Hack Dog Vision To Keep Your Bones Safe

[00:00:00]I'm here to talk about color vision, okay? Specifically, color vision in other animals. I spoke about this a while ago, but now it is real and it is on my body and it's protecting my bones.

[00:00:14]I'll show you. [laughter] >> It's unfortunate. Um, the probably going to cut the bit where you uh your your top came up with your hoodie and we saw an almost nude Michael.

[00:00:26]>> Was that in frame?

[00:00:28]>> No, you're fine. You're safe. Don't worry.

[00:00:30]>> Did you I guess not know that about me.

[00:00:31]In order to take my shirt off, I have to get completely nude first. [laughter] >> I did think when you when the pants came off, I thought it was too much. But, you know, you do you.

[00:00:40]>> It's just it's just easier for me.

[00:00:46][music] >> This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Our bodies are incredible machines worrying away making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.

[00:00:59]>> In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back.

[00:01:08]>> To the moon and back. That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London Underground into a suitcase. By the age of 50, you have copied almost six trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes.

[00:01:27]And over time, those mistakes can accumulate. And that collection of errors can lead to cancer. But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors. And by finding them, they've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer.

[00:01:47]>> For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearch.org/restiscience.

[00:01:58][music] Anyway, this is the shirt. And the shirt, you'll notice right away in white letters, it says no bones in here. And the shirt itself is a kind of orang-ish red color.

[00:02:18]>> And so humans can read this, you know, no bones in here part, but so can dogs.

[00:02:23]Dog vision is different. Dog vision is just diromatic. They only see um two two base colors, blue and yellow. All right?

[00:02:32]So they can see uh you know brightness and and and darkness, but they also can only see uh combos of blue and yellow.

[00:02:40]That's how the world is to them. And reds and greens >> look the same. They just kind of look perhaps like browns. We don't know what it is like to be a dog, but we do know that dogs cannot be trained to recognize the green and the red thing or a green thing on a red thing. And so in green letters on this red shirt, we have written JK. I'm full of bones actually.

[00:03:06]So only humans can see that actually I have a skeleton inside me. As far as dogs know, I don't have any bones in here.

[00:03:16]>> Yeah. I think this is an ingenious plan.

[00:03:18]Like I think I think you've thought everything through. I think you have worked it all out. I can only see one tiny floor.

[00:03:25]>> Yeah. Not sure dogs can read. Um, but beyond that, great.

[00:03:30]>> Some of our some of our testers brought that up. They said, "Well, I wore the shirt and I walked around bragging about my skeleton and sure enough, no dogs tried to steal my bones, but it might not be because of the shirt, Michael. It might be because dogs can't read."

[00:03:45]>> You need a control group.

[00:03:46]>> And I I think honestly science will never know what really happened.

[00:03:51]>> Sure.

[00:03:51]>> But I'd rather be safe than sorry. We call this the dog safety shirt. It's part of this season's color vision box.

[00:03:58]We've got the the color blindness tests all over it with different numbers.

[00:04:02]That's eight. If you can't read the eight on top of the box, then you you might have color blindness of of this type or you might be a dog, in which case, pause off my bones, pho.

[00:04:15][laughter] Now, I think I I think I may have mentioned the idea for this shirt already on the podcast, but now it is real and it's on my body protecting my bones. There's more though that I haven't shown and it's that we also made a whole sticker set. These are stickers that dogs cannot enjoy. So, [snorts] there are stickers of things that dogs would otherwise love like cats, bones, fire hydrants, poop, squirrels, tennis balls. This my my daughter's already been playing with the stickers and she put a diamond ring sticker on top of this one and I can't get it off. But this is a dog sniffing another dog's butt.

[00:04:53]>> Great.

[00:04:53]>> But the colors that have been chosen so that a to a dog, this heart-shaped sticker, for example, that's red with a green bone on it is just going to look like a brown heart. They won't be able to see the detail of the bone written on it. Ah, sucker. [laughter] As I show this off, it feels like we're just teasing dogs, but I think really we're teaching about the variety of visual experience amongst life forms on Earth, which is a beautiful thing >> because there are other animals like the the is it the mantis shrimp, which has if if humans have on average three cones, dogs have two. The mantis shrimp has something like 19 if I remember rightly. Yeah. Like we don't even know what it sees. It's like the idea is that um it's seeing perhaps some things that look translucent to us. It's managing to be able to distinguish between um that and the sort of the water background that it's that it's against. But I mean the the rainbow would be an entirely different experience if you were a manta shrimp.

