Listener Questions #16

00:00:14
Speaker 1: Snowflakes are hexagons, and each one is unique. Their amazing symmetry just adds to their mystique.

00:00:21
Speaker 2: I've heard flamingos are pink because of their diet. What if I ate a flamingo? Would I turn pink?

00:00:27
Speaker 1: If I tried it, i'dne injections protect from radiation. I saw it on TV, but I don't understand the mechanism. How exactly can that be?

00:00:37
Speaker 2: Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hello. I'm Kelly Winer Smith. I study parasites and space and I am so excited about our flamingo question today.

00:01:06
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I've never eaten a flamingo.

00:01:12
Speaker 2: I haven't either, as we'll see later in the show, we probably ought not to. But so my question for you today, Daniel. So we are recording the day before Google Calendars tells me that it's your birthday.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: How does Google know that?

00:01:25
Speaker 2: I'm actually not sure. I must have put it in at some point in the past, because you know, I've been co hosting with you for a while now, But so how do you celebrate birthdays?

00:01:36
Speaker 1: So, yeah, I'm turning fifty tomorrow, which is kind of a big milestone. But I actually don't really celebrate my birthday. I don't feel like it's that special a day, and I'm not really that intwo birthdays and sort of like being on the spot that way. I sort of prefer to fade into the background. And so to counteract that, I've actually been rounding up my age to fifty for a few years now, are you serious, which Katina is not very excited about. Yeah, especially because when she turned forty six, I welcomed her into the round up to fifty club and she was like, no, thank you.

00:02:05
Speaker 2: You can stay there alone. Daniel. Wow, I'll have to remember that strategy. I also may fade into the background birthday person, but I hadn't thought about the rounding up strategy. And I think I'm so I always forget how old I am. But I'm forty three, okay, is that right? No, my birthday's in October and it's twenty twenty. I'll be forty three in October, so I'm forty two. So it's not quite time for me to round up yet, but I will. I'll get there soon.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: Well, Katrina tells me it's ridiculous to round up, but I say, hey, look, it's arbitrary to round up to the year. People aren't super precise about how old they are. When you ask them. They don't say I'm forty two years and seven months and three days. They round up to the year, right, So I think, hey, I just round up to the decade. You know, what's the big deal?

00:02:51
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, No, Physicists are always you know, making broad assumptions about things and rounding, and so you might as well.

00:02:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, Pie is three and Daniel's fifty, what's the big deal?

00:03:01
Speaker 2: That's right there? You go, Well, I hope you have an amazing decade. Arbitrary though that milestone may be to you.

00:03:08
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're not here to talk about Daniel's birthday. We're here to answer your questions about the nature of the universe. How does it all work, how does it fit together? How can we make it click together in your mind? And so, as usual, we invite people to send us their questions right to us to questions at Danielankelly dot org. We write back to everybody with a response, we either give you the answer, or make a joke, or say we don't know, here's something to read.

00:03:32
Speaker 2: That's right. Lately, often I've been giving a reading suggestions, or if we don't know, we say we'll find out. And sometimes it becomes a question on a listener Questions episode. And today we have a lot of examples of that.

00:03:44
Speaker 1: That's right, So let's jump right in. Our first question comes from Zach in Minnesota. Zach is a question about why snowflakes are all different.

00:03:53
Speaker 3: Hey, they're extraordinaries. It's winter here in Minnesota and we just got a ton of snow. My dad took a really great picture of a beautifully symmetrical snowflake. I understand why snowflakes tend to form hexagonally. I think because of the crystallization pattern of water. But I don't understand why snowflakes so often come out looking so perfectly symmetrical. Why should they form exactly the same intricate crystallization on one arm as opposed to the other arm. I know this isn't a universal thing. Some snowflakes aren't symmetrical, but so many are. It just seems unlikely. Is this just because there are so many snowflakes or is there something deeper going on? Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

00:04:39
Speaker 2: Now, Daniel. If you and I were really good at this, we would have saved this for a Christmas episode, but instead we're going to release it in the middle of the summer.

00:04:46
Speaker 1: That's when people want snow, right, That's when they're missing it. You know, in the middle of winter people are like, Ugh, don't talk to me about snow. I'm fed up with it.

00:04:54
Speaker 2: Well, I guess it depends on where you are on this planet. Right it's winter somewhere. So okay, this is going to be a really good episode for the Australians if they're into snow.

00:05:03
Speaker 1: Or if you're sweltering in Texas this summer. Listen to this frosty episode about snowflakes.

