January 13, 2015 • 28 mins
Sex-reversed genitalia and tractor beams -- just a few of the extraordinary discoveries and breakthroughs of 2014. How have they changed our perception of the universe and ourselves? Join in on the discussion in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. This
is part two where we're rolling through some of the
big science that occurred in some of the little science.
It's amazing that you might have missed that. In some
(00:23):
cases we initially missed. Uh. It's not an exhaustive set
it in gold launch it into Space list. We likely
missed some things that you thought were amazing, and we
definitely would love to hear from you about those, uh,
those particular topics, those particular studies. But this is what
was what was on our brain. Yes, the stuff that
we thought was pretty extraordinary and wanted to share with you. Now,
(00:45):
I do want to just throw in here real quick though. Um,
there was some of these issues. There might be a
slight uh so called shrimp on a treadmill scenario that
can pop up if you're not familiar with that. I
think we've talked about in the podcast before you have
to study where essentially a shrimp was put on a
treadmill all and it became kind of the uh, this
kind of just pointless science money on this even though
(01:10):
it was actually a very good study. Was it had
some importance to it. It wasn't just you know, rogue
scientists doing silly things with no with no payoff, which
is kind of the charge. And I'm not even sure
if it was actually federally federally fund in the first place. Yeah,
I'd have to I'd have to to review the story
to get into the details of it. But you still
see this, uh, this idea kind of continue on our
(01:31):
Facebook page. UM I share not only our content, but
we try and share links to you know, current science,
it's trending, neat studies, that sort of thing, And invariably
there's one particular user who will chime in, we'll find uh, well,
you know, find flight three seventy instead, why can't we
find find flight three seventy if we're you know, chronicling
(01:53):
the genome of the of the Mantish shrimp or doing
this study or that, always chiming in with well where
the three So what you're saying is that you'll post
something you're like, oh, like extraordinary science, and then someone
will be like, but but where's that fight? Yeah, like
how can and and I don't want to completely discredit
it because it's uh. On one level, yes, it's your
your kind of poo pooing on our celebration of science
(02:16):
here um and and it's not that fun. But on
the other hand, I understand how, you know, one can
look around at this world. We're finding so much about
the world around is we're landing things on commets for
the first time in human history. And and then to
turn around and say, but wait, how can we do
that and not do this? How can there? How are
(02:37):
there still so many holes in our understanding of the
world and and just our ability to even keep track
of our things in this world? Well, and yes, there
are very there are so many unanswered questions and um and,
and many of them will remain that way. But of
course we have accums razor at our disposal, so we
can always turn to logic to try to cull out
(02:59):
what matters and what doesn't and what we can't answer
and what we can't and oncom's razor and logic and
all of that is predicated on something called symbolic thought.
And that just happens to be the first thing that
we're going to talk about in terms of extraordinary science,
because we Homo sapiens are so proud of our neo
(03:19):
cortex sitting atop our brain, those cortical folds that help
us manage our lives and ascribe meaning and symbolism to them.
But it turns out that Homo erectus was also doing
the same thing way back when. Yeah, this was pretty groundbreaking.
(03:40):
I mean, we already had some strong evidence that Neanderthals
engaged in this. We had there's some fifty thousand year
old perforated painted seashells and pignic containers that were discovered
on the Iberian Peninsula and a while back region that
was inhabited solely by Neanderthals at the time. But but
here is another non human hominid who seems to have
(04:04):
have I mean, in a sense, it's almost like some
sort of ones attempted to make some sort of biblical
comparison to you know, myths of of eating the fruit
of of one sacred tree or another, like taking that
that crucial step towards becoming uh, this kind of uh,
this kind of rational being that stands apart from everything
(04:27):
else on earth. Yeah, and this symbolism um we far
too often take as sort of a modern Homo sapien thing.
But this year researchers discovered a shell engraved with a
geometric pattern at an h erectus site known as Tranil
on the Indianesian island of Java that dates to between
five hundred and forty thousand and four hundred and thirty
(04:49):
thousand years ago. Yeah, that is crazy because that is
at least three hundred thousand years older than the the
oldest previously known engravings from US South Africa. And when
they analyze the engraving, they feel that it was probably
made with like a sharp tooth or another hard pointed
object to create that that that that fascinating geometric design. Yeah,
(05:11):
now why is this important? Well? Uh, someone like Peter
also say, the professor of psychological and brain sciences that
Dark Mouth might say, well, it's because the emergence of
symbolic thought had profound consequences for human moral cognition. And
he says, you might say that the birth of symbolic
thought gave rise to the possibility of true morality and
(05:32):
immorality of good and evil. Once acts become symbolized, they
could now stand for and be instances of abstract classes
of action, such as good, evil, right or wrong. Symbolic
thought permitted new dimensions of behavior. And I thought that
was very interesting because in this way, symbolic thought, which
(05:55):
is of course what our languages are built upon, is
the organizing factor. Yeah, I mean, this is the basics
of language here, this is the basics of the brains
operating system itself. You know that that we're able to
take symbols, were able to take signifiers uh, written or verbal,
and we're able to have these stand in for more
(06:15):
complicated ideas. And then and then essentially, then you can
combine two complicated ideas, you can combine a third, you
can start It's almost an externalization of of of of
of thinking and UH and cognition, and then a a
re to to reincorporate that back into the mental processes. Yeah,
and um, I mean the fact of that matters is
(06:36):
that Homo sapiens are but one of several human lineages
that use abstract intellect to ponder the world. So that
tells us that it's far more ancient than we ever knew. Yeah,
And it just drives home again that the fact that
humans have ascended to this UH status in the world.
I mean a lot of it simply has to do
(06:57):
with with our our ability to adapt a different environments
and uh, and to what extent we were we were
able to roll with with with with catastrophic changes that
were occurring well. And it also means that something as
rudimentary as a line drawing of a woman in a
dress or a skirt that's put on a bathroom door
to indicate that this this room is for females has
(07:20):
so many more layers upon it than you could ever imagine.
