Creatures Who Defy Gravity (But Not Really)

idea what you're in for. But anyways, today on the show, we're talking about creatures who spit in the face of gravity. These critters laugh at the general concept of physics and take things to an extreme level, defying gravity, shrugging off space flight, and being extremely improbable in general. Noticed how I've carefully avoided saying that we're only talking about animals.

I'm sure that won't be relevant later. And of course, at the end of the episode, I will reveal the animal behind the mystery sound from last week and the winner of the first ever Guests Who's Talk and contest.

It has no prizes, no rewards except feeling smug, which I think is actually a pretty good reward in smug is good joining me today to talk about physics, gravity and the animals who scoff at the Cosmos is part of all physicist and co host of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe Daniel whiteson, Hi, I'm here to defend gravity against scoffers and everybody who is smugly ignoring it. Daniel Whites and attorney at law coming into defend gravity

to object real heavy mood in the courtroom. That's right. You know, Gravity is unionized. They organized and effective and coordinated, and I'm here to speak for all of them. Well, dang, so, welcome back to this show. I'm really excited to have you on here today because we are talking about avity and the animals who just think it's no big deal. And in fact, later on in the show, we're going to talk about animals who are actually in space or

have been in space. Of course they had little help from us humans, but it's still very interesting how they adapt to space, something that they have never had to deal with until we intervened and decided, let's just let's just put you in space, little fellas. See how you do well? You know, physics isn't just here to constrain you. Physics isn't just here to say what you can't do. We also do physics so we can learn how to manipulate the universe and how to use it bended to

our will to accomplish our goals. So physics is also a helping hand sometimes exactly. I mean, in fact, the first little creature we're going to talk about uses physics to its advantage. Actually should say the creatures we're going to talk about, because we're gonna we're going to talk

about wall crawlers. So you know that Spider Man can crawl up walls and mess with the multiverse, but real spiders and get gos and other arthropods can crawl up walls and mess around with the universe on the atomic scale. So have you ever wondered how a spider or geck or other little wall crawlers managed to climb up on a straight vertical like they can go right up a wall, even up glass, which seems pretty slippery and hard. I've

I've tried, and doesn't work for me. I have a really fund mental image of you trying to climb the outside of a skyscraper. Listen, you know, you never know whether you can do it until you try at least once. And I got maybe two hands on there, and then it didn't keep working. But I'm not a gecko or a spider who to thunk it. So well, that's how you found out, right, maybe you were gecko or had bitten by or had been bitten by a radioactive get go,

and you wouldn't have gecko woman. That's a good one. That's a I think, yeah. And then I'd go around and I'd use my razor sharp reflex is to swap my tongue out at criminals. That's a that's a great superhero we st right for Marvel. I bet Marvel already owns that. I p probably they've just taken every animal and plant and phungi and like added man or woman to the end of it and copyrighted, copyrighted, copyrighted, so

nobody can do anything anymore. So. The ability of spiders and geckos and other small critters to ascend walls is thought to be primarily through Vanderwall's forces. So Daniel, you probably know how Vanderwall's forces work, as everyone knows Vender's walls, yet climb up them. That's right. Vander Wall's forces is a force between atoms and molecules, named after a Dutch physicist, Johannes vander Walls. And you know, I think it's funny how Van Dare makes something sound like, you know, fancy

or you know, pretendial us or whatever. But in Dutch it just means like from the you know, it's like Daniel from the Irvine or something, Lothar of the Hill people. The same thing in uh in Italian, you know, Davinchi, it's like he's just he's from from Vinchi, exactly, no big deal. It's like his address, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well vander Walt's forces are these forces, you know, between

atoms and molecules, and they can help hold things together. Um, they're kind of weak though, they're not like as strong as the electromagnetic force, and they fall off very quickly with distances, like you know, if Adams are too far apart, they basically don't feel the vander Walt's force at all. Yeah, that's exactly right. So you know, you don't as a

human really feel vander Wald's forces. Like if you put your hand on a wall, you're not necessarily going to feel like, oh yeah, I'm getting sucked into this wall because they're so weak. They're unlike other bonds between two atoms, Like if two atoms share an electron or have oppositely charged ions, it forms a much stronger bond. But the Vanderwalt's forces are these kind of it's a very mysterious, very gentle force between two atoms. Of course, you know more about it than I do. Only one of us

is a particle physicist. I hate to put you on the spot here, but how do Vanderwald's forces work? Like why would there be this very weak attraction between two atoms or or also very weak uh repellent between two atoms. Yeah, well, Vanderwaldt's forces are interesting because there's something we call a force. But you know, they're not like fundamental force of the universe. Like in particle physics we think about electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, and the strong force and the force

of gravity. These are the ways that particles can repel or attract each other. The vander Walt's force is something else. It's something that we've found through experiments, or that vander Walls found through experiments. It's sort of like an emergent force. It's like combination of all these things together has this sort of an overall effect. And you know it has also to do with like how the objects repel each other.

