How Volcanoes Turn Brains into GLASS | [OFFICE HOURS] Podcast #026

yeah what did you put it in this this time uh there's something about it no no take it back i will give maybe when i take my breaking oh hey hello and welcome to office hours the live component here at the facility where good old professor kyle opens up his blast doors and allows you my humble staff and any new guests that we have to ask yours truly any nerdy sciency pop culturally questions that might be on your slash they mind and we go through a number of topics uh from the previous week in science and technology and basically anything that i find interesting and we go through them we try to tease apart all the interesting happenings in this universe you know when it's not on fire i see a lot of professors from the facility in the chat already i see a lot of people who this is the first stream they are catching live if this is your first ever stream hi i'm kyle internet science boy and market value thor i'm a i'm a i'm a generalist who knows many a thing about various science topics so during today's stream we'll be going through a number of scientific topics we'll also be taking all of your questions and speaking of questions if you want me to really really really see a question you can also put it in the super chat on youtube and i'll do my absolute very best to read as many of those as possible you have people already like jay arrows with the 99 donation it says i played the basilisk in a game of spades and the weird thing was the only card they ever played was an island darn thing won every hand and took all the bags of holding hey kyle love the shows see amazing and all that's going towards simping for science if you also want to sim for science and help me get up to not evil things you can go to patreon.com kyle hill as my security team is putting in the chat right now get your lab coat and all that my security team will also kick you out because once we start talking about glass brains things are going to get weird before we start we also have a 50 from elizabeth calvert who says hey kyle love the show thank you for writing that like i'm not having a stroke no tiny human question this week wanted to check in with you and see how you are doing your shows help me make it through the mess that is 20 20. for all the awesomeness that you give us i worry about you being okay because it's 20 20. um yeah like i'm different it was weird because we transitioned to finally i i i regained my status as the administrator of the facility at the very week the beginning of the pandemic and it's it's been a lot of personal changes a lot of health changes but uh i think we're doing something interesting here so let's pause the super chats for a second because i know y'all want to be hearing about them shiny smooth brains no not just what you call someone on the internet an actual preserved 2 000 year old brain turn to glass we'll also be talking about a few other topics today of course we'll be talking about brain glass be talking about black holes in the recent prize the nobel prize in physics if you don't know what it's all about we're going to try to tell you what it's all about we also on a more somber note uh we have a calculation of the economic cost of covid19 just to kind of hammer the point home of what we're doing and how quickly we need to get out of it where i'll be also taking one of your comments from the last episode of the facility which was and then we'll also be talking about ants you want ants this is how you get ants but for science before we get to all that let's go to our first topic what you are seeing here is human brains turn into glass literally it's called vitrification and it doesn't happen very often vitrification is the effect where solid tissue becomes glass now when you say glass it's not like glass as you may be looking at me through glass in well made from silica or something like that this would be glass more in terms of the structure of the thing so glass is an amorphous solid as opposed to a crystalline solid um something something metal like in my little connectors here these little metal uh this little metal connector here is a lattice work like a little little cubes of metal atoms hooked together but if you look at something like glass it's amorphous which means it has no real structure repeating structure rather it can break off and separate on sheets on the atomic level which which makes them able to break off into incredibly sharp pains which is why obsidian obsidian glass obsidian knives are so sharp like just a couple of atoms thick literally because the amorphousness of the glassiness allows it to break along an atom's width plane in the material which is very cool and also gives it you know uh other material properties shiny it's very brittle etc etc but like i said when you think about glass you think about silica you don't think about human tissue so i wanted to bring back into focus a study this this study was about eight months old but it uh got added to and this study was the preservation of neurons in a vitrified human brain a 2 000 year old brain neurons like down to the cellular level we're not when we look at this brain glass we're not talking about just a globular hunk of glass and it's so amorphous there's nothing left no you can identify neuron and central nervous system structures in this material how is that possible well in 79 a.d or around that time the city of ugh i'm gonna get this wrong i gotta for there's gonna be grammar nerds in the jet herculaneum hercular name was one of the cities around the vesuvius eruption in ad-79 now when vesuvius erupted herculene herculaneum was swept was overcame with pyroclastic flows pyroclastic flows are one of the most dangerous things that volcanoes can do instead of the flowing uh lava instead of the slow and constant rain of ash a pyroclastic flow is a hundreds and hundreds of degree cloud of glass gas and dust that races down the side of volcano at hundreds of miles per hour sweeping away burying and burning everything in its path so this happened to hercule name in ad79 and when the pyroclastic flows reached it it was buried beneath 20 meters of pyroclastic flow deposit think about that if you're not with the rest of the planet if you're an american watching which you most likely are we're talking about a seven-story building worth of ash it's not just ash it's also 500 degrees celsius which is hot enough to vaporize anything volatile in chemistry if you ever worked in a lab we call these vocs volatile organic carbons when you want to measure the dry weight of a material you put it in an oven it's 500 degrees celsius it burns everything organic away so in a matter of moments an