 23:02Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Those are available for graduate students. We don't flunk them. We just hold on to them for five, six, seven years and that sort of thing.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For more years, yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  My advisor told me it was, getting a PhD was all about knowing more and more about less and less. And once I know everything about nothing, that's when she'd give me the degree. So.

• 23:20Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  But, but anyway.

• 23:24Chuck Nice?

  I don't understand what the purpose, what, cause I don't know enough about golf. What could you do to a putter? Because that seems to be the exact same motion for every single golfer I've ever seen. And the ball is already on the flattest surface that there is on the course, which is the green. So what do you do to a putter to, to create, to, to change that process?

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It seems like that would be the least susceptible.

• 23:52Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thing in golf to technological innovation.

• 23:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  And, and in a way, you're right. That's why there hasn't been too much technological innovation. But we partnered with Stuart Sink, who's a famous tech alum as well and golfer. And he.

• 24:05Chuck Nice?

  That's the best name for a golfer.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  He's the best putter.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuart, Stuart Sink?

• 24:10Speaker 02

  He's widely recognized as the best putter out, out there for, but, but we talked to him and there's, there's a variety of different things. Well, um, so we did additive manufacturing. So we're able to make putters with distributed uh, metal throughout. Um, the other aspect is the.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, it means the density is not constant across the putter or the width or through its depth.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Correct. We can change the center of gravity and the moment of inertia. And this is just 3D printed with steel. We did this as practice because really we want to use two different materials. One that's very dense, like tungsten, and one that's much, much lighter, not as dense, like aluminum. And then you can really move the, the weight around because you want to influence the ball to roll. You don't want to hit the ball and make it skid.

• 24:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So is that the only process, Judd, that will allow that? 3D printing is the only process that we have right now that allows this variation of density?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  It would allow a gradient. Right now, what they do is they'll take a piece of these two different materials and put them together, weld them, and so it's a step. Oh, yeah, so there'll be abrupt change. I get it.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  You need a billow and an anvil and a really hot fire.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so, you know. You mean a bellow.

• 25:19Chuck Nice?

  A bellow, not a billow, correct.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know what a billow is. So we looked at, we looked at the face inserts. This is really primitive. This was version 1.0. So we looked at changing the polymeric face inserts. They have different angles. So depending on the length of the grass, you can have half degree versus one degree, and you can put a couple together and make two and a half or whatever degrees to allow that ball to not get ground into the surface when you putt. The other aspect, and that has to do with what's known as toe hang. This is version two. We added some weight tracks in here on the bottom so that we've. So you're holding right now your 3D printed putter? This was also 3D printed. We did it a little differently. One of the main reasons that all these holes are here is that it was too heavy.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  And so we did a second design that takes out just hundreds of grams of weight to get it more comfortable. And one of the things that you see, see if I hold it like this, the face is basically flat. That's called toe hang. And so depending on where this part of the putter attaches, that's called the hozle, that can adjust it. We have the first adjustable hozle out here. So if I move this. Is that allowed, judges?

• 26:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Gary, Chuck? For the time being.

• 26:34Gary O'Reilly?

  See, the thing is, golf is mired in a billion and eight rules for everything. And so have they come back and given it the okay on this?

• 26:44Speaker 02

  So I just moved that hozle. Now see how it is slanted? See how it's adjusted? So the connecting point here, we can move it around. And based on my swing versus Chuck's swings, Gary's swing, you'll want that in a different place. And as your swing gets better, Chuck, with practice, you can move it to a different spot. Otherwise, you have to, with all current technology, you have to just go buy another putter. Or you can sometimes bend this. Uh, like heat it up and bend it a little bit. So that's, that's a key innovation. Um, that

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it's, so it's an all in one. It's an all in one putter.

• 27:19Chuck Nice?

  You've, you've, you've basically made a modular putter that can

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Modular putter.

• 27:23Chuck Nice?

  That, that, that changes with your game and, and changes with your skill level. That's ingenious.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  We also, Britt and, and now since Caroline's graduating, I told you I gotta keep the workforce going. So Britt, uh, is, is our, is the next student that's working on here. Uh, instead of the face inserts, we had a little challenge with the face inserts, uh, kind of making a unpleasant clacking sound when you put it, uh, which, which messes with putters heads. Um,

• 27:47Chuck Nice?