[00:05:56]>> I know. Have >> you come across the idea of a tetra chromat by the way?

[00:06:00]>> Well, yes. There are humans who have well they have different color vision.

[00:06:05]can see more colors than most people.

[00:06:07]>> Yeah. So, because it's all comes down to the X chromosome, um, which is where most of your cones are. Certainly, your red and green cones are, which is why being color blind is so much more common in men than it is in women. I think in women it's about one in every 200 women is is color blind. In men, it's more like 12% or something. But um yeah, the reason is is that if you end up with a defective X chromosome effectively that that that your cones aren't working properly. In women, you get two rolls of the dice. You have two X chromosomes. If one isn't working, you have the other one. It's fine. But in men, you only get one shot cuz the Y chromosome doesn't have um the right information on it.

[00:06:46]>> One strike and you're colorblind.

[00:06:47]>> One striking color blind. But because it is on the X chromosome, there is this idea that actually some women get two X chromosomes. They're substantially different that they end up with a fourth effectively a fourth cone tetra chromat.

[00:07:03]>> Now, I've heard about this, but what does that mean for their vision? What do they see that I don't? Well, so there's only been a really really really small number of women who have like been sort of identified and tested in a scientific way, but there are some some people some estimates say that actually maybe around 20% of women have this but don't know that they have it. I mean you can go your whole life being color blind and not know that you are.

[00:07:28]>> Yeah. Right. Because you there's it goes back to quality. You don't know how your experience relates to somebody else's.

[00:07:33]Um, but if you are a woman who ends up arguing with other people about the color of things quite a lot, then it's possible that you're a tetra chromat. I think the idea is that you can distinguish between colors much more >> yes >> easily. So whereas you and I might be able to see a million colors, a tetra chromat might be able to see up to 100 million. So they can detect extremely subtle changes that you otherwise wouldn't be able to see. But we don't know really. It may be that they have entirely different colors altogether.

[00:08:02]There was there was one woman who was a tetetrogrammer sort of confirmed tetetrochroma and she said that when she walks along a pebbly beach. [snorts] She doesn't understand how everyone just says, "Oh, it's all really gray." She didn't understand it because she was like, "What are you talking about? This is like being at a jeweler's shop window >> that you can see this like sparkling array of like myriad colors just shining back at you. What is everyone talking about? It's just really gray."

[00:08:28]>> Wow. Oh, maybe in there there is a pebble that says, "Hey, humans suckers."

[00:08:34]And it's just put there by the mantis shrimp.

[00:08:37]>> Yeah. You try chromats will never appreciate me, the pebble. Uh I I love that. Just it's such a good reminder that like we see such a small portion of the world >> and there's so much more there that other species see that even other individuals, humans can see.

[00:08:54]>> It's like the universe through a keyhole, you know.

[00:08:56]>> Exactly. Exactly. Um, now here's here's an ambiguous thing that we made. This is a coin.

[00:09:04]>> It's like a challenge coin sized coin.

[00:09:07]It's made of metal and you can flip this to never lose a coin toss. The way it works is that it says heads on one side and tails on the other. And it says also says tails on the other side and heads on the other. It's an ambigram. So if I hold it like this, >> you can read the word heads and the editors can maybe outline the word heads there. But if I turn it upside down, we're still looking at the same side, but now it says tails.

[00:09:33]>> Nice.

[00:09:34]>> So, you can flip this coin. The other person can call it in the air. You catch it, and then you just show it to them one side up or the other to have it be heads or tails so that you can always win or always lose. You know, it's up to you. You are in control. So, I love this a little bit of word art there. And then you see the coins around the edge. It's like different frames in the animation of a spinning coin. That's a zoatrope illusion. And so when you spin this coin, it's got a little divot in the middle. So you can spin it like a top.

[00:10:05]>> It looks like the coin is moving.

[00:10:07]>> But this coin can spin on its face like that, like a spinning top. And if you spin it and you look at it through your phone's uh camera, it can align with the frame rate and the coins along the edge become an animated spinning coin. So this is a coin that spins a coin.

[00:10:27]>> I like that a lot. It's like the origin of cinema.