00:05:09
Speaker 2: Amazing. All right, So, Daniel, I have to admit that I don't know why each snowflake has a unique shape. Can we start there before we get to why they're symmetrical?

00:05:21
Speaker 1: Yeah? I think that is the right direction to start from. This is a really cool question because I think Zach is thinking about how the snowflakes form, and he's wondering like, how can one arm form the same pattern as the arm on the other side. Is there some global for us controlling it? And so you're right, we need to think about the symmetry and the diversity of these objects. And snowflakes are really fascinating. And as it turns out, the cutting edge of human understanding of snowflakes doesn't have a complete answer to this question. Snowflakes remain mysterious. Yes, that's right, fascinating.

00:05:53
Speaker 2: There's not enough money in snowflakes, man.

00:05:57
Speaker 1: But if you go out into a snowstorm and you put out your hand and you see snowflakes land on your palm, and you can look at them briefly, just before they melt, and you notice they are not all the same. There's an enormous variety of snowflakes form this pattern and that pattern and the other pattern. And you know, people have known this for a long long time. This is famous quote from Thereaux who says, how full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated?

00:06:20
Speaker 2: Beautiful? But the answer is science science.

00:06:24
Speaker 1: But you know he was presient about this even though he didn't understand it. The answer is something about the chemistry of air, which we'll get to.

00:06:31
Speaker 2: I mean, you said a word I don't like, but let's let's move on anywhere.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: So your question was about the symmetry, so let's start with that, like why do snowflakes form this white, weird six prong pattern anyway, And that does come down to chemistry how the water molecules themselves bond to form the nexus of the crystal at the core. But let's back up and start with like, how does snow form, where does it come from? It comes from water freezing in clouds. And the things I understand about water is we're all familiar with ice and then liquid water and of course water vapor, steam, right, But water has complicated chemistry depending on the pressure. So down to the surface and normal atmosphere pressure, water has those three phases. But if you go up into the upper atmosphere or out into space, for example, where pressure is very very low, there is no liquid water. There's only solid in gas. And so if you have solid water and you heat it up, you don't get liquid water. Out in space, you get vapor. It goes directly from solid to gas. So there aren't three phases everywhere you can look up this phase diagram of water to learn more and that's going to turn out to be key. So what happens is you have the atmosphere and there's warm moist air that gets pushed upward when it hits the front, and that water condenses into droplets. So the air is also filled with like tiny dust particles, and each of those like can nucleate a tiny little droplet, and that's what a cloud is. Cloud is all these water droplets that have been nucleated as warm moist air has gone up and the water sort of comes out of the solution.

00:08:01
Speaker 2: Of the air and nucleated just means it's like surrounding the piece to dust.

00:08:05
Speaker 1: Mm hmm okay, yeah. Like you might ask why do you get a water droplet here and not one centimeter or one micron over? Like why do they form where they form and not somewhere else? The answer is dust. It's sort of like the way in the early universe we had like slight over densities in the plasma and that's what gravity grabbed onto to nucleate the formation of what turned into galaxies and stuff, Like why did galaxies form here and there? There has to be a reason it starts, and in the case of water droplets, it's tiny particles of dust.

00:08:33
Speaker 2: I heard it was also tiny bacteria that are in the atmosphere, Is that true? Or their bacteria around there forming snowflakes.

00:08:42
Speaker 1: There are bacteria out there. And dust is a very broad term. It includes lots of tiny stuff, you know, the way like sand does. And if you zoom in on this amazing variety of stuff in the atmosphere, we just call it dust. We can have a whole another episode about it, like what is dust?

00:08:56
Speaker 2: Sure that sounds fascinating.

00:09:00
Speaker 1: Anyway, you put all these together, you have a cloud. A cloud is like a million tons of water hanging there in the air, sort of amazing. So now temperatures drop right, and some of those droplets freeze, some of them evaporate become a vapor, but some of them freeze and you get a little crystal. And so here's where the chemistry comes in. You have this water molecule, which is like an oxygen and two hydrogens, and the two hydrogens come off at an angle, right, It's not like a line where you have hydrogen oxygen hydrogen. If you seem like a little drawing of water molecule you know, the hydrogen, it's like pulled close together. The angle between them is like one hundred and four degrees or something, and so when these things come together to make a crystal, they click together sort of like lego bricks. Right, there's bonds between them, and that makes a little hexagon. So you link up six water molecules. The oxygens are like the vertices on a hexagon, and then the bond between the oxygen and one hydrogen is like the edge of that hexagon, and then there are six hydrogen molecules sort of sticking out. But it makes this ring, this hexagonal ring, and then you just keep adding water molecules and it builds out and out and out, and you get a hexagonal crystal.