It doesn't just attract that sometimes can repel each other because like two atoms have electron clouds, and when those electron clouds get a little too close to each other, they don't like necessarily to overlap, and so those electron clouds can like repel each other a little bit. And so it's something that like emerges from lots of little effects altogether. And are these are these like quantum or sub atomic effects? Like how how tiny are we talking about?

Like at what level is this interacting in the universe. Yeah, it's something that only really makes sense to talk about between atoms and molecules. So if you get down to like the tinies little particles like quarks, they don't feel vander Wall's forces against each other because it's something that only sort of makes sense when you're talking about atoms

and molecules because it's an emergent phenomena. It's something that only arises at that scale um sort of like the way you know, ice cream doesn't make sense to talk about like an ice cream particle. There's no particle of ice cream, but ice cream is the thing we experience and we enjoy in the universities, and that comes together from other smaller pieces. It sounds like somebody has never had dippin dots. Dipping dots are not made of fundamental

particles of ice cream. Mind blown realization. I don't know. I don't know about that. That doesn't sound right. I know you're a particle physicist, but there are some things you don't know. Well, I actually did build a dipping dots collider. We smashed dipping dots together very high energies, and we look, we have the data. Okay, um, and the dipping dots company is going to come after me for docks ing them here on the podcast. But no,

dipping dots are just ice cream in another shape. Well, I would sign up for being a volunteer at that collider. Let those dipping dots collide right with my mouth. So yeah, It's it's an interesting thing because it's such a weak force. It's it's weaker than static electricity, where you know, if you rub a balloon on your head and you have that electrostatic force of it like clinging to your head. It's like that doesn't feel that strong, but it's even

weaker than something like that. So it seems odd that this could be used by something like a spider or even a geck, which is relatively large when we're talking about atomic forces, to crawl up a wall. But indeed they do, and the way they do it is just by the power of large numbers. So one kind of like little connection between two molecules, uh through vander walls is not very strong, but if you multiply that by millions,

suddenly you actually have something you can work with. So with spiders, who are adorable and cute and we love them, uh, if you look at their little feet on a microscopic level, they have a bunch of little hairs, nearly a million little tiny hairs on these feet, and they're so thin. What they're able to do that say, like a human hand can't do, is make contact really close with the

surface that they're walking on. So because they have these hundreds of thousands of little hairs on each little tiny leg tip, uh, that those little teeny tiny like you can only see them under an electron microscope, hairs brush up against that surface, and each one experiences very weak Vanderwall's force, and then you add that up to six hundred thousand. Suddenly you've got a spider if she's got

amazing miracle sticky feet. It's like if you take a spoonful of dipping dots, it actually tastes like a spoonful of ice cream exactly, so many tiny little exclusions going on in your mouth. And you take a spoonful of spiders, it's gonna taste like a spoonful of spiders. Have you done that experiment? In fact, the cumulative force of these tiny hairs on the spider feet are so strong they are pound for pound, much stronger than Spider Man himself,

a very real person. So the adhesive force of six hundred thousand spider foot hairs, all taking advantage of Vanderwald's forces, allows the spider a grip of a hundred and seventy times its own weight. So that's like if Spider Man could crawl up a skyscraper while carrying two horses, and that's pretty impressive. I can't carry two horses across a flat surface, not to mention up a skyscraper. Shamefully, I can only carry one horse. So it's the same thing

with get gos. Have you ever seen a geck foot? We used to have a gecko in my family. It was our failed experience of having a pet. The gecko was not just walking around anymore. Yeah. Yeah, they're very sensitive. They're hard to take care of. I had a crusted gecko in college. I don't think I was supposed to have a pet in the college dorms, but we had a crusted gecko, very cute. We fed it baby food. I don't know if that was the best thing for human babies. Yeah, it was like mango baby food and

supplemented with the insects we found in our apartment. How did that happen to a bunch of college freshmen go to the grocery store shopping for gecko food and not find any, and they thought, well, they could probably eat baby food. Yes, yes, that is what happened, because you didn't find any like flies or worms or crickets in the grocery store. Yeah, we just had plenty of abundant

pests in our party. And uh we did mix the the baby food with I think some cricket powder, so really lovely smell that we had go brewing in there, real real nice kind of home cooking that college freshman's did. But we actually, we actually took pretty good care of it, all things considered. But it was a very adorable little thing.