[00:10:30]>> But those those are some of the uh the little inventions that we've got here.

[00:10:35]>> Here's what I want to know, right? When you come up with all these inventions, where does it start? Are you just like like the idea of doing a a shirt for colorblind dogs? Where do you where where's that come from?

[00:10:48]>> Well, we always wanted to do something around color vision like the the the whole the whole box is always this team effort and people will have an idea and then we all piggyback off of it and add to it. And so I think for this shirt it began with we want to do something with color vision. Maybe make goggles that allow you to see the world as a dog would, for example. And we still might do that. I'd love to make a book actually that comes with pages that you can look through to see the world as a cat, as a dog, as we couldn't really do a mantis shrimp because you'd have to add colors.

[00:11:24]>> But maybe we'll figure out a way to do that. And then somehow it turned into a shirt that Oh, you know what? We had the idea to do a shirt that only your phone could see. Because you know, phones also see more colors. Yeah. Than humans do.

[00:11:39]This is a great experiment to do at home. Just open up your camera app and point it at the front of a TV remote control and start pushing buttons. To the human eye, the light on the remote will just look blank. But through your camera, you'll see like a bluish light flickering because the camera receives the infrared radiation and then it converts it into a color humans can see on the screen.

[00:12:04]So you can see lights that you couldn't otherwise see through your phone. We wanted to make a shirt that worked in the same way where until someone took a photo of it, they couldn't see what was on the shirt. And we couldn't actually get it to work with the the like shirt printing technology that exists today.

[00:12:23]>> So we said, "How about instead of phones, we focus on like an animal? How about dogs? They famously have limited color vision compared to a human." And then I was the one who said, "All right, here's the deal. It's going to be about bones. It's going to be about keeping you safe from a dog that wants your bones.

[00:12:40]>> I want to be in one of those meetings one day. Okay. I want to just be up on the wall and enjoy it.

[00:12:45]>> You should come by. We just had one this morning. Um we're talking [clears throat] about Here's something I I I'll have to send you a set. We're making a bunch of uh charms. They can be like keychains or just like charms for a charm bracelet that are based on SI standard units.

[00:13:00]>> Amazing. So, we're giving you a pendulum that has a period of exactly like a tenth of a second. We're giving you a little a little vial that contains exactly 1 kiloalorie of sugar. So, you know what that looks like. A a 10 g weight and a a square with a smaller square cut inside of it. That is an exactly a square inch and a square centimeter. So, you'll always have those to reference. And the plan is to do the full line of of of scientific unit charms. So we'll also have a light that produces either one lumen or how you know some some >> exact measurement. Yeah.

[00:13:40]>> Standard amount. And what else is there?

[00:13:42]There's Oh, we'll give you an ohm resistor um keychain.

[00:13:47]>> I like this a lot. Will it also look good, Michael? Because if it will, I'll wear it.

[00:13:51]>> They're made of steel, so they're they're hardwearing and they they're they're stainless so they're going to look beautiful. Um, I think it's all really well designed. I'd show you photos, but that's all um confidential.

[00:14:03]>> But then you'd have to kill us. Then you'd have to kill us.

[00:14:08]>> You know how silly people are? If you don't say anything, they don't do anything. But if you say, "Guys, can you subscribe to our channel?" Suddenly, there's a massive influx of subscribers.

[00:14:18]>> Yeah, but that's because we are influencers, Hannah. If we tell people to subscribe, they do it. Just like lemmings. though limines don't actually exhibit lim behavior.

[00:14:28]>> No, that's true. They were dri driven off the cliff by Disney producers, weren't they?

[00:14:33]>> Yeah. Anyway, the point is you should subscribe.

[00:14:36]>> Yeah, we hate saying that. We hate it because it's such a cliche, but unfortunately it works. So, until every last one of you has done your duty and clicked that like and subscribe button, we will continue forcing that narrative down your throats.

[00:14:51]>> Just a brief object that has nothing to do with science at all. It is purely a plug for my best friend's book. So this this woman, her name's Anna Macaui. She was my best friend through school. She was like the smartest kid in the school.

[00:15:06]So I felt very jealous and competitive with her. But we became very close friends. She was the best man at my wedding. And she's written a book. And the book is a perfect marriage of like UK and and America just like us. It's called Abby Offsides. [gasps] It's about an American who moves to England, starts working for a football team in Liverpool. And one of the characters in this book is based on me.