In your brain, there's the whole database built up about
that one image, and there are consequences for that image
as well. Now, another important thing about the power of
simple is of course that that that when you engage
with a symbol, uh, be it the symbol in the bathroom,
(07:42):
be it be a cross beat, the Apple logo, be
it a swastika, uh, you know, Eastern or or western. Um,
you are actually your brain is actually doing an unconscious
analysis and interpretation of that symbol before it ever enters
into your into your conscious mind. Like that's how powerful
symbol is. And as we discussed in our Symbols on
(08:03):
the Brain episode that published, I think uh um a
couple of years ago. Perhaps maybe it was um as
we discussed in that episode. I mean, that's that's kind
of core to the power of these things, and that's
why when you walk around through your environment, you're just
bombarded with symbols, be it symbols for the bathroom or corporate, political,
religious iconography, you name it. Yeah, And I think that
(08:26):
goes back to David Eagleman and his assertations that the
conscious I is really sitting on the sidelines of the unconscious,
that all of this decisions that we're making, all those
judgment calls are happening under cover, and all of that
stuff gets served up in this kind of like uh
consciousness belch of the brain and we think, oh, I
(08:50):
just had this epiphany or I just happened to think this. Well, no,
this this thinking thing that you just made about that
bathroom symbol has been in the works for years and
whatever I is that come along with it. Well, and
there have been studies before that have have suggested that
the Christians behave more honestly when they're exposed to a crucifix,
that people think more creatively if they're exposed to that
(09:12):
applehole like the light bulb or the apple logo. So
if you have the if you're culturally preloaded to be
affected by that symbol. Then you're kind of it's kind
of like having like little magnets on the wall pushing
a little metal do Dad down the hallway, and we're
the metal do Dad my now, which always gets back
to the whole thing of constructing your own reality, And yeah,
(09:32):
what is reality? What is illusion in the first place?
So that's that's another But that's all the reason why
this is a great study and one that was easy
to miss. It's easy to you know, just scroll through
the headlines and you see, oh, well they found a
shell with some scratches on it. Big deal. I'm gonna
go to read about, um, you know, what's happening with curiosity.
But but when you get down into the deep power
(09:53):
of it, and it really drives home how how substantial
the finding was. Indeed it does. Alright, we're gonn take
a quick break. When we get back, we're gonna talk
about chromosomes and tractor beans. All right, we're back. Um, Yeah,
(10:14):
let's talk about let's talk about chromosomes and more specifically,
let's talk about yeast. Let's talk about yeast, shall we This?
It sounds like a p S A Uh. In March
of this year, undergraduate students in John Hopkins University, UH,
their their course called Build a Genome recreated yeast chromosome three,
which controls sexual reproduction. This is kind of huge. Yeah,
(10:37):
this marks the first time in history, uh that a
a chromosome has been synthesized by humans and adopted by
the yeast, which and by the way, yeast serves as
one of biotechnologies model organisms. So this is kind of
ground level for any kind of future UM breakthroughs that
will happen. Among those future breakthroughs that they hope to
(11:00):
up to one day, UM synthesize all sixteen yeast chromosomes
and achieve the goal of what they call synthetic yeast
two point oh. Now, the researchers designed the chromosome to
include special markers on genes thought to be non essential,
and the markers were engineered so that they could be
triggered by an enzyme to scramble, delete or duplicate genes
(11:22):
duplica jeens. And then they made fifty thousand changes to
the synthetic chromosome at specific points in the code which
could have easily killed off the yeast cell, but instead
it took the mutations and stride and reproduced. So that
was the other part of this is that could you
kind of tinker with this mess with it and and
(11:42):
could it still survive? And then even though it's synthetic.
Now the hope here is that in the future this
will lead to new tests, new methods to uh, to
go after specific genes and to alove a better understanding
of junk DNA cell division and evolution itself. So we're
getting down here to the the core building blocks, and
and as we discover how to make some of the
building blocks ourselves, there you go. And does that mean
(12:06):
that we'll have our teas and all synthetic loaves of bread? Now?
That would be that would be interesting. And when when
do we get the first Frankenstein bread? The first because
you know they'll call it that in the Stein meat
as well, right, it's made from Alright. The next entry
that we have is a tiny little tractor beam. And
(12:30):
when you think about tractor beans, you probably think about
the Death Star or really any sort of alien civilization
trying to suck us up into the spaceship. That's right, Uh,
you know, you think of sci fi and it it
makes perfect sense because the term comes from sci fi.
The term tractor beam was coined by E. Smith. Uh
(12:51):
is also a PhD by the way, and a food engineer. UH.
And this was in his novel novel named a Space
Hounds of I p C. I p C stood for
Interplanetary Corporation. Uh. Smith was is considered by many kind
of one of one of the fathers, at least of
space opera, which, of course we you know, we see
in in Star Wars seeing doun Uh. Any of these properties, Um,
(13:16):
he was. A lot of stuff was published in the
Pulpse of the Day, Amazing Stories and the like, but
he was also widely read by scientists and engineers and
future scientists and engineers at the time. Uh. From the
nineteen thirties and on up into the nineteen seventies, his
his series, such as the Linsman series of Skylark series,
and so he ended up accidentally coining a number of
(13:37):
scientific terms, terms for things that did not yet exist,
that were purely science fiction, that ended up becoming a
part of the language of science in the decades to follow,
including the tractor being. Indeed, all right, the tractor beam
we're about to talk about is not actually on par
with say something like the Death Stars tractor beam. And
we just want to mention that because we really want
(13:57):
to square your expectations here. Yeah, it's kind of like
advances that we've seen over the years with so called
invisibility cloak technology. UH. It's not as awesome as somebody
putting on a Harry Potter invisibility cloak or a predator
stealth system. UH. What we're able to do and those
experiences takes place at a at a very small level
(14:18):
and in the future could have much larger possibilities. And
the same thing with the tractor beams. Tractor beams have
have been a matter of study, UH for for years now.