In retrospect, I probably wouldn't recommend them as pets, just because, you know, it's it's a really hard to take care of something like a gecko, and it's also hard to determine whether they are like ethically sourced. So but I was just a dumb college freshman, so what did I know. But it's little feet were so interesting, and it could crawl up vertically on walls, it could really grip to you,

it could just crawl up your arm um. And the crested gecko actually is a really good jumper, so you could jump from one hand to another person across the room. It's very impressive. And it's little feet we're really interesting

because they look like ruffles potato chips. They have these little ridges all over it, and when you zoom in with a microscope, on each ridge of this gecko's foot is millions and millions of little hair like structures called settee, and each of these little hairs, again tiny microscopic, small hair branches off into even tenier tinier nano scales called spatula,

and these are so tiny and delicate. When they touch a surface like a wall or even a pane of glass, just like the spiders and arthropods we talked about earlier, they make very close contact with the atoms of that

surface and they experience Vanderwall's forces. And so like the spiders, they by having millions of settee millions of these hair like structures and double the number of the little uh spetch juli, the nano scales that are on the tips of the hair like structures, they are able to get a pretty strong grip just using Vanderwald's forces uh and

which to me is kind of incredible. How it boggles my mind from an evolutionary standpoint, because it feels like, sure, as you know, someone really smart, like a physicist could come up with, Hey, let's like we could take advantage of Vanderwald's forces by having a bunch of teeny tiny hairs and multiplying them by a million, and we can

run it through a computer program. In fact, I think there are some researchers who have made robotic geckos using artificial site um, very cool, but like from an evolutionary perspective, like how many little steps you have to go through before kind of happening upon like, oh, these little tiny hairs on my feet are sticky and they stick to walls. It's it's crazy, it's amazing. And how many walls were there that these like ancient decos had to scramble up

to avoid predators? Did they like, you know, run up prehistoric glass walls inside volcano shafts or something to avoid predators? Why do you even need this crazy skill? Have you seen dinosaurs the nineties sitcom? They had houses? I do think it's super awesome though, because it reveals to you a layer of the universe you don't usually see that these surfaces that you think are super slick microscopically are

fundamentally different, right. They have all sorts of interesting like wiggles and cracks and texture to the surface that if you understand how to take advantage of microscopically, you can do things that macroscopically seem impossible. And I think that's a cool lesson. You know that that understanding how things work microscopically is actually important, and that the way things

look is not the way things actually work. Absolutely, And I jokingly kind of frame this episode of like animals who defy physics, but really they are using physics to their advantage. Physics is a neutral force, neither good nor evil. Um, it's undefiable, right, Like, you can't defy physics, not like some body of law that's going to come and strike you down. You're just like you can't. Yeah, science fiction novel.

What if I say pounds sand physics? Is that defiant enough? Well, you're using physics to scream your defiance at physics, my brain. Really you're compliant bow my brain. Um. But yeah, So, new research indicates that geckos might use, in addition to Vanderwald's forces, another molecular force up their sleeves, static electricity,

which I talked about earlier as being a stronger atomic force. Um. So, Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada gave a bunch of geckos teflon foot massages to measure the chart charge of their little feet, which sounds like the most adorable research I can imagine, Like they just like gently rubbed these little gecko feet against the teflon to

measure the charge. Uh, And they did, in fact find that their feet were positively charged and the teflon was negatively charged upon contact, so that that difference in charge creates an attraction. And just like you know when you rub a rub a balloon and your hair all sticks up and uh, you know, it's says somehow these geckos are able to take advantage of two forces, both vander walls and the static electricity. That's pretty amazing, good job geckos.

See they are masters of physics. They're basically tiny little physicists or engineers. I'm not sure. Move over, Daniel, Let a gecko take your job. I'm climbing the walls already over here. But this doesn't yet disproved that Vanderwall's forces are actually the primary uh method for geckos to climb alls, because geckos can actually climb up straight surfaces underwater where they can't form these electro static connections like the static

electricity connections. So while the static electricity may help them, it seems like it's more of a situational thing, like if they can form a static charge against the surface, they do and it probably helps them, but they don't appear to need that they still rely on this you know, very weak force that they just uh, multiply by a million. So getck research is like an active area of inquiry, Like there're people out there writing grants about geckos and

raising geckos for research. Is that ethical? Is it ethical? Well, you know, I think it's that's a difficult question to answer. I think it depends very much on the nature of care that the get go are getting. It depends on how you source the geckos. If you're getting them, if you're breeding them in a lab, I don't think that has too much of a negative impact on the environment unless you accidentally release them and they become invasive. So, you know, it depends on a lot of factors, the

ethics of geckos. But regardless of the ethics, we have shot geckos into space. These are just the fact, regardless of the ethics, whatever you say after that, I think the geckos need a union and they need representation because it sounds like nobody's really thinking about what the get go wants in these experiments. Daniel Whites and attorney at the Law of Physics here to and geckos so on board the b I O n M one unmanned spacecraft.

