You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what will?
What's that Mango?
So welcome back to day two of our countdown of the twenty five greatest science ideas in the past twenty five years. And you know what's funny is when I was driving around last night, I saw a car with a bumper sticker and this is true. It said science is like magic, but it's real. Okay, that's a real bumper sticker.
I like that, you know. And considering we've already covered how to get catch up to flow smoothly out of a bottle, and a scientist to capture the actual smell of space in a perfume, also a cure for hamster jet lag, I'd say we're off to a pretty magical star. It's also weird, but it's a pretty magical start. Yeah.
But as soon as I saw that sticker, I had to roll down my window to yell, Hey, science fans, subscribe to Part Time Genius on your favorite podcast.
You are not telling the that is not a mango move. But I feel like they might like the show well, and actually I feel like you forgot to tell them to leave a rating and review. That's that's your other go to.
Yeah, well, I'm sure they'll figure it out in the meantime. When do you say we get started with day two of our incredible countdown?
Can't wait, let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm here with my good friend mangesh Hot ticket there and over there in the booth knows deep in a book of magic tricks. It's our pal and producer Dylan Fake.
I think I might have inspired him to take up this new hobby with that little story.
As long as he doesn't run off to Vegas without us, I think that's okay. So Mango, I'm really excited to continue this countdown because today we're talking about bike helmets, We're talking about virtual dolphins, lobsters, and strangely, a healthy diet that doesn't involve lobsters unfortunately. So let's get started.
With Okay, Well, so how about we kick this off with a little pop quiz. What would you describe as sort of a modern healthy diet?
You know, obviously, I think it involves a lot of fruits and veggies, good fats. You hear about olive oil, fish, nuts, maybe some eggs, beans, poultry for protein, red meat, and alcohol in moderation of course, and not too much candy, which is a bummer, like those atomic fireballs we've been sending out, So just those in moderation as well. Those are the things that come to mind.
Yeah, so you just described the classic Mediterranean diet, right, and it's how people in the blue zones eat right like people who live along I'm in place like Sardinia, Italy, Italian Islands, Ikorea and Greece, and people tend to eat really healthy lives there. But what if I told you there might be an even healthier diet and instead of tomatoes and olive oil, we should be eating cassava and howler monkeys.
Oh, I didn't see that went coming. I think you'd have to give me some pretty convincing evidence. I don't think I'm up for this. I don't know. You might call it like the Temple of Doom diet.
Yeah, I feel like it's a good derivative from the Indiana Jones franchise. But let me tell you a little bit about it. So, over the past decade, there have been a number of studies involving the chi Mayne people and indigenous people native to the lowlands of the Bolivian Amazon, and the Chimyine live off the land, far from modern conveniences, and they basically have like little to no access to healthcare, at least the kind you and I are familiar with.
And for some reason they are freakishly healthy. Really, so if you take heart disease right like here in the US, about one in four people over the age of forty five shows signs of a clogged heart, but the Chimene zero.
Really.
In twenty seventeen, Lancet reported that, quote, the Chimyne have the lowest prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis of any population known to science.
Is that incredible? Yeah? So no heart problems.
Yeah. They also don't get high blood pressure or type two diabetes. They show little evidence of asthma or autoimmune diseases. Even their brains appear to be special. Like as we age are brains typically atrophy, but for some reason, the brains of older Chimyne people deteriorate at a rate that's slower than seventy percent.
Wow, so they just never get sick.
I mean, that's the weird thing. They do get sick like a lot. They are outdoorsy, their lifestyle exposes them to like an insane bacterial load, viral and parasitic infections. Seventy percent of their population has parasitic roundworm infections, and because they get sick so often, they high levels of inflammation. Now, the strange part is that for most of us, inflammation would increase our chance of heart disease and other chronic ailments,
but not for the Chimne. Their good health is so puzzling that scientists actually gave it a name, the Chimeyne inflammation paradox. Now, in recent years, researchers have descended on the population to learn their secrets, and so far their insights have gone against the grain of what we know
about healthy living. So take those roundworm infections right, Like, on the face of it, it sounds pretty unhealthy, but researchers have actually discovered that this particular roundworm alters the immune system in a way that might actually improve female fertility.
Oh wow, it's not crazy.
And most chi Mayne only got six or seven hours of sleep, and that's below the eight or nine hours that doctors typically recommend. Here, right, it's accepted wisdom that inadequate sleep can make you age faster, and yet tests that measure aging was called intrinsic age acceleration, show that the chi Mayne age slower than just about everybody.
That is incredible. But back to the idea of the diet. What does their diet have to do with any of this?
So historically, obesity is rare among the Chimyenne, even though they eat a lot more than we do. The typical Chimaye women eat six hundred more calories than the average American women in a given day. Okay, but there are two big differences here, right, So First of all, their diet is composed completely differently than ours. They eat only four to fifty grams of fat a day Americans eat
twice that. They also get more protein than we do, as much as fifty grams more per day than the average American, and they consume twice as much potassium, but just one eighth the amount of sodium. The other difference is activity level. The Chimayne actually average about sixteen thousand steps every single while, and they maintain this level of physical activity late into their lives.
Their apple watches and garments must just be giving them so many awards for all that activity. All right, so we've got low fat, high protein tons of activity. Obviously, what kinds of foods are they actually eating? Like what's on the menu for the average chimne home.