00:10:04
Speaker 2: Okay, so why do you get six in the center? Is that just available binding sites?

00:10:10
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:10:10
Speaker 2: I think it's because chemistry.

00:10:12
Speaker 1: Man, you get six because the angles. So imagine your oxygen atom and has two hydrogens coming off and there's one hundred degrees between them, which means is like two hundred and sixty degrees on the other side, right, So the other water molecule comes in with its hydrogen. It comes around the back on that big open space and it splits that in half, and that's what determines the angle. So half of two sixty you get about one hundred and thirty and that's the angle there that you build up to make the hexagons.

00:10:41
Speaker 2: Got it? Okay? I remember in organic chemistry there's a reaction called a backside attack, and the biologists in that class we could not get over that anyway.

00:10:49
Speaker 1: All right, moving on, all right, So initially you have this tiny, tiny crystal. It's like microns wide. And by the way, if you are out chopping and you see something called hexagonal water, that's a scam. It's not better for you. It's just pseudoscience, supplemental nonsense.

00:11:05
Speaker 2: I've never heard of that. What do they claim me?

00:11:08
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't even want to give them more airtime.

00:11:11
Speaker 2: Okay, save your money people, exactly.

00:11:14
Speaker 1: All right. So what we're talking about so far is just the core of the snowflake, right, it's this hexagonal crystal, and that can require like a million of these droplets. Wow, you have a tiny number of snowflakes compared to the number of droplets. It really takes a lot of droplets to make one snowflake.

00:11:28
Speaker 2: So why doesn't the snowflake just become infinite. Why did at some point does it stop accumulating more waters.

00:11:34
Speaker 1: Well, it has limited time in the cloud. So what happens next is you have this seated crystal which blows around inside the cloud, accumulating more and more, and then eventually it gets so heavy that it drops, right, And so it's a limited time in the cloud. Otherwise it would form like a cloud sized crystal, which should be awesome, and maybe that happens on some alien planet, but then.

00:11:55
Speaker 2: It falls on your head and that would be too much.

00:11:57
Speaker 1: So we're set up now to answer Zach's question. Right, we start with his crystal, and we understand why it's a hexagon, But then why does it form six identical arms, each of which are the same on one crystal, but different from all the other crystals? Right? And when I was first reading about this, my hypothesis was maybe it's some like impurity in the crystal, where like something has happened at the core, which then determines how it grows outwards. Right, you need something coordinating across the arms. But it turns out it's not that at all. And we know that because of amazing experiments done by a physicist Ukichiro Nakaya in Hokkaido in Japan in the nineteen thirties. He was really curious about snowflakes. He just like went for walks and saw snowflakes, and he asked the same question, but he wanted to figure it out. He did all these experiments, so he replicated the conditions of a cloud in the lab, and what he saw was that the formation of the crystal beyond the initial seed depends extremely sensitively on the temperature and on the density of water vapor. So, for example, you can get these like weird long needles that form, and you crank up the temperature a little bit and you get thin plates, or you get dendrites, or you get another formation. You crank it up another little bit and you get back to needles or back to columns. And so there's a lot of really complicated like chemistry and solid sat phistics that's happening there where these crystals are forming in certain patterns. Again super duper sensitive to the density and the temperature.

00:13:23
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm following you there, but I still feel like there's a jump to make, yes to hit symmetry.

00:13:28
Speaker 1: So now start with you or quarter crystal, right, the quarter crystal, some hexagon. Now it's going to blow through the cloud. The cloud is not uniform in density and temperature. There are regions of higher density, there are regions of lower density. There are colder and moral regions. As that snowflake blows through the cloud, its crystals grow depending on the density and temperature it's experiencing moment to moment. So like right now it grows in this certain pattern. Ooh, then the density drops and now it's going to make needles. Oh, now the density goes up. Ooh, now it's back to making these flat things. And so that's what controls the growth of each of the arms. And because all of the arms experience the same unique path through the cloud, which gives it a unique temperature and density history, that's why every snowflake is different. If two snowflakes had exactly the same trajectory through the cloud, you would expect them to be exactly the same. And that's probably true, but impossible to test, right, So we think the variety of snowflakes comes from their individual experience through the temperature and density fluctuations in the cloud which control their growth. And that also explains why they're the same on individual snowflake because on an individual snowflake, all the arms have the same experience, the same history through the density and the temperature. So it's really kind of an awesome like probe through the cloud.

00:14:45
Speaker 2: That's amazing, yeah, and beautiful and I'm trying to pull together like the Hallmark version, like we're all a result of the unique paths that we take. Anyway, very cool.