There are a bunch of turners thick toad geckos or there were, I don't know if this is a currently running experiment. And they wanted to see the effects of low gravity and and orbit on some reptiles, just see how they do. How how do you like that on the scale of zero to ten? Like how much you like space? Um? And these geckos apparently weren't having such a bad time because they were observed doing what appeared

to be play in space. So one of the get gos went rogue, got out of its collar, and because they were in low gravity, the collar floated away, and the geckos started playing with it, like pushing it, kicking it back and forth. One getto tried to put its head inside the collar. One of them tried to like stand on it. So they seemed to be playing around in space, taking an interest in the bizarre physics of

this floating little tiny gecko collar. Wow, we're really projecting human mental models onto geckos that we are torturing by launching them into space and then acting as if they liked it. You know, look, they're having fun. I mean, maybe they're like panicked and they're like scrambling desperately to get their collar back on. Who really knows what is it like to be a gecko? What is it like to be a geck in space? I don't know. I

wouldn't go into space? Would you? Would you get on board and experiment to go into space if they told you you could even play games in space as a human? Maybe not, But as a gecko, I think I would because, like, life as a gecko is already pretty perilous, so you know, being a getck Go in space doesn't sound so bad. I can already climb walls, so zero gravity shouldn't be

that weird for me. I guess I'd rather be a gecko in space than a get go like trapped in a lab somewhere massages or in some like cage in some freshman dorm or something, being fed baby food instead of okay, we were chilled, We were chill. Get Go paid into the beer the beer budget too, so you know,

I got the party. So when we were to we're actually going to talk about even more animals who have escaped gravity by literally being shot into space, the reasons they were up there and what they experienced while they were there, probably some fear. Well we'll find out. So, Daniel, do you know who the first animals in space were? Oh? I know that there was a Sylviet street dog that they launched into space. La. Yes, yes, that's about as

far back as my knowledge goes that was. It's such a tragic story because while it's something really interesting in terms of I am, you know, sort of scientific milestone, I have so much compassion for dogs. I can't help but feel just so emotional about that story, so so sorry for like who must have been so scared because you know, as as we know, like they were able to launch like up into space, up into lower orbit. But when they she came back down, the capsule burned

up and like died, which was very sad. But what doesn't make me sad is sending fruit flies into space. The first animals in space were not cute little dogs. That was not chimpanzees, it wasn't even rats. It was fruit flies. And they returned to Earth perfectly safely, which great. I don't care as much about the fruit flies as

I did Like. So that's what you are talking here, fruit flies in space, Ninete, what incredible fruit flies went to space and came back and we can ask them about it and the teeny tiniest of microphones, like, how is your experience in space? Mr? Fruit fly? It's like not that much fruit, So I wasn't that interested. Um, So the US launched a V two rocket from New Mexico with a payload of flies. The purpose was to

see how radiation affects living organisms at high altitudes. So, Danny, you probably know, like why radiation is more of a concern when you're in space than when you're on Earth. Yes, absolutely, because space is filled with radiation. The Sun, for example, is constantly pumping out huge amounts of radiation. This means like really high energy particles like protons and electrons, and also just really high energy photons. But this was not something we knew early on. We thought that as you

went up in space, the radiation would drop. We thought maybe the radiation radiation was coming from the Earth like minerals in the Earth, and as you went out into space it would fall off. So people were actually surprised when they discovered that radiation increased as you went up into space. Basically that the atmosphere is acting as a huge shield, just like a big wet mattress or something protecting us from all these tiny bullets from space. This

atmosphere seems pretty important. Well, good thing, we haven't done anything bad to it, so yeah, no, exactly. The sun is beaming down a lot of radiation. You feel it every time you go outside and you feel warmth on your skin. Maybe you get a sunburned. Don't do that where sunscreen from a red head to you everybody. You don't have to be a redhead to need sunscreen. But yeah, when you get a sunburn, that is a radiation burn. Uh, and it's a relatively mild one that you know, over

time does increase the chance of skin cancer. But in space, with no atmosphere to protect you, the radiation from the sun can really wallop you. That's right. Astronauts have to be really careful because not only is there a lot of radiation, but it fluctuates, like the sun can basically like burp and emit huge amounts of radiation, you know,

like these solar flares. They call this like solar weather or space weather, and then you can have like much more intense radiation very briefly, and most astronauts and space have like a panic room they can go into that's extra shielded with like it or something to protect them from these bursts of radiation. Makes me wonder if on the I. S. S there's like some kind of belch and then someone's like, who burped? It's like the Sun. Well it's better than calling it, you know, the Sun's flatulence.

Blame it on the Sun. Astronauts. There's nowhere to hide if you fart in the International Space Station. But you know, actually space has an interesting smell. You know, when you're come in from outer space. Space suits have an interesting odor because they've accumulated various stuff that's out there and they've been like activated by the various high energy particles, and so astronauts have reported that once you come in from outer space, they smell this is sort of smells

a little bit like you know, overdone barbecue. But sometimes if you get interesting aromatics, you can have like smells of raspberries or all the weird stuff someone's cooking somewhere in space. Space Gordon Ramsey yelling at some space chef, I love it. Yeah, So why didn't those fruit flies go up there and appreciate the raspberry smell of space? Yeah? I feel like we should have just left him up there.