[00:15:37]>> Oh, but you're not saying which.

[00:15:40]>> What bigger honor could there be? I will say this. First of all, it's really it's really a whole mind trip to read a book where you know there's a character based on you. It's It changes the whole experience.

[00:15:53]>> Wait, is it is it the dashingly good-looking romantic lead?

[00:15:57]>> No, it isn't. However, she did write the character to be a much better friend to the main character in this book than I have ever been to her. It just it actually almost made me feel bad. I'm like, "Oh, gee." Also, the character that I'm based on has hair, like thick curly hair, and I'm like, "Okay."

[00:16:16]>> I mean, so do you if you do a hand a handstand.

[00:16:19]>> That's true. Look at that. upside down.

[00:16:21]I am a hair suit man.

[00:16:24]Anyway, Abby Offsides not available here in New Zealand until October. So, luckily I've got my advanced readers copy. I read this uh you know a year ago.

[00:16:33]>> Okay, first question. Let's get back to it, shall we?

[00:16:35]>> Okay, this comes from Dan Pelco who asks, "I was curious to know if there is any way that we could use DNA and RNA to encode data like a hard drive. Is there anyone working on this?"

[00:16:49]They're not just working on it, Dan.

[00:16:50]There there's this whole race going on about it. So, at the moment, I'm filming this series and one entire episode of the series is going to be about exactly this exactly this question. So, um maybe what I should do is give you an update after we've gone off to film it. But, um yeah, this is like we're at this point where um semiconductors are reaching the the kind of limits of Moore's law. is unbelievably expensive to sort of transcribe data through this digital process, but it also just takes up physically a hell of a lot of space. So, this time next week, I'm going to be in a mountain in Pittsburgh, which is uh has been converted into a sort of safe data storage facility. the idea that you know if there's sort of attacks or like fires or whatever it might be out out there in the world inside the mountain the data will be safe and kind of can can stay there for a really long time but nothing has got anything on DNA you know like we've dug up woolly mammoths from the from the perafrost in Siberia and then and managed to extract DNA from them that's been there for you know hundreds of thousands of years since before humans even existed so this is like the only data source that we know for sure can be frozen in time and still be completely robust um you know hundreds of thousands of years later. So there there are people who are doing exactly this. Can I can I ask a question? Please go ahead.

[00:18:16]>> Okay. So when you and Dan talk about encoding information in or as DNA or RNA, what does that mean? Does that mean using their actual amino acids to to store data using the the >> Yeah. A t G and C. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:18:35]>> Okay. So So and that's what makes it DNA because obviously if you encoded the text of Moby Dick >> Mhm.

[00:18:43]>> it wouldn't be DNA in the sense of like oh this is instructions for a living organism. It would it would be using the language of DNA to form a long molecule that could be >> Yeah.

[00:18:57]>> Uh read to give us back Moby Dick.

[00:19:00]>> Exactly. Right. So you couldn't sort of pop it into a cell or pop it into an egg and then suddenly Moby Dick be born.

[00:19:06][laughter] >> But you could pop it into a special reader.

[00:19:10]>> You could pop it into a special reader >> like a like an electronic computerized reader that would then be like, "Ah, I've analyzed this DNA molecule and here's call me Ishmail." blah blah blah blah blah blah.

[00:19:20]>> Exactly right. And if you think about it, this is one of the big advantages of it. Apart from the fact that we know that it's sort of that it's stable over incredibly long periods of time.

[00:19:29][snorts] Um we also in DNA you have four bases, right? A D um C and G. Whereas in binary you've only got two, zero and one, right?

[00:19:40]>> So it's also incredibly articulate.

[00:19:42]Basically you can you can it's extremely extremely capable at compressing data really really really efficiently and you are also you're down at the size of molecules right so like one bit becomes minuscule even physically it's very compressed because you're writing with molecules large molecules you know but still >> molecules and I know DNA can be lost pretty easily but it's it's it's stable like you said we can pull them out of wool mammoths. But it I guess it'd be more stable than like, okay, let's etch some little markings on a little wafer and hope it doesn't get scratched.

