March 3, 2025 • 35 mins
We’re kicking off this series with a breakthrough for jetlagged hamsters, a hot tub that’ll take you on a journey, a better ketchup bottle, a solution for one of the world’s most common tech annoyances, and some very bad news: chickens are definitely judging you. Plus, we meet the man who brought the smell of outer space to earth.
We’re giving away great prizes every day this week! Head over to our Instagram @parttimegenius to find out how you can win.
Discover Steve Pearce’s work with fragrances and flavors here!
Learn more about your ad choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
What's that mango? So you know what's funny? You know
what's funny. Your headband is funny. But sorry it interrupt
Go ahead.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Well, we've been friends for a little over twenty five
years now.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I think we actually known each other for twenty seven
years now, if I'm not mistake, but I said friend, right, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
But think of all the fun things that have happened
in the last twenty five years, right, Like this's the
launch of the iPod, thousands of songs in your pocket.
Social media exploited with Facebook. People started dancing Gungnam style
and we're taught how to duggy for some reason. There's
planking and photos that became a fad, and Lady Gaga
(00:52):
wore a meat dress to the MTV video War.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I think that summed it up. I think you actually
covered everything.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, yeah, I mean we also had a block president,
our first black president, gay marriage became legal, and people
challenge each other with ice buckets. But for me, everything
really starts with that meat dress.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, and don't forget we launched a little magazine from
our drm room called Mental Flaws way back in the
year two thousand. Yeah, I can't believe.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
It's been almost twenty five years since that first issue
hit newsstands. But this week's super special edition of Part
Time Genius is all about celebrating this last quarter century.
Every day this week, we're gonna be counting down the
twenty five greatest science ideas of the past twenty five years,
and we are sending out lots of fun prizes to
our listeners too.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
But I've just got one question for you, mego, why
are you wearing a velord tracksuit and a homemade headband? Again,
I don't really understand what's happening.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Here because I am pump Oh got it, Okay, so
let's dive in.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson, and of course I'm here with my friend
Mangesh hot Ticketter and over there attending to what I
thought was a Bob Ross chia pet but is actually
a vintage, discontinued Albert Einstein chia pet. Is our pal
and producer Dylan Fagan and Mengo. I think Einstein with
(02:29):
sprouts for his hair is exactly the energy we're trying
to pull for this week's twenty five list.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, that's right. Well, so I kind of want to
start by having you tell our listeners about how we
became friends, because I was definitely trivia obsessed as a kid.
I think I've mentioned that when cable came to my
neighborhood in third grade, my friends and I were obsessed
with doubledare and every day in the summer we would
practice drilling each other with trivia questions and setting up
(02:55):
these challenges all over our houses and the creek in
the backyard, and you know, we're just trying to get
ourselves physically prepped for this thing. We want to be
ready in case a producer just called us up to
be on the show. Yeah, but you were obviously obsessed
with lists. I was very much obsessed with lists. I
think this started when I was probably eleven or twelve
years old.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I just love making lists. They all started as pretty basic.
It's like, here's my list of presidents, here's my list
of state capitals. And then it got a little weirder
over the years. It was like, here's a list of
my favorite left handed artists and favorite you know books
with more than four hundred pages or whatever it might
have been. It was just fun to keep lists, and
(03:35):
people would ask like, why do you do this, and
I didn't really know the answer, other than it just
felt good to collect this information, you know, and to
just know this information, So anyway was what I did.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I love it, and so when we started Mental Fluss,
we were definitely list obsessed. And one of my favorite
annual things that we do was we would declare the
most important books of the last twenty five years for
the most important music of the last time five years
of TV shows, And the lists were always so fun
and totally unexpected. You came away just appreciating all these
(04:07):
other amazing things. I don't know about you, but I
think for me, part of the reason I wanted to
do a big science list this week was because right now,
you know, there's so much talk about AI and gene
therapies and those kind of dominate the headlines. Yeah, but
I also love the weird, fun inventions and and kind
of the joy of Obama at the Science Fair shooting
(04:29):
rockets and things. And you know, science is obviously nerdy,
but it's also cool and weird and fun, and I
thought it would be just really fun to celebrate it.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That sounds good, but I feel like before we dive in,
we really have to talk about the process and everything
that goes into how we choose a list like this.
So before we jump in, do you want to start
by giving a little rationale of how we chose all
of these things?
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, totally so, Gabe, Mary, our friend Lucas Riley. They
helped us look up a whole bunch of ideas and
then we pare them down to things that truly delighted
or impressed us. Ideally both of those things. And then
you and I picked a bunch and researched some more.
And now's the fun part where we get to like
take turns presenting the ideas. Plus we are sending part
(05:14):
time genius certificates to all of the winners, which they
can put on their.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Refrigerators, all of the winners.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, and also atomic fireballs, the most sciencey candy we
could find in honor of this week's Signs special.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
You know, it's funny that we're choosing fireballs because, as
my kids know, I love fireballs. So we have this
special cabinet at our house just outside the kitchen called
the Center of Excellence, and it's basically where all of
my candy obsessions get to be stored because I'll fall
in love with the candy. We were at a great
sushi restaurant and I love the little treats they bring
you at the end of it, and I decided I
(05:49):
needed to order those in bulk. I ordered some atomic
fireballs in bulk, and then I move on to the
next thing, but we just keep them in that collection.
So it's a big prize, and we're giving out prizes
on our insta all week as well.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Right, Yeah, so Mary is running contest for us all
week and has a bunch of ridiculous swag to send out.
She and the person who manages our social media, our
friend Calypso. So after you listen, head over to our
Instagram handle at part Time Genius and go win some stuff.
Were to send it out, but that is way too
much set up. Let's just get into.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
It all right, Okay, So don't let the number fool you.
Our list is kicking off with an innovation that happens
to tackle one of the biggest problems in all of society,
and that is how to get ketchup out of a bottle. Now,
as we all know, there is nothing more frustrating than
holding a ketchup bottle at a forty five degree angle
over your food, shaking it vigorously and having absolutely nothing
(06:43):
come out. And for years there were only two solutions.
People would jam a knife in a bottle. I feel
like you don't see that as much anymore, remember jamming
as a kid. I feel like people just would put
that knife in there and then give it a stir
and they hope the ketchup would start flowing. Also, there's
the smack the number trick, where people figured out that
if you give the number fifty seven on the side
of a glass bottle of hinds a nice wallap, it
(07:04):
would get the ketchup moving. But of course the problem
with both of those is that you could end up
with way too much ketchup on your fries.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah, it's kind of a ketchup conundrum that we've all experienced.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It's exactly right, and one of the biggest leaps forward
for all of humanity and our quest board an appropriate
amount of ketchup was the upside down ketchup bottle.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Right, so you are obviously talking about the ketchup bottles
where the dispenser is on the bottom and it's sitting
on there and the gravity is just kind of pulling
it down.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Right, that's exactly right. That bottle, or rather the valve
in it, was invented by a gentleman named Paul Brown. Now,
his idea wasn't specifically for ketchup. He just thought a
better valve would work for most liquids, from dish detergent
to hand sanitizers to whatever it may be. This is
in the nineteen nineties, so Paul Brown had this dream,
but he really struggled to make it a reality. He
(07:53):
made one hundred and eleven different prototypes, Wow, maxed out
a bunch of credit cards, borrowed money from his folks
to you know, make a better valve for dispensing liquid.
And while trying to make this valve, like, what was
he trying to solve for exactly Well, he realized that
to make a better squeeze bottle, you wanted the nozzle
to open when you place pressure on it, but then
(08:14):
you need it to completely close up when the pressure
is removed, so there's no accidental leaking from this Anyway,
After years of failures, his one hundred and twelfth prototype work,
and once he'd perfected his valve, everyone came calling in,
including NASA, who saw I used for the valve in
space and was trying to make leak proof cups for astronauts.