I hate fruit flies. I mean I don't. I don't hate any animal really, but still when they get on my fruit, it's very annoying. I have a friend who does research on fruit fly brains actually, and she just kills the fruit flies when she's done. They just you know, they knock about with C two and just squish them. There's like no compassion there at all. Oh boy man, they don't get to retire to a field like a farm, a fruit fly sanctuary. Here's a banana one for each

of you. Thank you for your contributions to science. Nope, get knocked out and squished. Well, speaking of questionable practices towards animals. While I don't particularly have a huge amount of sympathy for fruit flies, although I do not hate them, I don't hate any insect. They're all very interesting, uh.

In the nineteen seventies, NASA, working with Italian researchers, sent some bull frogs up into orbit on the Orbiting Frog Odalith satellite to see how they dealt with motion sickness, which, god, I feel so much sympathy for these poor frogs. As someone who has a sensitive stomach and who gets motion sick in cars? If I read for like a nanosecond, Ah, this sounds like a nightmare. Well why frogs? Why would they use frogs? Are frogs particularly sensitive to motion sickness?

Well that's what's really interesting about this. So to talk about why. First, why is it called orbiting frog odalith? The odalith refers to a structure in the inner ear that allows vertebrates to detect motion and gravity. So in humans and other mammals, odaliths are these little grain like mineral structures made out of calcium carbonate that are suspended

in a fluid. So when our heads tilt back and forth, or when we experience gravity on our bodies, uh, the odalis move inside the fluid and press on cells inside your inner ear. Like if you have imagine sort of like a jar filled with little rocks, and the jars filled with olive oil or something and you move it around, Um, they will respond, uh, you know, not extremely quickly, but gradually will respond to being tilted here and there and

and being dropped on the ground. Um. And so what happens when these these little grains, these little odaliths move flash back and forth in your ear? They press upon what are called hair cells. So hair cells don't have anything to do with like the hair on your head. They are actually slender cells inside your inner ear that connect to nerve fibers and sends information to your brain.

So these odalis form like a little avalanche and press on these slender hair like cells, and then that sends a message to your brain that oh, I'm falling, this is bad. Or you're in a car and you're moving and these odalists get pushed back in your ear, and if you tilt your head forward, it can give you this sense of falling forward and cause you to become

disoriented and motion sick. So I'm imagining like having a cup of coffee in your car and then you hit the accelerator and then the surface of the coffee changes right, doesn't just stay flatted like moved back towards the cup where if you hit the brakes, suddenly your coffee flies out of your cup. So you can like have a little container of stuff that tells you whether you're accelerating forwards or backwards or whatever. So that's what's happening inside

our ear. We have like little coffee mugs basically, and they're telling us whether they're spilling over or not, and that tells your brain basically how you're being moved. Little coffee mugs with like lumps of sugar in it that slash around. So while odolith's function differently in other vertebrates, frogs, coming back to your question, Daniel, actually have a similar inner ear structure to humans. So that's why we shot frogs into space, specifically bull frogs, because their inner ear

mechanism works similarly to humans. Uh and unfortunately for them, very unfortunately for them. So how did they measure motion sickness of bull frogs alone in space? Was it little froggy barf bags or a survey? Sadly no, they used electrodes implanted in their inner ear nerves or vestibular nerves to collect data on the activity of those inner ear nerves. So activity that varied greatly from baseline indicated that the inner ear was panicking and sending frantic messages to the

brain about weight blessness in spaceflight in orbit. And uh, because this was very interesting, uh in terms of like, well, what will happen to astronauts that we send out if we send them into orbit? Are they just going to be vomiting continuously, which would be horrible because in the

vomit would float away. Uh and uh. What they found was that after an initial period of the frog ears freaking out, that their ears sending these frantic messages to their brand going like what is happening, they actually returned to baseline. So that indicated that the bull frogs acclimated to low gravity, and after a little while of adjustment,

they're like, this is fine, I'm fine. You know, image of image of that dog sipping coffee in the fire, except it's like a bullfrog in space sipping coffee, going this is fine, I'm vomiting. Of course, it becomes a little more nightmarish when you hear about the actual set up of the experiment, because of course they didn't just have a bunch of cute little frogs and little froggy spacesuits all buckled in, all all cutely. The way the frogs were sent into space is a little bit of

a kind of black mirror situation for frogs. Their arm nerves were severed so they wouldn't move and so they wouldn't pull out the electrodes, and so that they could survive longer without eating um because like by severing their arm nerves, it meant they wouldn't move around and they would slow down their metabolism. And they were suspended in water to allow gas exchange and breathing, so like the

ultimate sensory deprivation tank. But being shot into space and not being able to move your arms and legs, that's a you know, I'm glad I wasn't a bullfrog in the nineteen seventies. We got to find out who that bullfrog's agent was because they really fell down on the job. Like, seriously, those frogs needs to representation. That sounds like a nightmare. Yeah, and did they did they survived? Did they come back to Earth or are they still up there like frozen

frog somewhere? You know, I'm not sure if they survived. I think they did have to retrieve the capsule though, to get the electrode data, so one or the other the frogs came back to Earth. But regardless of whether they survived, they were probably euthanized because what kind of a life is it for a frog to, you know, just be suspended in water and uh, with all these electrodes sticking out of you, maybe you got to listen to podcasts. You know that would Yeah, if you're a