But this particular study comes to us from Australian National
University UM. They have a laser based tractor beam that
they wrote to successfully a pull the part of pull
these tiny particles a distance about eight inches or twenty centimeters,
(14:41):
which is about a hundred times farther than any previous
experiments with tractor beams UH. During there During the experiment,
the researchers used a laser that projected a kind of
uh Ring shaped beam of light UM with a without
with a hot outer ring and a cool center and
they used this, uh, this light being to suck in
(15:02):
tiny glass spheres, each of which measured about point two
millimeters or point zero zero eight inches wide. So the
key here is is heat. Okay, this is how this
is working. The laser warms up the air around the
tiny glass sphere, causing tiny hot spots on the surface.
The air particles hit the hot spots and they bounce
off and that propels the sphere in the opposite direction.
(15:25):
So you want to make the back hotter than the
front and then you can propel it along. So yeah,
this is not the stuff of moving around starships or
capturing the millennium falcon. But uh, the scientists believe that
there could be possible applications, say dealing with pollution. Uh,
you could you could successfully extract toxic particles from a
given body. Uh. Of course, we have a long way
(15:48):
to go before this can can deal with with greater
distances than those plunged in the study. He also wanted
to mentioned that there was another chapter being Shenanigan's thing
going on here, and I'm talking about researchers at the
University of Dundee in the UK. They used acoustic tractor
beams to pull an object by firing sound waves at it.
(16:10):
So what they did is they used this ultrasound device
that was clinically approved for use in mri I guided
focused ultrasound surgery, and the team was able to move
surprising large objects will large in this sense, um or
in this application, of approximately one centimeter in size. And
(16:30):
so the idea here is that in addition to just
manipulating objects, you could also manipulate fluids and tissues inside
the body, and you could deliver encapsulated drugs to the
exact location in the body that requires treatment. Yeah. So again,
you know, we're in the early days of tractor beams,
and and tractor beam is kind of, to a certain
extent a catch off for a number of different techniques
(16:52):
of pulling in something, uh without actually grabbing it with
some sort of a grapple or a hook or what
have you. Because there's also also been experiments where you're
using the mass of an object in space to pull
in a smaller body, uh in the same way that
any smaller massed object can potentially orbit around another. I'm
(17:13):
just trying to imagine this technology fifty years from now
on the black market you know, you just you're welcomed
down the street and all of a sudden you're being
pulled into some sort of direction that it sucks all
the particles out of your body. Terrible particles, terrible. All right,
we should take a quick break. When we get back,
we're going to talk about how there's another breakthrough this
year and tinkering with the brain and memory again. All right,
(17:45):
we're back. Um. You know, we love to talk about
the brain and our manipulation of the brain and how
as we learned to manipulate the brain. I mean, we're
still learning how the brain works, and then trying to
learn how the brain works. We're trying to learn how
we work, how our experience, ourselves in the universe works.
And some memory comes up quite a bit. We've we've
done whole episodes on the sciences memory, the fallibility of memory.
(18:08):
You can't trust it. You change a memory every time
you draw it out of your head. And uh, we
inevitably come back to the the issue of what about
what about bad memories? What about memories that are traumatic,
even that that mess up our our our lives on
a daily basis. Is there a way we can zap them?
Is there a way we can deal with them. Can
we eternal sunshine them? Inevitably that the movie is referenced
(18:32):
in any news article covering these breakthroughs. Yes, Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind clinics popping up around the country
right now. Uh No, but this is interesting Stanford psychiatrists
and neuroscientists, Dr Carl That's Roth uses optogenetics. This is
a technique that manipulates neuronal activity with beams of light.
(18:53):
Here we go again, with beams of light. He and
his researchers show that they can manipulate specific memories in mice.
They can delete existing memories, and they can implant false ones,
and they went so far as to switch the emotional
content of a mouse memory from good to bad and
vice versa. Yeah, it was important here to to break
(19:16):
down is that we're talking about contextual information about an
event where and what they happen, and that's recorded in
the brains of a campus, whereas you also have the
emotional component of the memory and that's stored separately in
the amygdala. So you know, you have like one file saying, oh, yeah,
we went to the beach and uh saw a shark
in the water, that memory is is filed away. But
(19:38):
but then there's the emotional context. Did you see that
shark in your feet were still you were in the
water up to your ankles and it just freaked you
out to an amazing degree. Or was it a moment
of wonder where you're like, ah, there is a shark
and I live in an amazing world and being alive
is fantastic. The emotional coloring of that experience has a
huge effect on our lives. Yeah. I was just thinking
about in terms of tattoos, like a sort of tattooed
(19:59):
on your brain, and this this process, and this goes
back to the symbolic thought too. That tattoo of what
a shark is in your brain could be lightened a bit, right,
or could be reduced. You could have a little bit
of that tattoo thought removal. You could have the residue
of what that symbol means, but maybe not fully. Um.
Obviously this isn't as simple. It's just zapping a memory
(20:20):
and there there's a bunch of complexity involved in here.
But it's one more uh research study that is showing
us that memory manipulation is on the horizon. And here's
just another way to get at it. And I wanted
to mention that optogenetics are predicated on proteins called options,
(20:41):
and these are found in human eyes, in microbes and
other organisms. And when light shines on an option, it
absorbs a photon and changes it. And that's how uh
Dr Dysrerov has really gone about this. And by the way,
dest Wroth is huge in this field. He's done a
ton of stuff in turn of um options and optic genetics.
(21:04):
And he also created something called hydro gel. Oh, yes, hydrogel.
This was This is another really cool study that came
out this year which basically answers that question, Hey, if
I had a dead rat um and I wanted to
make that rat translucent, how would I go about that?