00:14:54
Speaker 1: It's very cool, and it's sort of amazing and lucky, and it's another example of how amazing complexity emerges in world. You know, this could have been totally boring. It could have been that snowflakes all just form hexagons and then drop and they're all the same, and like, yeah, hexagons are cool. But because they're so sensitive to density and temperature, we get this incredible variety of beautiful forms. It amazes me. It makes me wonder about that same philosophical question we've talked about before, like why do we think that this kind of stuff is beautiful? Are we programmed to do it somehow? Is it because we evolved on this planet or is it just something deep about being alive and aware in the universe? Like do aliens find their ugly planet beautiful.

00:15:31
Speaker 2: Also well, it is now the peak heat and humid period in Virginia, so I am looking forward to seeing the snow. As you said, let's see if Zach feels satisfied with this unique answer.

00:15:44
Speaker 3: Hi, Daniel and Kelly, thank you for the beautiful answer to my question about these beautiful crystals, especially since it meant wading into a bit of chemistry to do so. I too was surprised that the crystal shape was not intrinsic to the nucleation dust, but rather a kind of record of the snowflake experience as it drifts through its cloud. It makes me wonder if there are other polar molecules that could form snowflakes with other basic patterns instead of hexagons, like squares or triangles, or if there would be some molecules that would tend to make three D structures instead of planer ones. Anyhow, on a personal note, my son was born just a week ago, and you have me smiling thinking about how he's going to gather experiences as he grows to become something unique and beautiful as well. Thanks again, guys.

00:16:50
Speaker 2: All Right, Daniel, this is quite possibly the most important question we've ever answered on the show.

00:16:56
Speaker 1: Solunny because it determines what you're gonna have for your birthday dinner.

00:16:59
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe, and also his biology, so that automatically puts it in the top fifty percent. But let's enjoy this amazing question from Bernard and Munich.

00:17:09
Speaker 4: Hi, Danielle and Kelly. This is Bernhardt from Munich in Germany. I understand that flamingos are pink because of their diet, but it's the pink color just in their feathers or also in their flesh. And could I become pink if I would start eating flamingos instead of my usual vegetarian food.

00:17:26
Speaker 2: Love your show by incredible.

00:17:30
Speaker 1: How seriously do you think Bernard is considering abandoning his vegetarianism. Do we have a weighty responsibility here?

00:17:36
Speaker 2: You know? So I was reading about the frequency at which people drop vegetarianism, and it is pretty high. I think it's something like sixty to seventy five percent of the people who become vegetarians will not stay vegetarians. But I really doubt that he's going to drop his vegetarianism for flamingos, and not least of all because it would be very hard for him to get his hands on a flamingo.

00:18:01
Speaker 1: Well, your husband is a dedicated vegetarian, isn't he.

00:18:04
Speaker 2: He is, Yeah, he's been a vegetarian for twenty years. And I think the worst thing that I have done to him during our relationship is I once left a few pounds of ur ducan in his fringe when we were dating, and I forgot it was there, and so he found what is it a turkey inside of a duck inside of a chicken.

00:18:22
Speaker 1: I think you have that backwards, but say, yeah.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: Sorry, chicken, it's that you are right anyway, in his refrigerator, and he was pretty grossed out anyway, Sorry, honey.

00:18:31
Speaker 1: Good thing there wasn't a flamingo in there as well.

00:18:33
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. We did look up. Somebody had managed to get like twenty four creatures inside of each other and that was the max.

00:18:38
Speaker 1: But all right, well, let's get an answer to Bernard's question. Tell us, okay, from the beginning, why are flamingos pink? Anyway?

00:18:45
Speaker 2: Right? All right? So there are actually six different species of flamingos, and they are all rose colored. They get their color through their diets, and so they eat algae. They eat crustaceans, and these organisms make their own colors called krotenoioids, so they have pigments, but they aren't necessarily pink. So some organisms have ways of metabolizing carotenoids to get them to be particular colors. And so the way that the flamingos metabolize the carotenoids that they get from their food turns them pink.

00:19:16
Speaker 1: So metabolized means does chemistry on them, does chemistry and basically changes their color. So the things they eat are not pink, but they eat this stuff and the stuff has something in it and they do chemistry inside and that makes them pink. Is that right?

00:19:29
Speaker 2: That's right? Yep. So they're filter feeders and so they're eating lots and lots of tiny little things with carotenoids that they turn pink.

00:19:36
Speaker 1: And is it good for the flamingos to be pink? Do they care? Is it helpful in some way? Or are just like a weird oddity in our universe.