frog in space in some kind of secret experiment. Thanks for listening, uh and don't forget to like and subscribe. So there's one more organism I want to talk about, But the fact that it's going to be orbiting the Earth is perhaps the least interesting part about it. And so when we return, we're going to be talking about a blob. So Daniel, let's talk about the space blob. Space blob of what frog vomit or something else. It's

just the space blob. Period. So earlier in the episode, I teas that we're not going to be only talking about animals. Uh so most recently, uh so, relatively recently, we uh sent wait, no sorries. So we are currently sending a rather different organism into space. It is a slime mold called VI Serum poly syphonium, which is a slime mold known colloquially as the blob. That's like the actual name that researchers often referred to. It's it's the

blob um. They have blob conferences and blob meetings. We need to discuss the blob. It's becoming urgent. So this thing is not an animal. It's not a fungus, it's not a bacteria, and it's not a plant. It is a eukaryote like humans and plants and animals, but it is a protest, So protest is any eukaryote that's neither an animal, plant, or fungus, Which is kind of circular logic,

isn't it. It's like, right, right, what is it's just the miscellaneous bin of animals or actually no, it's the miscellaneous bin of non animals that are not plants or fungus. But they are eukaryotes, which you know, and they must have other things in common with each other, right, They can't only be defined by not being something else. That's kind of how it is. Actually, they are not necessarily

always related that closely like. There might be some that are more closely related, but there might be some that are like more closely related to animals or more closely related to plants or to fungus, But they just why what they share in common is the lack of being an animal, a fungus, our plant, which you know when you think about it. Sometimes the strongest friend groups are just made based on what you dislike and not what you like you get together and I'll complain about the

same TV show. Yeah, you get together there and complain about me and all these animals and plants and and uh, fungus just watching Friends reruns. It's not even that good. It's not that funny. They just wanted to be invited. Really, they're just bitter. Put us in our own little group of misfits. Will show you. So are slime mold connected to anything else? So they have any like weird other evolutionary cousins are They like on their own the only

things like them on earth. They're kind of on their own and even weirder like a slime mold is not again, like necessarily all closely related to each other. It's kind of like when we talk about fish, where you know, we call a lot of things fish, but a one fish might be more closely related to humans than it is to another fish. It's a similar case with slime molds. Uh. They can often look pretty similar or behave somewhat similarly,

but sometimes they're just not very related at all. They're just kind of this like catch all thing of like it's weird and slimy and kind of looks like a mold, but we don't know. Uh So, the blob. Sorry, excuse me, so the blob. Let's get back to the blob. We got to talk about the blob. Very important to talk about the blob. What does the blob look like? Kind of looks like a yellow splat, you say, in the

most flattering terms possible. It is like a ballago that you forcefully threw down on the ground and kind of splattered all over the place. Uh So, it is like a goop that has these branching yellow veins coming out of the goo. Uh yeah, looks it looks looks good, looks cool. It looks like a nightmare. It sounds like a nightmare. Looks a little bit like neon barf um. And aside from living, crawling neon barf living neon barf uh And other than that, it's also very strange, very

weird organism. Uh So, during one stage of its life cycle, it is actually an a cellular organism, which means that instead of dividing into multiple cells as it grows, it's just one big, goopy, expanding cell. It doesn't have like cell walls or anything. Well, it has organills, but it does not have cell walls at that stage. In its life cycle. It has cell walls at different stages in its life cycle, which I have tried to study the

things like life cycle. I've looked at diagrams. It's it's difficult. It's a doozy. There's like multiple branching circles that happen, and I'm not sure I fully understand it. I'm gonna be very candid. It's it's really hard for me to wrap my head around. But I'm turning your brain into a blob. It's turning my brain into a blob. This is how it reproduces. It just turns your brain into a blob. But it's going viral because now you're turning

all your listeners brains into blobs. We all become blob. I guess it's better than carsonization, where we all become crabs. Welcome to the blob. Everyone more questions about how they work, like do they have DNA or any sort of like nucleus. Yes, in fact, they have many nucleus is all floating around

inside just a big old party. It's decisions. Yes, So they have one it's one big expanding cell with these like branch You see this blob, that's one cell and then even it's branching veins that are coming off of it. That's all part of the same cell, just kind of expanding and growing, and it's got multiple nucleus is inside of it instead of having just one nucleus, so you know, in these nucleus are full of genetic material and they can all start to grow and use this genetic material

as building blocks at different parts of the cell. So that's why it's like a goose bladder that just keeps growing and branching out. Um. And I guess that's why it's called the blob. And aren't they also like really hard to kill, Like they're really hearty objects, aren't they? Yeah? I think so, because basically, if you chop off part of the blob, there's more blob that still has a genetic material inside of it. Uh. So it is interesting in that slime molds are often kind of they may