entire city's people were covered in a six-story building worth of vaporizingly hot ash and dust what this did was create an effect not seen almost anywhere and this is vitrification sorry i'm scrolling through the study just to make sure i don't get anything wrong here and this process to create glass from human tissue is fairly simple but requires the conditions that we're talking about incredibly hot rapid onset of of material and what that does is rapidly heats and boils human tissue i don't mean to make a squeamish but there's evidence that it was so hot it was so hot that the occupants of herculaneum their brains boiled into liquid inside of their skulls and then the pressure exploded those skulls quickly lived these events like this are that liquid lipid and fat and protein of the brain gets so hot so quick it melts and then it rapidly cools and if you rapidly cool a substance like this you can preserve the amorphousness of it so when you and this this this is how you get a city obsidian too and you have lava bombs that shoot out of the volcano they're you know they're thousands of degrees fahrenheit and they cool rapidly that's how you get the volcanic glass similar thing happened to this poor person's brain boiled inside the skull then rapidly cooled and their brain became glass but this isn't all i have to show you about this they literally had the site where this human passed away you can see there's not much left a here is showing the brain glass found where the head and where the skull would be they also found brain glass on the inside of the skull and b here is showing you parts of the spine inside of the spine parts of the central nervous system these all preserved and one way you can get you know this is an aside but one way you can double check that you're actually looking at what you think you're looking at they found these fragments attached to skull pieces but they didn't find them anywhere else at the site it's only attached to the skull we know brains can be vitrified probably brain it probably did more than that i didn't look at all the method sections nobody does so when you look closer in a here because of this rapid heating and rapid cooling you can literally preserve the structure of neurons and the central nervous system so what you're looking at is the structure of a neuron axons dendrites all that stuff from a brain that was boiled in a skull two thousand years ago by a volcano that's incredible it's an incredible sentence to say but it's also incredible because this represents and this isn't an exaggeration this this photo and the evidence from this one site represents the best evidence the best preserved evidence of ancient human brains and brain structures in all of archaeology let me say that again in the entire field of digging stuff up out of the ground this is the best example of ancient brains that we've ever found ever in 2000 years i think it's absolutely incredible uh for for a few reasons of course if you didn't know that human brains could turn into glass it's pretty metal and thinking about i mean it's morbid but you don't really think about what a volcanic eruption could do to a city and it's absolutely horrendous it does stuff to the body you never even you'd never even think about but to have a preservation like this a human fossil unlike any any other i think it's absolutely incredible but let's see what the chat has to say about it stephen shivers with the five says everybody always asks you science questions kyle but everyone anyone alright anyone it's live anyone ever ask about how you're doing uh yeah i'm fine chugging along i really know i really like the next video i really like the video this week to do some do some bonkers views and it has to do with anime so i'm sure it would cause machine says glass is metal no you funny person alexander weber says when i die i want my brain to be turned into a ritual knife i am reporting you to the witch police gene sergeant with the 10 canadian eh says the picture of the m87 black hole was taken with the event horizon telescope would it be possible to create an even bigger virtual telescope by using the earth's path around the sun for parallax um yeah well i mean to image things this far away in this big um you do need to a single telescope on the surface of earth is not going to help you need to separate it uh by distance to get different views of it um but i i don't know if that specific uh setup would work that's outside of my purview that's more of a neil degrasse tyson kind of thing i get uh corona xd with the mx50 don't know what that is but hey show okay thanks for recommending the expanse it's the only show where inaccurate science has never taken me out of the experience say it all the time go watch the expanse it's the most scientifically accurate show on tv and the best science show the best sci-fi show since star trek the next generation period it's better than firefly too yeah fight me uh moon went to a hundred says oh hey first time catching a live and it's in the middle of the night i gotta sleep but i will re-watch tomorrow uh that's you're in korea yeah well i actually um i love watching competitive starcraft 2 i don't play it i just love watching it because i like starcraft but watching the best pros in the world play it is fascinating to me because they're so fast and so smart um it's like hyper nerd chess and um almost nine like 99 of the pros are korean and so you say that you got to go to bed i actually have a an alarm for 1am tonight because that's when the next gsl streams so if uh if you're awake during that time you like starcraft find me in the chat i'll be memeing luna with the 10 says first time not lurking in the stream hey thank you so much hi how are you with gene editing being a topic of debate how far you reckon we can change our own human biology without being unethical something for science that is a difficult question because the real holy grail of gene editing so to speak would be to use something on crispr case 9 to go into your genome start changing it such that the genome was passed on to future generations so right now when you when you when you hear about gene therapy or gene editing techniques a lot of it is just um injecting into your body something to supplement your body's deficiencies so there could be a genetic disorder disease caused by the deficiency of some protein and so you use genetic engineering to get that protein into your body and in some cases cure outright cure the disease um but what's much more ethically dangerous is to go into your genome or the genome of an embryo and alter it in some way and they will carry with that they will carry that with them uh until that bloodline runs out um so