[00:20:21]>> These molecules kind of preserve themselves by their own intermolecular forces >> quite literally that you're exactly right. I mean, if you think about, so um I know we've spoken about this before, but the human genome project was trying to take human DNA and then transcribe it into a string of those letters A, T, C, G, and so on. Um the human genome project, I went to go and see it the other day as part of this this program that I'm filming uh at the Sanger Institute. They have it printed out as a series of books. I cannot tell you like it is absurd when you see just human DNA written out. It is I like I I think it's 112 books and these books are meaty tombs and you think you think oh tombs sorry I never get that word right [laughter] a meaty tomb that sounds like a very movie >> but you open them up expecting the writing to at least be big and it's not.

[00:21:17]It's minuscule. We are talking many many many many thousands of pages across many hundreds of books. Right? these this it's insane and all of this is squished in and is copied in every single one of your cells which are just I mean it's so tiny right like it's so articulate DNA there's this one estimate that basically if you took everything that humans have ever created and then you tried to re-encode it using DNA instead of instead of sort of traditional methods then they would basically fit in the back of two vans the backs of two vans.

[00:21:54]Wow. Everything that's ever been written by humans. I mean, you go to like you go to a a data mountain like the one in Pittsburgh, you put it in DNA and it's basically just like a little fridge, you know, like a little tiny little little fridge, right? You need nothing. It's almost nothing.

[00:22:10]>> Would this be smaller than electronic storage as it exists today? Like how much physical space does a bit take up on a hard drive?

[00:22:22]>> Do you know what? I don't know.

[00:22:23]>> Yeah. I don't know either >> cuz the problem is that one bit I mean the bits you had to have like transistors right so like even though transistors are small we're still talking many orders of magnitude larger than DNA >> yeah if I had an entire encyclopedia encoded into a strand of DNA >> that DNA could be put into a little envelope kind of thing and I could inject it into my body and I could have the Encyclopedia Britannica in my body as a virus.

[00:22:56]>> You you could I mean you would you would really hope that there wasn't some sort of weird fluke that actually Ebola uh actually just so happens to be the exact same strands of >> as my life story >> as their life story was Moby Dick, right? You know what a fluke that would be that when you translate Moby Dick into amino acids it just reads like a bola. [laughter] That would be um bad.

[00:23:22]Anyway, the way that people do this Yeah. So, so the only problem about this is if you're accessing the data, so one of the real advantages of electronic storage is that you can read it and write it extremely quickly, right? And even once you have it, once you have it written, reading it again is really quick. Whereas, if you're storing something as biological material, you're going to need to pass it back through a sort of electronic process in order to read it. So, one of the ways that that people do this is they go for like [laughter] quite a retro approach. They basically put it on a cassette tape um which I really like. They sort of like, you know, play out the DNA on this long strand and then have this tape sort of winding around um so that that then can be read through a machine really easily.

[00:24:07]They sort of coat it with this kind of crystal armor so that just to stop the DNA bonds from from breaking down. But yeah, there I mean this is like there's a big rush in this at the moment. This is um if you want data that will exist forever, then this is the way to go.

[00:24:25]Okay, next question. We've got one here from Simon Garner. He says, "I was recently thinking about free will and decided if scientists discovered definitive evidence that it wasn't real, I wouldn't want to know." That made me want to ask you as two people who've dedicated their lives to the acquiring and relaying of information. Is there anything you wouldn't want to know even if we had the scientific knowledge and it was accessible to you? Is there anything you would ask to not be told?

[00:24:53]Man, I find it really hard to answer if if we proved that everything was determined and everything could given enough, you know, um uh calculating could be predicted. Um it still wouldn't feel that way. I mean, we evolved to feel like causal agents.

[00:25:12]And so, >> you could probably just never convince everybody that like they had no free will or no choice in in in their decisions. But if I could, you know, know anything, what would I not want to know? It was hard. I for me, I'd say probably I don't want to know the inner thoughts of everyone um that knows me.

[00:25:38]>> Don't Don't you feel that it's a bit like being on the internet version of that?

[00:25:43]>> Yeah, we already have we already have a version of that that does enough. Um but in terms of future events, I don't know.

[00:25:51]I feel like it would it would be really hard to believe that if someone told me, "Okay, you're going to die in this way on this date [snorts] that I would I would feel like, yeah, but I could avoid that now."

[00:26:04]>> Mhm.