  Oh God.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  I know.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, right, right, right.

• 27:51Chuck Nice?

  How much more fragile can these fricking golfers be?

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just stop.

• 27:55Chuck Nice?

  Everybody.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one, you can't even crunch a potato chip while they're swinging.

• 27:59Chuck Nice?

  Everybody's already super silent. Okay. The, the people who are commenting are just like, Okay, and he's approaching.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They wish, and they're in a, in a, in a sound booth, someplace.

• 28:10Chuck Nice?

  They're four blocks away and they're just like, Well, he's about to make his move, maybe. Look at what he's doing right now. Okay. So.

• 28:18Chuck Nice?

  I mean, and then, and now you're

• 28:20Gary O'Reilly?

  The trouble is, you know, if you were gonna do something, Chuck.

• 28:23Chuck Nice?

  That the sound of the ball hitting the putter may disturb

• 28:29Speaker 02

  It doesn't, it didn't sound

• 28:30Chuck Nice?

  These guys.

• 28:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 28:31Chuck Nice?

  That, that is, I hate golf so much right now.

• 28:37Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, but you'd think the first thing they do is just turn the volume down on the clothes. They all have the loudest clothes. They should be worried about that first. So the thing is, how do you alter the polymer in the face? Because you, you're kind of thinking you need a more rubberized contact surface to lessen the noise. But if you're putting more rubberized content in there, then you've got deformation when you connect with the ball. So how did you overcome that, Judd? Cause everybody, everybody hates clacking.

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  Let me ask it a different way. So, so how exactly did you change the face of the butter? Because of course the deformation may.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah Chuck's got that golf speed really good there.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  That is great. I'm gonna have to practice that when we go to a break. The polymer itself, there's a variety of different uh, polymeric compounds that can be explored. We did this with a company called Carbon 3D that's located up the street here uh, in Atlanta. Uh, they printed this. We also can do metal ones as well and it it varies between putter to putter. Putter, the whole game of golf is is what they call a game of feel. So the way I feel putting is different than you, any of y'all feel. And so the the clacking occurred when we um, is really due to the way we attach it to this face. So we're gonna get back to having these face inserts because they've got them currently in putters. But um, we wanted to to explore some other things. So Britt moved uh, to this with a standard face.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  But because of putting, you want to promote the ball rolling immediately off the putter as opposed to sliding a little bit and then starting rolling. You can see the grooves perhaps?

• 30:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes, the horizontal grooves going across the face of the uh, putter.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  But they are not periodic. They are at different spacing between each other. So if you're slightly above or slightly below the center of gravity of the ball, you'll have a different amount of these grooves grabbing it to promote rolling, whether you're.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can control it. You can control. Now, isn't there a regulation at the length of the grass on the green? So what are you saying for tall, high grass and slow grass? If you're putting, you're on the green. And so isn't that all very stubby grass?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  It is stubby grass, but it it can be differences of millimeters and uh, that that can make make a difference. The the grass itself is not regulated. All sorts of stuff with this putter are regulated from the the width and the depth of those grooves to the length and and all sorts of other different things.

• 31:00Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That is amazing. So now here's, I need to know this. So you guys come up with all these great ideas, these uh, you know, kind of innovations.

• 31:11Chuck Nice?

  Do you own them?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Sort of. Georgia Tech.

• 31:15Chuck Nice?

  Sort of.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  The Georgia Tech Research Corporation owns the intellectual property that I create using facilities at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech makes no claim whatsoever on any student-based intellectual property that was created. So for instance, when Mike created the arm sleeve.

• 31:31Chuck Nice?

  The sleeve.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Didn't use any Georgia Tech resources. We didn't go to use sewing machines or anything like that. And so Georgia Tech made no claims on that. So that's 100% his. This, on the other hand, we are using Georgia Tech facilities like.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  This is the putter. The.

• 31:46Chuck Nice?

  The putter.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  The 3D printed, the tools are very expensive. And so then we get into discussion and they actually did release this IP to Caroline as well.

• 32:00Chuck Nice?

  So Caroline has this.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  IP intellectual property.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Intellectual property, has filed a patent. It's patent pending, as they say.

• 32:07Chuck Nice?