00:19:42
Speaker 2: There's some debates over why they're pink, but it does seem that being pink is an indicator of how healthy you are, so because they get the pink from their diet, If you are super extra pink. That is a great way of showing people.

00:19:56
Speaker 1: That's like a Flamingo Valentine card to my extra super pinker.

00:20:01
Speaker 2: That's right, something like that. Yeah, and so if you are like a super pink dude, then you are showing that you've got the best territory with the best food and you're able to get loads of food. So you'd probably be able to get loads of food for your offspring, and so it's sort of an indicator of quality that is honest, because it's showing you essentially that they've been able to get a lot of food. So anyway, it's a signal for them to communicate with other Flamingos.

00:20:25
Speaker 1: And if you're a Flamingo listening to this podcast, you are now also getting dating advice.

00:20:29
Speaker 2: That's right. There you go. And the Flamingos also do pretty cool dances and so like buy good outfits and learn to dance. You're welcome. But the babies are actually not pink when they're born.

00:20:41
Speaker 1: Okay, Is that because they haven't eaten this stuff yet?

00:20:43
Speaker 2: That's exactly right. Yeah, they are dull colors, and then eventually they'll become pink when they get it from their diet. I didn't know any of this. I learned it from doing a little bit of research. But what I really did for this question was call in an old friend of mine who is an expert. So I called my friend, well, and by call I mean I contacted on Facebook Messenger my friend Caitlin Kite, who in twenty fifteen released a book called Flamingos about flamingos ooh shocker. And I shared the question with her and she was sort of a pulled like.

00:21:20
Speaker 1: At the idea of eating baby flamingos.

00:21:22
Speaker 2: You know, I think you've made Bernard out to be a little bit worse than that. He didn't say he was gonna eat baby flamingos in particular, and they're not pink, so you know that wouldn't make sense, all.

00:21:31
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, okay, eat the old grampa flamingos, Bernard.

00:21:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's right. No, the robust flamingos with good territories.

00:21:38
Speaker 1: Oh, yes, exactly.

00:21:39
Speaker 2: Anyway, so she she said, you know what a question, and she her understanding was that carotenoids can permeate lots of stuff. For example, the egg yolks are richly colored and they have reddish what's called crop milk, and so this is essentially birds often feed their babies by eating food and then throwing it up into the baby's mouth, and they call that milk.

00:21:59
Speaker 1: Oh man I, Well, hey, look, if they're gonna make milk out of oats and almonds and call that stuff milk, then hey, why not?

00:22:05
Speaker 2: Yes, why not? And so she noted that part of how they get that coloration isn't just by actually having it in their feathers, but they extract the carotenoids, they process the crotenoids, and then they have a gland and they can extract this like oil from the gland and then rub it on their feathers and it makes their feathers even pinker. And so her hypothesis is that the pink is only skin deep, and so you wouldn't end up with pink muscles. So Bernard couldn't turn pink by eating the pink muscles. But when she was researching flamingos her book, she reached out to Paul Rose, who is now a colleague of hers at the University of Exeter. Paul works on flamingos and has dissected some. So she was like, you know what, let's connect you to another expert. So this next trip in the journey brought me to Paul.

00:22:54
Speaker 1: Who maybe has actually seen a flamingo filet.

00:22:56
Speaker 2: Who has in fact filayed flamingos. So here is Paul's answer. All of the flamingo's soft tissues, integument, and feathers are stained by carotenoids from their diets. Okay, so right there we know they are pink.

00:23:10
Speaker 5: Oh.

00:23:10
Speaker 2: The base carotenoid ingested by the flamingo from crustaceans, algae or cyanobacteria is metabolized within their liver to form a range of pigments that create pink, orange, red, yellow, and purple hues. Wow, the whole rainbow, the whole rainbow. As a flamingo ages, you see a saturation of their skin, fat, and integument with carotenoids, so the internal organs of the bird can look quite bright. Okay, so Caitlin was right that they can wipe this pink oil to make them more pink. But they are all pink on the inside, which is maybe good news for Bernard.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: But wait, now we're leaning towards eating the flamingo meat.

00:23:48
Speaker 2: Right right, That's right, that's where we are right now. I know. So Paul goes on to say, we know that the greater flamingo uses carotenoid saturated prene oil to enhance the color of its plumage during breeding season, but this has yet to be described in the other species, although it's highly likely they too have saturated pre and oil. Okay, so that's the oil stuff we already talked about. Here's the kicker. If you ate a flamingo, that's right, we've made a professional scientist go here. If you ate a flamingo, you would not turn pink, as we are unable to metabolize carotenoids in the same way as the birds do. You would likely die though, as they consume some very noxious blue green algae that are often neurotoxic.