[00:26:04]>> And yet, in this thought experiment, determinism is the case. We don't have free will, and I couldn't escape it. Um, that would be a real trip to find out like, no, this is going to happen in this way no matter what you do. It'd be hard to accept.

[00:26:21]>> I'm the same I'm the same as you. I think anything bad in the future, I'm okay with not knowing. I'm I don't want to know when when I'm going to die. I don't want to know when my family are going to die. I don't want to know if there's an apocalypse around the corner.

[00:26:36]I don't want to know. I'm okay with it.

[00:26:37]I'd rather not know.

[00:26:39]I mean, I think the only reason why knowledge would be comforting would be if you if the knowledge itself allowed you to change things.

[00:26:50]>> Yeah. In which case, we could already do that. Like a a person could pretend to be a mystic psychic and tell you what's going to happen in order to encourage you to act differently than you are now.

[00:27:02]>> But you're right, we already do know this, right? Don't smoke, don't drink too much, go for exercise.

[00:27:08]Like we already know all the things. Be kind to people. Enjoy every day. Like we already know all of the things.

[00:27:14]>> We already know that, but we don't really live like we know it.

[00:27:18]>> I think we may have mentioned this before, but it's a real trip to keep in mind that we have so many movies about time travel and going back in time to change the way things are. But we rarely in our lives sit and think about like, whoa, I am already a time traveler.

[00:27:37]Meaning right now will be the past at some point. And so the decisions I make now will radically alter the future. I already have the power to change what's going to happen. I'm going to take advantage of it. Greg Egan wrote a short story called The Hundred Lightyear Diary.

[00:27:54]>> Mhm.

[00:27:55]>> That is about uh the discovery of a galaxy where I think time runs the other way. and they're able to align some telescopes in such a way that they can see the future, >> right?

[00:28:08]>> Uh I have I'll have to reread this story to see how they do it. It's it's incredibly hard sci-fi. Really amazing.

[00:28:15]But then what happens is people wind up receiving um through these telescopes diaries from their future selves. And their future selves will write about what happened each day. And the future selves have to make these decisions about how many details do I tell them.

[00:28:31]like you're going to be in a car accident. I'm going to leave out how much it hurts, but I will let you know that it will happen. And then people live their whole lives knowing that, oh yeah, tomorrow is the day that I'm going to be in this car accident. And they all the psychology behind how people live in a society where they already know the main landmarks of their life is really it's I mean I I almost don't have much to say about it because I need to just kind of lay in bed and think about it more. But it was a real incredible read because it worked. It worked.

[00:29:02]>> That's so interesting. What made me think about that as you were talking is that idea of talking to people about what lays ahead in their future and leaving out the most painful details deliberately because I actually think that we do that to each other.

[00:29:17]>> Yeah. You know, I was thinking here about um with child birth, for example.

[00:29:23]I mean, people say, you know, child birth is painful, blah blah blah blah blah, but I think that um I sort of don't want to say it out loud, but I think [laughter] I think that something happens when when couples have their first baby and almost every single time that couple is like, "Something definitely went wrong because that was so bad." like that was so bad.

[00:29:47]And it's sort of only when you're out the other side of it, you're like, "No, it really it really really is that bad.

[00:29:53]We just didn't tell you. [laughter] We just didn't tell you." Or maybe you just didn't hear. Maybe you just didn't hear. Or [snorts] I think also having young children is a similar thing. You know, I think if anybody really told you how much sleep you lose, um I think people sort of they kind [clears throat] of dance around it a little bit but then don't actually say it, you know. Yeah.

[00:30:14]Well, right. I mean, it's it's hard to make it clear like, oh, you're going to you're not going to sleep much. It's going to be stressful in brand new ways.

[00:30:23]It's it's hard to really conceive of what that means. But at the same time, there is growth that comes from that.

[00:30:31]Like, I have learned things about myself >> and my childhood that I never would have learned or thought of if I had not been a parent. Mhm.

[00:30:41]>> I think I've said this before, but having a kid is like a big psychedelic experience. It can go really wrong, but it can also go really right and you can really like reach a higher plane. It's up to you. It's all about the set and setting.

[00:30:56]>> Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's not just about new birth though. I think it's also about death. I think that I think that people maybe deliberately or maybe because it's just too painful hold back on some of the details of what it's like to be close to somebody as they're dying. You know, what it's really like.