And uh and and that's what what we're talking about here,
(21:26):
the ability to to take a a cadaver even and
make it into this translucent, visible man, visible rat body,
which of course has a tremendous importance when it comes
to studying anatomy, looking at the physiology of diseases, etcetera. Yeah, this,
this substance they created, hydro gel, is similar to that
(21:48):
used for contact lenses, and the method is called clarity,
and the result is you get the see through brains
and the innerds are revealed in a way that no
current technologies cand We're talking about large structures like the
hippocampus showing up with the clarity of organs and transparent fish.
That's pretty exciting. It's like putting a flashlight into the
(22:09):
brain there, and you can even see neural circuits and
individual cells. So yes, um, you know, you could dissect it.
You can have ultra thin slices, examining each slide under
a microscope and and this is what is traditionally done
heretofore um before this technique came along. But when you
do that, you're you're you're changing that sample and you're
(22:34):
effectively removing some clues that you might not otherwise see
unless it were whole, a whole brain that you could
just see through. Indeed, I do have to say when
I'm initially discovered the study, I was a little bit
disappointed when I of course realized that the individual must
be dead, because for a split second, I was imagining,
(22:55):
like the new fashion trend would be to make yourself translucent,
and I was, you know, French run white models walking
around with translucent skin. It was, it was, it was
a great like three seconds of my life. And then
I realized that, well, this is actually a practical thing.
You never know again, hundred years from now we could
have translucent engineered models possibility. Now, I wanted to mention
(23:20):
that hundreds of papers have been published about not just
the hyndrogail, but also the opto genetics, and according to
Huge Escoff at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers are
using and developing techniques to study brain wave sleep, memory, hunger, addiction, aggression, courtship,
sensory modalities, and motor behavior. Of course this is in
mice and rats. But again, the extra appolation here is
(23:44):
that we're getting a far better picture of the brain.
Um and even three years ago, two years ago, you
and I were talking about reverse engineering the brain and
how difficult that is. But now there's more technologies online
to actually do that in a more meaningful way. Indeed,
now when it comes to changing the I keep getting
hung up on just the idea of changing the emotional
(24:06):
context of a memory. Uh, Like, I can't help but
imagine like a future scenario we're say it's say say
Julie Douglas goes into her local doctor's office, and the
doctor says, look, I can't do anything about that bad
memory that you have about clowns that just set off
this whole clown phobia for you. But I can change
(24:26):
the context. But you might have to buy some grease pain,
you might have to behavioral therapy. You might end up
in enrolling in clown colleging. I mean, I'm thinking probably
not because because phobias are a little more more complicated
than that. But imagine a world where you could you
could simply change a life altering fear into a life
(24:51):
altering enthusiasm for something uh with just with just a
little uh neural tinkering. But see, I don't want clowns
to to be eradicated from my memory. I mean, that's
part of the rich tapestry of narrative, right, Well, yeah,
I mean that's that's kind of what you get into
when you discuss any changing of the brain or or
(25:11):
certainly with you know, talking about would you change something
in the past. What you're what you're talking about when
you're changing the memory of the something in the past,
you're essentially changing the past is in terms of your
your perception of it, So you kind of get into
the same time travel paradox uh situation. Well, if I
remove that uh trauma from my history, am I the
same person anymore? And is that good or bad? Yeah?
(25:34):
And if I smoked from cannabis, how does that change
the perception of all of it? Yeah, but that was
kind of a really crappy way to try to transition
and not into a section about cannabis. We're not going
to do that, but just to mention that this this
might have been the year of cannabis. Oh yeah, I
mean this was even the year that we actually had
a single country fully legalized marijuana, that being Uruguay, UM
(25:59):
and number of US states following along with parts of
Europe moving in a similar direction. Yeah. So perhaps we
will do an episode in the future here about cannabis
and medical marijuana recreational And we've already touched on it
a bit when we've talked about hacin genics and um
how they made treat depression and and and help the
(26:21):
brain in certain ways. But it's a it's sort of
a minefield this year, if you ask me, there's so
many studies that have come out. Yeah, there's been a
lot of studies. Some one in particular that came to
mind was really more dealing with the with the adverse
effects from it. But even this study was only looking
at it really from an addiction point of view, and
(26:41):
and and not a medication point of view, and in
terms of developing brains too, because we know that that
this is not good to introduce substances that can alter
brain structures in someone who is not fully developed as
not just even a person, but their brain. So interesting
stuff here and uh and if you doubt the reach
(27:03):
of cannabis, then just consider I would say the reach
of reefer. That would have been the reach of refer
the reach of reefer. Then know that the word of
the year for I believe it was Oxford Dictionary O
is vape? Oh yes, I mean the vape technology is
very impressive in terms of marijana, but's certainly in terms
(27:26):
of just um normal tobacco cigarettes as well. I've uh,
there's several people in my life, um, including my mother
in law who has has transition from traditional cigarettes to vaping. Um. Um,
you know, for health reasons, for personal life choice reasons,
and uh that the technology is is fascinating. The whole
(27:48):
growth industry is people, do you know, making their own
technology and tinkering with it. It's uh, I mean, just
from a purely technological standpoint, it's it's it's really fascinating stuff.
So well, you nineteen twenties people sitting around going, did
you guys hear that pouka is the word of the year,
trying to imagine that. Yeah, equivalent individual in our office
(28:09):
who will remain nameless. I guess that has like a
vape puuka. Yes he does, alright, So there you have it. Um,
just till you know, a run through some of the
the studies that caught our eyes this year. Again, that's
not an exhaustive list. Certainly there were other studies that
that we got to kick out off, that we've blogged about,
that we podcasted about, that we did videos on, and
(28:30):
you'll find all of those. It's stuff to blow your
mind dot com. And if you have some thoughts to
share with us, we'd love to hear from you. You
can send an email to you below the mind at
house to works dot com. For more on this than
thousands of other topics. Is that house touff works dot
com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. This
is part two where we're rolling through some of the
big science that occurred in some of the little science.