Wow shampoo bottlers who wanted a more convenient bottle for
(08:37):
their soaps and shampoos also came calling on him as well,
and eventually, after he pitched it to Hines, they saw
his innovation as part of a catch up revolution. They
started this ad campaign about the quote waiting man, where
a guy is just sitting and holding a glass ketchup
bottle vertically over his meal and nothing is moving or
happening for like twenty seconds, and then is why comes over,
(09:00):
squeezes the perfect amount of ketchup onto his food and
solves the problem in a second. And the ad slogan
was quote no weight, no mess, no anticipation.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
It is so funny that as a society we are
so impatient that we need our ketchup immediately. Yeah, it's
just a condiment.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
I don't know why you're you really don't get it.
It's super important that we get it quickly. But I
was actually thinking this too, to be honest, until I
read this Malcolm Gladwell piece on ketchup, and this was
a piece that he wrote for The New Yorker, and
in it he quotes a food professor who calls ketchup
the Esperanto of cuisine because it's one of the few
foods that satisfies your cravings for salty, sweet, sour, bitter,
(09:41):
and dow mommy all at once. If you think about it,
that's that's actually true, and that's part of the reason
the world loves ketchup so much. But back to Brown.
According to the patent professor, this is a website on
inventors and patents. Today, about seventy five percent of Hinz
bottles that are sold are upside down squeeze bottles now,
And it wasn't long before Brown paid off his credit
cards and paid his parents back. Of course, I.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Mean, I do love this, but this invention is from
the nineteen nineties, right, so like it doesn't quite make
the twenty five year cut off.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Lit. I thought you were going to call me out
for that, but I'm actually not done yet. So all
of those lay the groundwork for the quote problem of ketchup.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Look at me being impatient.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah, you're doing that. But even though Paul Brown Squeeze
bottle valve helped us get much more ketchup out of bottles,
the truth is it's hard to get the last bits
of ketchup out of there, and that means there's a
lot of food wasts. But that's where some grad students
from MIT came in. In twenty twelve, that is, within
the last twenty five years here a PhD candidate named
(10:41):
Dave Smith and a team of mechanical engineers and nanotechnologists
at MIT's Varnacy Research Group had been working on various
lubricants and coatings to solve various issues. So they were
tackling things like how to coat an oil or gas
line so that there's no clogs, or how to cote
a windshield so that the water doesn't collect on it
and is more easily pushed off by your wipers. But
(11:04):
then they started wondering what would happen if they applied
some of their technology to consumer packaging. I think the
idea started with the frustration of getting honey out of
a bottle, you know, because there's still so much in
there at that point.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, I mean it's obviously annoying, but why were they
putting all this technology towards food bottles.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Well, according to Fast Company, that's one of the questions
they got asked the most. And the answer is that
the market for bottles and I'm just talking sauce bottles
here is a seventeen billion dollar market and if you
could solve food waste there, you could basically save a
million tons of food from being thrown out every single year.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
That's pretty incredible.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, So they created this coating called liquid glide, and
it's really miraculous. Like if you watch the videos, the
Ketchup flows out of the bottle almost like a liquid
with nothing left in the bottle. As Professor Krippa Varnasi
puts it, there's this fundamental friction constraint called no slip
boundary condition between a liquid and a solid. And so
because they basically created a new surface for the liquid
(12:01):
to move on, you can get the product to slide
across the surface. And so he continues describing this. He
says that, Aha, moment that we could get around a
fundamental constraint of fluid dynamics.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
That's really cool that they can take this like uncooperative
fluid like Ketchup and just make a glide out.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah, and all the applications for this are actually pretty crazy.
It isn't just ketchup or honey that it affects suddenly,
Like you can get toothpaste out of a tube more effectively,
which makes that recyclable. You can use variations on medical
devices to get essential fluids out of bags like. It's
really remarkable.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I love that. So, of course, congratulations, doctor Varnossi and
team will be sending you a part time genius certificate
for your achievement and a handful of atomic fireballs for
your important work.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Such a great price, right.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So, sitting at number twenty four is a pretty whimsical
invention that maybe means more to me than it means
to you. It is a floating hot tub boat invented
in Finland called the hot tug, which sounds a little dirty,
but this loading tub is actually really wonderful.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
And there's this story about why you like hot tubs
so much. I'm guessing I mean, to.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Be clear, I do like hot tubs in the appropriate context.
My friend Dave is a hot tub behind his place
in Idaho, and you can sit out there when it's
snowing and look at the Grand Tetons behind you, and
that is incredible. But also there was one time when
I was on a work trip and I showed up
at a hotel room in a dicey neighborhood that had
been booked for me, and there was a giant hot
tub in the middle of the hotel room, and that
(13:30):
was less appeeling.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, I could see maybe avoiding that.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
But as you might know, I hate cold water. And
part of the reason is that when I was on
my study of broad trip, and this is so many
years ago in Tibet, we were hunting for this anthropological
evidence of a semi nomadic civilization, and there hadn't been
a lot of study done in this region of Tibet.
It was pretty pristine and hard for academics to get
(13:54):
to anyway, my friends and I saw these hots that
were set up across this little river, and we knew
we wanted to get to it, and there was a
bridge about two hours up one way and one hour
down the other way, and so my friends were like,
we should probably just cross this river. And to be clear,
there was snow on the ground at the time and
the water was ice cold, and we didn't want to
get our clothes wet, so basically we got naked and
(14:16):
cross this thing so we'd have dry clothes on the
other side. And I just remember getting up to my
ankles and being like, I've never been this cold, and
then getting up to my knees and being like I've
never been this cold, and then getting to my waist.
But the current was also crazy strong, and I almost
slipped out some moss and somehow caught myself with the
stick and it was miserable. But I just remember being
(14:38):
so cold for so long, and the worst part was
the huts weren't any big discovery, so it was just
like a normal settlement. But I was very angry, and
since then I don't really go in cold water, but
I will go in hot water, and that's where the
hot tug comes in.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Wow, I'm with you on the cold water. I don't
understand people that can do the cold plunge thing. It's
just I don't get it. But anyway, tell me more
about this invention.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
So it is the brainchild of a Dutch furniture designer.
His name is Frank de Bruyne. And it's not just
a barrel with heat under it. So this thing is
a beautiful two thousand liter eight seater jacuzzi boat. And
according to an interview with the New York Post, Jabrun
actually grew up on a barge where his parents were skippers,
and he'd always loved campfires and nature and looking up
(15:25):
at the stars. And at some point he wondered, like,
what if you could have a mobile hot tub, like
not just something that was parked in your backyard, but
something that would allow you to float out wherever you were,
and that could be on a lake or a fjord.
And so he created this boat with an electric motor,
so it is entirely quiet for the nature aspect, but
the hot tub contraption is also entirely stable, so you
(15:49):
can sit in the hot tub and then stand up
and dive off the side into like a crisp, refreshing
lake and you won't tip anything over. To me, it
feels like a really beautiful way to float your way
through a cold land escape. Like imagine being in one
of these off the coast of Alaska or in the
Pacific Northwest, And that's kind of de Bruyn's dream too.
Right now, the hot tubs are cost prohibitive. They run
(16:11):
about fifteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars. But his hope
is that national parks and cities will buy fleets of
these things and then rent them out to people like me,
you know, tourists who hate the cold but love nature.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
That sounds pretty awesome. I'm on board, Mango. The next
one for me is a discovery that deals with one
of my biggest pet peeves. Tangled headphones and chords so frustrating.