  And that's going to belong to Caroline?

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Correct. It takes five, five years. And the co-inventors, there's a variety of co-inventors. I'm named on it as well as some other students. It takes five, roughly five years, half dozen years for a patent to get fully prosecuted. So we're a long way from that becoming a fully patent.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we got to take a break. When we come back, we're going to go into Cosmic Queries' portion of this Cosmic Queries' edition.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. It's a material world. Materials world, excuse me.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  Yes, not the Madonna kind.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Metals, ceramics.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than one kind of material. Yes, indeed. And Judd, how can we find your, your, your, where do we find your creations?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Go to materials.gatec.edu. That's the Institute for Materials. We've also got a Twitter. Judd Reedy is on Facebook and LinkedIn. There's only four other Judd Reedys around and all of them are dead. So I'm the last one around. So.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be R E A D Y, Judd Reedy. And that's two D's.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  No, right. One D.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wendy. So Gary, you got the questions this time from our Patreon members. So that's from the Patreoniverse. So let's do it.

• 33:40Gary O'Reilly?

  This is a long question from Jason M. in Bentonville. Biomimicry is a fascinating field of research, both in athletics and robotics. Are we currently using it in the exploration about a space?

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Most of the exploration, for instance, on Mars is geared at making larger things. Now, we do have the helicopter that's able to fly around, but I think what Jason's asking is little tiny like insect type drones, which certainly the Department of Defense here in the United States is exploring for sure. Very small insect-like drones. I think the challenge that you would have doing that on an outer space application, some sort of exploration, will be a capability of that individual drone, as well as powering it and its survivability in general. Some, many of the larger rovers are designed to have

• 34:36Speaker 02

  good power systems and heaters to survive the very cold nights that will destroy a lot of electronics. But certainly, there's, there's an extension of larger rovers, but also small things like CubeSats, like we're doing here at Georgia Tech in the Center for Space Hardware Assembly Fabrication and Testing that I direct, when I'm not doing sports.

• 35:00Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So here's, here's one. I've got to try and pronounce this correctly. Syzygy?

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't be like Chuck now messing up everybody.

• 35:11Gary O'Reilly?

  S, you, so you make the sense of this. S Y Z Y G Y.

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one actually has that name. Syzygy is an astronomical term, and nobody's named that. So they just, that's just their handle, for sure. What's Syzygy? Syzygy. What's that mean, Neil?

• 35:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Syzygy. Yes, I'm lost with that. I'm lost in space.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the only word where it's S Y Z Y G. It has like five or four or five consecutive letters, which when written in script, all dip below the line. There's a stupid little fact about it. A syzygy is when any three objects that are part of an orbital system have the same azimuth in space. So, an eclipse, the Sun, Moon, and the Earth are in syzygy. Either a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse. That's all it is. Gotcha. Okay.

• 35:56Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Orion's Belt.

• 35:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Sisagie, or as I would, or as I man would it, Sisagie. Anyway, here's the question. Take an imaginative punt at how nanotechnology will impact human health and improve human abilities.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say, I would.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Judd, before we begin, I've heard people not use nano properly. Nano means one billionth of. And they talk about a nanobot and it's something that you can hold in two hands.

• 36:24Chuck Nice?

  It's sitting on a table.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's sitting on a table. That's not a nanobot. That's a full-fledged bot. If it were nano size, you wouldn't be able to see it. So, so Judd, how are you guys using the prefix nano?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, nano is just 10 to the minus 9. Um, so it's a thousandth of the size of a, of a human hair. Very, very small structures. But nano in the 90s got a really good name. There's a lot of funding thrown behind it. So everybody's just slapping nano on whatever. Micro would be a better phrasing, which is 10 to the minus 6. 6 zeros instead of 9 zeros. Um, so, so how will nano affect things? Well, first of all, uh, our entire body is, is already nano-structured. So it's very natural for us to begin to interface at those length scales that Mother Nature has already figured out over many millions of years. Now humankind is, is able to start engineering at those scales.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  So certainly interfacing with any of the electrical aspects of our body, like our eyes, ears, tactile senses, any sort of, uh, uh, paralysis, like your, your central nervous system, those, those are there. Uh, we, we definitely use nanotechnology to engineer, say, the titanium implants that you might have in your hip replacement. We already do that now. You've also got polymeric implants, ceramic materials. All of these are engineered, maybe not necessarily at the nano level to the minus 9 zeros, but certainly the micro level.