what what's dangerously un potentially dangerously unethical about that is that you'd be making decisions for potentially generations upon generations of human beings without their consent i don't know the way through that there's entire fields of st i mean bioethics is an entire field of study so i do not have the answer to that but that's why it could be so potentially um unethical i don't know how to get around it uh mahmoud says hey show kyle the love also contain bae too i broke the screen in here and reality is all wrong now don't believe what kevin says send help kevin who's you're still you're still getting this right okay he says he has a surprise for me that i did it's gonna spice up my uh dark matter coffee we'll see doom for zombies with the 4.99 hey show love kyle that why do we only need a cloth mask as opposed that's not how you spell any of that as opposed to a gas mask type mass hashtag simping for science well this is a very common question don't feel bad if you also have this question the answer is simple but it's not intuitive why does a cloth mask protect you from a virus that is smaller than the pore size on the mask well that very simply put is because virus does not when it's aerosolized it does not travel through a cough or through a sneeze or through the air on its own rather it hitches a ride on much larger droplets those droplets are almost always larger than the pore size of the mask and so the virus is effectively blocked by even that slightly larger pore size yes a gas mask n95 mask are smaller pores and would filter out more but in the case of the virus when it's affecting millions and millions of people the effectiveness in dealing with the droplet size is more than enough to save hundreds of thousands of lives literally you can clip that i think i nailed that uh we have my evil inner child with the 10 who says hey kyle live the show quick god why why can't teeth repair themselves like bones do also tell aria i said hello don't you creep up on my ai don't do that how do you know we're not together anyway um why can't teeth repair themselves can they not is enamel not reese's every so often i i don't know um i actually don't know i don't know the regeneration habits of teeth um it's the only part of the skeleton you can touch dustin stark with the 20 says hey kyle love the show let's pause the super chat for a second so we can get to our second topic we're already 20 minutes in and look at me running my mouth hey kyle love the show thank you dustin see i can say it right just wanted to say i wear a mask in a 120 degree fahrenheit boiler rooms for 70 hours a week and it sucks major brain glass but i still do it so all the cairns out there are just wimps i agree that's all there is to it yeah that's that's hard that's hard man mammoth with the 50. hey kyle love the show you are the bill nye of this generation getting kids to want to get into stem you humble me um i don't think that's warranted but uh i have been described as millennial bill nye with depression so it's on brand but uh no to be serious um that's one of the uh it's incredibly high praise uh and thank you i'm doing my best this is what i feel i'm not a spiritual person by any stretch of the imagination but i think this kind of thing is what i'm supposed to be doing because we all know growing a beard is not what i'm supposed to be doing i mean look at me i'm ridiculous again let's pause for just a second mike benavidez with the 10 could you pee in a hot wire hard enough to not get shocked or or simply can a water stream outpace connectivity or electricity through force i don't like why you're asking this but you have it backwards the harder okay ladies you might this might not apply to you as much but if you wanted to pee on something and get electrocuted don't you could die uh the harder you pee the more solid and consistent the stream is going to be which will give an a better path for any electricity if you're not peeing as hard any breaks in the stream introduce air gaps and air is very hard for electricity to break down so you probably won't get shocked if you have a weak stream you know what stream isn't weak this one baby you see how i did that that's what you're simping for transitions like that i'm sometimes i it's like my genius can create its own gravity you know i stole that from jeremy clarkson that's not like black holes there's one behind me now if i was this close to it that my body is now implying i would be aging less than you which is weird but why am i showing a black hole well uh the recent prize nobel prize in physics involved black holes both of them oh that were sharing a nobel prize in physics and uh it's fascinating so the nobel prize in finnic physics went to roger penrose legendary physicist and uh reinhard genzel and andrea goetz from the university of los angeles california los angeles who like i don't know why i hoot i'm not from there anyway um but penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity and for the other two sorry for the discovery of a super massive compact object at the center of the galaxy let's take the second half first now what these two scientists did was rather rather amazing they wanted to take better and better images of the center of the milky way galaxy so they had to develop new technology and new techniques to get better and better resolution and data from the very center of our galaxy where there's all you know millions and millions and billions of stars and once they had better resolution they were looking at some of these stars and they were absolutely zipping around the center of the solar system i mean the galaxy rather and they were going so fast their speed could not be explainable by what was observed and that's a that's a that's a big that's a big issue in science what what the heck what what's doing that that's bad so what they posited rather was this speed seems to be caused by something that is smaller than the solar system but has the mass of 4 million suns and so they went on to um discover that a super massive black hole or what would be a black hole was residing at the center of our galaxy and then in ensuing years scientists have speculated that supermassive black holes are at the center of most galaxies so they won a nobel prize in physics for that roger penrose um years after einstein himself mused that black holes were only theoretical penrose took the same equations from uh general relativity and he used it to show that when a large star died it could collapse in itself if it had enough mass and create a region of space time where space and time would become discontinuous and that the center of this warping would be a singularity where time stopped and then all the