And this comes from a British scientist named Robert Matthews
from Aston University. So over the years, people have tried
to deal with knots in tons of ways. You can
very carefully coil up chords using special reels. They're actually
(16:47):
a ton of anti nodding gadgets out there. But Robert
Matthews developed a mathematical theory which has an incredibly simple answer.
According to his loop conjecture, one of the easiest things
you can do is clip the ends of a chord
together to form a loop. Based on his mathematical models,
forming a simple loop produces a tenfold reduction in the
(17:07):
risk of knots forming in the headphone course. That's amazing,
But what's also sweet about his theory is that Matthews
organized something called the British not Experiment, where, according to
Science Daily, kids at schools across the country looked at
this phenomena with quote various cord thickness, rigidity, and other
parameters likely to affect nodding risk.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
I mean, tangled chords are definitely one of my biggest
pet peeves, and every year I try so many different
ways to make sure that my Christmas lights don't get
tangled or chords don't get tangled. And I'm just kind
of fascinated by this idea that if you just loop
the chords, it solves the issue.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, And Matthews points out that even though it feels
trivial in nature, quote, the phenomena of spontaneous nodding is
of great significance in other areas, including polymer chemistry and
molecular biology. Like if you consider there's over a meter
of DNA crammed into every one of our selves, and
any knots can dramatically increase the risk of genetic malfunction,
(18:04):
you can see how there might be some really interesting
applications there, Like Matthew's points to some anti cancer drugs
that work by affecting not formation. And cancer cells, and
he's hoping that the loop conjecture can lead to new
approaches in drug design.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
That's amazing that you can tackle something that's annoying like
headphones and it solves genetic problem.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Yeah, something almost as important like cancer.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Right, Yeah, well that is pretty awesome. I know we've
got lots more to cover, from space perfumes to bird esthetics,
but before we get to any of that, let's take
a quick break.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about
twenty five great science ideas over the last twenty five years.
And I forgot Mengo. What number are we on? All right,
number twenty two? So Mango, what do you have next?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Well, let's talk about the sense of smell, because when
it comes to memory and emotion, there is no sense
quite as powerful as scent. And for me, like a
whiff of jasmine takes me to my grandmother's backyard and India,
there's a certain wet grass and pavement smell that reminds
me of monsoons and also spring in Delaware. Yeah, also
lemon pledge weirdly reminds me of when my sister and
(19:26):
I used to have to dust wood furniture every Saturday
after cartoons. So are there any distinctive sense that you
can think of.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's funny that you mentioned your grandmother. I feel like
everybody who you know had the benefit of being able
to go to a grandmother's house has a certain scent there.
For me, it was the smell of bacon, because my
granddad cooked bacon every single morning of his life, and
so whenever you walk into that house, you're just like bacon.
I love that.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Mike Myers always talks about like how it smells like soup,
whinny he thinks.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
About old people. This is a little better than that.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
So our next guest knows a lot about scent. It's
what he does for a living. And our pal Mary
actually got him on the phone.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
I'm Steve Pierce. I've worked in the flame room fragrance
industry for more than forty years in various roles and
now a consult for some companies in that industry. I'm
a bit of a jack of all trades, to be honest.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
So Steve has a degree and applied biochemistry and says
he's been interested in smells since he was a kid.
So back in the early two thousands, he was approached
by a museum curator who wanted to make an exhibit
about impossible smells, like smells that were so fleeting or
so far in the past that no one's been able
to experience them. And one of the impossible smells he
developed for this exhibit was the scent of the Mere
(20:45):
Space Station as it fell back to Earth. The exhibit
was a huge hit and people were fascinated.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
It made a bit of a splash. It was on
TV all the rest of it. And it was a
few months after that that I got this call from
someone at NASA. He explained his role as having to
smell every single component that went into the Space Shuttle
to make sure that when astronauts were up there, there
was nothing that was going to create an off an
(21:14):
unpleasant environment for them to live and work in.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
So I'm trying to imagine this guy's work day, like
he walked around sniffing rocket parts.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah, I guess something like that, And I guess he
told Steve that NASA had a smell problem.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
They had astronauts returning to Earth who'd gone for a
vehicular walk outside. So they'd gone outside to service satellites
and do all the things they do, and then when
they got back inside, they were going through the airlock
and they'd repressurized, take their suit helmet off, and then
they got hit by this smell. And a number of
(21:49):
them came back and said, look, we went through all
this training about fitness, about psychology here, about how to
fly things, how to service satellites, how to walk as
they nobody warned us about this smell.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Never would have thought that space had a smell. Apparently
NASA hadn't either, So they asked Steve if you could
recreate the scent of space for training purposes, and he
was like, sure, I'll give it a try. So NASA
put him in touch with some astronauts so he could
get a first hand account of the space smell.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
They were pretty consistent in terms of it, focusing on
things like hot metal. They said fried steak, but I
kind of think that was when maybe they were near
a barbecue which was hot metal, and they were associating
the fried steak and the hot metal. And one of
them described it as the scent of the hot metal
(22:41):
when he was welding on his motorbike as a young
man and things like this. So that was the description
that I had to go for and try and recreate
that in a safe way that could be used during
the training.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
So around the same time, some other papers came out
that offered all these hypotheses about what space smell like
based on beectroscopic analysis, and two of the notes that
got mentioned were raspberries and rum, which I've read about
and it sounds really nice. But Steve didn't buy it.
None of the astronauts he'd interviewed mentioned any of those scents,
(23:14):
so he stuck to his brief of hot metal and meat.
And the more he thought about it, the more it
made sense because when the astronauts were outside, their suits
were bombarded by high velocity particles and solar wind, so
when they came back inside, they detected the odor left
by all that energy.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So we managed to recreate the smell for NASA.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Yeah, I mean, it took a couple of months, but
he did. And unfortunately, in the time he was working,
his NASA contact had retired or maybe been laid off,
like to this day Steven in shore, which all he
knew was that he called NASA to say, hey, I've
got your space smell, and NASA was like, we don't
know where you're talking about, man.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
I couldn't find anyone else to want to take it forward,
so it was a bit disappointing to have done that
work and then not be able to see it put
to use. So I kind of parked it.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
The story might have ended there, but the BBC happened
to visit Steve's lab for a report on fragrance and flavors.
The reporter asked if he'd worked on anything particularly unusual,
and Steve said, well, as a matter of fact, I
made the scent of space for NASA, and that turned
into the kicker of the piece, and then another media
storm erupted, so the news traveled to this side of
(24:28):
the Atlantic and Steve was contacted by an American education
advocate who wanted to leverage the scent to raise money
for STEM programs. Right, this is awesome. So the initial
goal was something like, let's sell two thousand dollars of
this perfume, and in the end the project raised over
six hundred thousand dollars on kickstar.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1 (24:47):
And the idea was that for every bottle someone bought,
a bottle would get sent to a school. But this
meant a new challenge for Steve.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Before, I wasn't worried about skin contact and things like that.
I was just thinking people would smell it. No, that
would be the end of it. Now I had to
go back to the drawing board and reformulate it to
make sure it was completely safe in case anybody accidentally
sprayed it in their eye or swallowed it, or make
sure there were no allergens in there and so on.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
So what's more, Steve had actually developed a second space scent.