[00:31:14]>> And I think that partly it's because maybe other people aren't ready to hear it. But I but I also wonder whether it's a bit like your egan idea of like actually you just don't need to know.

[00:31:25]You just don't need to know. You don't need to know unless you have to unless unless you're unfortunate enough to go through it. I wonder if it's also just really hard to articulate some of these really difficult things. Like we just don't have the ability to communicate the kinds of pain. And it's not that we're shielding other people from it. We just can't even ourselves really grasp what was so difficult and why. So we just say, "Uh, yeah, it was bad, but like it's okay." Or maybe it's also that actually the people listening are not in a position to really hear it, >> right?

[00:32:04]>> Like to really understand it. So for example, I did this program [laughter] did this program recently and I spoke to a person who'd previously been on the program and they said it's really really fun but it's also really really hard. [snorts] And I was like, "Yeah, yeah." And then I went on and then I spoke to her afterwards and I was like, "You didn't tell me. It was really hard." She was like, "I did." She did.

[00:32:33]>> I did. I just didn't I just didn't hear it. Yeah. the ways we take and give advice and what we hear and don't hear in it and and say and don't say in it I think is would be a really rich place to investigate because you're right advice never really prepares you completely for anything and then afterwards you are incapable of producing the advice that you should like it just kind of has to be experienced so many things.

[00:33:04]>> Yeah. Like you do transition, you change, you are a time traveler yourself, right? You you become a different person as you have these different experiences.

[00:33:12]>> Yeah, that one got very deep, didn't it?

[00:33:14]Anyway, so [laughter] shall we move on? Yeah. All right. Look, Olive Ridley asked this question. I've been having a think about dragons. Could it ever be biologically possible for an animal to anatomically produce fire? I think bombader beetles are on the right track.

[00:33:35]>> Okay, so bombader beetles, right? I've been watching videos of them today. I hadn't actually come across them um before, but like they're incredible these things. So other animals will try and eat them and then they quickly learn because what they do is uh when they're sort of attacked or they're disturbed, they they turn around and then they have essentially an internal chemical explosion in their abdomen and then they expel this jet of boiling like acid um towards their attackers. I've seen a couple of videos of a mongoose getting this uh this stuff sprayed in its eyes.

[00:34:11]it. The mongus did not did not appear happy >> and it's actually boiling hot.

[00:34:16]>> Yes, it's like superheated.

[00:34:18]>> So the but the heat comes from the chemical reaction. Obviously the animal isn't doesn't have a little oven inside of it.

[00:34:24]>> No, exactly. Um what it's it's hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, right? Which is this and those two are actually quite common as a defensive um agent amongst insects. But what they're doing is because they are uh combining they're like they're creating this chemical at the exact moment of use they're kind of mixing these two chemical precursors in this protective chamber in their hind quarters and then as they combine they can get it sort of gives us this intense heat and they expel it exactly that moment. Um and they got this little passageway basically between the two internal chambers that opens and closes when they want to like spurt it outwards. So, okay, that's like that's pretty good, but it's not actually ignited. It's it's pretty good, but it's it's not actually on fire. Um, there is this paleontologist called Philip J.

[00:35:13]Center who's tried to work out what are the different options for fireb breathing creatures. Um, and and why haven't we got one? And there's like a few different ways that you could do it.

[00:35:24]One is that if you I mean methane >> is already produced by a number of animals, us included. cows also notably um you know cattle and sheep in particular they they they belch you know dozens of little methane burps every hour um so all you got to do is ignite it >> but igniting the methane is the question >> which wouldn't even be that hard there are animals that produce electricity you know that would be getting the spark wouldn't be hard >> true >> the problem is that the methane club would probably envelop the animal's own head um so that not so good. Also, by the way, there is actually some evidence of this genuinely happening in humans where someone belches while they're they've got a cigarette and then they burn themselves.

[00:36:14]>> Really? So, so there's enough methane in the belch >> that the cigarette lights it.

[00:36:20]>> Mhm. I think in particular there's something going on already with the which is allowing them to produce a more flammable burp. So, that's you know burping is not it's just not going to work. It's not going to work. Right. is you're going to you're going to burn yourself first. Oh, there's also the idea that you could create a gas cloud.