laws of physics broke down and by showing this mathematically which we're not going to go through because it's complicated by showing this mathematically and proving that general relativity could also explain this it is considered to be the most um robust addition to the theory of general relativity since einstein formulated it so that won a nobel prize in physics now i don't have a lot else to say about that except one of the diagrams that the science team here put out with these announcements describe the black hole in a way that i that i've never heard it described before and they sound even cooler now and i want to share that with you um so i've never seen a black hole diagram i've seen this and on the right it's kind of confusing because that's keep in mind that the y-axis here is a time evolution with time going up so you start with matter and a star at the bottom and that evolves over time into a black hole and a singularity with an event horizon as you can see so that looks a little weird but that's because it's an evolution through time this is a single snapshot now what i've never seen before was a black hole described thusly where at the event horizon where the effect of surface gravity makes an escape velocity higher or at the speed of light so not even like an escape as you know space and time become discontinuous space separates from time the way they describe this is so brain breakingly cool at the event horizon time replaces space and points only forward the flow of time carries everything towards a singularity furthest inside the black hole where density is infinite and where time ends how cool is that where time replaces space and it only points forward in time and then at the center time ends so if you're looking at these bottom we've looked at these light cones so to speak in a number of episodes that i've been involved with and light cone shows your present and then all the possible events you could interact with in your past in your future based on the speed of light as drawn out by these cones the 45 degree angle here is a distance over time and that's the speed of light so that gives you a cone boundary for where you could possibly be in space time because you can't travel faster the speed of light so at the top here you're seeing that as an observer gets closer their light going gets closer to a black hole you see right here i went past the event horizon uh right here the very edge of the light cone is now within the black hole's event horizon which means there's no possible pathway there's no possible world line that even light could escape and then at the top here you see that once you're inside the event horizon there is no possible configuration of a light cone that takes you outside which is what this is saying time only points inwards density becomes infinite and time stops if that doesn't blow your mind honestly i don't know what will but if you can think of stuff like that you win a nobel prize and get a lot of money paul james with the 10 says simp for science and fellow wisconsinite go pack go looking good this year my boy my boy aaron rodgers uh classic says i saw you on mythbusters the other day and about had a heart attack yeah if you don't know uh in 2016 i had terrible hair but i did host the search miss bus mythbusters the search um which tried to find the replacement hosts um but i hosted that show and i was in my 20s it's crazy i don't know why they let me do that you could tell that i did my own hair and makeup on that show that's that's uh where i also met alan pan one of my friends sports mag with the five says show love kyle the hey do you play no man's sky fun fact it would take 585 billion years to visit every planet hashtag go pack go hashtag sim for science um i have played no man's sky i bought it at launch i thought it was terrible i played it again afterwards i was kind of bored um and i know it's much better now but i haven't gone back to revisit it um i do i love the idea of procedural generation of planets though jose barrow with the 10 says do you think the increasingly increasingly rapid expansion of the universe will lead to another big bang recreating in an another reality another what if we're in a singularity hashtags him for science i don't know man honestly dude i just don't know i mean nobody knows that you're talking about like theoretical beyond theoretical i i caution you maybe not you specifically but i do see people with a with a great interest in physics which is fine of course getting enamored with an idea or theory and then projecting it way outside the scope of that so you know you see this all the time and again jose i'm not saying you do this but you know for example when quantum mechanics became like a pop culturally relevant thing then you have physics but then you have people asking like well what if our brain is just quantum consciousness foam that i could talk to you about in a self-help book probability densities and stuff is like that between that and deepak chopra there's a lot of daylight there um so i don't know i i sounds let's pause the super chats for a second so we can uh move on but um yeah i i caution you in taking theories about the end of the universe or big crunch and heat death and extending them out past the point that we have any business talking about before we figure other stuff out you know what i mean um like could we interact with another universe dog i don't even know if other universes exist yet you know i feel like more professors should talk to students like that like man i don't know calm down uh jg with the 10 says hey sorry this is off topic if you fall from somewhere high holding on to something significantly heavier and wider could you reduce or transfer your energy by hopping off at the last second yes but uh your hop so i've seen this meme this poorly drawn meme where you know a guy jumps out of building with a chair and at the very bottom he jumps off the chair and he's fine um this in physical theory would work but in impractica a term that i coined last week in practica it wouldn't um because if you launch something downwards away from you you yes you are creating upward thrust and this is exactly what a rocket does it just throws propellant downwards quickly that's all rocket science is just fiddling with that so if you threw a chair away from you or if you were in space and you threw a chair away from you you would go in the other direction but in practica as i said the speed at which you would have to throw or push or jump off of something that could cancel out your downward momentum is so undoable for human legs it's impossible i i don't i i don't have the math i don't just to estimate you know like rocket exhaust is many