He met the astronaut Charles Duke at a conference, and
Duke could actually walk down the Moon with the Apollo
eleven crew, So naturally Steve wanted to know what that
had smelled like.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
And of course he's, well, of course you can't smell
anything through the suit, and he's having a joke and
all that, But then he says, when you get inside
and you're covered in this fine dust, he starts explaining
to everyone about it. Takes his helmet off, he says,
and all you can smell is this smell of the moon,
he says. And everyone thinks it smells of cheese and
makes all these jokes about it, but he says, it
smells like spent gunpowder.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
So the scent of Space and the Scent of the
Moon became available through this kickstarter. And now Steve does
want to make it very clear that he is not
involved in any of the logistics for fulfillment with this
Space scent product. He just made vats of the stuff
and had it shift to a distributor. But he is
really happy about all the bottles that made their way
to schools and STEM programs, And he told us one
(26:12):
of his proudest moments was meeting a dad whose son
had really severe learning disabilities, but he was fascinated by
space and being able to smell it made it come
to life in this incredible, vivid way.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Oh that's so cool. I do have to ask my
go have you smelled this stuff? And if so, is
it good?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I don't think the word is good, like maybe interesting, fascinating, meaty.
I looked up out to Space on perfume review website
and a lot of people complained that it didn't smell
like something you'd wear, which makes sense because that wasn't
the intention. But what's really interesting is several reviewers mentioned
that the scent made them feel a sense of loneliness
(26:52):
or dispair and so we actually asked Steve about this.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
I wouldn't have used words like despair and loneliness. I
can understand if people are putting that concept of the
fragrance alongside the fact that you're in an airless and
void of space and you're weightless. If it manages to
conjure up those feelings, I can understand why they might
describe it as that. There's definitely a meaty element to it.
(27:18):
It is quite harsh and metallic as well. I would
have said I would have described it as that. The
other image I had was if you've ever been the
electrical sparks and you get that blue flash and there's
that sense of burning although nothing's burning, it's almost like
the ozone in the air that's created in that high
(27:38):
energy impact. Those were the kind of images I was
trying to recreate. I never set out to make anyone
feel despair, but you know what, when you're working on
these things on your own and you're sometimes coming up
against a bit of a block and trying to improve it,
sometimes that can feel pretty lonely as well.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
And maybe that's the next challenge for a fragrance scientist
like Steve, like figure out a way to bottle the
scent of loneliness along with one that makes you feel
maybe more like you're surrounded by people you love.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
That's a great idea.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Anyway, I'm sure everyone's wondering, Okay, how can I get
a whiff of this? Well, we manage to get our
hands on a bottle of the Space scent and a
bottle of the Moon scent, and.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
We squirted it on a fire mall.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
So we are giving them away today on our Instagram.
So go check it out at part time Genius to
see how you can win.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
I'm gonna apply. So for anyone who's suffered from jet lag,
you know how hard it can be to try to
get your body clock to shift time zones. It is
really not a pleasant process. But for a bunch of hamsters,
at least one thing has helped, taking viagra. You can
see any of this coming to do jet lag, Hamsters, viagra?
(28:46):
Can you work those into the sentence? It's like the
weirdest success, Mad Live success.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
So why were they giving viagra to hamster?
Speaker 2 (28:55):
What else would you give them? Mango? But anyway, it's
really only in small doses. So, as the Smithsonian points out,
since nineteen ninety eight, when viagra was first approved by
the FDA. Scientists have found all sorts of other uses
for the drug, including for flowers. Actually, so if you
crush viagra into a vase, it can help your fresh
cut flowers last longer. It's also good for treating blood pressure,
(29:17):
and in two thousand and seven, a trio of Argentinian
scientists figured out that injecting a small amount of viagra
into a hamster will help cure it of jet lag.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
I mean, of course it has to be a small dose, right,
These are hamster. These are also scientists, so they could
do whatever, but anyway. But it's basically enough viagra to
affect them, but not enough to get them aroused or
anything like that.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
But back to the jet lag. Normally, humans tend to
take a full day to adjust for an hour of change,
So if you travel to Singapore from New York, it'll
take your body about twelve days to fully adjust to
that time change. But with viagra, the hamsters were covered
in about half of that period. And do we know
why this is Well, according to the Smithsonian quote, they
(29:59):
believe even happened because the drug raises levels of a
molecule called cyclic guanascene monophosphate in the body. cGMP is
the molecule that expands blood vessels, which helps with getting
men excited. That's how it works from that purpose. But
cGMP also speeds up the body's internal clock, which is
how it combats jet lag. Anyway, the most fascinating thing
(30:21):
about this study, or to me at least, was that
the viagra only worked when hamsters were traveling east. Like,
the viagra helped if you adjusted the time zone from
New York to London, but if you had them going west,
it basically had no effect. I heard viagra's the same way, So.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
That is wilds Well, I've got another discovery about animals,
but before we get to that, let's take one last break.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're counting down
the twenty five greatest science ideas of the past twenty
five years. All right, mango, we are all the way too.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Why those sesame street numbers never get old to me?
And at number twenty, we're going to cover one of
the most important scientific discoveries of our time, according to me,
which is why chickens like Denzel Washington more than you.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
More than I like Denzel Washington, or they like Denzel
more than they like me.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
They like Denzel more than they liked Okay, god, okn me,
they preferred Denze.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Making sure I didn't know if I was part of
this study.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Now, over the years, there have been lots of discoveries
about chickens. We know that the color of a chicken's
eggs often coincides with the color of the bird's ear lobes.
We know that today's chickens descended from the red jungle
fowl of Southeast Asia about eight thousand years ago, and
they were probably first domesticated not for meat, but as
early alarms systems like watchdogs, but birds right, bird dogs?
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
But perhaps most importantly, chickens can tell other chickens apart,
and studies have shown they can easily identify up to
thirty other chickens at a chicken party, but once the
numbers get to about one hundred, they get more confused.
They can't keep tracked. I mean, it's like people. Yeah,
it feels fair. But in two thousand and two, in
a paper called quote Chickens prefer beautiful humans. This is
(32:29):
actually the title of the scientist Stefano Ghirlanda Listen, Loote
Jensen and Magnus Anquist. Don't worry, it'll be spelled properly
on the certificates. They all discovered that much like humans,
chickens are attracted to symmetrical faces, and in the experiment,
chickens pecked more at screens with symmetrical faces, and these
(32:50):
results actually match the results of humans who were asked
to choose between the same faces. According to nat GEO,
the study was limited in that only tests did a
small number of chickens and humans, but the results may
suggest the mutual admiration for symmetry is rooted in the
nervous system. Isn't that awesome? So it's not really based
(33:11):
on cultural influences, but it's triggered by something in the brain.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, well, you said this was only a small number
of chickens, so I'm still not quite on board with
the idea that they like Denzel more than you. But
we'll see. And actually, you know what, you know, I
have chickens and chickens that lay different colored eggs. Huh.
I did not know that chickens had ear lobes, much
less ear lobes that you could use to detect what
sort of eggs they would lay. But anyway, it's all
super fascinating. So back to this idea of the chickens
(33:37):
preferring symmetrical faces. Do we know the evolutionary reason for that? Like,
why do humans and chickens prefer these faces?
Speaker 1 (33:43):
We don't know yet. But nat Geo did have a
fun kicker to the piece. They wrote, quote, what could
be more humiliating than a chicken who sees your Tinder
profile and swipes left? I think that's a good way
to answer.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
So that is definitely. We have reached the end of
day one in our countdown of the twenty five best
science ideas from the past twenty five years. Now, remember
we got four more days to go, so be sure
to tune in all week. Don't forget to enter today's
giveaway on our Instagram at part time Genius and Mengo.
What's the teas up for tomorrow?
Speaker 1 (34:16):
So we have got stories about lobsters, dolphins and bike helmets.
Oh yeah, the trio, although unfortunately none of these involve
lobsters and dolphins wearing bike helmets. But it's still going
to be fun, I promise. Anyway, that's it for today's
episode from Gabe, Dylan, Mary, Will and myself. Thank you
so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production
(34:49):
of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will
Pearson and Me Mongays Chatikler, and research by our good
pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's EPISO was engineered and produced
by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay,
(35:11):
Trustee Dara Potts and Vinny Shorey. For more podcasts from
Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
What's that mango? So you know what's funny? You know
what's funny. Your headband is funny. But sorry it interrupt
Go ahead.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Well, we've been friends for a little over twenty five
years now.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I think we actually known each other for twenty seven
years now, if I'm not mistake, but I said friend, right, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
But think of all the fun things that have happened
in the last twenty five years, right, Like this's the
launch of the iPod, thousands of songs in your pocket.
Social media exploited with Facebook. People started dancing Gungnam style
and we're taught how to duggy for some reason. There's
planking and photos that became a fad, and Lady Gaga
(00:52):
wore a meat dress to the MTV video War.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I think that summed it up. I think you actually
covered everything.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, yeah, I mean we also had a block president,
our first black president, gay marriage became legal, and people
challenge each other with ice buckets. But for me, everything
really starts with that meat dress.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, and don't forget we launched a little magazine from
our drm room called Mental Flaws way back in the
year two thousand. Yeah, I can't believe.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
It's been almost twenty five years since that first issue
hit newsstands. But this week's super special edition of Part
Time Genius is all about celebrating this last quarter century.
Every day this week, we're gonna be counting down the
twenty five greatest science ideas of the past twenty five years,
and we are sending out lots of fun prizes to
our listeners too.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
But I've just got one question for you, mego, why
are you wearing a velord tracksuit and a homemade headband? Again,
I don't really understand what's happening.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Here because I am pump Oh got it, Okay, so
let's dive in.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson, and of course I'm here with my friend
Mangesh hot Ticketter and over there attending to what I
thought was a Bob Ross chia pet but is actually
a vintage, discontinued Albert Einstein chia pet. Is our pal
and producer Dylan Fagan and Mengo. I think Einstein with
(02:29):
sprouts for his hair is exactly the energy we're trying
to pull for this week's twenty five list.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, that's right. Well, so I kind of want to
start by having you tell our listeners about how we
became friends, because I was definitely trivia obsessed as a kid.
I think I've mentioned that when cable came to my
neighborhood in third grade, my friends and I were obsessed
with doubledare and every day in the summer we would
practice drilling each other with trivia questions and setting up
(02:55):
these challenges all over our houses and the creek in
the backyard, and you know, we're just trying to get
ourselves physically prepped for this thing. We want to be
ready in case a producer just called us up to
be on the show. Yeah, but you were obviously obsessed
with lists. I was very much obsessed with lists. I
think this started when I was probably eleven or twelve
years old.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I just love making lists. They all started as pretty basic.
It's like, here's my list of presidents, here's my list
of state capitals. And then it got a little weirder
over the years. It was like, here's a list of
my favorite left handed artists and favorite you know books
with more than four hundred pages or whatever it might
have been. It was just fun to keep lists, and
(03:35):
people would ask like, why do you do this, and
I didn't really know the answer, other than it just
felt good to collect this information, you know, and to
just know this information, So anyway was what I did.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I love it, and so when we started Mental Fluss,
we were definitely list obsessed. And one of my favorite
annual things that we do was we would declare the
most important books of the last twenty five years for
the most important music of the last time five years
of TV shows, And the lists were always so fun
and totally unexpected. You came away just appreciating all these
(04:07):
other amazing things. I don't know about you, but I
think for me, part of the reason I wanted to
do a big science list this week was because right now,
you know, there's so much talk about AI and gene
therapies and those kind of dominate the headlines. Yeah, but
I also love the weird, fun inventions and and kind
of the joy of Obama at the Science Fair shooting
(04:29):
rockets and things. And you know, science is obviously nerdy,
but it's also cool and weird and fun, and I
thought it would be just really fun to celebrate it.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That sounds good, but I feel like before we dive in,
we really have to talk about the process and everything
that goes into how we choose a list like this.
So before we jump in, do you want to start
by giving a little rationale of how we chose all
of these things?
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, totally so, Gabe, Mary, our friend Lucas Riley. They
helped us look up a whole bunch of ideas and
then we pare them down to things that truly delighted
or impressed us. Ideally both of those things. And then
you and I picked a bunch and researched some more.
And now's the fun part where we get to like
take turns presenting the ideas. Plus we are sending part
(05:14):
time genius certificates to all of the winners, which they
can put on their.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Refrigerators, all of the winners.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, and also atomic fireballs, the most sciencey candy we
could find in honor of this week's Signs special.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
You know, it's funny that we're choosing fireballs because, as
my kids know, I love fireballs. So we have this
special cabinet at our house just outside the kitchen called
the Center of Excellence, and it's basically where all of
my candy obsessions get to be stored because I'll fall
in love with the candy. We were at a great
sushi restaurant and I love the little treats they bring
you at the end of it, and I decided I
(05:49):
needed to order those in bulk. I ordered some atomic
fireballs in bulk, and then I move on to the
next thing, but we just keep them in that collection.
So it's a big prize, and we're giving out prizes
on our insta all week as well.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Right, Yeah, so Mary is running contest for us all
week and has a bunch of ridiculous swag to send out.
She and the person who manages our social media, our
friend Calypso. So after you listen, head over to our
Instagram handle at part Time Genius and go win some stuff.
Were to send it out, but that is way too
much set up. Let's just get into.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
It all right, Okay, So don't let the number fool you.
Our list is kicking off with an innovation that happens
to tackle one of the biggest problems in all of society,
and that is how to get ketchup out of a bottle. Now,
as we all know, there is nothing more frustrating than
holding a ketchup bottle at a forty five degree angle
over your food, shaking it vigorously and having absolutely nothing
(06:43):
come out. And for years there were only two solutions.
People would jam a knife in a bottle. I feel
like you don't see that as much anymore, remember jamming
as a kid. I feel like people just would put
that knife in there and then give it a stir
and they hope the ketchup would start flowing. Also, there's
the smack the number trick, where people figured out that
if you give the number fifty seven on the side
of a glass bottle of hinds a nice wallap, it
(07:04):
would get the ketchup moving. But of course the problem
with both of those is that you could end up
with way too much ketchup on your fries.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah, it's kind of a ketchup conundrum that we've all experienced.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It's exactly right, and one of the biggest leaps forward
for all of humanity and our quest board an appropriate
amount of ketchup was the upside down ketchup bottle.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Right, so you are obviously talking about the ketchup bottles
where the dispenser is on the bottom and it's sitting
on there and the gravity is just kind of pulling
it down.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Right, that's exactly right. That bottle, or rather the valve
in it, was invented by a gentleman named Paul Brown. Now,
his idea wasn't specifically for ketchup. He just thought a
better valve would work for most liquids, from dish detergent
to hand sanitizers to whatever it may be. This is
in the nineteen nineties, so Paul Brown had this dream,
but he really struggled to make it a reality. He
(07:53):
made one hundred and eleven different prototypes, Wow, maxed out
a bunch of credit cards, borrowed money from his folks
to you know, make a better valve for dispensing liquid.
And while trying to make this valve, like, what was
he trying to solve for exactly Well, he realized that
to make a better squeeze bottle, you wanted the nozzle
to open when you place pressure on it, but then
(08:14):
you need it to completely close up when the pressure
is removed, so there's no accidental leaking from this Anyway,
After years of failures, his one hundred and twelfth prototype work,
and once he'd perfected his valve, everyone came calling in,
including NASA, who saw I used for the valve in
space and was trying to make leak proof cups for astronauts.
Wow shampoo bottlers who wanted a more convenient bottle for
(08:37):
their soaps and shampoos also came calling on him as well,
and eventually, after he pitched it to Hines, they saw
his innovation as part of a catch up revolution. They
started this ad campaign about the quote waiting man, where
a guy is just sitting and holding a glass ketchup
bottle vertically over his meal and nothing is moving or
happening for like twenty seconds, and then is why comes over,
(09:00):
squeezes the perfect amount of ketchup onto his food and
solves the problem in a second. And the ad slogan
was quote no weight, no mess, no anticipation.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
It is so funny that as a society we are
so impatient that we need our ketchup immediately. Yeah, it's
just a condiment.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
I don't know why you're you really don't get it.
It's super important that we get it quickly. But I
was actually thinking this too, to be honest, until I
read this Malcolm Gladwell piece on ketchup, and this was
a piece that he wrote for The New Yorker, and
in it he quotes a food professor who calls ketchup
the Esperanto of cuisine because it's one of the few
foods that satisfies your cravings for salty, sweet, sour, bitter,
(09:41):
and dow mommy all at once. If you think about it,
that's that's actually true, and that's part of the reason
the world loves ketchup so much. But back to Brown.
According to the patent professor, this is a website on
inventors and patents. Today, about seventy five percent of Hinz
bottles that are sold are upside down squeeze bottles now,
And it wasn't long before Brown paid off his credit
cards and paid his parents back. Of course, I.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Mean, I do love this, but this invention is from
the nineteen nineties, right, so like it doesn't quite make
the twenty five year cut off.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Lit. I thought you were going to call me out
for that, but I'm actually not done yet. So all
of those lay the groundwork for the quote problem of ketchup.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Look at me being impatient.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah, you're doing that. But even though Paul Brown Squeeze
bottle valve helped us get much more ketchup out of bottles,
the truth is it's hard to get the last bits
of ketchup out of there, and that means there's a
lot of food wasts. But that's where some grad students
from MIT came in. In twenty twelve, that is, within
the last twenty five years here a PhD candidate named
(10:41):
Dave Smith and a team of mechanical engineers and nanotechnologists
at MIT's Varnacy Research Group had been working on various
lubricants and coatings to solve various issues. So they were
tackling things like how to coat an oil or gas
line so that there's no clogs, or how to cote
a windshield so that the water doesn't collect on it
and is more easily pushed off by your wipers. But
(11:04):
then they started wondering what would happen if they applied
some of their technology to consumer packaging. I think the
idea started with the frustration of getting honey out of
a bottle, you know, because there's still so much in
there at that point.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, I mean it's obviously annoying, but why were they
putting all this technology towards food bottles.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Well, according to Fast Company, that's one of the questions
they got asked the most. And the answer is that
the market for bottles and I'm just talking sauce bottles
here is a seventeen billion dollar market and if you
could solve food waste there, you could basically save a
million tons of food from being thrown out every single year.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
That's pretty incredible.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, So they created this coating called liquid glide, and
it's really miraculous. Like if you watch the videos, the
Ketchup flows out of the bottle almost like a liquid
with nothing left in the bottle. As Professor Krippa Varnasi
puts it, there's this fundamental friction constraint called no slip
boundary condition between a liquid and a solid. And so
because they basically created a new surface for the liquid
(12:01):
to move on, you can get the product to slide
across the surface. And so he continues describing this. He
says that, Aha, moment that we could get around a
fundamental constraint of fluid dynamics.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
That's really cool that they can take this like uncooperative
fluid like Ketchup and just make a glide out.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah, and all the applications for this are actually pretty crazy.
It isn't just ketchup or honey that it affects suddenly,
Like you can get toothpaste out of a tube more effectively,
which makes that recyclable. You can use variations on medical
devices to get essential fluids out of bags like. It's
really remarkable.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I love that. So, of course, congratulations, doctor Varnossi and
team will be sending you a part time genius certificate
for your achievement and a handful of atomic fireballs for
your important work.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Such a great price, right.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So, sitting at number twenty four is a pretty whimsical
invention that maybe means more to me than it means
to you. It is a floating hot tub boat invented
in Finland called the hot tug, which sounds a little dirty,
but this loading tub is actually really wonderful.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
And there's this story about why you like hot tubs
so much. I'm guessing I mean, to.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Be clear, I do like hot tubs in the appropriate context.
My friend Dave is a hot tub behind his place
in Idaho, and you can sit out there when it's
snowing and look at the Grand Tetons behind you, and
that is incredible. But also there was one time when
I was on a work trip and I showed up
at a hotel room in a dicey neighborhood that had
been booked for me, and there was a giant hot
tub in the middle of the hotel room, and that
(13:30):
was less appeeling.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, I could see maybe avoiding that.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
But as you might know, I hate cold water. And
part of the reason is that when I was on
my study of broad trip, and this is so many
years ago in Tibet, we were hunting for this anthropological
evidence of a semi nomadic civilization, and there hadn't been
a lot of study done in this region of Tibet.
It was pretty pristine and hard for academics to get
(13:54):
to anyway, my friends and I saw these hots that
were set up across this little river, and we knew
we wanted to get to it, and there was a
bridge about two hours up one way and one hour
down the other way, and so my friends were like,
we should probably just cross this river. And to be clear,
there was snow on the ground at the time and
the water was ice cold, and we didn't want to
get our clothes wet, so basically we got naked and
(14:16):
cross this thing so we'd have dry clothes on the
other side. And I just remember getting up to my
ankles and being like, I've never been this cold, and
then getting up to my knees and being like I've
never been this cold, and then getting to my waist.
But the current was also crazy strong, and I almost
slipped out some moss and somehow caught myself with the
stick and it was miserable. But I just remember being
(14:38):
so cold for so long, and the worst part was
the huts weren't any big discovery, so it was just
like a normal settlement. But I was very angry, and
since then I don't really go in cold water, but
I will go in hot water, and that's where the
hot tug comes in.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Wow, I'm with you on the cold water. I don't
understand people that can do the cold plunge thing. It's
just I don't get it. But anyway, tell me more
about this invention.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
So it is the brainchild of a Dutch furniture designer.
His name is Frank de Bruyne. And it's not just
a barrel with heat under it. So this thing is
a beautiful two thousand liter eight seater jacuzzi boat. And
according to an interview with the New York Post, Jabrun
actually grew up on a barge where his parents were skippers,
and he'd always loved campfires and nature and looking up
(15:25):
at the stars. And at some point he wondered, like,
what if you could have a mobile hot tub, like
not just something that was parked in your backyard, but
something that would allow you to float out wherever you were,
and that could be on a lake or a fjord.
And so he created this boat with an electric motor,
so it is entirely quiet for the nature aspect, but
the hot tub contraption is also entirely stable, so you
(15:49):
can sit in the hot tub and then stand up
and dive off the side into like a crisp, refreshing
lake and you won't tip anything over. To me, it
feels like a really beautiful way to float your way
through a cold land escape. Like imagine being in one
of these off the coast of Alaska or in the
Pacific Northwest, And that's kind of de Bruyn's dream too.
Right now, the hot tubs are cost prohibitive. They run
(16:11):
about fifteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars. But his hope
is that national parks and cities will buy fleets of
these things and then rent them out to people like me,
you know, tourists who hate the cold but love nature.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
That sounds pretty awesome. I'm on board, Mango. The next
one for me is a discovery that deals with one
of my biggest pet peeves. Tangled headphones and chords so frustrating.
And this comes from a British scientist named Robert Matthews
from Aston University. So over the years, people have tried
to deal with knots in tons of ways. You can
very carefully coil up chords using special reels. They're actually
(16:47):
a ton of anti nodding gadgets out there. But Robert
Matthews developed a mathematical theory which has an incredibly simple answer.
According to his loop conjecture, one of the easiest things
you can do is clip the ends of a chord
together to form a loop. Based on his mathematical models,
forming a simple loop produces a tenfold reduction in the
(17:07):
risk of knots forming in the headphone course. That's amazing,
But what's also sweet about his theory is that Matthews
organized something called the British not Experiment, where, according to
Science Daily, kids at schools across the country looked at
this phenomena with quote various cord thickness, rigidity, and other
parameters likely to affect nodding risk.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
I mean, tangled chords are definitely one of my biggest
pet peeves, and every year I try so many different
ways to make sure that my Christmas lights don't get
tangled or chords don't get tangled. And I'm just kind
of fascinated by this idea that if you just loop
the chords, it solves the issue.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, And Matthews points out that even though it feels
trivial in nature, quote, the phenomena of spontaneous nodding is
of great significance in other areas, including polymer chemistry and
molecular biology. Like if you consider there's over a meter
of DNA crammed into every one of our selves, and
any knots can dramatically increase the risk of genetic malfunction,
(18:04):
you can see how there might be some really interesting
applications there, Like Matthew's points to some anti cancer drugs
that work by affecting not formation. And cancer cells, and
he's hoping that the loop conjecture can lead to new
approaches in drug design.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
That's amazing that you can tackle something that's annoying like
headphones and it solves genetic problem.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Yeah, something almost as important like cancer.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Right, Yeah, well that is pretty awesome. I know we've
got lots more to cover, from space perfumes to bird esthetics,
but before we get to any of that, let's take
a quick break.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about
twenty five great science ideas over the last twenty five years.
And I forgot Mengo. What number are we on? All right,
number twenty two? So Mango, what do you have next?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Well, let's talk about the sense of smell, because when
it comes to memory and emotion, there is no sense
quite as powerful as scent. And for me, like a
whiff of jasmine takes me to my grandmother's backyard and India,
there's a certain wet grass and pavement smell that reminds
me of monsoons and also spring in Delaware. Yeah, also
lemon pledge weirdly reminds me of when my sister and
(19:26):
I used to have to dust wood furniture every Saturday
after cartoons. So are there any distinctive sense that you
can think of.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's funny that you mentioned your grandmother. I feel like
everybody who you know had the benefit of being able
to go to a grandmother's house has a certain scent there.
For me, it was the smell of bacon, because my
granddad cooked bacon every single morning of his life, and
so whenever you walk into that house, you're just like bacon.
I love that.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Mike Myers always talks about like how it smells like soup,
whinny he thinks.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
About old people. This is a little better than that.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
So our next guest knows a lot about scent. It's
what he does for a living. And our pal Mary
actually got him on the phone.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
I'm Steve Pierce. I've worked in the flame room fragrance
industry for more than forty years in various roles and
now a consult for some companies in that industry. I'm
a bit of a jack of all trades, to be honest.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
So Steve has a degree and applied biochemistry and says
he's been interested in smells since he was a kid.
So back in the early two thousands, he was approached
by a museum curator who wanted to make an exhibit
about impossible smells, like smells that were so fleeting or
so far in the past that no one's been able
to experience them. And one of the impossible smells he
developed for this exhibit was the scent of the Mere
(20:45):
Space Station as it fell back to Earth. The exhibit
was a huge hit and people were fascinated.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
It made a bit of a splash. It was on
TV all the rest of it. And it was a
few months after that that I got this call from
someone at NASA. He explained his role as having to
smell every single component that went into the Space Shuttle
to make sure that when astronauts were up there, there
was nothing that was going to create an off an
(21:14):
unpleasant environment for them to live and work in.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
So I'm trying to imagine this guy's work day, like
he walked around sniffing rocket parts.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah, I guess something like that, And I guess he
told Steve that NASA had a smell problem.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
They had astronauts returning to Earth who'd gone for a
vehicular walk outside. So they'd gone outside to service satellites
and do all the things they do, and then when
they got back inside, they were going through the airlock
and they'd repressurized, take their suit helmet off, and then
they got hit by this smell. And a number of
(21:49):
them came back and said, look, we went through all
this training about fitness, about psychology here, about how to
fly things, how to service satellites, how to walk as
they nobody warned us about this smell.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Never would have thought that space had a smell. Apparently
NASA hadn't either, So they asked Steve if you could
recreate the scent of space for training purposes, and he
was like, sure, I'll give it a try. So NASA
put him in touch with some astronauts so he could
get a first hand account of the space smell.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
They were pretty consistent in terms of it, focusing on
things like hot metal. They said fried steak, but I
kind of think that was when maybe they were near
a barbecue which was hot metal, and they were associating
the fried steak and the hot metal. And one of
them described it as the scent of the hot metal
(22:41):
when he was welding on his motorbike as a young
man and things like this. So that was the description
that I had to go for and try and recreate
that in a safe way that could be used during
the training.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
So around the same time, some other papers came out
that offered all these hypotheses about what space smell like
based on beectroscopic analysis, and two of the notes that
got mentioned were raspberries and rum, which I've read about
and it sounds really nice. But Steve didn't buy it.
None of the astronauts he'd interviewed mentioned any of those scents,
(23:14):
so he stuck to his brief of hot metal and meat.
And the more he thought about it, the more it
made sense because when the astronauts were outside, their suits
were bombarded by high velocity particles and solar wind, so
when they came back inside, they detected the odor left
by all that energy.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So we managed to recreate the smell for NASA.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Yeah, I mean, it took a couple of months, but
he did. And unfortunately, in the time he was working,
his NASA contact had retired or maybe been laid off,
like to this day Steven in shore, which all he
knew was that he called NASA to say, hey, I've
got your space smell, and NASA was like, we don't
know where you're talking about, man.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
I couldn't find anyone else to want to take it forward,
so it was a bit disappointing to have done that
work and then not be able to see it put
to use. So I kind of parked it.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
The story might have ended there, but the BBC happened
to visit Steve's lab for a report on fragrance and flavors.
The reporter asked if he'd worked on anything particularly unusual,
and Steve said, well, as a matter of fact, I
made the scent of space for NASA, and that turned
into the kicker of the piece, and then another media
storm erupted, so the news traveled to this side of
(24:28):
the Atlantic and Steve was contacted by an American education
advocate who wanted to leverage the scent to raise money
for STEM programs. Right, this is awesome. So the initial
goal was something like, let's sell two thousand dollars of
this perfume, and in the end the project raised over
six hundred thousand dollars on kickstar.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1 (24:47):
And the idea was that for every bottle someone bought,
a bottle would get sent to a school. But this
meant a new challenge for Steve.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Before, I wasn't worried about skin contact and things like that.
I was just thinking people would smell it. No, that
would be the end of it. Now I had to
go back to the drawing board and reformulate it to
make sure it was completely safe in case anybody accidentally
sprayed it in their eye or swallowed it, or make
sure there were no allergens in there and so on.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
So what's more, Steve had actually developed a second space scent.
He met the astronaut Charles Duke at a conference, and
Duke could actually walk down the Moon with the Apollo
eleven crew, So naturally Steve wanted to know what that
had smelled like.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
And of course he's, well, of course you can't smell
anything through the suit, and he's having a joke and
all that, But then he says, when you get inside
and you're covered in this fine dust, he starts explaining
to everyone about it. Takes his helmet off, he says,
and all you can smell is this smell of the moon,
he says. And everyone thinks it smells of cheese and
makes all these jokes about it, but he says, it
smells like spent gunpowder.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
So the scent of Space and the Scent of the
Moon became available through this kickstarter. And now Steve does
want to make it very clear that he is not
involved in any of the logistics for fulfillment with this
Space scent product. He just made vats of the stuff
and had it shift to a distributor. But he is
really happy about all the bottles that made their way
to schools and STEM programs, And he told us one
(26:12):
of his proudest moments was meeting a dad whose son
had really severe learning disabilities, but he was fascinated by
space and being able to smell it made it come
to life in this incredible, vivid way.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Oh that's so cool. I do have to ask my
go have you smelled this stuff? And if so, is
it good?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I don't think the word is good, like maybe interesting, fascinating, meaty.