[00:36:36]So, rather than just like burping, you could sort of create a little cloud uh like a nostril. Um there are uh these chemicals called polyoric molecules which do burst into flame as soon as they come into contact with air. So, that might work. Uh but again, [laughter] unfortunately, it just detonates too close even if it comes out of a very narrow hole like a nostril, right? Um it detonates right next to the tube opening. So it would just like >> yeah, >> burn your nostril if you're a dragon. Um and then [clears throat] the uh then there's also hypergolic pears, which is where you get two chemicals that ignite spontaneously on contact. This is like very close to what the bombarder beetle is doing. But unfortunately uh these things I mean the the temperatures are incredibly high and um you know it creates this like spc scalding liquid rather than a flame. So there's no spark there's no ignition sort [sighs and gasps] of you know doesn't really doesn't really work. So unfortunately every fire mechanism that's been proposed doesn't doesn't really work in a real animal because you can't do it without cooking your own face >> right. I mean, there there are hypergolic mixtures that will ignite, but I'm sure they're like super toxic to a living thing.

[00:37:51]>> You're right. I think the bombader beetle is there, but the methane thing sounds like the best bet if you could.

[00:37:58]The problem is creating enough methane to get like a nice flame, and you'd have to shoot it out at a lot of at a high pressure, >> right? Definitely. The animal would have to evolve to have like compressed liquid methane in its body that it could then expel.

[00:38:14]>> Yeah.

[00:38:14]>> And and then it would have to do like an electric eel little spark thing to ignite it.

[00:38:20]>> It's not beyond the realms of possibility. I mean, if it produced the same amount of methane as a cow, but just happened to be the size of a beetle, that would work.

[00:38:28]>> Okay, >> there's enough there's enough pressure there.

[00:38:31]>> Maybe it's not enough of a deterrent.

[00:38:33]Like it'd be better to just evolve fast legs to run away from a threat [laughter] >> or wings or wings >> than to breathe fire at it.

[00:38:44]>> It's a shame.

[00:38:44]>> I I would almost think that fire breathing would be more advantageous to a creature for other like practical reasons, not attack and defense, but just to create warmth. like humans had to have opposable thumbs and the ability to get flint and and create fire and then feed the fire and collect what's needed to for its fuel. The problem with fire is it doesn't really discriminate, does it? You know, once it's out there, sort of um you sort of it's it's a bit like when there's people who suggest that um smallox could be released by a bad actor in order to gain some sort of military advantage. Like, yes, sure. But small pox doesn't small pox doesn't discriminate between you and your enemies, you know, right?

[00:39:30]>> And fire doesn't either. And I think that unless these dragons are also fireproof, I agree that it's it's not a good defense mechanism.

[00:39:39]>> It's too dangerous to burn down your own home to scare away a burglar. Because I was just imagining if if some like dinosaur had evolved the ability to start a fire and then they could have started cooking their food and consuming more calories and their brains got bigger and like they became the intelligent species on our planet. Problem is it'd be a big risk. you know, uh, a dinosaur gets stampeded and it explodes.

[00:40:09]Whereas [laughter] the way humans controlled fire protected us from that risk. We weren't walking flammable creatures. We had to >> decide deliberately we're going to do a fire here. And that's maybe a better way to do it.

[00:40:25]>> I think overall it probably is. So yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, apologies, Olive. No fire breathing dragons for us this time. Um, okay. I think that brings us to the end. As ever, please do send us in your questions to the rest of [email protected].

[00:40:41]You can also leave us comments under this video or go to our subreddit, which I only recently found out about r/restcience.

[00:40:49]Um, we uh read all of the things that you send us and uh if you're lucky enough, if your question is good enough, if we think you're kind of cool enough, then maybe we'll answer it here.

[00:40:59]>> Yeah. See you over there. I mean, I hope so. Side note, I can't use my Reddit account anymore because I set it up using my old Google email address when I worked at Google. I no longer have access to that. And now Reddit is saying I have to like change the password, but I can't get any of their emails. So, Michael Stevens on Reddit is just like I I can't do anything. So, president of Reddit, uh, if you listen to the podcast, uh, I'd appreciate that. But I I'll I'll make a new account if I if I have to because I want to see you guys over there on our subreddit. And yeah, email in your questions if you prefer.

[00:41:34]We love hearing from you. And until next time, see you later. Byebye.

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