• 37:53Chuck Nice?

  Let me ask you this. Does, uh, both you and Neil. So does the engineering of something like MNRA, does that considered nanotech? Since you're working on what is clearly a cellular level?

• 38:08Speaker 02

  I'd say yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  I think, I mean, as long as you're

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, cellular is much bigger than M N R.

• 38:13Chuck Nice?

  Well, cellular is bigger than M N R.

• 38:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I would say, I can summarize this.

• 38:16Chuck Nice?

  Working within the cellular level.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can, I can summarize this. You cannot build something more intricate than the scale of the tools you're using. You can't, you can't, right? So, so if you're going to put together a building and it's made of bricks, sure, you can, you, brick layers can do that. Okay. But if the building is made of cells and all you have are forklifts, it's, you can't build it. Okay. So the scale of the tools has to match the scale of what it is you are assembling. If you want to control what you're assembling. And often medically, we will co-opt what are already biological tools.

• 38:54Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That your body has in order to build or destroy cells that are smaller than the size of our tools. But in the limit.

• 39:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but wait a minute, let me push back. So you're not counting the manipulation of those readily available tools, although they serve other purposes. If you are co-opting them, you have turned them into so-called the tools of your particular trade.

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, but they have to, like, like you can control enzymes, right?

• 39:19Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That can then make something else happen. Sure. But, yes, but the enzyme is still a tool in that sense.

• 39:26Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is doing the work for you and the size of the enzyme is commensurate with the size of what it is it's trying to make happen. So, Judd, are you with me on that? Do you, you agree with me there?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yes, certainly. And, and the tools that we have to do to do nanotechnology, um, did not exist when I was born or any. And they're just now advancing where we can physically manipulate individual atoms if we need to. Or in the DNA sense that you're able to, uh, alter, um, aspects of it.

• 39:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I think we're, I think we're done with this topic. I just want to make it clear that the size of the tools matters.

• 40:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that makes sense, that makes sense.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Gary O'Reilly?

  That makes sense, totally. Okay, so next question. Zeki Majed asks, would we reach a point where biomechatronics would be advanced enough to help us adapt to something like zero G without long-term complications that it carries?

• 40:20Speaker 02

  I would say, I would say the challenges with, with long-term spaceflight first depends on where you're at. I mean, because we spent over a year in Earth orbit, both Russians and Americans, I think Scott's a little bit shy of one year, but certainly cumulatively.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scott Kelly.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Scott Kelly, exactly.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's on a first-name basis with these folks.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  You know, that's how we roll at Georgia Tech. We know them all. We've got a great space innovations that we'll hope you come to.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we've had Scott Kelly as a guest on StarTalk, so there.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  There we go. Good guy. His brother's a good guy as well. So, so around the Earth, you're protected from the radiation. You're, you're, you're within the magnetic field, so that's keeping the, the cosmic particles from, from doing you harm. Now, if we go to the moon, or the Mars, or, or Enceladus, or wherever, we're outside of that range and, and maybe even increased radiation, for instance, if we're sending humans to the vicinity of Jupiter. That, I think, is, is the major impediment to, to life. It's not the zero G. That, that, I mean, that affects your bones, and, and a little bit of your vision and other sorts of things. But I think the primary concern is going to be the cosmic ray and the other radiation impacts at a cellular level. And that's going

• 41:33Speaker 02

  to be, that's going to be tough to overcome. We're going to have to build in mechanisms in the spacecraft to prevent that radiation from penetrating the human bodies, whether it's simple things like water.

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  Or would you, or would you build in the mechanism to the human dermis, like, like what we do with sunscreen? You know, we slather that on top. But is there, when you talk about nanotech, like, wouldn't you be able to, you know, figure out a way to put a barrier underneath your, like, fourth layer of, of skin there?

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Potentially. The sunscreen works because of the wavelength of ultraviolet light, whereas the wavelength of these cosmic particles is vastly different, that it may not be able to prevent. But, you know, that's a, that's a really good, good concept.