It's amazing that you might have missed that. In some
(00:23):
cases we initially missed. Uh. It's not an exhaustive set
it in gold launch it into Space list. We likely
missed some things that you thought were amazing, and we
definitely would love to hear from you about those, uh,
those particular topics, those particular studies. But this is what
was what was on our brain. Yes, the stuff that
we thought was pretty extraordinary and wanted to share with you. Now,
(00:45):
I do want to just throw in here real quick though. Um,
there was some of these issues. There might be a
slight uh so called shrimp on a treadmill scenario that
can pop up if you're not familiar with that. I
think we've talked about in the podcast before you have
to study where essentially a shrimp was put on a
treadmill all and it became kind of the uh, this
kind of just pointless science money on this even though
(01:10):
it was actually a very good study. Was it had
some importance to it. It wasn't just you know, rogue
scientists doing silly things with no with no payoff, which
is kind of the charge. And I'm not even sure
if it was actually federally federally fund in the first place. Yeah,
I'd have to I'd have to to review the story
to get into the details of it. But you still
see this, uh, this idea kind of continue on our
(01:31):
Facebook page. UM I share not only our content, but
we try and share links to you know, current science,
it's trending, neat studies, that sort of thing, And invariably
there's one particular user who will chime in, we'll find uh, well,
you know, find flight three seventy instead, why can't we
find find flight three seventy if we're you know, chronicling
(01:53):
the genome of the of the Mantish shrimp or doing
this study or that, always chiming in with well where
the three So what you're saying is that you'll post
something you're like, oh, like extraordinary science, and then someone
will be like, but but where's that fight? Yeah, like
how can and and I don't want to completely discredit
it because it's uh. On one level, yes, it's your
your kind of poo pooing on our celebration of science
(02:16):
here um and and it's not that fun. But on
the other hand, I understand how, you know, one can
look around at this world. We're finding so much about
the world around is we're landing things on commets for
the first time in human history. And and then to
turn around and say, but wait, how can we do
that and not do this? How can there? How are
(02:37):
there still so many holes in our understanding of the
world and and just our ability to even keep track
of our things in this world? Well, and yes, there
are very there are so many unanswered questions and um and,
and many of them will remain that way. But of
course we have accums razor at our disposal, so we
can always turn to logic to try to cull out
(02:59):
what matters and what doesn't and what we can't answer
and what we can't and oncom's razor and logic and
all of that is predicated on something called symbolic thought.
And that just happens to be the first thing that
we're going to talk about in terms of extraordinary science,
because we Homo sapiens are so proud of our neo
(03:19):
cortex sitting atop our brain, those cortical folds that help
us manage our lives and ascribe meaning and symbolism to them.
But it turns out that Homo erectus was also doing
the same thing way back when. Yeah, this was pretty groundbreaking.
(03:40):
I mean, we already had some strong evidence that Neanderthals
engaged in this. We had there's some fifty thousand year
old perforated painted seashells and pignic containers that were discovered
on the Iberian Peninsula and a while back region that
was inhabited solely by Neanderthals at the time. But but
here is another non human hominid who seems to have
(04:04):
have I mean, in a sense, it's almost like some
sort of ones attempted to make some sort of biblical
comparison to you know, myths of of eating the fruit
of of one sacred tree or another, like taking that
that crucial step towards becoming uh, this kind of uh,
this kind of rational being that stands apart from everything
(04:27):
else on earth. Yeah, and this symbolism um we far
too often take as sort of a modern Homo sapien thing.
But this year researchers discovered a shell engraved with a
geometric pattern at an h erectus site known as Tranil
on the Indianesian island of Java that dates to between
five hundred and forty thousand and four hundred and thirty
(04:49):
thousand years ago. Yeah, that is crazy because that is
at least three hundred thousand years older than the the
oldest previously known engravings from US South Africa. And when
they analyze the engraving, they feel that it was probably
made with like a sharp tooth or another hard pointed
object to create that that that that fascinating geometric design. Yeah,
(05:11):
now why is this important? Well? Uh, someone like Peter
also say, the professor of psychological and brain sciences that
Dark Mouth might say, well, it's because the emergence of
symbolic thought had profound consequences for human moral cognition. And
he says, you might say that the birth of symbolic
thought gave rise to the possibility of true morality and
(05:32):
immorality of good and evil. Once acts become symbolized, they
could now stand for and be instances of abstract classes
of action, such as good, evil, right or wrong. Symbolic
thought permitted new dimensions of behavior. And I thought that
was very interesting because in this way, symbolic thought, which
(05:55):
is of course what our languages are built upon, is
the organizing factor. Yeah, I mean, this is the basics
of language here, this is the basics of the brains
operating system itself. You know that that we're able to
take symbols, were able to take signifiers uh, written or verbal,
and we're able to have these stand in for more
(06:15):
complicated ideas. And then and then essentially, then you can
combine two complicated ideas, you can combine a third, you
can start It's almost an externalization of of of of
of thinking and UH and cognition, and then a a
re to to reincorporate that back into the mental processes. Yeah,
and um, I mean the fact of that matters is
(06:36):
that Homo sapiens are but one of several human lineages
that use abstract intellect to ponder the world. So that
tells us that it's far more ancient than we ever knew. Yeah,
And it just drives home again that the fact that
humans have ascended to this UH status in the world.
I mean a lot of it simply has to do
(06:57):
with with our our ability to adapt a different environments
and uh, and to what extent we were we were
able to roll with with with with catastrophic changes that
were occurring well. And it also means that something as
rudimentary as a line drawing of a woman in a
dress or a skirt that's put on a bathroom door
to indicate that this this room is for females has
(07:20):
so many more layers upon it than you could ever imagine.
In your brain, there's the whole database built up about
that one image, and there are consequences for that image
as well. Now, another important thing about the power of
simple is of course that that that when you engage
with a symbol, uh, be it the symbol in the bathroom,
(07:42):
be it be a cross beat, the Apple logo, be
it a swastika, uh, you know, Eastern or or western. Um,
you are actually your brain is actually doing an unconscious
analysis and interpretation of that symbol before it ever enters
into your into your conscious mind. Like that's how powerful
symbol is. And as we discussed in our Symbols on
(08:03):
the Brain episode that published, I think uh um a
couple of years ago. Perhaps maybe it was um as
we discussed in that episode. I mean, that's that's kind
of core to the power of these things, and that's
why when you walk around through your environment, you're just
bombarded with symbols, be it symbols for the bathroom or corporate, political,
religious iconography, you name it. Yeah, And I think that
(08:26):
goes back to David Eagleman and his assertations that the
conscious I is really sitting on the sidelines of the unconscious,
that all of this decisions that we're making, all those
judgment calls are happening under cover, and all of that
stuff gets served up in this kind of like uh
consciousness belch of the brain and we think, oh, I
(08:50):
just had this epiphany or I just happened to think this. Well, no,
this this thinking thing that you just made about that
bathroom symbol has been in the works for years and
whatever I is that come along with it. Well, and
there have been studies before that have have suggested that
the Christians behave more honestly when they're exposed to a crucifix,
that people think more creatively if they're exposed to that
(09:12):
applehole like the light bulb or the apple logo. So
if you have the if you're culturally preloaded to be
affected by that symbol. Then you're kind of it's kind
of like having like little magnets on the wall pushing
a little metal do Dad down the hallway, and we're
the metal do Dad my now, which always gets back
to the whole thing of constructing your own reality, And yeah,
(09:32):
what is reality? What is illusion in the first place?
So that's that's another But that's all the reason why
this is a great study and one that was easy
to miss. It's easy to you know, just scroll through
the headlines and you see, oh, well they found a
shell with some scratches on it. Big deal. I'm gonna
go to read about, um, you know, what's happening with curiosity.
But but when you get down into the deep power
(09:53):
of it, and it really drives home how how substantial
the finding was. Indeed it does. Alright, we're gonn take
a quick break. When we get back, we're gonna talk
about chromosomes and tractor beans. All right, we're back. Um, Yeah,
(10:14):
let's talk about let's talk about chromosomes and more specifically,
let's talk about yeast. Let's talk about yeast, shall we This?
It sounds like a p S A Uh. In March
of this year, undergraduate students in John Hopkins University, UH,
their their course called Build a Genome recreated yeast chromosome three,
which controls sexual reproduction. This is kind of huge. Yeah,
(10:37):
this marks the first time in history, uh that a
a chromosome has been synthesized by humans and adopted by
the yeast, which and by the way, yeast serves as
one of biotechnologies model organisms. So this is kind of
ground level for any kind of future UM breakthroughs that
will happen. Among those future breakthroughs that they hope to
(11:00):
up to one day, UM synthesize all sixteen yeast chromosomes
and achieve the goal of what they call synthetic yeast
two point oh. Now, the researchers designed the chromosome to
include special markers on genes thought to be non essential,
and the markers were engineered so that they could be
triggered by an enzyme to scramble, delete or duplicate genes
(11:22):
duplica jeens. And then they made fifty thousand changes to
the synthetic chromosome at specific points in the code which
could have easily killed off the yeast cell, but instead
it took the mutations and stride and reproduced. So that
was the other part of this is that could you
kind of tinker with this mess with it and and
(11:42):
could it still survive? And then even though it's synthetic.
Now the hope here is that in the future this
will lead to new tests, new methods to uh, to
go after specific genes and to alove a better understanding
of junk DNA cell division and evolution itself. So we're
getting down here to the the core building blocks, and
and as we discover how to make some of the
building blocks ourselves, there you go. And does that mean
(12:06):
that we'll have our teas and all synthetic loaves of bread? Now?
That would be that would be interesting. And when when
do we get the first Frankenstein bread? The first because
you know they'll call it that in the Stein meat
as well, right, it's made from Alright. The next entry
that we have is a tiny little tractor beam. And
(12:30):
when you think about tractor beans, you probably think about
the Death Star or really any sort of alien civilization
trying to suck us up into the spaceship. That's right, Uh,
you know, you think of sci fi and it it
makes perfect sense because the term comes from sci fi.
The term tractor beam was coined by E. Smith. Uh
(12:51):
is also a PhD by the way, and a food engineer. UH.
And this was in his novel novel named a Space
Hounds of I p C. I p C stood for
Interplanetary Corporation. Uh. Smith was is considered by many kind
of one of one of the fathers, at least of
space opera, which, of course we you know, we see
in in Star Wars seeing doun Uh. Any of these properties, Um,
(13:16):
he was. A lot of stuff was published in the
Pulpse of the Day, Amazing Stories and the like, but
he was also widely read by scientists and engineers and
future scientists and engineers at the time. Uh. From the
nineteen thirties and on up into the nineteen seventies, his
his series, such as the Linsman series of Skylark series,
and so he ended up accidentally coining a number of
(13:37):
scientific terms, terms for things that did not yet exist,
that were purely science fiction, that ended up becoming a
part of the language of science in the decades to follow,
including the tractor being. Indeed, all right, the tractor beam
we're about to talk about is not actually on par
with say something like the Death Stars tractor beam. And
we just want to mention that because we really want
(13:57):
to square your expectations here. Yeah, it's kind of like
advances that we've seen over the years with so called
invisibility cloak technology. UH. It's not as awesome as somebody
putting on a Harry Potter invisibility cloak or a predator
stealth system. UH. What we're able to do and those
experiences takes place at a at a very small level
(14:18):
and in the future could have much larger possibilities. And
the same thing with the tractor beams. Tractor beams have
have been a matter of study, UH for for years now.
But this particular study comes to us from Australian National
University UM. They have a laser based tractor beam that
they wrote to successfully a pull the part of pull
these tiny particles a distance about eight inches or twenty centimeters,
(14:41):
which is about a hundred times farther than any previous
experiments with tractor beams UH. During there During the experiment,
the researchers used a laser that projected a kind of
uh Ring shaped beam of light UM with a without
with a hot outer ring and a cool center and
they used this, uh, this light being to suck in
(15:02):
tiny glass spheres, each of which measured about point two
millimeters or point zero zero eight inches wide. So the
key here is is heat. Okay, this is how this
is working. The laser warms up the air around the
tiny glass sphere, causing tiny hot spots on the surface.
The air particles hit the hot spots and they bounce
off and that propels the sphere in the opposite direction.
(15:25):
So you want to make the back hotter than the
front and then you can propel it along. So yeah,
this is not the stuff of moving around starships or
capturing the millennium falcon. But uh, the scientists believe that
there could be possible applications, say dealing with pollution. Uh,
you could you could successfully extract toxic particles from a
given body. Uh. Of course, we have a long way
(15:48):
to go before this can can deal with with greater
distances than those plunged in the study. He also wanted
to mentioned that there was another chapter being Shenanigan's thing
going on here, and I'm talking about researchers at the
University of Dundee in the UK. They used acoustic tractor
beams to pull an object by firing sound waves at it.
(16:10):
So what they did is they used this ultrasound device
that was clinically approved for use in mri I guided
focused ultrasound surgery, and the team was able to move
surprising large objects will large in this sense, um or
in this application, of approximately one centimeter in size. And
(16:30):
so the idea here is that in addition to just
manipulating objects, you could also manipulate fluids and tissues inside
the body, and you could deliver encapsulated drugs to the
exact location in the body that requires treatment. Yeah. So again,
you know, we're in the early days of tractor beams,
and and tractor beam is kind of, to a certain
extent a catch off for a number of different techniques
(16:52):
of pulling in something, uh without actually grabbing it with
some sort of a grapple or a hook or what
have you. Because there's also also been experiments where you're
using the mass of an object in space to pull
in a smaller body, uh in the same way that
any smaller massed object can potentially orbit around another. I'm
(17:13):
just trying to imagine this technology fifty years from now
on the black market you know, you just you're welcomed
down the street and all of a sudden you're being
pulled into some sort of direction that it sucks all
the particles out of your body. Terrible particles, terrible. All right,
we should take a quick break. When we get back,
we're going to talk about how there's another breakthrough this
year and tinkering with the brain and memory again. All right,
(17:45):
we're back. Um. You know, we love to talk about
the brain and our manipulation of the brain and how
as we learned to manipulate the brain. I mean, we're
still learning how the brain works, and then trying to
learn how the brain works. We're trying to learn how
we work, how our experience, ourselves in the universe works.
And some memory comes up quite a bit. We've we've
done whole episodes on the sciences memory, the fallibility of memory.
(18:08):
You can't trust it. You change a memory every time
you draw it out of your head. And uh, we
inevitably come back to the the issue of what about
what about bad memories? What about memories that are traumatic,
even that that mess up our our our lives on
a daily basis. Is there a way we can zap them?
Is there a way we can deal with them. Can
we eternal sunshine them? Inevitably that the movie is referenced
(18:32):
in any news article covering these breakthroughs. Yes, Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind clinics popping up around the country
right now. Uh No, but this is interesting Stanford psychiatrists
and neuroscientists, Dr Carl That's Roth uses optogenetics. This is
a technique that manipulates neuronal activity with beams of light.
(18:53):
Here we go again, with beams of light. He and
his researchers show that they can manipulate specific memories in mice.
They can delete existing memories, and they can implant false ones,
and they went so far as to switch the emotional
content of a mouse memory from good to bad and
vice versa. Yeah, it was important here to to break
(19:16):
down is that we're talking about contextual information about an
event where and what they happen, and that's recorded in
the brains of a campus, whereas you also have the
emotional component of the memory and that's stored separately in
the amygdala. So you know, you have like one file saying, oh, yeah,
we went to the beach and uh saw a shark
in the water, that memory is is filed away. But
(19:38):
but then there's the emotional context. Did you see that
shark in your feet were still you were in the
water up to your ankles and it just freaked you
out to an amazing degree. Or was it a moment
of wonder where you're like, ah, there is a shark
and I live in an amazing world and being alive
is fantastic. The emotional coloring of that experience has a
huge effect on our lives. Yeah. I was just thinking
about in terms of tattoos, like a sort of tattooed
(19:59):
on your brain, and this this process, and this goes
back to the symbolic thought too. That tattoo of what
a shark is in your brain could be lightened a bit, right,
or could be reduced. You could have a little bit
of that tattoo thought removal. You could have the residue
of what that symbol means, but maybe not fully. Um.
Obviously this isn't as simple. It's just zapping a memory
(20:20):
and there there's a bunch of complexity involved in here.
But it's one more uh research study that is showing
us that memory manipulation is on the horizon. And here's
just another way to get at it. And I wanted
to mention that optogenetics are predicated on proteins called options,
(20:41):
and these are found in human eyes, in microbes and
other organisms. And when light shines on an option, it
absorbs a photon and changes it. And that's how uh
Dr Dysrerov has really gone about this. And by the way,
dest Wroth is huge in this field. He's done a
ton of stuff in turn of um options and optic genetics.
(21:04):
And he also created something called hydro gel. Oh, yes, hydrogel.
This was This is another really cool study that came
out this year which basically answers that question, Hey, if
I had a dead rat um and I wanted to
make that rat translucent, how would I go about that?
And uh and and that's what what we're talking about here,
(21:26):
the ability to to take a a cadaver even and
make it into this translucent, visible man, visible rat body,
which of course has a tremendous importance when it comes
to studying anatomy, looking at the physiology of diseases, etcetera. Yeah, this,
this substance they created, hydro gel, is similar to that
(21:48):
used for contact lenses, and the method is called clarity,
and the result is you get the see through brains
and the innerds are revealed in a way that no
current technologies cand We're talking about large structures like the
hippocampus showing up with the clarity of organs and transparent fish.
That's pretty exciting. It's like putting a flashlight into the
(22:09):
brain there, and you can even see neural circuits and
individual cells. So yes, um, you know, you could dissect it.
You can have ultra thin slices, examining each slide under
a microscope and and this is what is traditionally done
heretofore um before this technique came along. But when you
do that, you're you're you're changing that sample and you're
(22:34):
effectively removing some clues that you might not otherwise see
unless it were whole, a whole brain that you could
just see through. Indeed, I do have to say when
I'm initially discovered the study, I was a little bit
disappointed when I of course realized that the individual must
be dead, because for a split second, I was imagining,
(22:55):
like the new fashion trend would be to make yourself translucent,
and I was, you know, French run white models walking
around with translucent skin. It was, it was, it was
a great like three seconds of my life. And then
I realized that, well, this is actually a practical thing.
You never know again, hundred years from now we could
have translucent engineered models possibility. Now, I wanted to mention
(23:20):
that hundreds of papers have been published about not just
the hyndrogail, but also the opto genetics, and according to
Huge Escoff at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers are
using and developing techniques to study brain wave sleep, memory, hunger, addiction, aggression, courtship,
sensory modalities, and motor behavior. Of course this is in
mice and rats. But again, the extra appolation here is
(23:44):
that we're getting a far better picture of the brain.
Um and even three years ago, two years ago, you
and I were talking about reverse engineering the brain and
how difficult that is. But now there's more technologies online
to actually do that in a more meaningful way. Indeed,
now when it comes to changing the I keep getting
hung up on just the idea of changing the emotional
(24:06):
context of a memory. Uh, Like, I can't help but
imagine like a future scenario we're say it's say say
Julie Douglas goes into her local doctor's office, and the
doctor says, look, I can't do anything about that bad
memory that you have about clowns that just set off
this whole clown phobia for you. But I can change
(24:26):
the context. But you might have to buy some grease pain,
you might have to behavioral therapy. You might end up
in enrolling in clown colleging. I mean, I'm thinking probably
not because because phobias are a little more more complicated
than that. But imagine a world where you could you
could simply change a life altering fear into a life
(24:51):
altering enthusiasm for something uh with just with just a
little uh neural tinkering. But see, I don't want clowns
to to be eradicated from my memory. I mean, that's
part of the rich tapestry of narrative, right, Well, yeah,
I mean that's that's kind of what you get into
when you discuss any changing of the brain or or
(25:11):
certainly with you know, talking about would you change something
in the past. What you're what you're talking about when
you're changing the memory of the something in the past,
you're essentially changing the past is in terms of your
your perception of it, So you kind of get into
the same time travel paradox uh situation. Well, if I
remove that uh trauma from my history, am I the
same person anymore? And is that good or bad? Yeah?
(25:34):
And if I smoked from cannabis, how does that change
the perception of all of it? Yeah, but that was
kind of a really crappy way to try to transition
and not into a section about cannabis. We're not going
to do that, but just to mention that this this
might have been the year of cannabis. Oh yeah, I
mean this was even the year that we actually had
a single country fully legalized marijuana, that being Uruguay, UM
(25:59):
and number of US states following along with parts of
Europe moving in a similar direction. Yeah. So perhaps we
will do an episode in the future here about cannabis
and medical marijuana recreational And we've already touched on it
a bit when we've talked about hacin genics and um
how they made treat depression and and and help the
(26:21):
brain in certain ways. But it's a it's sort of
a minefield this year, if you ask me, there's so
many studies that have come out. Yeah, there's been a
lot of studies. Some one in particular that came to
mind was really more dealing with the with the adverse
effects from it. But even this study was only looking
at it really from an addiction point of view, and
(26:41):
and and not a medication point of view, and in
terms of developing brains too, because we know that that
this is not good to introduce substances that can alter
brain structures in someone who is not fully developed as
not just even a person, but their brain. So interesting
stuff here and uh and if you doubt the reach
(27:03):
of cannabis, then just consider I would say the reach
of reefer. That would have been the reach of refer
the reach of reefer. Then know that the word of
the year for I believe it was Oxford Dictionary O
is vape? Oh yes, I mean the vape technology is
very impressive in terms of marijana, but's certainly in terms
(27:26):
of just um normal tobacco cigarettes as well. I've uh,
there's several people in my life, um, including my mother
in law who has has transition from traditional cigarettes to vaping. Um. Um,
you know, for health reasons, for personal life choice reasons,
and uh that the technology is is fascinating. The whole
(27:48):
growth industry is people, do you know, making their own
technology and tinkering with it. It's uh, I mean, just
from a purely technological standpoint, it's it's it's really fascinating stuff.
So well, you nineteen twenties people sitting around going, did
you guys hear that pouka is the word of the year,
trying to imagine that. Yeah, equivalent individual in our office
(28:09):
who will remain nameless. I guess that has like a
vape puuka. Yes he does, alright, So there you have it. Um,
just till you know, a run through some of the
the studies that caught our eyes this year. Again, that's
not an exhaustive list. Certainly there were other studies that
that we got to kick out off, that we've blogged about,
that we podcasted about, that we did videos on, and
(28:30):
you'll find all of those. It's stuff to blow your
mind dot com. And if you have some thoughts to
share with us, we'd love to hear from you. You
can send an email to you below the mind at
house to works dot com. For more on this than
thousands of other topics. Is that house touff works dot
com
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