mock to lift the rocket into the into the into the air a large multiple of 343 meters per second so to stop a free fall where you might be going like 100 miles an hour by the time you hit the ground with jumping off of something like a chair you probably have to jump off the chair at some like ridiculous hundreds of miles per hour kind of thing and the human body just can't do that so theoretically yes impractica no damon with the 10 says hey kyle lo after seeing all the political insanity going on in the u.s i've been thinking that politics has pretty much become religion for many and manipulates much in the same way well you know what i have to say about that nothing so uh speaking of catastrophes in the united states um something i wanted to go through quick where there was a new report in the let me get this right new england journal of medicine where am i no it's jama yeah there was a new uh article in jama which is free and i'll link to it after the video post but what it was trying to do is tabulate the actual economic cost of the pandemic that we're currently in and i wanted to go through this because people are talking about at least in this country and i think right rightfully so but okay in this country people are experiencing a tension between what they want best for public health and what they want best for their personal economy and the economy in general and that is a valid viewpoint until you have data that says otherwise so if you wanted to really game out okay well how much should we deal with how long should we stay locked down versus you know versus should we go back what are the economic gains and losses well now that we have data on this it seems absolutely clear that by not dealing with the pandemic in a robust and scientifically accurate way which the united states is not doing the losses economically are so far beyond the cost of locking down and i know if you're of the you know we should reopen persuasion i know that sounds sacrilegious to you perhaps but i got numbers so listen so the two halves of this is a loss of people and then a loss of economic opportunity basically so how you would go about calculating a total would be you know you estimate the number of deaths that would happen from the pandemic in you this is in the united states alone then you assign in an economic value to a human life and if that sounds callous it's what economists do every single day so economists put yes so environmental and health policy for example the paper says a statistical life is assumed to be worth 10 million with a more conservative estimate of 7 million the economic cost of premature deaths throughout the next year is estimated to be and you see this right here right here 4.4 trillion dollars so that's thousand billion 4.4 trillion dollars and this is yes i know what you're thinking how could one life be worth you know seven million dollars well you think of what they bring in in terms of wealth and then what they output in terms of working for 65 years in the economy and blah blah blah you get roughly that number trust me i'm in a condom i'm not the next part of this calculation that you do is you start calculating the estimated loss for long-term cal complications for people who have this so this is the total health care cost of people who aren't dying but have long-term cognitive and mental impairment which we know is a symptom uh and a result of the diagnosis and then also people who are impaired not able to work have severe respiratory lung problems that kind of thing mental health conditions to quote the proportion of u.s adults who report symptoms of depression or anxiety has averaged approximately 40 percent since april last year it was 11 percent that's that is legitimately crazy that's what a 400 percent increase in depression and anxiety statistics since last year now the stigma around mental health has you i can feel you has you immediately knee-jerk away like well if you're depressed it doesn't affect the economy well of course it does i mean for one it would easily impact productivity maybe you know sick days that you take blah blah blah now when you add all this up as you can see um the cost and i'm quoting here because what they say is incredible this could possibly be a 16 trillion dollar pandemic in the united states alone so that's adding up the 7 billion the 4 billion the 2 billion etc etc now i'm quoting from the paper here just really to hit this home this is the cost right now output losses of this magnitude are immense the lost output in the great recession was only one quarter of this the economic loss here is more than twice the total monetary outlay for all the wars the u.s has fought since september 11th including those in afghanistan iraq and syria combined by another metric this cost of the pandemic is approximately the is approximately the estimate of damages from 50 years of climate change damage now so what what can you do with these numbers how how can you show how do you compare this to the argument that i brought up the beginning at the beginning of this topic should we reopen what are the costs and benefits well obviously right now it's a tremendous cost cost more than all the war since 2011 i mean 2001 combined so one of the writers lawrence h summers puts it this way okay so the fact that this number is so high i'm quoting him implies that investments in reducing covid are hugely valuable we estimate the value of testing more testing in the united states alone to be at least 30 times the cost so the real punch line here the real punch line here is that the more we do now and aggressively to really get a a hold of the pandemic in the united states the more you will eat into this sunk cost right now it's it's 75 percent worse than the great than the great depression in the 20s the estimated cost so right now the argument it is so so economically valuable to do whatever we can to stem these losses to to tourniquet the bleeding we're hemorrhaging right now you know 200 000 deaths is an incredible amount of people doesn't sound like the biggest number in the world but when you multiply that by 10 million dollars it's a lot of money so right now the pendulum has not yet swung to the to the other side the economic cost of doing nothing or doing things poorly is not equal to the cost of doing things carefully and still being safe and mostly locked down so i just i wanted to um i just wanted to point that out because before i read this paper this the scope and the scale of the of the damages to the country and to the world it can seem a little away from you especially you know perhaps if you're around my age or uh you know you're decently well off and you have health care and stuff like that but