• 42:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Robert Bork, Robert Bork has asked, is there any organism that biomimicry could replicate to take on climate change? That would be better than the possible technology advancement we could make.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  I just really like the change of heart that Robert Bork has. Last time I saw him, he was a strongly conservative Supreme Court nominee. And now for him to be concerned about climate change. I mean, I'm really glad he's picked up some science books and put down the law books.

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  Nice to see people change.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, everybody can change. It shows that. Um, so is there an organism? Well, the the problem with climate change is that we're changing the carbon inside the earth into gaseous carbon, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, which is creating differences in temperature, both high and cold. You know, you don't call it global warming anymore because it's both high and low. So the the the ability to store that carbon dioxide or do something with it would be would be great. So you can pump it into the ocean, the bottom of the ocean, they say, but then that makes the ocean acidic and is no good for the the fish. Or you can pump it into old wells like caves and that sort of thing, and hopefully it'll get the salt back into the rocks. Or you can let trees do it.

• 43:33Chuck Nice?

  Pump it down into basalt.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. Trees, trees convert the carbon dioxide on their own, but the vast majority of of of conversion is actually from plankton in the ocean as opposed to like the rainforest. Certainly, cutting down the rainforest is no good from a perspective of sustainability, absorbing that. But if you could engineer an algae-like substance, that would be a very useful material to to to convert that CO2 into, say, oxygen, which which could be useful. Now, converting too much into oxygen has its own trouble as well. So earth is at a really nice gold blocks point. We're not like Venus, which has way too much carbon in greenhouse gases and not like Mars, which has hardly any at all. We're at kind of a nice point, but the problem is.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  And we've been

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, just to be clear, Mars is basically 100% CO2. It's just very little.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. So all the gas that is there is actually greenhouse gas, but it can't trap the heat because it's too thin.

• 44:32Chuck Nice?

  Too thin of an atmosphere. So but really, what you're saying is the idea, some mitigation might happen through capture, but the real deal is we have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere. We got to stop with the carbon. We got to stop with the methane. These greenhouse gases that we're pumping into the atmosphere on such a gigaton basis, we got to stop that.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But clearly, Bork doesn't want to do that. He wants, he wants Judd to invent something that he can keep putting carbon in there. And then Judd takes it out. That's the whole point of the question.

• 45:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I think just the, the, the, the production of the, of the CO2 needs to slow down. And people say, well, volcanoes, you have a whole bunch of CO2. But you can very easily track the, the development of humanity and the, the emissions and see a direct correlation. It's very, it's, it's very clear when you plot it and it's not, it's not a matter of science.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Judd, we know that. We're trying to get you to fix it.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  I know. Again, I'm not a biologist, so I'll, I'll need to talk to.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not a biologist, Jim. I'm, I'm an engineer, Jim.

• 45:38Chuck Nice?

  Damn it, Jim.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  But there's certainly mechanisms of catalysis where, where you convert one material, say CO2, to some other material that becomes beneficial. For instance, as Neil was mentioning, for Mars, they're considering converting that CO2 to rocket fuel. You bring along some additional components, specifically the hydrogen, and you can do a reaction to take the CO2 and the hydrogen and make methane. And then you can burn that, which will help you get off the surface of Mars or hop around the surface of Mars, as the case may be.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is, we need you coming and going in our sports, in our space exploration, and even in our survival.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Just look around, I just ask your readers to look around themselves right now, or listeners to look around themselves, and there's glasses, there's metals, they'll call them plastics, I don't allow my students to do that, we call them polymers, and then, all of those have been engineered, even wood is engineered to a degree from a shaping perspective, and some is preferentially planted.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright guys, I think we're gonna have to call it quits there, but the lesson here is that we need Judd for all of civilization.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  For everything. Come to me once a week, you know, fifty bucks, I'll charge you, nah, we'll make it a hundred bucks now.

• 46:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright, we'll talk. I just know that we had scratched the surface with the questions.

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright guys, Judd, it's been really good to have you, this second, or is it third time on this program, and this will happen again, for sure, and we'll have you cross over into our StarTalk flagship, and talk about just a broader conversation about materials and civilization. We got this. Alright, Chuck, Gary, always good to have you.

• 47:26Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Thank you Neil.

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright guys, this has been StarTalk, Sports Edition, it's a material world. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrologist.