July 25, 2019 • 46 mins
It’s easy to think of electricity as the domain of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Street Fighter’s Blanka. But as Robert and Joe explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, it’s also the domain of microbes -- and it will change the shape of future technology.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. Can we figured we'd start off today
talking about our favorite electricity monsters. Robert, what's your favorite
electricity monster? Oh? You know, my, my, my, just gut
(00:25):
instinct answers to go with Blanca from Street Fighter. You know,
he's the green skinned and I was, I was. I
looked into this a little bit. I was never sure
why he had green skin. Apparently some alleged backstory involving
chlorophyll um, but I don't know. It ends up with
he's like a beast creature, a beast man with green
skin and like bright orange hair, wearing board shorts, wearing
(00:48):
board shorts and just kind of doing this this, this
kind of hulking, uh pose bent over, and then he
can produce electricity. Basically has the powers since he's kind
of been kind of a you know, a mildum of
various Amazonian things. He has the powers of an electric eagle,
and so he can shock his opponents that way. That's
(01:10):
a good one. Uh. There there are a few really
good electricity movies. By really good, I mean really bad
from the nineteen eighties and nineties. Did you ever see
the Pulse? I don't think I ever did. I think
there was another horror movie called Pulse, which was about
something else. So this one was about. Uh, it's like
some family living in a house and like a regular
(01:30):
suburban neighborhood in California in the nineteen eighties, and an
evil burst of electricity goes throughout goes out through the mains. Uh.
I don't remember if there's like an evil storm or
like an alien arrives or something. But for some reason,
there's this pulse of of killer electricity and it goes
into their house and it turns all the appliances against them,
(01:50):
so the TV starts trying to kill him and everything,
a real maximum over drive scenario. But it's like it's
sold as like the the malevolence is delivered to actually
through the electrical wires the wrong voltage or something. Yeah,
I guess. So, yeah, I was thinking about this, like,
what are some other examples of electric creatures or humanoids?
And I mean, obviously I thought of of of electric
(02:13):
Christopher Lambert from from Mortal Kombat another fighting game. Yeah,
but but so many, so often is the case you
see individuals with some sort of pyrotechnic mobility, you know.
Like one of a film that we've talked about before
has been the Toby Hooper film, in which Brad Dorriff
(02:34):
played a like a pyromaniac who could catch things on
fire with his brain. He's got like like pyro kinesis,
but he doesn't want it. He's not like a you know,
a villain out there like Piro and the X Men,
just throwing fireballs wherever he wants. It's more like every
he's kind of like the Hulk. He's like fire Hulk.
Every time he gets upset, he starts catching things on fire.
(02:54):
But he also like burns the heck out of himself too,
which wasn't a nice twist. And of course Brad Dorriff
is wonderful and in that film there are at least
portions of it where he's it's it's a rare film
or Brad Dorriff is the lead and he's sort of
playing a regular human in some of the scenes. So
it's interesting to see. But but so often is the
case you see fire based powers in these characters and
(03:17):
creatures as opposed to electric based powers. And it's kind
of weird when you think about it, because, as we'll
discussing this episode, electricity is more tied in with biology
than fire. And even from the human perspective perspective, you
know who among us has not harnessed the power of
electricity by by walking across a carpeted floor in the
(03:38):
wintertime and then shocking somebody with a touch. You do
that on purpose? I have in the past done it
on purpose. Yes, yeah, but it's pretty not announce of
guilt on your face. Well, one of one of the
things I do like to do when it gets cold,
when the conditions are just right, have my son go
down a curly slide, build up static electricity and then
(03:59):
give me a high. I've on the way down, and
at times it has been stiff enough to like leave
a numbness in my hands, like when you feel it
in your wrist kind of in the bone. That's creepy,
real shocking power. I don't know if there's ever been
like an actually really scary electricity monster movie. The other
(04:19):
main one I was thinking of is one of my
favorite cheesy mid mid career West Craven movies, which is shocker.
I think that's from nineteen or so, and it's got
Mitch Poleggi or Poleggi, the guy who plays Skinner on
the X Files. Uh, he plays the villain. He's like
a serial killer who does some like evil black magic
ritual to turn himself into electricity after he gets killed
(04:42):
in the electric chair. That's right. I remember saying I
never saw it, but I remember seeing the boxes for it,
and he's in an electric chair on the You should
see it sometime. It's a laugh riot and he's Oh,
he's just like acting, I mean, beat galaxies beyond normal
levels of acting is uh. Would you say it's an
electric performance? I would say he is a live wire.
(05:04):
But yeah, So I think you're right about the idea
that maybe electric monsters should be more biologically intuitive than
pyrokinetic or fire throwing monsters or even fire breathing dragons,
because you know, it shouldn't come as any surprise that
the use of electricity by living organisms predates the technological
(05:25):
uses predates you know, Tesla and medicine or even Franklin
and Galvani and all that, Like all kinds of animals
use electricity in various ways. Now they're the really noticeable
charismatic uses of electricity, like how sharks and rays have
electro sensory organs known as the ampullae of Lorenzini, which
they used to sense very faint electric currents transmitted through
(05:46):
water by potential prey animals. And then you've got the
electrogenic organisms that like generally aquatic organisms that emit strong
electric currents, maybe too stun prey or two deploys a
defensive weapon. And these would include things like electric fish,
electric catfish, and raise. Yeah. Yeah, the electric eel is
certainly the electric animal par excellence. Uh, though it's always
(06:10):
worth reminding everyone, and it's not really an eel. It
has more it's more related to a catfish. Oh, I
don't think I knew that. Well, I didn't know they
were electric catfish, but I didn't know the eel was one, right, Yeah,
I mean you look at it, if you you know,
fortunate enough to see one in a tank somewhere or
in the wild, Uh, you know you're gonna notice that
it doesn't really look like an eel. It's uh, it's
(06:31):
it's it's a very curious looking creature. Have you ever
seen a de fleshed eel skull. Oh, I don't know
that I have it is one of them. Is usually
don't leave them on when I go sushi. You should.
You should look up an eel skull. Sometimes it might
be different for different species, but at least some eel
skulls are like the most metal thing in nature. It's amazing.
But anyway, we today we wanted to to think about
(06:53):
electric organisms. But instead of focusing on these larger organisms
that use electricity, may be in a sensory capacity or
as a weapon of some sort, we wanted to go
down to zoom in with the microscope and to take
a look at the world of micro organisms that deal
in the currency of the Holy fire, the amber, the electricity.
(07:15):
So I just wanted to start by saying by giving
a shout out that I got the idea to do
this episode after I read a really interesting article a
couple of weeks ago in the New York Times by
previous Stuff to blow your mind. Guest Carl Zimmer, Oh, yes, yeah,
that was a tremendous episode. It was great to chatting
with him. I'd love to have him back on the show.
Sometimes we should see about that if we get him
back on the show, then he becomes a friend of
(07:36):
the show. That's the way it works two appearances. Two
appearances make you a friend of the show, so just
one is previous guest. I almost said friend of the show,
but I didn't want to presume. I think those are
the rules. Yes, uh so, of course electricity. You know,
it's generally thought of as the flow of electrons. You
might have other ways of defining it. You could maybe
define it other ways in terms of electrical potential, like
(07:57):
a positive or negative charge. But generally you've got current.
If you've got electrons flowing that, you think of that
as some form of electricity. And there are ways in
which the metabolism of our bodies could be considered electric.
For example, what is actually happening when we breathe. I
don't know if I've ever thought of it quite this
(08:19):
way before, but I was reading an article in New
Scientists from July which quotes the U c l A
microbiologists Kenneth Nielsen in characterizing the most basic biochemistry of
life as a flow of electrons. So basically, think about
it like this. You eat carbon based compounds, you take
in that chemical energy, and that's gonna be molecules like sugars,
(08:42):
and these molecules, these carbon based compounds like sugars, have
excess electrons, and then cells in the body break down
those compounds and they pass on the extra electrons through
a series of chemical reactions that power the body, and
part by making a dinascene triphosphate or a t P,
which is the chemical energy transport molecule that that captures
(09:04):
the energy obtained through the breakdown of food and then
uses it to power things that happen inside ourselves. I've
I've sometimes seen a TP characterized as an energy storage molecule,
but that's not quite right. That would be more like
fats or sugars or something. A TP is like it's
like a car for energy, you know, it carries it
from one place to another in the cell. And apparently
(09:24):
the flow of electrons is an indispensable part of making
that a TP that powers our cells. But eventually the
extra electrons, since they're flowing, they've got to go somewhere
at the end of this chain of chemical reactions. You
can't just keep building up extra electrons in the body
until you become a humanliding jar or you become the
guy from Shocker, and you just electrocute people by touching them.
(09:47):
So you have to pass on the electrons onto a
molecule that will accept them. And in our case, that
molecule is oxygen. You breathe in the oxygen, and that
oxygen we breathe in goes around to the body, to
the cells, and it accepts those extra electrons that are
the waste product of our metabolism. Uh, and it bonds
with carbon molecules and then you breathe out this waste
(10:08):
product as CEO two. And to quote from this researcher
Kenneth Nielsen, as as quoted in in New Scientists, that's
the way we make all our energy, and it's the
same for every organism on this planet. Electrons must flow
in order for energy to be gained. This is why
when someone suffocates another person, they're dead within minutes. You
(10:29):
have stopped the supply of oxygen, so the electrons can
no longer flow. So choking somebody is kind of like
it's like putting a resistor in the electric circuit. That's interesting.
I mean this is all getting down to the fact
that we're all essentially bioelectric organisms. Yeah, that's exactly right,
and it's not just us like this is basically the
rule for all kinds of life forms, from humans to
(10:50):
coconut crabs to lots of single celled organisms. Pretty much
every organism needs to create an electron flow by taking
in food with that excess electrons and then running that
through a series of chemical reactions to extract usable energy
for cells, and then dumping those electrons out into some
kind of electron accepting waste bucket like oxygen molecules. And
(11:14):
this is even true for bacteria, where for many species
oxygen must be present as this terminal receptor for the
electrons at the end of the metabolic line. But there
are some prokaryotic organisms, single celled organisms that can't or
don't use oxygen, and these are known as anaerobic bacteria,
and they live in places where oxygen doesn't reach or
(11:37):
where oxygen is very limited. And the examples of this
might be places like deep in the sediment along a river,
or buried in a sea bed, or even ever a
deep underground in oil wells. I mean, try to imagine
that that far underground, that like life is thriving in
some way. We've also talked about them thriving in some
human created sewer environments. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, all all
(12:01):
these environments, especially these environments that are cut off from
the surface by by mud or sediment or even by
vast expanses of dead rock. So if the electrons have
to flow for life to go on, how do these
anaerobic bacteria survive without oxygen molecules to accept the excess
electrons at the end of the metabolism and basically to
(12:25):
breathe out. How you know, where do the electrons go
when they're done with them? So here's where we get
to a bacterial discovery story. So in the mid nineteen eighties,
I think around nineteen seven, the American microbiologist Derek Lovely
was out pulling up samples of sediment from the Potomac River.
And one of these samples from the Potomac River, it
(12:46):
was around Washington, d C contained one of these weird
single celled organisms. It was a bacterium called geo bacter
Metalla reducens. And like other bacteria, this bacterium would be
again the electron flow of its metabolism by consuming organic
compounds that have excess electrons, for example, ethanol, which is alcohol.
(13:08):
So there's some ethanol in its environment, it can eat that,
but it would end its metabolism by passing the excess
electrons off into iron oxides, which are rust. So this
is a life form that can survive by eating grain
alcohol and breathing out rusty iron. Yeah. I've read and
lovely um some some of his papers that when they're
(13:30):
working within the lab they essentially just feeded vinegar. Yeah,
that's that's all it requires. Wow. So if you have
to breathe out into rusty iron, would you rather survive
by eating only grain alcohol or by eating only vinegar? Um?
I feel like vinegar from for me, vinegar would probably
be healthier for you. For me, that's my personal choice.
(13:52):
But I am I'm not a microbe. So just as
an interesting side note, in this process, the bacteria Karl
Zimmern the Sinness article. The bacteria help transform the regular
old iron oxides, the rust particles in their environment into
the naturally fair magnetic mineral known as magnetite. So that's like,
you know, the strong natural magnetic rock you might find
(14:15):
in sediments around the world, and these bacteria helped produce
that magnetite by by by pushing off these electrons into it,
which sort of magnetizes it. Now we've been speaking kind
of metaphorically by calling this bacterial process breathing, because it's
not breathing in the exact same way we do. Like,
the bacteria don't have respiratory systems with lungs and alveola
(14:38):
and all that. We breathe by sucking in oxygen and
then transporting it around our bodies to the cells where
it needs to go, and then breathing out the molecular
waste products of our metabolism through the same gas exchange
system in the lungs. But the bacteria don't have lungs,
They don't suck rust particles into the body to allow
the electrons to attach to them. Uh, and so what's
(15:02):
going on there? Like according to Carl Zimmer's article, it
took Lovely and his colleague Dr. John Stoltz in their
labs years to figure out how this respiration process was
taking place. And what they discovered was that instead of
like sucking in the rust particles and breathing them out,
Geobacter exhaled by putting out electric wires. Yeah, this is amazing.
(15:26):
And of course, when we're saying wires we're talking about
micro filaments. Yeah, but they do, in a way function
like electric wires. I mean, they're they're conductive. They are long,
filamentous kind of conductive material that is there to transmit
a flow of electrons between potentials. So you've got to
build up of electrons as a waste product in the bacterium,
(15:48):
and then you've got a lower potential thing out there
that can accept them, like maybe a deposit of iron oxide,
and you pump the electrons out through this wire to
the iron oxide outside the cell. Yeah, and we're these
things are tiny too. We're talking about like three nanometers
in diameter. Yeah, extremely too. Though they can get pretty long. Yeah,
(16:09):
we can get pretty long in some cases. And then
we'll get into other species later. But there are species
with with with larger filaments. Yeah. Uh So, when you're
a geobacter and you since the presence of iron oxide
and your surroundings, basically what it seems like you do
is you sprout out these microscopic little filaments, each one
(16:30):
known as a pealis plural peely and bacterial peely are
fascinating in other respects too, because, for one thing, they
play a role in the bacterial process known as horizontal
gene transfer, and we've done a podcast on this before.
This is a really interesting phenomenon. Basically, bacteria, they don't
(16:51):
have sex in the way that like sexually reproducing eukaryotic
animals do. Write they reproduce a sexually, meaning they make
act copies of themselves in a process called binary fission.
They split off and create two daughter cells, not by
mating with other individuals and combining their DNA to create
an ad mixed offspring. But despite this, despite them not
(17:14):
having sexual reproduction, bacteria do engage in something kind of
like sex, and this is this process of horizontal gene
transfer where bacteria can meet up and share genetic material
between one another. And this doesn't always work out great
for us, because, for example, it is one of the
main methods by which bacteria acquire d NA for antibiotic resistance.
(17:37):
We just did an episode of our other podcast, Invention,
about the invention of antibiotics, and antibiotics are a you know,
a miraculous invention of the twentieth century, but one of
the big problems with them is that over time, the
diseases that we're fighting get better at overcoming these medicines. Yeah,
I think. I think the way we put it in
that episode is with with penicilla and and other antibiotics,
(18:01):
we're stealing a weapon from the you know, the eons
old war between a fungi and bacterium and uh, and
when we've stole the weapon, but the but the war
continues on and the the the the evolution of their
warfare continues, and in the way we use the fungal
weapon sort of accelerates the arms race, like provoked. It's
(18:26):
in a Cold war style, like provokes the other side
to uh make go with a with a build up,
you know, an arms build up, when that seems to
be what's happening on the bacterial side. Now we stole
like a fungal catapult. But now we're quickly advancing into
the age of where a fungal tribute SHA would be
a more appropriate that's right. We have to find those
(18:48):
those fungal tributes or develop them ourselves. I hope we do.
But for the but for the bacteria to share their
own tribute shape plans. What one of the things they
do is this horizontal transfer process. Specifically this process known
as conjugation, where to bacteria meet up and they're like,
let's hook up, and they extend a peliss between the
(19:10):
donor bacterium and the recipient bacterium, and this little hair
like filament hooks them together so they can share. Plasmids,
which are little segments of DNA, and peely also enhance
the virulence of bacteria by helping them bind two cells
in the host body. And this is the case in
disease causing strains of bacteria like Streptococcus or an e. Coli.
(19:31):
The plist can kind of hook them onto the cells
lining your the inside of your throat or in your gut,
or wherever it is they're trying to infect. But in
the case of Geobacter, the researchers who worked with Geobacter
originally concluded that the peely we're being used for another
purpose entirely, and that purpose was the off routing of
(19:52):
electricity into electro receptive molecules in the environment. So to
picture this as a again this is going to be
a very crude metaphor, but imagine if you were to
breathe instead of by sucking oxygen into your lungs and
exhaling CEO two, by shooting electric wires out of your
(20:13):
mouths into the environment, which would then attach to the
toaster and the TV and pour waste electricity out of
your lungs into those appliances. Oh that's pretty good. That
sounds like a good electric alien creature for a future
film or a past film. I mean done. Yeah, I
mean I can imagine Dan Ackroyd playing a character that
(20:33):
does this. Uh, you know, back in the nineties or so. Oh,
you know they're one of those nineties like a kind
of grimy computer monster movies. What was that one that
Jamie Lee Curtis was in about like a killer computer
virus that like just puts gross wires everywhere. Oh yeah,
this was I think Donald Sutherland was in it. Yeah,
it's not a ship or something. It was really bad.
(20:54):
It was like a sort of it was kind of
a take on the thing, but with this this cybernetic
blend of like wires and flesh. Uh. Yeah, it's like
a computer virus that decides that Earth is that the
humans are a pathogen and the virus, I think pathogeny.
It's called virus. Yeah. And I should note as a
as a follow up to what I was just saying
(21:16):
about the bacterial peely, it's not fully settled whether the
geobacter actually use peely as their electric wires, or whether
they use peely exclusively. Karl Zimmer's article notes that the
Yale physicist and Nikkil S. Malvankar and colleagues believe that
instead the bacteria use dedicated wires made out of organic
(21:39):
compounds called cytochromes. But the fact that Geobacter does pump
electrons out through biological wires of some sort doesn't seem
to be in dispute. It's just there are different ideas
about to what extent they're using different structures as the wires.
All right, on that note, we're going to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. All right, we're back.
(22:01):
So we've been talking about the idea of electroactive bacteria,
bacteria that in some metaphorical since, breathe by releasing excess
electrons that are the the end product of their metabolism
into things in their environment, like little deposits of iron oxide.
And they do this by sticking these wires out of
(22:23):
their cells that connect to things, and they can pump
the electricity out through those wires. But it doesn't stop there,
because researchers have also discovered that in some cases, the
electric wires put out by metal reducing bacteria like Geobacter
would not just go out into iron oxide in the
(22:44):
environment or into other metals in the environment, but sometimes
these wires would go out and connect to other species
of electroactive bacteria. And so the same way that Geobacter
metaphorically breathes by putting out electron low, some species of
bacteria can metaphorically eat by taking in electron flow, and
(23:06):
this energy intake allows the bacteria to convert carbon dioxide
into methane, kind of like how plants use direct energy
from the sunlight to power the chemical reaction that turns
carbon dioxide from the air into the sugars and the
carbon compounds that make up the bodies of plants. When
I'm sure I've said in a million times on the show,
(23:27):
but one of my favorite crazy facts about plants is
they make their bodies from the air. They don't make
their bodies from you know, the dirt or something, and
that it's it's the carbon from the carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere that becomes the wood beings of air and
sun basically totally well and to be fair and like
water from the ground and other minerals and stuff, but
(23:49):
primarily yes, primarily of air and sun. So yeah, so
if these bacterial species that that do this, if they
pair up, they can form these like cross networks of
underground bacterial wires where one species feeds another with its
waist electricity. So I was reading a BBC article on
(24:10):
electroactive bacteria by an author named Jasmine Fox Skelly, and
this article mentioned that it was not long after loveliest
discovery of the electrical properties of geobacter that the u
C l A microbiologist Kenneth Nielsen, who was quoted in
that article earlier describing all of you know, the respiration
of life is the flow of electrons before Nielsen found
(24:33):
another electronic screening bacterium, this one in the Oneida Lake
of New York State and published his findings in the
journal Science. And this was a very similar story, except
the bacterium here was not geobacter. It was shoe and
Ella on identis uh and and much the same way
that the geobacter metaphorically breathes iron oxide, this bacterium breathe
(24:56):
this oxygen when it's available, but when it's not, it
breathes manganese oxide, pumping electrons out into the external deposits
of the compound, though it can also pump electrons out
into other metals like iron but um. Unlike Geobacter, which
uses some form of wire to conduct electricity, quote, she
(25:18):
and Ella appears to shuttle electrons out of their cells
using transport molecules called flavians and stepping stone proteins embedded
in the outer membrane called cytochromes. So there we've got
this cytochromes being involved again. So we're starting to build
up a picture that there are many different ways for
bacteria to kind of breathe electrically or be electro active
(25:42):
in one way or another. And these tend to be
bacteria that that don't have access to air, or don't
or only do this win they don't have access to air,
and so so Carl Zimmer's article also discusses the work
of Danish microbiologist Lars Peter Nielsen, And this is different
spelling of Nils, different Nielsen. This is a two Nielsen night.
(26:03):
But it's once an in e A L and one's
an in I E L. Personally, no offense to the
other guy, but I'm more of an inn I E
L kind of guy. Yeah, it stands out a little
bit more so. This guy, Lars Peter Nielsen, discovered an
electrical bacterial ecosystem within the mud from the Bay of
(26:23):
our Hoots. I hope I'm saying that right. It's a
coastal area on the western side of the main peninsula
of denmarks are roos A A R H U s.
So basically within a core of mud sample here, you'd
have bacteria lower down down in the mud with anaerobic metabolism. Again,
(26:44):
that means oxygen free. They don't need oxygen to live,
and they would produce hydrogen sulfide. Is a waste product
of their way of life. And hydrogen sulfide we've talked about,
I'm sure plenty of times on the show before. It's
a it's a poisonous gas that smells like rotten eggs.
It's just like it's bad stuff. It smells like death.
You'd commonly find it in places where biological material is
(27:06):
being decomposed in the absence of oxygen, so again anaerobic decomposition.
Like you will smell this stuff wafting up out of
swamps and out of sewers and stuff like that. It
was one of the bye products that people had to
protect their faces from when they went down to fight
the soap dragon. Yeah. The fact, I don't know why
I said protect their faces. I mean like wear gas masks, right,
(27:29):
I don't mean like it's going to hurt their faces
out at them and try to attach. It's like the
face hugger. Uh no, no, like it's like you don't
want to breathe it um now. Of course, in order
for you to smell hydrogen sulfide, in order to smell
this nasty bacterial byproduct in a mar sura sewer, the
gas has to bubble up to the surface and waft
(27:52):
out right. But Nielsen noticed that it wasn't doing that
in this mud. Something was consuming this poisonous waste product
before it buoyed up to the surface of the mud
and escaped. But as Carl Zimmer writes in this article,
if other bacteria below we're breaking down this hydrogen sulfide
without oxygen to aid in the metabolic process, again, you
(28:14):
would have an unacceptable build up of electrons, and so
this excess electricity would have to go somewhere. And what
they found is exactly what you might guess. The bacteria
were extending biological electric wires built out of thousands of
cells surrounded by a conductive protein sheath. Uh kind of
(28:35):
like the you know, the sheath you might see on
a copper wire to protect it, except it's the other
way around. In this case. The sheath is what's conducting
the electricity. So it's kind of like if you had
like plastic surrounded by copper, I guess, which would be
a bad design for a wire, but it works in
this case. And these wires are known as cable bacteria.
The cable bacteria allow the waste electricity to flow out
(28:59):
to the surface, and once the electrons reach the surface,
there you've got surface bacteria which have access to oxygen,
unlike the bacteria below because they're on the surface of course.
So these bacteria use the electricity to cause a chemical
reaction between oxygen and hydrogen, the waste product of which
is water. And to quote from Karl's article quote and
(29:23):
cable bacteria grow to astonishing densities. One square inch of
sediment may contain as much as eight miles of cables.
Dr Nilsen eventually learned to spot cable bacteria with the
naked eye. Their wires look like spider silk reflecting the sun. Beautiful,
and you can look at pictures of this. Actually, I agree,
(29:44):
they do look kind of like spider silk. They're kind of, uh,
these glistening, almost invisible filaments that can kind of catch
the light in certain ways. Very beautiful. But one cool
thing that I guess we have to consider is they're
discovering that these electroactive bacteria are found all over the place.
(30:05):
They're abundant in ecosystems throughout the world. And given how
abundant these electroactive bacteria are, it's not inconceivable that they
play a major role in regulating various forms of geochemistry,
like maybe regulating what kinds of minerals you would find
in the top soil producing magnetite, maybe regulating the chemistry
(30:26):
of the atmosphere, or regulating the chemistry of the oceans. Right, So,
I mean other they come here is that this is
not just some rare, obscure thing that you encountering only
like you know, some sort of bizarre extreme environment. But
they're they're they're found all over and could have a
very important role. Now, primarily the examples we've been looking
at so far have been bacteria that sort of pump
(30:48):
out electricity in order to metaphorically breathe. You know, the
electricity is this waste product, so the extra electrons have
to be disposed of and to something that will accept them.
But we already mentioned that it does go both ways.
Like also mentioned in h Fox Skellies article for the
BBC is the idea that um that scientists have been
(31:09):
finding more bacteria that simply are able to consume pure electricity,
that consume electrons when they need to, And she gives
the example of a University of Cincinnati microbiologists named Innett
Row who's found several bacterial species that live on the
ocean floor and apparently they can live off of pure
electrical current if they need to. It's not that they
(31:32):
naturally make make their lives this way, but it seems
like this is something that they are able to to
sustain themselves without dying for a period of time. So
if I understand correctly, this is different than an organism
that just like thrives on pure electricity with no food.
But there there is even evidence of like you know,
(31:53):
we were talking earlier about these relationships between electroactive organisms
and one bacterium having electric city is a waste product
and then routing it to a bacterium that will accept
it as a as an incoming energy product. And there's
even evidence of like cross species or cross organism type
electrical grids spanning different kingdoms of life, and this example
(32:16):
being the electrical cooperation between bacteria and archaea in deep
ocean floor habitats that are rich with methane uh to
to quote from Fox Skellies article, the archaea feed on
electrons from methane, oxidizing the gas to generate carbonate. They
then pass the electrons onto their partner bacteria along the
(32:37):
nano wires, which act like power cables. Finally, the bacteria
deposit the electrons onto sulfate, producing energy that the cell
can use in the process. And so we don't know
how far back these types of relationships go, but it's
easy to imagine these these types of cooperation evolving billions
of years ago, especially before Earth's atmosphere underwent the gray
(33:00):
poisoning when all the oxygen showed up. All right, we're
gonna take a quick break. When we come back. We're
going to get to an area that a lot of
you are probably thinking about like, you know, if we
have we're talking about the organisms that they utilize electricity,
they're producing these these nano filaments. Uh, then there's got
to be a way that we could harness that power
(33:21):
ourselves put them to work. Yeah, that's exactly what we're
going to discuss when we come back. Thank alright, we're back.
So if you're listening to this this podcast via some
sort of an electronic device, I mean, we electronics are
are kind of our thing right as a species, and
so it stands to reason that as we discover these
(33:45):
these these bacteria that are they're using electricity, that are
that are creating these little filaments that we eat envisioned
ways to again harness their power. I don't know about you.
I listen to my podcast by plugging directly into bacterial
ats like I've got a I've got a big stroma
light in my house, and I just jack in, Well,
that's not that's not as as as crazy distant from
(34:09):
the reality. The possible realities we're going to discuss is
one might think it's it's a little crazy, but but yeah,
when you when you think about these actual electroactive bacteria
that there do seem to be some potentials just one example, Like,
there are all kinds of ideas where people have talked
about using electroactive bacteria as as a potential electrical sources.
(34:30):
But one of the many ideas I came across was
to use the electrical potential of geobacter for small scale
energy purposes in Peru. So I was reading a few
articles from about how researchers at the University of Engineering
and Technology in Peru were pioneering a method to draw
usable electricity directly from the soil, specifically using the outflow
(34:55):
of electrons from the respiration of geobacters. Now this is
meaningful in in the context of what they were doing
in Peru, because some villages and dwellings in the Peruvian
rainforest don't have connections to the electrical grid mini don't
at the time they were doing this project. The project
leaders claimed that it was like fort of villages in
(35:16):
the rainforest did not have connections, and those that do
have connections are at risk to lose power entirely when
lines are knocked out by floods, as happened in March.
And so this means of course, after it gets dark,
people can't read, kids can't study for school unless they
use like kerosene lamps, which are apparently unhealthy and are
hard on the eyes. I can imagine that. So this method,
(35:40):
developed by ut Ec in partnership with a company called
FCB Mayo, works to charge batteries and power LED lamps
with a special bioelectric box. And the box has a
plant on top with roots planted in the soil, and
then electrodes plunged into this grid of little so oil
buckets that are full of geobactors, and the metabolic interaction
(36:04):
between the plant and the geobactors generates excess electric charge
in the soil, and that electric charge gets routed up
through the electrodes that are planted in the soil, whisks
those free electrons away to charge a battery, which in
turn powers the LED lamp. Now we're not sure how
scalable this individual technology is, but it shows the general
(36:24):
principle that you can draw small, at least small amounts
of power or electricity directly from electric bacteria and the
soil when other power sources are not readily available. And
this seems possibly like an interesting alternative to say, you know,
those small scale solar panels that you see being used
to power individual devices or lights, you know, things like
(36:45):
that like various garden gnomes and whatnot that light up
or their garden gnomes they get power. Yeah, I think so.
You see, this is like the main place I feel
like one tends to see this sort of technology, like
little little lights that go in your yard that have
little solar panel on them, you know. Uh. But um oh,
I guess I've just never seen one mounted in a gnome,
but I see it now. It can have red light
(37:05):
up eyes. Yeah. I mean I assume there's a no
there has someone has had to have created one. Wanted
to know. But you know, it's one thing to to
to power an LED lamp. But I think this does,
you know, drive home that even if you're only talking
about producing such small amounts of electricity to power you know,
you know, very low energy lighting effects, that still can
(37:25):
make a huge difference in the right circumstances. Yeah, it can.
And you can imagine using elements of this bacterial electro
biology in concert with other technologies, uh, to build up
more capabilities. Like in his Times article, Carl Zimmer mentions
that a Cornell University researcher named Buzz Barstow and colleagues
are trying to figure out if bacteria could be of
(37:47):
use when paired with solar panels, so not in place
of them, but working in concert with them, and the
idea is that the solar panels would convert the sunlight
into electric current, which would then be routed into bacterial
wires down down to these colonies of bacterium called shoe
and Ella. That's the one I mentioned earlier that was
discovered in Lake Oneida, shoe and Ella, and that could
(38:11):
use the energy from the electrons to metabolize organic compounds
and turn it into fuel. Yeah, this would really be
key for for carbon fixation. So so the studying question
here is two thousand nineteen study title Electrical Energy Storage
with Engineered Biological Systems published in the Journal of Biological Engineering,
and we're essentially talking It kind of comes back to
(38:31):
the Virus movie we're talking about because we're essentially talking
about a cybernetic energy storage system a synthesis of biological
and non biological electrochemical engineering. The authors point out that
non biological methods for using electricity for carbon fixation they
started to match and even exceed the capability of microbes
(38:53):
but that biological methods are better at pumping out the
complex sort of complex molecules that are ultimately necessary for
biofuels and polymers. So it's it's kind of a way
to improve you know, the photosynthesis in this situation, Like
you think of it as like photosynthesis plus or photosynthesis
two point oh. Nice. So it's like making an artificial tree,
(39:17):
except it's a solar panel and a bunch of bacteria. Yeah.
Well yeah, it's like it's it's part bacteria, part solar
system technology and uh and and the results, yeah, can
could could help with carbon fixation. Yeah. Another thing Carl
mentions is that the electrical bacterial filaments could be used
as some form of sensors, like a little little tiny
(39:38):
electro sensitive or conductive wires can be useful to you know,
essentially for signaling purposes. And he gives the example of, uh,
you know, being attached to some kind of wearable technology
that would touch the skin, and these little bacterial nano
wires could detect chemical changes in the properties of our
sweat and that might be biologically useful information that can
(40:00):
be transmitted to a device that might tell you, I
don't know what you know there's something wrong with your sweat, dude,
you need to Yeah. Yeah, just basically this gets into
the whole area of like, to whatever extent we can
develop dependable like real time biomonitoring medical medical monitoring technology
like this kind of a you know, a huge positive
(40:20):
impact on human health. But yeah, so Carl Carl mentioned
specifically the work of Derek Lovely again. Uh So he
you know, again the guy who discovered geobacter and uh
and has since expanded in into discovering several other microbe species,
just as other researchers have also discovered other microbe species
that have these same capabilities. And he's pointed out that
(40:40):
while geobacters filaments are super thin, like three nanometers in diameter,
some are more really some of the more really recently
discovered bacteria have fatter filaments and uh and this is
especially useful for us if we're looking to manipulate them.
If you want to manipulate them into some sort of
an electronic device, like an nano wire sensors that we're
(41:01):
talking about, it pays to have something a little on
a you know, a slightly larger scale so that we
can we can actually work with it. Lovely and Uh
and his co authors. They also point out that protein
nano wire like this would have a number of advantage
over silicon nano wires. So if we're talking about the biocompatibility,
the state of the stability, the potential for modification into
(41:23):
various biomolecules and quote chemicals of medical or environmental interest,
and plus the sustainable method of producing these nano wires
will make it easier to build the sort of devices
we're trying to make and hoping to make in the future.
He points out that we've been making the thimble sized
amounts of the sort of you know, wire materials that
(41:45):
we need for for the future we're trying to build.
But what we need we need buckets of them. We
need buckets of these nano wires. And this is a
possible means by which we can grow buckets of nano wires. Oh,
it almost sounds like the early penicilla problem, you know,
with the Oxford researchers in the lab and they were
working with Alexander Fleming strain of penicillin. We talked about
(42:06):
this in a recent episode of Invention. Uh. You know,
they could they could create this penicillin from the Penicillium fungus,
the mold, but they couldn't make enough of it that
it would be useful. Like the first time they tried
to treat somebody with it who had a deadly infection.
The guy was successfully treated for a few days, but
(42:27):
the guy with the infection eventually died because they ran
out of penicillin. They just couldn't make enough of it.
And they later uh, it only broke through his medicine
because they discovered a more productive strain that could make
more of the stuff. Yeah, And I want to come
back to the the the the the sustainability aspect of
this too. The idea here being that if you know,
(42:47):
you could have these these devices and when they're done,
you're not just like it's not going into a dump,
it's not potentially being you know, part of some sort
of toxic waste. It is just you know, biodegrading into
the environment. Oh yeah, I mean electronic waste is actually
a big deal. Like we you know, we we don't
see a lot of it. But what happens to all
these electronic components when we're done with them and the
(43:09):
thing breaks and you just throw it away. Possibility to
be able to grow these things. I mean obviously that's
that that would have tremendous advantage. Yeah, absolutely, and and
that they'd be biodegradable just you know, some other bacterium
just eats them up when you're done. But another thing
that I've read about these electroactive bacteria is that some
of them are extremely good candidates for the bioremediation of waste,
(43:32):
including toxic and radioactive waste, where they can take something like,
you know, a type of radioactive waste, say, like you know,
a type of uranium, and they can, through their their
metabolic process, reduce that uranium to say, a less soluble form,
So they're not going to completely destroy it, but they
might change it into a form that makes it less
(43:55):
damaging to the environment. And the same could be true
for other forms of pollution. Another another thing I've seen
it referenced as the the idea of using bacteria like
this to clean up oil spills. You know that you
can like eat eat hydrocarbons that are in places they
shouldn't be, right, Plastic waste being another another big one. Yeah,
So it's interesting We've been championing fung gui on the
(44:16):
show for a little bit here and now it's it's
bacteria's time to shine. We're back in the land of Jubilex. Yeah,
jubile X being the d n d H demon lord
of slimes and oozes, which in bast episode we kind
of associated loosely with bacteria, and it is the arch
enemy of Zogdomoi, the demon lord of funga. I raised
(44:38):
the flag of Jubilex for today. Yes, that's my side,
all right. So there we have it. Um, there's you
know they're there are various areas here where we could
branch off, so you know, if you're interested in hearing
more episodes about about bacteria or about various means of
dealing with radioactive waste, but we would love to hear
from you. In the meantime, check out stuff to All
your mind dot com. That's where you find all the episodes.
(45:00):
And if you want to support the show, you need
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tell household pets about our show, and then make sure
you rate and review us wherever you have the power
to do so. Huge thanks as always to our excellent
audio producer, Maya Cole. If you'd like to get in
touch with us with feedback, on this episode or any other.
To suggest a topic for the future, or just to
(45:20):
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your
Mind is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio is at the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(45:42):
your favorite shows. One
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. Can we figured we'd start off today
talking about our favorite electricity monsters. Robert, what's your favorite
electricity monster? Oh? You know, my, my, my, just gut
(00:25):
instinct answers to go with Blanca from Street Fighter. You know,
he's the green skinned and I was, I was. I
looked into this a little bit. I was never sure
why he had green skin. Apparently some alleged backstory involving
chlorophyll um, but I don't know. It ends up with
he's like a beast creature, a beast man with green
skin and like bright orange hair, wearing board shorts, wearing
(00:48):
board shorts and just kind of doing this this, this
kind of hulking, uh pose bent over, and then he
can produce electricity. Basically has the powers since he's kind
of been kind of a you know, a mildum of
various Amazonian things. He has the powers of an electric eagle,
and so he can shock his opponents that way. That's
(01:10):
a good one. Uh. There there are a few really
good electricity movies. By really good, I mean really bad
from the nineteen eighties and nineties. Did you ever see
the Pulse? I don't think I ever did. I think
there was another horror movie called Pulse, which was about
something else. So this one was about. Uh, it's like
some family living in a house and like a regular
(01:30):
suburban neighborhood in California in the nineteen eighties, and an
evil burst of electricity goes throughout goes out through the mains. Uh.
I don't remember if there's like an evil storm or
like an alien arrives or something. But for some reason,
there's this pulse of of killer electricity and it goes
into their house and it turns all the appliances against them,
(01:50):
so the TV starts trying to kill him and everything,
a real maximum over drive scenario. But it's like it's
sold as like the the malevolence is delivered to actually
through the electrical wires the wrong voltage or something. Yeah,
I guess. So, yeah, I was thinking about this, like,
what are some other examples of electric creatures or humanoids?
And I mean, obviously I thought of of of electric
(02:13):
Christopher Lambert from from Mortal Kombat another fighting game. Yeah,
but but so many, so often is the case you
see individuals with some sort of pyrotechnic mobility, you know.
Like one of a film that we've talked about before
has been the Toby Hooper film, in which Brad Dorriff
(02:34):
played a like a pyromaniac who could catch things on
fire with his brain. He's got like like pyro kinesis,
but he doesn't want it. He's not like a you know,
a villain out there like Piro and the X Men,
just throwing fireballs wherever he wants. It's more like every
he's kind of like the Hulk. He's like fire Hulk.
Every time he gets upset, he starts catching things on fire.
(02:54):
But he also like burns the heck out of himself too,
which wasn't a nice twist. And of course Brad Dorriff
is wonderful and in that film there are at least
portions of it where he's it's it's a rare film
or Brad Dorriff is the lead and he's sort of
playing a regular human in some of the scenes. So
it's interesting to see. But but so often is the
case you see fire based powers in these characters and
(03:17):
creatures as opposed to electric based powers. And it's kind
of weird when you think about it, because, as we'll
discussing this episode, electricity is more tied in with biology
than fire. And even from the human perspective perspective, you
know who among us has not harnessed the power of
electricity by by walking across a carpeted floor in the
(03:38):
wintertime and then shocking somebody with a touch. You do
that on purpose? I have in the past done it
on purpose. Yes, yeah, but it's pretty not announce of
guilt on your face. Well, one of one of the
things I do like to do when it gets cold,
when the conditions are just right, have my son go
down a curly slide, build up static electricity and then
(03:59):
give me a high. I've on the way down, and
at times it has been stiff enough to like leave
a numbness in my hands, like when you feel it
in your wrist kind of in the bone. That's creepy,
real shocking power. I don't know if there's ever been
like an actually really scary electricity monster movie. The other
(04:19):
main one I was thinking of is one of my
favorite cheesy mid mid career West Craven movies, which is shocker.
I think that's from nineteen or so, and it's got
Mitch Poleggi or Poleggi, the guy who plays Skinner on
the X Files. Uh, he plays the villain. He's like
a serial killer who does some like evil black magic
ritual to turn himself into electricity after he gets killed
(04:42):
in the electric chair. That's right. I remember saying I
never saw it, but I remember seeing the boxes for it,
and he's in an electric chair on the You should
see it sometime. It's a laugh riot and he's Oh,
he's just like acting, I mean, beat galaxies beyond normal
levels of acting is uh. Would you say it's an
electric performance? I would say he is a live wire.
(05:04):
But yeah, So I think you're right about the idea
that maybe electric monsters should be more biologically intuitive than
pyrokinetic or fire throwing monsters or even fire breathing dragons,
because you know, it shouldn't come as any surprise that
the use of electricity by living organisms predates the technological
(05:25):
uses predates you know, Tesla and medicine or even Franklin
and Galvani and all that, Like all kinds of animals
use electricity in various ways. Now they're the really noticeable
charismatic uses of electricity, like how sharks and rays have
electro sensory organs known as the ampullae of Lorenzini, which
they used to sense very faint electric currents transmitted through
(05:46):
water by potential prey animals. And then you've got the
electrogenic organisms that like generally aquatic organisms that emit strong
electric currents, maybe too stun prey or two deploys a
defensive weapon. And these would include things like electric fish,
electric catfish, and raise. Yeah. Yeah, the electric eel is
certainly the electric animal par excellence. Uh, though it's always
(06:10):
worth reminding everyone, and it's not really an eel. It
has more it's more related to a catfish. Oh, I
don't think I knew that. Well, I didn't know they
were electric catfish, but I didn't know the eel was one, right, Yeah,
I mean you look at it, if you you know,
fortunate enough to see one in a tank somewhere or
in the wild, Uh, you know you're gonna notice that
it doesn't really look like an eel. It's uh, it's
(06:31):
it's it's a very curious looking creature. Have you ever
seen a de fleshed eel skull. Oh, I don't know
that I have it is one of them. Is usually
don't leave them on when I go sushi. You should.
You should look up an eel skull. Sometimes it might
be different for different species, but at least some eel
skulls are like the most metal thing in nature. It's amazing.
But anyway, we today we wanted to to think about
(06:53):
electric organisms. But instead of focusing on these larger organisms
that use electricity, may be in a sensory capacity or
as a weapon of some sort, we wanted to go
down to zoom in with the microscope and to take
a look at the world of micro organisms that deal
in the currency of the Holy fire, the amber, the electricity.
(07:15):
So I just wanted to start by saying by giving
a shout out that I got the idea to do
this episode after I read a really interesting article a
couple of weeks ago in the New York Times by
previous Stuff to blow your mind. Guest Carl Zimmer, Oh, yes, yeah,
that was a tremendous episode. It was great to chatting
with him. I'd love to have him back on the show.
Sometimes we should see about that if we get him
back on the show, then he becomes a friend of
(07:36):
the show. That's the way it works two appearances. Two
appearances make you a friend of the show, so just
one is previous guest. I almost said friend of the show,
but I didn't want to presume. I think those are
the rules. Yes, uh so, of course electricity. You know,
it's generally thought of as the flow of electrons. You
might have other ways of defining it. You could maybe
define it other ways in terms of electrical potential, like
(07:57):
a positive or negative charge. But generally you've got current.
If you've got electrons flowing that, you think of that
as some form of electricity. And there are ways in
which the metabolism of our bodies could be considered electric.
For example, what is actually happening when we breathe. I
don't know if I've ever thought of it quite this
(08:19):
way before, but I was reading an article in New
Scientists from July which quotes the U c l A
microbiologists Kenneth Nielsen in characterizing the most basic biochemistry of
life as a flow of electrons. So basically, think about
it like this. You eat carbon based compounds, you take
in that chemical energy, and that's gonna be molecules like sugars,
(08:42):
and these molecules, these carbon based compounds like sugars, have
excess electrons, and then cells in the body break down
those compounds and they pass on the extra electrons through
a series of chemical reactions that power the body, and
part by making a dinascene triphosphate or a t P,
which is the chemical energy transport molecule that that captures
(09:04):
the energy obtained through the breakdown of food and then
uses it to power things that happen inside ourselves. I've
I've sometimes seen a TP characterized as an energy storage molecule,
but that's not quite right. That would be more like
fats or sugars or something. A TP is like it's
like a car for energy, you know, it carries it
from one place to another in the cell. And apparently
(09:24):
the flow of electrons is an indispensable part of making
that a TP that powers our cells. But eventually the
extra electrons, since they're flowing, they've got to go somewhere
at the end of this chain of chemical reactions. You
can't just keep building up extra electrons in the body
until you become a humanliding jar or you become the
guy from Shocker, and you just electrocute people by touching them.
(09:47):
So you have to pass on the electrons onto a
molecule that will accept them. And in our case, that
molecule is oxygen. You breathe in the oxygen, and that
oxygen we breathe in goes around to the body, to
the cells, and it accepts those extra electrons that are
the waste product of our metabolism. Uh, and it bonds
with carbon molecules and then you breathe out this waste
(10:08):
product as CEO two. And to quote from this researcher
Kenneth Nielsen, as as quoted in in New Scientists, that's
the way we make all our energy, and it's the
same for every organism on this planet. Electrons must flow
in order for energy to be gained. This is why
when someone suffocates another person, they're dead within minutes. You
(10:29):
have stopped the supply of oxygen, so the electrons can
no longer flow. So choking somebody is kind of like
it's like putting a resistor in the electric circuit. That's interesting.
I mean this is all getting down to the fact
that we're all essentially bioelectric organisms. Yeah, that's exactly right,
and it's not just us like this is basically the
rule for all kinds of life forms, from humans to
(10:50):
coconut crabs to lots of single celled organisms. Pretty much
every organism needs to create an electron flow by taking
in food with that excess electrons and then running that
through a series of chemical reactions to extract usable energy
for cells, and then dumping those electrons out into some
kind of electron accepting waste bucket like oxygen molecules. And
(11:14):
this is even true for bacteria, where for many species
oxygen must be present as this terminal receptor for the
electrons at the end of the metabolic line. But there
are some prokaryotic organisms, single celled organisms that can't or
don't use oxygen, and these are known as anaerobic bacteria,
and they live in places where oxygen doesn't reach or
(11:37):
where oxygen is very limited. And the examples of this
might be places like deep in the sediment along a river,
or buried in a sea bed, or even ever a
deep underground in oil wells. I mean, try to imagine
that that far underground, that like life is thriving in
some way. We've also talked about them thriving in some
human created sewer environments. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, all all
(12:01):
these environments, especially these environments that are cut off from
the surface by by mud or sediment or even by
vast expanses of dead rock. So if the electrons have
to flow for life to go on, how do these
anaerobic bacteria survive without oxygen molecules to accept the excess
electrons at the end of the metabolism and basically to
(12:25):
breathe out. How you know, where do the electrons go
when they're done with them? So here's where we get
to a bacterial discovery story. So in the mid nineteen eighties,
I think around nineteen seven, the American microbiologist Derek Lovely
was out pulling up samples of sediment from the Potomac River.
And one of these samples from the Potomac River, it
(12:46):
was around Washington, d C contained one of these weird
single celled organisms. It was a bacterium called geo bacter
Metalla reducens. And like other bacteria, this bacterium would be
again the electron flow of its metabolism by consuming organic
compounds that have excess electrons, for example, ethanol, which is alcohol.
(13:08):
So there's some ethanol in its environment, it can eat that,
but it would end its metabolism by passing the excess
electrons off into iron oxides, which are rust. So this
is a life form that can survive by eating grain
alcohol and breathing out rusty iron. Yeah. I've read and
lovely um some some of his papers that when they're
(13:30):
working within the lab they essentially just feeded vinegar. Yeah,
that's that's all it requires. Wow. So if you have
to breathe out into rusty iron, would you rather survive
by eating only grain alcohol or by eating only vinegar? Um?
I feel like vinegar from for me, vinegar would probably
be healthier for you. For me, that's my personal choice.
(13:52):
But I am I'm not a microbe. So just as
an interesting side note, in this process, the bacteria Karl
Zimmern the Sinness article. The bacteria help transform the regular
old iron oxides, the rust particles in their environment into
the naturally fair magnetic mineral known as magnetite. So that's like,
you know, the strong natural magnetic rock you might find
(14:15):
in sediments around the world, and these bacteria helped produce
that magnetite by by by pushing off these electrons into it,
which sort of magnetizes it. Now we've been speaking kind
of metaphorically by calling this bacterial process breathing, because it's
not breathing in the exact same way we do. Like,
the bacteria don't have respiratory systems with lungs and alveola
(14:38):
and all that. We breathe by sucking in oxygen and
then transporting it around our bodies to the cells where
it needs to go, and then breathing out the molecular
waste products of our metabolism through the same gas exchange
system in the lungs. But the bacteria don't have lungs,
They don't suck rust particles into the body to allow
the electrons to attach to them. Uh, and so what's
(15:02):
going on there? Like according to Carl Zimmer's article, it
took Lovely and his colleague Dr. John Stoltz in their
labs years to figure out how this respiration process was
taking place. And what they discovered was that instead of
like sucking in the rust particles and breathing them out,
Geobacter exhaled by putting out electric wires. Yeah, this is amazing.
(15:26):
And of course, when we're saying wires we're talking about
micro filaments. Yeah, but they do, in a way function
like electric wires. I mean, they're they're conductive. They are long,
filamentous kind of conductive material that is there to transmit
a flow of electrons between potentials. So you've got to
build up of electrons as a waste product in the bacterium,
(15:48):
and then you've got a lower potential thing out there
that can accept them, like maybe a deposit of iron oxide,
and you pump the electrons out through this wire to
the iron oxide outside the cell. Yeah, and we're these
things are tiny too. We're talking about like three nanometers
in diameter. Yeah, extremely too. Though they can get pretty long. Yeah,
(16:09):
we can get pretty long in some cases. And then
we'll get into other species later. But there are species
with with with larger filaments. Yeah. Uh So, when you're
a geobacter and you since the presence of iron oxide
and your surroundings, basically what it seems like you do
is you sprout out these microscopic little filaments, each one
(16:30):
known as a pealis plural peely and bacterial peely are
fascinating in other respects too, because, for one thing, they
play a role in the bacterial process known as horizontal
gene transfer, and we've done a podcast on this before.
This is a really interesting phenomenon. Basically, bacteria, they don't
(16:51):
have sex in the way that like sexually reproducing eukaryotic
animals do. Write they reproduce a sexually, meaning they make
act copies of themselves in a process called binary fission.
They split off and create two daughter cells, not by
mating with other individuals and combining their DNA to create
an ad mixed offspring. But despite this, despite them not
(17:14):
having sexual reproduction, bacteria do engage in something kind of
like sex, and this is this process of horizontal gene
transfer where bacteria can meet up and share genetic material
between one another. And this doesn't always work out great
for us, because, for example, it is one of the
main methods by which bacteria acquire d NA for antibiotic resistance.
(17:37):
We just did an episode of our other podcast, Invention,
about the invention of antibiotics, and antibiotics are a you know,
a miraculous invention of the twentieth century, but one of
the big problems with them is that over time, the
diseases that we're fighting get better at overcoming these medicines. Yeah,
I think. I think the way we put it in
that episode is with with penicilla and and other antibiotics,
(18:01):
we're stealing a weapon from the you know, the eons
old war between a fungi and bacterium and uh, and
when we've stole the weapon, but the but the war
continues on and the the the the evolution of their
warfare continues, and in the way we use the fungal
weapon sort of accelerates the arms race, like provoked. It's
(18:26):
in a Cold war style, like provokes the other side
to uh make go with a with a build up,
you know, an arms build up, when that seems to
be what's happening on the bacterial side. Now we stole
like a fungal catapult. But now we're quickly advancing into
the age of where a fungal tribute SHA would be
a more appropriate that's right. We have to find those
(18:48):
those fungal tributes or develop them ourselves. I hope we do.
But for the but for the bacteria to share their
own tribute shape plans. What one of the things they
do is this horizontal transfer process. Specifically this process known
as conjugation, where to bacteria meet up and they're like,
let's hook up, and they extend a peliss between the
(19:10):
donor bacterium and the recipient bacterium, and this little hair
like filament hooks them together so they can share. Plasmids,
which are little segments of DNA, and peely also enhance
the virulence of bacteria by helping them bind two cells
in the host body. And this is the case in
disease causing strains of bacteria like Streptococcus or an e. Coli.
(19:31):
The plist can kind of hook them onto the cells
lining your the inside of your throat or in your gut,
or wherever it is they're trying to infect. But in
the case of Geobacter, the researchers who worked with Geobacter
originally concluded that the peely we're being used for another
purpose entirely, and that purpose was the off routing of
(19:52):
electricity into electro receptive molecules in the environment. So to
picture this as a again this is going to be
a very crude metaphor, but imagine if you were to
breathe instead of by sucking oxygen into your lungs and
exhaling CEO two, by shooting electric wires out of your
(20:13):
mouths into the environment, which would then attach to the
toaster and the TV and pour waste electricity out of
your lungs into those appliances. Oh that's pretty good. That
sounds like a good electric alien creature for a future
film or a past film. I mean done. Yeah, I
mean I can imagine Dan Ackroyd playing a character that
(20:33):
does this. Uh, you know, back in the nineties or so. Oh,
you know they're one of those nineties like a kind
of grimy computer monster movies. What was that one that
Jamie Lee Curtis was in about like a killer computer
virus that like just puts gross wires everywhere. Oh yeah,
this was I think Donald Sutherland was in it. Yeah,
it's not a ship or something. It was really bad.
(20:54):
It was like a sort of it was kind of
a take on the thing, but with this this cybernetic
blend of like wires and flesh. Uh. Yeah, it's like
a computer virus that decides that Earth is that the
humans are a pathogen and the virus, I think pathogeny.
It's called virus. Yeah. And I should note as a
as a follow up to what I was just saying
(21:16):
about the bacterial peely, it's not fully settled whether the
geobacter actually use peely as their electric wires, or whether
they use peely exclusively. Karl Zimmer's article notes that the
Yale physicist and Nikkil S. Malvankar and colleagues believe that
instead the bacteria use dedicated wires made out of organic
(21:39):
compounds called cytochromes. But the fact that Geobacter does pump
electrons out through biological wires of some sort doesn't seem
to be in dispute. It's just there are different ideas
about to what extent they're using different structures as the wires.
All right, on that note, we're going to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. All right, we're back.
(22:01):
So we've been talking about the idea of electroactive bacteria,
bacteria that in some metaphorical since, breathe by releasing excess
electrons that are the the end product of their metabolism
into things in their environment, like little deposits of iron oxide.
And they do this by sticking these wires out of
(22:23):
their cells that connect to things, and they can pump
the electricity out through those wires. But it doesn't stop there,
because researchers have also discovered that in some cases, the
electric wires put out by metal reducing bacteria like Geobacter
would not just go out into iron oxide in the
(22:44):
environment or into other metals in the environment, but sometimes
these wires would go out and connect to other species
of electroactive bacteria. And so the same way that Geobacter
metaphorically breathes by putting out electron low, some species of
bacteria can metaphorically eat by taking in electron flow, and
(23:06):
this energy intake allows the bacteria to convert carbon dioxide
into methane, kind of like how plants use direct energy
from the sunlight to power the chemical reaction that turns
carbon dioxide from the air into the sugars and the
carbon compounds that make up the bodies of plants. When
I'm sure I've said in a million times on the show,
(23:27):
but one of my favorite crazy facts about plants is
they make their bodies from the air. They don't make
their bodies from you know, the dirt or something, and
that it's it's the carbon from the carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere that becomes the wood beings of air and
sun basically totally well and to be fair and like
water from the ground and other minerals and stuff, but
(23:49):
primarily yes, primarily of air and sun. So yeah, so
if these bacterial species that that do this, if they
pair up, they can form these like cross networks of
underground bacterial wires where one species feeds another with its
waist electricity. So I was reading a BBC article on
(24:10):
electroactive bacteria by an author named Jasmine Fox Skelly, and
this article mentioned that it was not long after loveliest
discovery of the electrical properties of geobacter that the u
C l A microbiologist Kenneth Nielsen, who was quoted in
that article earlier describing all of you know, the respiration
of life is the flow of electrons before Nielsen found
(24:33):
another electronic screening bacterium, this one in the Oneida Lake
of New York State and published his findings in the
journal Science. And this was a very similar story, except
the bacterium here was not geobacter. It was shoe and
Ella on identis uh and and much the same way
that the geobacter metaphorically breathes iron oxide, this bacterium breathe
(24:56):
this oxygen when it's available, but when it's not, it
breathes manganese oxide, pumping electrons out into the external deposits
of the compound, though it can also pump electrons out
into other metals like iron but um. Unlike Geobacter, which
uses some form of wire to conduct electricity, quote, she
(25:18):
and Ella appears to shuttle electrons out of their cells
using transport molecules called flavians and stepping stone proteins embedded
in the outer membrane called cytochromes. So there we've got
this cytochromes being involved again. So we're starting to build
up a picture that there are many different ways for
bacteria to kind of breathe electrically or be electro active
(25:42):
in one way or another. And these tend to be
bacteria that that don't have access to air, or don't
or only do this win they don't have access to air,
and so so Carl Zimmer's article also discusses the work
of Danish microbiologist Lars Peter Nielsen, And this is different
spelling of Nils, different Nielsen. This is a two Nielsen night.
(26:03):
But it's once an in e A L and one's
an in I E L. Personally, no offense to the
other guy, but I'm more of an inn I E
L kind of guy. Yeah, it stands out a little
bit more so. This guy, Lars Peter Nielsen, discovered an
electrical bacterial ecosystem within the mud from the Bay of
(26:23):
our Hoots. I hope I'm saying that right. It's a
coastal area on the western side of the main peninsula
of denmarks are roos A A R H U s.
So basically within a core of mud sample here, you'd
have bacteria lower down down in the mud with anaerobic metabolism. Again,
(26:44):
that means oxygen free. They don't need oxygen to live,
and they would produce hydrogen sulfide. Is a waste product
of their way of life. And hydrogen sulfide we've talked about,
I'm sure plenty of times on the show before. It's
a it's a poisonous gas that smells like rotten eggs.
It's just like it's bad stuff. It smells like death.
You'd commonly find it in places where biological material is
(27:06):
being decomposed in the absence of oxygen, so again anaerobic decomposition.
Like you will smell this stuff wafting up out of
swamps and out of sewers and stuff like that. It
was one of the bye products that people had to
protect their faces from when they went down to fight
the soap dragon. Yeah. The fact, I don't know why
I said protect their faces. I mean like wear gas masks, right,
(27:29):
I don't mean like it's going to hurt their faces
out at them and try to attach. It's like the
face hugger. Uh no, no, like it's like you don't
want to breathe it um now. Of course, in order
for you to smell hydrogen sulfide, in order to smell
this nasty bacterial byproduct in a mar sura sewer, the
gas has to bubble up to the surface and waft
(27:52):
out right. But Nielsen noticed that it wasn't doing that
in this mud. Something was consuming this poisonous waste product
before it buoyed up to the surface of the mud
and escaped. But as Carl Zimmer writes in this article,
if other bacteria below we're breaking down this hydrogen sulfide
without oxygen to aid in the metabolic process, again, you
(28:14):
would have an unacceptable build up of electrons, and so
this excess electricity would have to go somewhere. And what
they found is exactly what you might guess. The bacteria
were extending biological electric wires built out of thousands of
cells surrounded by a conductive protein sheath. Uh kind of
(28:35):
like the you know, the sheath you might see on
a copper wire to protect it, except it's the other
way around. In this case. The sheath is what's conducting
the electricity. So it's kind of like if you had
like plastic surrounded by copper, I guess, which would be
a bad design for a wire, but it works in
this case. And these wires are known as cable bacteria.
The cable bacteria allow the waste electricity to flow out
(28:59):
to the surface, and once the electrons reach the surface,
there you've got surface bacteria which have access to oxygen,
unlike the bacteria below because they're on the surface of course.
So these bacteria use the electricity to cause a chemical
reaction between oxygen and hydrogen, the waste product of which
is water. And to quote from Karl's article quote and
(29:23):
cable bacteria grow to astonishing densities. One square inch of
sediment may contain as much as eight miles of cables.
Dr Nilsen eventually learned to spot cable bacteria with the
naked eye. Their wires look like spider silk reflecting the sun. Beautiful,
and you can look at pictures of this. Actually, I agree,
(29:44):
they do look kind of like spider silk. They're kind of, uh,
these glistening, almost invisible filaments that can kind of catch
the light in certain ways. Very beautiful. But one cool
thing that I guess we have to consider is they're
discovering that these electroactive bacteria are found all over the place.
(30:05):
They're abundant in ecosystems throughout the world. And given how
abundant these electroactive bacteria are, it's not inconceivable that they
play a major role in regulating various forms of geochemistry,
like maybe regulating what kinds of minerals you would find
in the top soil producing magnetite, maybe regulating the chemistry
(30:26):
of the atmosphere, or regulating the chemistry of the oceans. Right, So,
I mean other they come here is that this is
not just some rare, obscure thing that you encountering only
like you know, some sort of bizarre extreme environment. But
they're they're they're found all over and could have a
very important role. Now, primarily the examples we've been looking
at so far have been bacteria that sort of pump
(30:48):
out electricity in order to metaphorically breathe. You know, the
electricity is this waste product, so the extra electrons have
to be disposed of and to something that will accept them.
But we already mentioned that it does go both ways.
Like also mentioned in h Fox Skellies article for the
BBC is the idea that um that scientists have been
(31:09):
finding more bacteria that simply are able to consume pure electricity,
that consume electrons when they need to, And she gives
the example of a University of Cincinnati microbiologists named Innett
Row who's found several bacterial species that live on the
ocean floor and apparently they can live off of pure
electrical current if they need to. It's not that they
(31:32):
naturally make make their lives this way, but it seems
like this is something that they are able to to
sustain themselves without dying for a period of time. So
if I understand correctly, this is different than an organism
that just like thrives on pure electricity with no food.
But there there is even evidence of like you know,
(31:53):
we were talking earlier about these relationships between electroactive organisms
and one bacterium having electric city is a waste product
and then routing it to a bacterium that will accept
it as a as an incoming energy product. And there's
even evidence of like cross species or cross organism type
electrical grids spanning different kingdoms of life, and this example
(32:16):
being the electrical cooperation between bacteria and archaea in deep
ocean floor habitats that are rich with methane uh to
to quote from Fox Skellies article, the archaea feed on
electrons from methane, oxidizing the gas to generate carbonate. They
then pass the electrons onto their partner bacteria along the
(32:37):
nano wires, which act like power cables. Finally, the bacteria
deposit the electrons onto sulfate, producing energy that the cell
can use in the process. And so we don't know
how far back these types of relationships go, but it's
easy to imagine these these types of cooperation evolving billions
of years ago, especially before Earth's atmosphere underwent the gray
(33:00):
poisoning when all the oxygen showed up. All right, we're
gonna take a quick break. When we come back. We're
going to get to an area that a lot of
you are probably thinking about like, you know, if we
have we're talking about the organisms that they utilize electricity,
they're producing these these nano filaments. Uh, then there's got
to be a way that we could harness that power
(33:21):
ourselves put them to work. Yeah, that's exactly what we're
going to discuss when we come back. Thank alright, we're back.
So if you're listening to this this podcast via some
sort of an electronic device, I mean, we electronics are
are kind of our thing right as a species, and
so it stands to reason that as we discover these
(33:45):
these these bacteria that are they're using electricity, that are
that are creating these little filaments that we eat envisioned
ways to again harness their power. I don't know about you.
I listen to my podcast by plugging directly into bacterial
ats like I've got a I've got a big stroma
light in my house, and I just jack in, Well,
that's not that's not as as as crazy distant from
(34:09):
the reality. The possible realities we're going to discuss is
one might think it's it's a little crazy, but but yeah,
when you when you think about these actual electroactive bacteria
that there do seem to be some potentials just one example, Like,
there are all kinds of ideas where people have talked
about using electroactive bacteria as as a potential electrical sources.
(34:30):
But one of the many ideas I came across was
to use the electrical potential of geobacter for small scale
energy purposes in Peru. So I was reading a few
articles from about how researchers at the University of Engineering
and Technology in Peru were pioneering a method to draw
usable electricity directly from the soil, specifically using the outflow
(34:55):
of electrons from the respiration of geobacters. Now this is
meaningful in in the context of what they were doing
in Peru, because some villages and dwellings in the Peruvian
rainforest don't have connections to the electrical grid mini don't
at the time they were doing this project. The project
leaders claimed that it was like fort of villages in
(35:16):
the rainforest did not have connections, and those that do
have connections are at risk to lose power entirely when
lines are knocked out by floods, as happened in March.
And so this means of course, after it gets dark,
people can't read, kids can't study for school unless they
use like kerosene lamps, which are apparently unhealthy and are
hard on the eyes. I can imagine that. So this method,
(35:40):
developed by ut Ec in partnership with a company called
FCB Mayo, works to charge batteries and power LED lamps
with a special bioelectric box. And the box has a
plant on top with roots planted in the soil, and
then electrodes plunged into this grid of little so oil
buckets that are full of geobactors, and the metabolic interaction
(36:04):
between the plant and the geobactors generates excess electric charge
in the soil, and that electric charge gets routed up
through the electrodes that are planted in the soil, whisks
those free electrons away to charge a battery, which in
turn powers the LED lamp. Now we're not sure how
scalable this individual technology is, but it shows the general
(36:24):
principle that you can draw small, at least small amounts
of power or electricity directly from electric bacteria and the
soil when other power sources are not readily available. And
this seems possibly like an interesting alternative to say, you know,
those small scale solar panels that you see being used
to power individual devices or lights, you know, things like
(36:45):
that like various garden gnomes and whatnot that light up
or their garden gnomes they get power. Yeah, I think so.
You see, this is like the main place I feel
like one tends to see this sort of technology, like
little little lights that go in your yard that have
little solar panel on them, you know. Uh. But um oh,
I guess I've just never seen one mounted in a gnome,
but I see it now. It can have red light
(37:05):
up eyes. Yeah. I mean I assume there's a no
there has someone has had to have created one. Wanted
to know. But you know, it's one thing to to
to power an LED lamp. But I think this does,
you know, drive home that even if you're only talking
about producing such small amounts of electricity to power you know,
you know, very low energy lighting effects, that still can
(37:25):
make a huge difference in the right circumstances. Yeah, it can.
And you can imagine using elements of this bacterial electro
biology in concert with other technologies, uh, to build up
more capabilities. Like in his Times article, Carl Zimmer mentions
that a Cornell University researcher named Buzz Barstow and colleagues
are trying to figure out if bacteria could be of
(37:47):
use when paired with solar panels, so not in place
of them, but working in concert with them, and the
idea is that the solar panels would convert the sunlight
into electric current, which would then be routed into bacterial
wires down down to these colonies of bacterium called shoe
and Ella. That's the one I mentioned earlier that was
discovered in Lake Oneida, shoe and Ella, and that could
(38:11):
use the energy from the electrons to metabolize organic compounds
and turn it into fuel. Yeah, this would really be
key for for carbon fixation. So so the studying question
here is two thousand nineteen study title Electrical Energy Storage
with Engineered Biological Systems published in the Journal of Biological Engineering,
and we're essentially talking It kind of comes back to
(38:31):
the Virus movie we're talking about because we're essentially talking
about a cybernetic energy storage system a synthesis of biological
and non biological electrochemical engineering. The authors point out that
non biological methods for using electricity for carbon fixation they
started to match and even exceed the capability of microbes
(38:53):
but that biological methods are better at pumping out the
complex sort of complex molecules that are ultimately necessary for
biofuels and polymers. So it's it's kind of a way
to improve you know, the photosynthesis in this situation, Like
you think of it as like photosynthesis plus or photosynthesis
two point oh. Nice. So it's like making an artificial tree,
(39:17):
except it's a solar panel and a bunch of bacteria. Yeah.
Well yeah, it's like it's it's part bacteria, part solar
system technology and uh and and the results, yeah, can
could could help with carbon fixation. Yeah. Another thing Carl
mentions is that the electrical bacterial filaments could be used
as some form of sensors, like a little little tiny
(39:38):
electro sensitive or conductive wires can be useful to you know,
essentially for signaling purposes. And he gives the example of, uh,
you know, being attached to some kind of wearable technology
that would touch the skin, and these little bacterial nano
wires could detect chemical changes in the properties of our
sweat and that might be biologically useful information that can
(40:00):
be transmitted to a device that might tell you, I
don't know what you know there's something wrong with your sweat, dude,
you need to Yeah. Yeah, just basically this gets into
the whole area of like, to whatever extent we can
develop dependable like real time biomonitoring medical medical monitoring technology
like this kind of a you know, a huge positive
(40:20):
impact on human health. But yeah, so Carl Carl mentioned
specifically the work of Derek Lovely again. Uh So he
you know, again the guy who discovered geobacter and uh
and has since expanded in into discovering several other microbe species,
just as other researchers have also discovered other microbe species
that have these same capabilities. And he's pointed out that
(40:40):
while geobacters filaments are super thin, like three nanometers in diameter,
some are more really some of the more really recently
discovered bacteria have fatter filaments and uh and this is
especially useful for us if we're looking to manipulate them.
If you want to manipulate them into some sort of
an electronic device, like an nano wire sensors that we're
(41:01):
talking about, it pays to have something a little on
a you know, a slightly larger scale so that we
can we can actually work with it. Lovely and Uh
and his co authors. They also point out that protein
nano wire like this would have a number of advantage
over silicon nano wires. So if we're talking about the biocompatibility,
the state of the stability, the potential for modification into
(41:23):
various biomolecules and quote chemicals of medical or environmental interest,
and plus the sustainable method of producing these nano wires
will make it easier to build the sort of devices
we're trying to make and hoping to make in the future.
He points out that we've been making the thimble sized
amounts of the sort of you know, wire materials that
(41:45):
we need for for the future we're trying to build.
But what we need we need buckets of them. We
need buckets of these nano wires. And this is a
possible means by which we can grow buckets of nano wires. Oh,
it almost sounds like the early penicilla problem, you know,
with the Oxford researchers in the lab and they were
working with Alexander Fleming strain of penicillin. We talked about
(42:06):
this in a recent episode of Invention. Uh. You know,
they could they could create this penicillin from the Penicillium fungus,
the mold, but they couldn't make enough of it that
it would be useful. Like the first time they tried
to treat somebody with it who had a deadly infection.
The guy was successfully treated for a few days, but
(42:27):
the guy with the infection eventually died because they ran
out of penicillin. They just couldn't make enough of it.
And they later uh, it only broke through his medicine
because they discovered a more productive strain that could make
more of the stuff. Yeah, And I want to come
back to the the the the the sustainability aspect of
this too. The idea here being that if you know,
(42:47):
you could have these these devices and when they're done,
you're not just like it's not going into a dump,
it's not potentially being you know, part of some sort
of toxic waste. It is just you know, biodegrading into
the environment. Oh yeah, I mean electronic waste is actually
a big deal. Like we you know, we we don't
see a lot of it. But what happens to all
these electronic components when we're done with them and the
(43:09):
thing breaks and you just throw it away. Possibility to
be able to grow these things. I mean obviously that's
that that would have tremendous advantage. Yeah, absolutely, and and
that they'd be biodegradable just you know, some other bacterium
just eats them up when you're done. But another thing
that I've read about these electroactive bacteria is that some
of them are extremely good candidates for the bioremediation of waste,
(43:32):
including toxic and radioactive waste, where they can take something like,
you know, a type of radioactive waste, say, like you know,
a type of uranium, and they can, through their their
metabolic process, reduce that uranium to say, a less soluble form,
So they're not going to completely destroy it, but they
might change it into a form that makes it less
(43:55):
damaging to the environment. And the same could be true
for other forms of pollution. Another another thing I've seen
it referenced as the the idea of using bacteria like
this to clean up oil spills. You know that you
can like eat eat hydrocarbons that are in places they
shouldn't be, right, Plastic waste being another another big one. Yeah,
So it's interesting We've been championing fung gui on the
(44:16):
show for a little bit here and now it's it's
bacteria's time to shine. We're back in the land of Jubilex. Yeah,
jubile X being the d n d H demon lord
of slimes and oozes, which in bast episode we kind
of associated loosely with bacteria, and it is the arch
enemy of Zogdomoi, the demon lord of funga. I raised
(44:38):
the flag of Jubilex for today. Yes, that's my side,
all right. So there we have it. Um, there's you
know they're there are various areas here where we could
branch off, so you know, if you're interested in hearing
more episodes about about bacteria or about various means of
dealing with radioactive waste, but we would love to hear
from you. In the meantime, check out stuff to All
your mind dot com. That's where you find all the episodes.
(45:00):
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To suggest a topic for the future, or just to
(45:20):
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(45:42):
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