the the the real cost here is unprecedented staggering absolutely staggering ct says it's cool to watch this in vr right now don't try to touch me i can feel it uh jay taylor says lucky new zealand is voting on cannabis legislation right now if a yes vote will work towards fixing our economy yeah legalizing cannabis will bring in tens of millions of dollars in like the first month and it happened in colorado uh amiga de mousse says where can i find this paper i will post it after the video is live i will go in and edit i'll go in and pin a comment at the top with a link to the paper um just pause the super chats i know they're going to start coming in in a second we're already at yeah i know i'm sorry i'm sorry but we gotta move on we're already 45 minutes in we gotta get on uh dominic with the five appreciate you in the show stay well everyone i second and i third that but we gotta get to peer review so uh last episode of the facility i did a meme episode could would there be a distance at which a frozen pizza was perfectly cooked from a nuclear blast you can watch that if you want to know my thoughts on it um but one of the comments that i need to put to rest it's from gilded bearer says so what you're saying kyle so what you're saying kyle i'm not a super villain yeah is that a single slap cannot choke cannot cook a chicken so instead we need to use a series of consecutive normal slaps well first of all isn't that a one punch man move and second of all this meme needs to die i don't know why it's so intuitive that you can hit a chicken a number of times to heat it up to cooking okay there's a there's a balance in again impractica between hitting something a number of times and hitting something a less number of times with more energy or more momentum you're slapping it you're imparting energy to it some of that energy is transformed into the deformation of material and then dissipates inside the material as heat uh other other components of the energy comes out as sound other components are lost heat sound that kind of thing so how hard you'd have to so so let's think about it let's get down to it a single slap going what a neat what was the person that calculated 1700 miles an hour that would destroy the chicken if you uh it would obliterate the chicken go watch uh the mythbusters rocket episode it would obliterate the chicken so now what do i do okay well how about less slaps we kind of like have like a rocket equation here we're like okay that's probably too hard too hard too hard too hard to turn but that's not enough slaps now that's not enough slaps now so we reached some sort of asymptote some sort of answer where we're slapping the chicken enough frequently don't give that to cook it but we're hitting it light enough such that the chicken is slowly thoroughly cooked now if you think about this this is this is like a richard fineman kind of thought now if you think about this what's the least amount of force that i could apply to a chicken well yeah i could start kind of like rubbing it tapping it but what if i could just hit it with a single atom that sounds pretty light okay well what if i could hit that chicken trillions of times with that single atom it's like all right but you do the math you know back the envelope single atom hitting something like the size of a chicken macro scale trillion times is going to do much so what if i take trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms and put them all around the chicken and have them all slap the chicken on every possible surface of the chicken that's available and until it's thoroughly cooked with the least amount of force possible well then we are describing an oven that is what an oven does an oven uses tiny atoms air molecules to slap a chicken with air molecules until it's cooked we measure temperature as the kinetic energy of particles so uh very hot air molecules o2 nitrogen awesome very hot air is moving with some kinetic energy with a lot of kinetic energy when those particles impact the chicken just like slapping it some of that kinetic energy deforms the material ever so slightly which gets translated into heat inside the material and if you do that enough times over enough time you can slowly heat the chicken so you can slap a chicken to cook it if the slappers are atoms and the cooking is oven dang it i thought that was going to come out a lot cooler than i nailed the go back to like when i said like that's what anova did like clip it there because i i didn't anyway gilded bear for making me think about this and for having me kind of stick the landing on it you are now an honorary member of the facility fantastic fan i'm jazz snapping fantastic what's that he doesn't get a plot uh gilded bear um so usually all the honorary professors get a plaque but kevin says i need to oh it's ready all right just a second uh i gotta take a quick break i'll be right back wait what is this don't know about this man i don't like how it's pouring out you want me to put this right into my into my coffee that seems like a bad all right i mean i'll do it it's gonna taste yeah okay it's gonna taste good then i'll try it hey by the way kevin you're doing a great job let's see what the chat has to say oh wait oh i gotta gotta add my secret ingredient to my to my coffee i told you at the beginning we're gonna add something to it okay here we go you want me to drink this i uh oh just more okay sorry um yeah i'm uh no joke though if i drank this right now i would literally die on stream let's see if that shatters i don't know how ceramic is gonna handle that uh we have a hundred dollar donation from thomas hedrick who says just got all my october bills paid so i wanted to simp for science baby he didn't say that i said it i also wanted to ask if you had any non-supervillain plans involving halloween involving almost 3 000 neodymium neodymium magnets for halloween in fact uh yes yes i do um will that come out during october it might yay i do i'm just about to get ready to do that build whatever it may be and um yeah i think it's going to be a world first i mean it's not good it's no mark rover but you know i don't have that many ball caps adam frost with the uh new zealand 17 says hey professor coyle that's not nope uh thanks for being both informative and interesting it's a great combo hey i seem to think so the hair helps quick question what happens to the energy when light destructively interferes i don't know i i don't know i honestly don't know it's great if anyone knows has an idea in the chat uh sc with the seven says good day mr hill i enjoy your educational media content thank you not a robot person if you're a robot i'm sorry if i offended you uh breadboard uh says hey lyle