00:24:32
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:24:32
Speaker 2: So, Bernard, Bernard, you you've been misled. This is not a good idea. Do not eat the flamingos. You will not turn pink, and you might die.

00:24:44
Speaker 1: Go have a nice eggplant dish or some portabellos if you need umami. But flamingos do not seem to be something that you should be eating.

00:24:52
Speaker 2: Leave those beautiful birds alone, Bernard. All right, So let's go ahead and see if we've convinced Bernard, whose name I I hope I've said correctly because I've said it many times. Now let's go ahead and see what he has to say and if we've convinced him to not raid the local zoo in search of flamingos.

00:25:10
Speaker 4: Thanks Kelly and Daniel for all the insights, both from your personal life and zoology. It was not only an interesting and most useful answer, but the journey there also helped me to get rid of some misconceptions I had. I'm quite relieved that I can stick to my lifestyle, and so is the very attractive flamingo community here in the Munich Zoo.

00:25:50
Speaker 1: All right, we're back and we are answering questions from listeners like you. If you have a question about the nature of the universe, whether you should have a flamingo burger, or how to protect yourself from nuclear fallout, please write to us. We love answering your questions. And this last question comes from a longtime listener who's asked us lots and lots of questions over the years. This is a question from Petrie in Waterloo.

00:26:13
Speaker 2: Petrie always asks fantastic questions and provides fantastic answers. For our Person on the Street's responses at the beginning of some of our episodes, and you too can share your responses if you write us at questions at Danielankelly dot org.

00:26:28
Speaker 5: Hi Daniel and Kelly, this is Petri from Waterloo, Canada, and I have a question that I think relates to the both of you. I was watching some science fiction recently. In the show, the characters were exposed to what they called hard radiation. To keep themselves alive, they injected themselves with iodine. So my question is this, From a particle physics perspective, what is hard radiation and what role, if any, would iodine play in protecting us from it? From a biology perspective, how does radiation exposure cause injury? And what is happening physiologically? How can damage at the molecular level cause issues at the organ level? Thank you very much.

00:27:08
Speaker 1: I love this question because it's something you see in science fiction and you hear in popular science all the time, and hey, that might actually be important these days. You never know what's going to happen. Yeah, so it's important that people are well informed.

00:27:22
Speaker 2: Yes, it is, especially with all of this chat about moving to Mars. If you could just take iodine and radiation would not be a problem anymore. We wouldn't have to live underground. So there's a lot hanging on this answer being correct.

00:27:35
Speaker 1: All right, So Petrie's first question is what is hard radiation exactly? And the way you think about radiation is basically, like tiny little bullets. These are high energy particles. They can be photons, they can be electrons, they can be helium nuclei, they can be protons, they can be anything, essentially, but they are high energy particles, and some of them penetrate into your body more deeply. Some of them absorb on the surface. Episode recently about the different kinds of radiation being used to treat cancer and so like X rays versus electrons versus protons all have a different deposition pattern, but basically all of them tear through your body, deposit some energy, and do a bunch of damage. And so you don't want radiation in your body, unless, of course, you're trying to kill a cancer tumor, in which case you want to aim it very very tightly, so that it does damage to the cancer tumor and not to something important like your spleen.

00:28:27
Speaker 2: Very delicate process.

00:28:28
Speaker 1: Yes, and radiation could hurt you both from the outside if there's like radioactive decays happening around you, like you're standing next to plutonium or something, and also inside you if you ingest something, it can do its radioactive thing while inside you. It's like bringing little guns inside you and shooting. So this is the way, like the Russian regime likes to kill people and of put like polonium or something in their coffee. They drink it. It's not part of your body, and those plonium atoms are now decaying inside you, creating a radiation's out from within you. So that's pretty bad.

00:29:03
Speaker 2: It was Britain's so it was tea, right, not coffee.

00:29:05
Speaker 1: Oh it was a tea, yes all right, so be careful if you're all out there enjoying your tea. Kelly just ruined it for you.

00:29:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, drink coffee instead problem salt.

00:29:16
Speaker 1: And it is really quite dangerous because these metals can be very very hard to get out of your system. So it really can be like a death sentence if you get this stuff inside of you. It's really terrible and there's really horrible stories about people putting radioactive elements in like other people's coffee in the lab when they're competing with them, and like, yeah, really really bad stuff.

00:29:35
Speaker 2: That was a physicist, right, I'm guessing.