I looked up out to Space on perfume review website
and a lot of people complained that it didn't smell
like something you'd wear, which makes sense because that wasn't
the intention. But what's really interesting is several reviewers mentioned
that the scent made them feel a sense of loneliness
(26:52):
or dispair and so we actually asked Steve about this.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
I wouldn't have used words like despair and loneliness. I
can understand if people are putting that concept of the
fragrance alongside the fact that you're in an airless and
void of space and you're weightless. If it manages to
conjure up those feelings, I can understand why they might
describe it as that. There's definitely a meaty element to it.
(27:18):
It is quite harsh and metallic as well. I would
have said I would have described it as that. The
other image I had was if you've ever been the
electrical sparks and you get that blue flash and there's
that sense of burning although nothing's burning, it's almost like
the ozone in the air that's created in that high
(27:38):
energy impact. Those were the kind of images I was
trying to recreate. I never set out to make anyone
feel despair, but you know what, when you're working on
these things on your own and you're sometimes coming up
against a bit of a block and trying to improve it,
sometimes that can feel pretty lonely as well.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
And maybe that's the next challenge for a fragrance scientist
like Steve, like figure out a way to bottle the
scent of loneliness along with one that makes you feel
maybe more like you're surrounded by people you love.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
That's a great idea.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Anyway, I'm sure everyone's wondering, Okay, how can I get
a whiff of this? Well, we manage to get our
hands on a bottle of the Space scent and a
bottle of the Moon scent, and.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
We squirted it on a fire mall.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
So we are giving them away today on our Instagram.
So go check it out at part time Genius to
see how you can win.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
I'm gonna apply. So for anyone who's suffered from jet lag,
you know how hard it can be to try to
get your body clock to shift time zones. It is
really not a pleasant process. But for a bunch of hamsters,
at least one thing has helped, taking viagra. You can
see any of this coming to do jet lag, Hamsters, viagra?
(28:46):
Can you work those into the sentence? It's like the
weirdest success, Mad Live success.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
So why were they giving viagra to hamster?
Speaker 2 (28:55):
What else would you give them? Mango? But anyway, it's
really only in small doses. So, as the Smithsonian points out,
since nineteen ninety eight, when viagra was first approved by
the FDA. Scientists have found all sorts of other uses
for the drug, including for flowers. Actually, so if you
crush viagra into a vase, it can help your fresh
cut flowers last longer. It's also good for treating blood pressure,
(29:17):
and in two thousand and seven, a trio of Argentinian
scientists figured out that injecting a small amount of viagra
into a hamster will help cure it of jet lag.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
I mean, of course it has to be a small dose, right,
These are hamster. These are also scientists, so they could
do whatever, but anyway. But it's basically enough viagra to
affect them, but not enough to get them aroused or
anything like that.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
But back to the jet lag. Normally, humans tend to
take a full day to adjust for an hour of change,
So if you travel to Singapore from New York, it'll
take your body about twelve days to fully adjust to
that time change. But with viagra, the hamsters were covered
in about half of that period. And do we know
why this is Well, according to the Smithsonian quote, they
(29:59):
believe even happened because the drug raises levels of a
molecule called cyclic guanascene monophosphate in the body. cGMP is
the molecule that expands blood vessels, which helps with getting
men excited. That's how it works from that purpose. But
cGMP also speeds up the body's internal clock, which is
how it combats jet lag. Anyway, the most fascinating thing
(30:21):
about this study, or to me at least, was that
the viagra only worked when hamsters were traveling east. Like,
the viagra helped if you adjusted the time zone from
New York to London, but if you had them going west,
it basically had no effect. I heard viagra's the same way, So.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
That is wilds Well, I've got another discovery about animals,
but before we get to that, let's take one last break.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're counting down
the twenty five greatest science ideas of the past twenty
five years. All right, mango, we are all the way too.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Why those sesame street numbers never get old to me?
And at number twenty, we're going to cover one of
the most important scientific discoveries of our time, according to me,
which is why chickens like Denzel Washington more than you.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
More than I like Denzel Washington, or they like Denzel
more than they like me.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
They like Denzel more than they liked Okay, god, okn me,
they preferred Denze.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Making sure I didn't know if I was part of
this study.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Now, over the years, there have been lots of discoveries
about chickens. We know that the color of a chicken's
eggs often coincides with the color of the bird's ear lobes.
We know that today's chickens descended from the red jungle
fowl of Southeast Asia about eight thousand years ago, and
they were probably first domesticated not for meat, but as
early alarms systems like watchdogs, but birds right, bird dogs?
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
But perhaps most importantly, chickens can tell other chickens apart,
and studies have shown they can easily identify up to
thirty other chickens at a chicken party, but once the
numbers get to about one hundred, they get more confused.
They can't keep tracked. I mean, it's like people. Yeah,
it feels fair. But in two thousand and two, in
a paper called quote Chickens prefer beautiful humans. This is
(32:29):
actually the title of the scientist Stefano Ghirlanda Listen, Loote
Jensen and Magnus Anquist. Don't worry, it'll be spelled properly
on the certificates. They all discovered that much like humans,
chickens are attracted to symmetrical faces, and in the experiment,
chickens pecked more at screens with symmetrical faces, and these
(32:50):
results actually match the results of humans who were asked
to choose between the same faces. According to nat GEO,
the study was limited in that only tests did a
small number of chickens and humans, but the results may
suggest the mutual admiration for symmetry is rooted in the
nervous system. Isn't that awesome? So it's not really based
(33:11):
on cultural influences, but it's triggered by something in the brain.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, well, you said this was only a small number
of chickens, so I'm still not quite on board with
the idea that they like Denzel more than you. But
we'll see. And actually, you know what, you know, I
have chickens and chickens that lay different colored eggs. Huh.
I did not know that chickens had ear lobes, much
less ear lobes that you could use to detect what
sort of eggs they would lay. But anyway, it's all
super fascinating. So back to this idea of the chickens
(33:37):
preferring symmetrical faces. Do we know the evolutionary reason for that? Like,
why do humans and chickens prefer these faces?
Speaker 1 (33:43):
We don't know yet. But nat Geo did have a
fun kicker to the piece. They wrote, quote, what could
be more humiliating than a chicken who sees your Tinder
profile and swipes left? I think that's a good way
to answer.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
So that is definitely. We have reached the end of
day one in our countdown of the twenty five best
science ideas from the past twenty five years. Now, remember
we got four more days to go, so be sure
to tune in all week. Don't forget to enter today's
giveaway on our Instagram at part time Genius and Mengo.
What's the teas up for tomorrow?
Speaker 1 (34:16):
So we have got stories about lobsters, dolphins and bike helmets.
Oh yeah, the trio, although unfortunately none of these involve
lobsters and dolphins wearing bike helmets. But it's still going
to be fun, I promise. Anyway, that's it for today's
episode from Gabe, Dylan, Mary, Will and myself. Thank you
so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production
(34:49):
of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will
Pearson and Me Mongays Chatikler, and research by our good
pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's EPISO was engineered and produced
by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay,
(35:11):
Trustee Dara Potts and Vinny Shorey. For more podcasts from
Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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