live the snow okay no no no no do not start a thing where people start don't they're not even using the right words because my brain because i'll drink that and i will i will just straight up die i'm not even joking that would kill me um i got a i knew it was you breadboard i knew it was you i see you in doc's chat i got the black on black on vanta black lab coat and i'm ready for velocity science magnitude am i on the right stream no you're not but feeling good today baby yeah yeah five foot ten 20 what's a 30 inch vertical leap i am vaseline out of my mind though two fingers in mystic dueler with the 999 says hey kyle love the show thank you you're a bright spot on an otherwise dark timeline oh that's nice are you excited for monster hunter rise repeated from last week because you didn't have time well i'm sorry i didn't get to that uh let's pause the super chats for a second because oh we're gonna run out of time um i enjoyed a little bit of monster hunter that i played it but um i'm biased in that i really don't enjoy tedious menuing and that combined with the fact that the monsters had no health bars and when i first started playing it i had no idea each fight was going to take like 35 minutes i uh i didn't really get into it but i did identify matt mercer's voice i was like oh hey look at you night watcher with the 10 says hey kyle's wondering if the study took into account the age that people are dying it's not sure it meant to be better if we opened uh not was not sure if you meant it would be better if we opened up or not oh no i um i i don't know but i believe it's it was just a general statistical life and between you know four and ten million dollars something like that which catches a lot of the variability crabby cranberry with the 10 says it's amiga de mousse and i changed my name so you can say it now also something for science thank you crabby cranberry thank you i appreciate that i took a lot of amigo de mousse i took i took a lot of spanish in high school but you know i'm trying to get back ants that's what we got to finish off with ants are smart and if you want to get ants that's how you get ants how do you get ants put a lot of sugar in some water this is really really cool so this is a study looking at um how ants who have been observed to use tools which is incredible for an insect to do and signify some kind of intelligence be it singular or collective this is adaptive tool use and uh i don't think this has ever been seen in ants before and when i say adaptive tool use what this study did this study and suggesting their tool use what this study did is take the fire ant and it it it wanted to see if a feeding strategy for the ants was disrupted if the ants could adapt and continue that feeding strategy so they took little bottle caps because science doesn't need to be fancy all the time it had some bottle caps they took some bottle caps and they put sugar water in it now the ants the ends of the ants legs are small enough that the surface tension of the water they can they can stand on it and so the ants would go stand on the surface of water and drink it and leave i mean that's cool but then what the scientists did was apply a surfactant like a soap to the water eliminating the surface tension or decreasing it by a large amount now there was a there was a real drowning risk for the ants so if they tried to employ the same strategy they would go on top of the water and they would drown and die so if an ant wasn't intelligent in its tool use they might just all go die or they might just stop feeding but here's what the ants did actually so on the top you that is a pile of sand now once the surfactant is applied and the ants are no longer able to stand on the surface what you'll notice over time is that mounds of sand begin to form what the ants are doing here is putting sand into the bottle caps and you can you can see the liquid coming out into and around the bottle caps and what that does by capillary action it allows the the sugar water to flow out into the sand and onto the sand surface where there's no longer a threat of drowning these say these these ants are building a sand siphon in real time in reaction to a changing feeding environment that it that is absolutely incredible would you would you think of that sometimes there's there's animal uh like studies like with crows and stuff where the crow would do something or like i don't think i would have figured that out but this is this is absolutely incredible to me the fact that they know or can reason all of this physics and fluid dynamics out to continue to feed in this way is incredible and of course they don't know quote unquote no in the same way that you or i know something or they probably don't it is more um it's more a hardwired trait it's probably not a learned trait um it's more a hardwired trait that you know millions of years ago some ants had a genetic mutation and some population of ants started doing stuff like this and it was selected for so they they may not know what they're doing like hey there aunt gary we should we should take you know sand might work i learned that in high school no they're not doing that but they do have enough evolutionary history behind them where they can employ an adaptive to an adaptive task this is cool in the black hole thing to me okay maybe not but it's close so uh just a couple more comments and questions before we call it a day i'm living on martian time so i'm a little bit later than you ethan carp says hive mind kinda but not really it's not a distributed consciousness um like the geth or like the borg or something like that they're not all part of a singular consciousness it's kind of like a wisdom of the crowds kind of thing uh nathaniel coral says i don't like sand it's coarse and rough and um no i can't read the rest of the comments sorry i don't know what it says eugene oliveiros says technically ants are already fighting a huge world war at the moment between super colonies yes i saw that kurzgazat video as well and i recommend it and a nag man says what about all the people that died from drinking liquid nitrogen yeah don't drink liquid nitrogen it expands in your stomach and it also freezes your stomach it destroys your stomach um literally and then you die mad cow says they're building a pyramid i like to think they're using the sand more of like in a dayz kind of zombie body sort of way alicia kennedy says my child's doctor just told me that taking vitamin d can reduce your chances of getting covered by over 50 based off of a study he has seen have you seen anything similar no i have not seen anything similar but that does not mean it's true um i don't know uh what you're describing is a prophylactic