00:29:37
Speaker 1: I think it was a chemist. I think it was a chemist. I don't want to slander anyone, but probably a chemist.

00:29:42
Speaker 2: Oh that makes sense.

00:29:45
Speaker 1: All right. So that's what radiation is. It's energetic particles tearing through you, depositing energy, probably breaking up your DNA, up drink cell walls, all kinds of bad stuff. And you know, radiation is all around us. We are surrounded by radiations. Radiation on peanut butter, there's radiation from bananas, there's radiation from the ground, there's radiation from the sky. Is constant grates hit the atmosphere and the cane to muons which tear through you. This neutrinos passing through you. Not all of it hurt too. Somebody goes right through you and at certain levels just sort of like what we've evolved to withstand. And it's important as part of like mutation. The reason my sun is better looking than I am and faster than I am is maybe because of cosmic gray mutations. I can't explain it any other way.

00:30:26
Speaker 2: I think it's Katrina's genes is what it is.

00:30:29
Speaker 1: I think maybe she just cloned herself in the lab, and I don't think I was involved at all. No, I love that kid, and I hope you got the best of me. Anyway, const mutations are important in creating new opportunities and trying new stuff in the next generation. So it's not like all radiation bad, right, It's like a lot of things. It's too much radiation, it's bad.

00:30:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean even a little bit of radiation could cause a bad mutation. I think, you know, the probability that you get a mutation that makes things better as opposed to makes a new neutral or a worse change is pretty low.

00:31:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:31:02
Speaker 2: So I think in general you want to protect yourself from too much radiation.

00:31:05
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yes, Now I was thinking more globally on a philosophical scale, like if you could go back and shield the Earth from all radiation from space a few billion years ago, what would the Earth look like now? We don't know. It might have a lot less diversity on it, we might not be here. And so radiation plays a role in evolution. But yeah, you should never choose radiation. It's not like a little bit is good for you and a lot and it's bad for you, yeah.

00:31:31
Speaker 2: Right, and our bodies have ways of trying to fix the damage that radiation causes.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:31:36
Speaker 2: But anyway, so you would not want to be living on the surface of Mars without any protection from radiation exactly.

00:31:42
Speaker 6: No.

00:31:42
Speaker 1: I would want to bring a lot of flamingos with me to form like a shield, you know, like a dome of flamingos between me and the radioactive source.

00:31:49
Speaker 2: Yeah no, And then you have your food source also, and it's very convenient. But I'm not joining your settlement, Daniel.

00:31:56
Speaker 1: All right. So the lore is that iodine can protect you, and people say you should take iodine if there's been a nuclear disaster or whatever. So what are we talking about here, Well, iodine is something that your body needs but doesn't produce, and it absorbs it as you eat it. So there's like trace amounts of food and water, and you need it for all sorts of chemistry that's happening in your body, and so you take it in as you eat it or drink it or whatever. So your body absorbs it and a lot of it ends up in your thyroid because that's the part of your body that needs iodine, and a problem is that a lot of nuclear disasters can create radioactive iodine. So, for example, iodine one thirty one and iodine one thirty three. Iodine one thirty one is a major fission product for uranium and plutonium. So like Fukushima and chernobyl, there's a lot of iodine one thirty one produced. It's like three percent of the total fission products by weight are iodine one thirty one and iodine one thirty one is radioactive. Half life is like eight days, and it shoots off an energetic electron or a positron, depending on the charges, and you end up with photons and decays into radioactivized tope of zenome, which is then the case again emitting another gamma particle. And so basically, if you have this around, your body's going to take it in, because your body takes in iodine and stores it because it needs it. And if the idone one thirty one around, your body's going to take that in and store it. Now it's going to be inside you doing it's a radioactive thing, which is bad.

00:33:18
Speaker 2: And so we're talking about one kind of radiation, and there's lots of kinds of radiation. So we are only really honing in on when iodine causes thyroid cancer.

00:33:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you can take iodine, and the theory is that if you take good, normal, non radioactive iodine, you'll fill up on iodine, and then if radioactive iodine comes into your system, your body won't store it and it won't keep it in your thyroid, which would cause you thyroid cancer. But having iodine in your body doesn't protect you against radiation from the outside or other kinds of things you might absorb. You can't just like take iodine and then have a snack of plutonium and be fine, for example, or stand in front of an X ray machine and then be like ping ping ping. This doesn't bother me. There's no protection against radiation. It's not like it builds a shield or prevents damage or does anything like that. The only thing eating iodine can do is prevent your body from absorbing radioactive iodine. So you just make sure you're filled up on iodine.