look similar, but they function differently. So Um, like I said, slime molds are sort of a catch all term for weird eukaryotes that are kind of unclassifiable. They're not always related to each other, but often slime molds are actually unicellular organisms that have teamed up into a big ball of individual organisms that are working together to form a

single aggregate. So uh, you know, it's like it's similar to you know, as a human, we are a bunch of cells all working together, but we're much more organized, whereas a slime mold are a bunch of unicellular organisms that sometimes work together. Sometimes they'll even form like a slug that kind of moves in unison, but ultimately they're all in it for themselves. So but on the other hand, uh, the blob uh is just one big cell and so

uh it's this is just incredibly weird. It's there are large unicellular organisms, but the blob is weird and that it's like it has these multiple nucleus is and it kind of just uses outwards and it has a kind of weird, spooky intelligence that arises from the ability to use these multiple nucleuses to grow and expand in multiple directions. Uh. So it can learn the fastest path to grow towards food. Keep in mind, this has no brain, It has no

nerves we'd have, it doesn't really have sensory organs. Uh. So how it is able to find the fastest, most efficient path towards food is really weird and kind of freaky. It's like solving an optimization problem. It's like a little distributed computer. Yes. In fact, it is often considered as a candidate to build a bio computer because it can be trained to be used as a logic gate, because it is so efficient at moving from you know, one

particle of food to the next. Researchers in Japan created like a miniature uh Tokyo where they used oat flakes to represent like different cities, different like locations, and they put the slime mold on it and it grew out. It's weird, goopy tendrils to each of the oat flakes. I guess they love oat flakes. I don't know, very healthy blob um, but uh, and it would grow out, and they showed that this network of expanding tubular structures coming out of this one blobby cell was so efficient.

It was similar to how city planning works in terms of designing subway lines and transit lines. So we should have the blob design our public transport. Look, I'm sorry to break it to you urban planners, but the blobs coming for your job. Well, we definitely need an improvement in our urban planning here in southern California, we basically have no public transport, so bring on the blob, Bring

on the blob. But yeah, it is really it's like kind of spooky how intelligent they are, because again, it's not like a consciousness. There's no nervous system, there's no brain. It's not even like with ants, where you know, each of the ants have their own little tiny brain and they kind of work together using pheromones, so they kind of have this emergent intelligence coming out of an ant colony.

That kind of makes some sense. But something like this blob that has uh, you know, it doesn't have sensory organs like animals do. They must be doing it in some other ways. So one theory is maybe energy conservation, like it's somehow is op of minds towards the most efficient kind of energy path. Um, there may be some like chemical process that is happening on the surface of the blob cell and that allows it to grow towards food. It is really weird, really mysterious, and I'm not sure

that there's a definitive answer yet. And does the blob have any predators? Like why hasn't the blob just taken over the world by now it's a good question. I doubt it tastes very good. In fact, it might not be uh super palatable. So that's that's one method of of survival is to just be super disgusting. That's what that's my strategy. But just don't shower, don't make an effort, and people will avoid you. People leave me alone anyway, because I'm a physicist. It's just like a second layer

of protection. So uh So, how though, despite it being a disgusting splat, it does undergo sexual fusion with one another, which means there's hope for us all. So they can form a plasmodium, which is what we've been talking about. That is the blob we know and love. That's this one big cell, one big happy, massive nucleus is and and cytoplasm and goo and growing out and eating oat flakes. But this is only one stage of its many stages

of its life cycle that it can go through. So uh it can actually it starts out as a spore, which the plasmodium, that the blob can grow a fruiting body and send out spores and make more of these horrifying things. And so the spore stage actually does have a hard cell wall, and it can lie dormant until conditions are favorable, and then after that it has an amiba stage with a flexible permeable membrane in instead of

a cell wall. Are these dormant sports? Can they like hang off, you know, a hundred years, a thousand years, just like waiting for the right moment. They can wait a good amount of time. I'm not sure it's thousands or hundreds of years, but it's definitely on the order

of years. Well. I actually once had a listener to our podcast, send me a slime mold, because I speculated on air about whether there are creatures that could have distributed intelligence because we were talking, of course about aliens. And one of our listeners was like, you need to meet a slime mold. I can send you one. Send me a slime mold. And so he did, and he

sent us a bunch. And my wife is a microbiologist who the microbiologist, she grew it and it turned into this disgusting Then we have to figure out, like what to do with it, because you can't just throw it in the garbage. It would like take over the garbage. Did did you try to eat it? We did not, try to teach. This is my point. This is my point.

But yeah, I mean so even weirder, like if they develop into these amibas and it turns out life kind of sucks, they can revert back into a spore so and then go lie dormant again for x amount of time and then come back out and become an amiba again. And uh, they can be mobile with a flagella, or ditch the flagella and just do sexual fusion to become the plasmodium. And uh yeah, and then there's other branches to its life cycle that I'm gonna be honest with you.