treatment something you can do to your body to make you less likely to get something um and i haven't seen that study uh but again i'm not a doctor or i'm not a pediatrician so i would look into it but also see this is complicated not a duck but something like vitamin d is something that a lot of people are deficient in anyway by which i mean taking some vitamin d supplementation could be totally harmless so it's not the end of the world if you start taking in vitamin d you're not gonna die but i haven't seen verification on that study it's something you could look into um if you have some medical background or you're just curious you could search for it or you could use google scholar scholar.google.com i think and that will search all the available papers in its network and you could try to find something like that but i would suggest looking for it um zeren maelstrom destroyer of the third realm with the ten says hey kyle finally made it here here's a question can the human brain truly understand randomness or would you just keep finding patterns where they are none oh well we certainly find patterns where they're none um of course this is true i mean you all know about confirmation bias about um you know uh gambler's fallacy these kind of things where our brain does not handle randomness well i think that's why quantum mechanics is so unintuitive it's why we will pick you know faces out of static or see things in the clouds paradolia is is the psychological quirk where we see faces everywhere it's because our brains are looking for all those pieces be like face even if it's not a face um i think we have some intuitive understanding about things that are random um but we we we search out meaning you know it's more for whatever reason for the social animals that we are it's more psychologically comforting that when something terrible happens to you or something amazing happens to you well there's two sides of this coin but when something this is a proven psychological effect but we tend to think when something amazing happens to us that we have something to do with it but when something terrible happens to us we never have anything to do with it the classic example i think daniel kahneman nobel prize winner had a study on this where um if you do poorly on the tet on a test the test is bad but if you do great on a test you're an amazing student um so i think we understand it i i think it probably goes wrong more often and more detrimentally than we ever think though confirmation bias is everywhere all the time music century piano 29 like every week amazing supporter of the facility with the 50 says keep up the great work kyle ants are awesome yes do you have a favorite cosmic event i pick a starquake seismic solar events are incredible stark it's hard to beat the name it's hard to beat the name i like the roche limit the um the distance at which a moon would have to be from a planet to be ripped apart by tidal forces and form rings i think that's pretty metal um we're just about done here so no more super chats we're going to wrap it up in just a second jesus skywalker see now you could have made that jesus water walker if you wanted he didn't walk on the sky well i guess he did fly at one point if ants used to that could have been offensive i'm sorry i went to 16 years of private catholic school i can say it it's fine if ants use tools does that mean they're in some sort of ant stone age well that implies that they're gonna no actually it wouldn't be a stone age um no you're right it's i was gonna say yes it's a stone age lord help us skywalker when the ants reach the bronze age the little tiny swords and stuff and finally we have rejected amoeba with the five says hey kyle i love the show i want to say thank you for your content as well as to say that you and others have inspired me to go back to college for stem uh rejected you are now accepted in my heart because i cannot thank you enough that's very very high praise and i consider that kind of thing to be one of the metrics that i'm doing my job well so i wish you the absolute most success um you're only going to get that success if you prepare if you study if you take it seriously but if you do that and you find something you're really passionate about i know you can do great things we all have the capacity to do great um it's being about it's being prepared to have the opportunity for greatness right because the world is random the best you can do you know being lucky is just being prepared for opportunity right so when it comes along seize it and don't let it go like an ant with a grain of sand trying to get sugar water thank you so much for joining me for this edition of office hours whew i feel like i nailed that one not gonna lie i'm glad i didn't die on stream that would have been bad what did we talk about today we talked about ants we also took one of your comments from the last episode about slapping a chicken that's what an oven does we also talked about the absolute catastrophic economic cost of the current pandemic yay we also talked about the nobel prize in physics went through that a little bit and then firstly finally we talked about brain class and how amazingly terribly cool it is um if you want to join the facility if you want to keep this conversation going with me there are private live streams there are uh behind the scenes content like photos and videos you get episodes early you give me episode ideas you talk with me in discord almost every day look i know some of you saying hey where's kyle been hey look i have a lot of magnets okay i have a lot of magnets to take care of plus i'm always lurking so if you want to talk to me you can join the facility at patreon.com kyle hill and you can get all that great stuff and there's also merch and all that stuff but if not subscribe to the channel and uh i promise to bring you oh i'll try i promise to bring you some at least something that i find really interesting and then i hope you find interesting each and every week um only a couple more weeks until uh until something's gonna happen so until then and then especially like right after then let's try to be understanding of each other nice to each other because if your brain hasn't been turned into glass yet this is all we got

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 146,954

Rating: 4.9147367 out of 5

Keywords: science, stem, education, math, physics, space, kyle hill, biology, podcast, learning, because science, the facility, kyle hill channel, office hours, volcano, pompeii, vesuvius eruption, archaeology, brains, glass, Herculaneum, eruption, vitrification

Id: j8-lHCIOuJc

Length: 67min 41sec (4061 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020