00:34:18
Speaker 2: So like, if the Russians are after you, you can't be safe just because every morning you take an iodine pill.

00:34:23
Speaker 1: That's right. Seven does not fill up on iodine to protect themself from being poisoned. By the Russians if But it is true right that if you are filled up on normal, good iodine, you are protected against absorbing bad radioactive iodine. So it's not a complete protection against all radiation, but it does prevent you from absorbing bad iodine which would give you thyroid cancer in the future, and that would be bad. And so like Germany's Federal Ministry for the Environment says, iodine supplements can help after a nuclear power plant accident inner radius of about one hundred kilometers around, so it's not nothing. It can protect you and any protection you have is good protection. Right. You should know also that your thyroid doesn't store iodine for very long, so you need to have taken it very recently. Right. So experts say the iodine block only has a chance of helping if the good iodine is taken just before contact with radioactive iodine. And also be careful. Too much iodine bad for you, right, Like lots of things, it becomes poison. So it's complicated, right, Yes, it can protect you from absorbing bad radioactive iodine if you have taken it just before the radioactive iodine shows up and you didn't take too much. But it doesn't protect you against basically any other form of radiation boom, including radioactive iodine that the case just outside your body and shoots its little radioactive bullets inside you.

00:35:47
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, what a pain in the rear end. So you should take the German Federal Ministries advice you should take your iodine. But while you're taking it, you should be heading out of that one hundred kilometer radius and get out of there as soon as you can.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And so like there's a scene I remember on this show for All Mankind, which in general is great and gets the science right, where they're going to have to walk on the surface of the Moon and be exposed to radiation and they're like, take idi. Oh, it's you know all right, it's not going to prevent you from being shredded by cosmic rays, etcetera, etcetera. So anybody living on the moon right now, be very very careful.

00:36:21
Speaker 2: Okay, you're going too far in the other direction. I was talking to some people the other day who don't think Americans have landed on the moon. So anyway, there's none of us up there right now.

00:36:35
Speaker 1: Well, there was some news segment recently where an American politician I named him said he had recently spoken to an American astronaut on the moon. He just misspoke, he meant somebody in the space station. But the Internet went crazy with theories about like, oh, he's just revealed the fact that we have a secret moon base and that's where we're talking to the aliens. And the Internet. Oh, I love you the Internet, but sometimes you're crazy.

00:36:59
Speaker 2: I'm so glad I'm not a politician. Every once in a while they've said like little slips and the Internet has gone crazy, and I'm like, man, the number of times I slip up in a day is colossal. I can't imagine being on the hook for every word that I said.

00:37:11
Speaker 1: Did you hear that time? Recently, some politicians said we now have technology that allows us to control space and time, by which he probably meant like, we can make phone calls and we can travel around the Earth. Yeah, but the Internet was like, see they make wormholes.

00:37:25
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, oh gosh.

00:37:28
Speaker 1: Anyway, the Internet, if you have questions about what the American government can and cannot do, please write to us. We're happy to talk to you about it, to give us answers. I actually did get a phone call once from a US congress person who heard some of these crazy internet theories and he's a listener of the podcast, and he called me up and he's like, hey, tell me, is any of this real physics? And we had a great conversation about it. Even though he and I would not vote the same way on basically any political issue, we came together to talk about physics. And so I like to believe physics is the great uniter. We all want to understand the universe, and we can all talk calmly and productively about what we do and don't know about it.

00:38:03
Speaker 2: And we are all squishy meatbags. So biology brings us together as well. And so I am also always available to answer science questions to anyone of any political stripe who has them.

00:38:13
Speaker 1: That's right. Are you a pink meat bag? Do you want to become a pink meatbag? Kelly has got you covered.

00:38:18
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. Doesn't matter what country you are from. Send us your meatbag questions.

00:38:23
Speaker 1: We really do want to hear from you. So send us questions to questions at Danielankelly dot org. And in the meantime, think deeply about the universe, ruminate on how it all works and what we do and do not understand. Thanks for listening. Join us next time.

00:38:37
Speaker 2: We look forward to hearing from you.

00:38:38
Speaker 6: Hi, Daniel and Kelly, thank you for answering my question on the podcast. It makes perfect sense that an individual would not want to be low on idine when there's an unstable isotope present in the environment, and it clearly does not provide protection against all types of radiation exposure like it is sometimes portrayed in the media. Keep up the great work. Thank you again for your answer and for the great podcast.

00:39:10
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00:39:15
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00:39:21
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00:39:28
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00:39:34
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