I got a little bit lost. It's very twisty, attorney, very very strange, and like like you said, very Uh, it's got a lot of qualities that means it's a real survivor so and it's got this spooky emergent intelligence. So of course we're going to shoot it in a space and see what happens. See if space will reject it fit it back at this, what do you do when sending me this garbage? Or maybe welcome his return? Maybe the slime molds don't look like anything else on

Earth because they're not from Earth. Yeah, This was its plan all along, just be so weird and gross that we send it back home. We're throwing it back into the Brier patch. So of course France is shooting it into space. They love their weird cheeses, They love their weird mold on cheeses, so I guess they like their

weird slime molds. So it is going onto the International Space Station to study, uh, And then on Earth, French school students are going to be following the progress of the blob on and studying it while researchers on the International Space Station are studying it, which just sounds like the perfect intro to like a science fiction horror apocalypse alien takeover thing where it's like, oh, these school students, they're just these cute little French students wearing their little berets,

are studying the slime mold with these astronauts, and they've got some kind of on their iPads. They see a live feed and then suddenly just mold comes into view and then you hear screaming and then silence. Biology is always so cute and fuzzy mm hmm, until until you've got something that looks like a yellow bar trying to grow on the International Space Station. So how we not had that movie yet? Slime molds take over the space station.

It's just so cinematic, these ideas, these concepts. Listen, scriptwriters get to it. Uh yeah, they are trying to find out whether how they respond to low gravity. So does it grow like it does on Earth where it's just kind of a splatter, or could it grow into columns, or maybe it grows into the brains of astronauts. And then they return home and they're like, yes, I am normal. I returned from space, so very human. Then so very normal. I am not blob. Hey have you about blob? It's

pretty cool. Everyone's joining Blob. See humans come back, and then they are the union representation for the blob speaking for the Blob. Everybody needs representation. Listen, join our Blob union. Here's my card. Whoops, sorry, I guess now you're part of the Blob. Blobs of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your cell walls. Uh perfect, Well, I think that about does it. For the animals that we've shot into space that are probably going to form

like an army in attack us any day now. But before we go, I do need to reveal the animal behind the last week's mystery sound. Oh my gosh, And so I've decided to call this segment Guess Who's Talking, which I think works. If anyone has a better idea for the name of this game, send it in um. But to refresh your memory, let me play the mystery sound from last week. Can I guess what it sounds like? Yes,

you can. It sounds to me like a frog in suspended It sounds to me like a frog that's had its arms severed, suspendion water and forced ten ago crazy accelerations I have. I have no arms, and I must scream very good guests, Very good guests. Unfortunately incorrect. But there are some winners of this contest who guessed correctly the incognito animal. So actually I've got two winners because they wrote in it like almost exactly the same time,

Thomas Crone and Jared Miller, who both guessed sage grouse. Congratulations, and runner up is a a faction confection on Twitter. Great job you guys. I thought I started out with a real head scratcher, a real tough one, and you have absolutely blown my mind with how good you are at guessing sounds. The greater sage grouse which you have heard, which apparently sounds like a frog orbiting the earth and distress, is actually a ground dwelling bird found in sagebrush planes

in the US and Canada. These weird calls are mating noises that this sage grouse makes in a designated mating area called a lek. So the males put on a big show for the females. They they inflate their neck sacks, which are called gol or pouches, They strut around with their tails fanned out, and then they make this extremely bizarre noise, apparently to attract the females. Well, it is a strange noise, and I guess if I was a female grouse, I would find it attractive. I'm not really

sure what's like to be a female grouse. Nobody knows. I mean it sounds rough to me, honestly. So of course, now we're going to play around two of guests. Who's talking? Uh? So here is our next mystery sound contender And a hint, this is a conversation between two Canadians. So, Daniel, who do you think is talking in that video? That sounds like the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition.

You got it? Game over now now right in with your guesses to Creature feature Pot at gmail dot com, Creature feet Pad on Twitter that's E. E. T Et or Creature feature Pod on Instagram. You can also write in any questions that you have, animal questions and me pictures of your pets, concerns that the slime mold has already invaded your brain. If you're starting to feel like you want to become a blob, that's one sign of it.

Uh And I'm afraid it's probably too late for you, but you can still write in while you have control of your body. Thank you so much for joining me today. Daniel H. What what is your favorite animal that we shot into space. I'm definitely pro blob, mostly because I think the blob has the best chance of eventually taking over the Earth. So I'm just sort of making a Pascal's wager here and figuring if the Blob listens to this podcast, I'm gonna get some points for collaborating earlier. Yeah, yeah,

you're hedging your beds. I think that's pretty smart. We love the blood, don't we, folks. We share love the Blob, the Benevolent lab But Thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show, uh, and you have a minute to spare, if you can leave me a rating or review, it really helps. I read all of them and I uh it always makes my day when I get a review and I can hear your feedback. And of course thanks to the Space Classics for their super

awesome song. Ex Alumina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just, the one you just heard, visit the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast, or Hey guess what where? Have you listen to your favorite shows? See you next Wednesday.