Yeah, So for starches and veggies, they tend to eat like plantains, cassava, rice, and that's about it. Their primary seafood is a fish called the trahira, also known as the wolffish because of its dog like teeth. Then for protein, they eat a lineup of local mammals, including capabera, the pecari,
which is basically a small wild pig. They also eat pakas, which are these giant rodents with markings kind of like deer, and Kutta Mundi's, which well, it's kind of like a cross between a lemur, a raccoon, and a small beer. And that's about it. They don't eat that much else. Most of their calories come from just nine different foods,
which is pretty counterintuitive. Like here in the US, we're always told we should be eating the rainbow of vegetables and a wide variety of foods, but that's not what they do.
That's super interesting. I want to say that I'm sold here, because it does feel like they've figured out the perfect diet. But I don't know how you could achieve that here. It's not like you're able to go to the store and pick up a code of Mundi, which, by the way, i'd never heard of that before. You said it's a cross between a lemur, a raccoon, and a small base. It all looks like a small I got it. I got it. But anyway, that sort of food isn't exactly accessible here.
Yeah, you're not finding it out a barbecue. This dietary advice isn't realistic for people like you and me, And lately even the Chimene have been having a hard time following this diet, and that's because modern life has started intruding on their space, right on their villages. Kids are now eating pasta there and processed foods and sugars. After generations of this diet that's like helped them defy the odds, their health's actually getting worse, it's kind of sad to see.
And they're gaining weight. So it's possible that the world's healthiest diet might actually be on the verge of extinction.
That's rough this has become a universal problem of trying to pry the sugary snacks away from our kids, you know, so they don't ruin their appetites before they eat a good dinner. It's just it's still different. Like here we're eating chicken. There they're eating capy bara, which I actually didn't know that was something people late.
Yeah, So now, if you don't want to eat a capy berra, I certainly don't blame you, but maybe you'd like to hug one. Today on our Instagram, we're actually having a little contest. We're giving one lucky listener a wonderful and ridiculous plushy capabera for them to not eat. So get the details and enter to win at part time genius.
All right, So for number eighteen, I got admit that last story did make me a little bit hungry, so I'm gonna stick with that theme. Here's a question for you, mego, do you like lobster I'm kind of like so so on it. Okay, I like lobster rolls, but I don't love lobster meat that much. I'm also not into working for my food. Other than pistachios and bananas, maybe boiled peanuts, I don't really like cracking foods open with my fingers
and pulling chunks of meat out of there. You put it that way, Well, I actually do like lobster, although it's not that I get to have it that often. But anyone who's ever dined on whole lobster knows it is not the easiest thing to eat. So, like you said, you have to break it apart with mallets and crackers and stick little forks in there to retrieve every last little bit of meat. And if you don't know what you're doing, it is a daunting task.
Yeah, it's really intimidating, especially for you know, I was a vegetarian for a large part of my life, and so I think that's.
Part of why I'm not as attracted to it, right. Right, it's sort of intimidating, and you know, even if you do know what you're doing, it's messy, like it's one of the only foods that served with a bib and wet wipes. But I've actually got a pretty big solve for you here. This goes back to two thousand and six. A man named Johnny Hathaway was thinking about this problem. He's a Native manor and he and his family had opened a seafood restaurant and a touristy part of the state.
So every summer the place was flooded with people who craved lobster, but, as he told us in an interview, customers were turned off by the mess.
Well, I soon found out that people really wanted the food, not the animal.
He thought, there has to be an easier way to cook and serve lobster, and it turned out there was. I've got three words for you, mango, high pressure processing, you get it.
I like that you're saying these things expecting me to have a reaction, but I have no idea what any of that means.
All right, Well, in the simplest terms, it's kind of like pasteurization, except it uses cold water and pressure instead of high heat. So the process is really useful because it kills the pathogens and the microorganisms that can actually
make food spoil. Now, one day, Johnny happened to be chatting with someone from the main lobster promotion Council is sort of a collective for the state's prize industry, and she told him she'd heard about some guy in New Orleans who were using high pressure processing to kill bacteria and oysters. That's a big problem. By the way, a lot of people enjoy eating oysters raw, so having the ability to eliminate that bacteria without cooking was a pretty
big deal. And it gets better. So the folks in Louisiana were finding that putting oysters in a high pressure machine didn't just make them safe to eat, it actually also shucked them. That's pretty magical. Now, just completely detached the meat from the shell. And what is lobster if not a larger and more complicated oyster. Right.
I feel like some of Breene biologists out there might disagree with that. H No simple assessment continues, just.
Facts, manu. So when Johnny heard this, he knew he had to see this for himself. So he got in touch with the oyster guys and they were like, we don't know anything about lobsters, but we're up for trying an experiment. So here's Johnny again.
So I brought some lobster down in New Orleans and I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what it did. We put it in the machine, we take it out, and it's a very simple process. But what it does is it breaks the membrane between the shell and the meat, and it allows you to take out the meat raw. The meat slides right out.
So I just want to take a second to acknowledge the historic nature of that moment, right like it was the first time in human in history that anyone had shucked a raw lobster. It's just not possible otherwise. So until that fateful day, the only way to break meat from the membrane was by cooking it. So Johnny heads home, he tracks down a high pressure processor online. He calls it the big mother Shucker because this thing is huge.
The first machine I bought was sixteen feet high and weigh to eighty thousand pounds, and all it is is a cylinder that you'd fill with water, no heat, no chemicals, It's just water and you turn on the pressure and find the right pressure. The cycle last maybe three minutes.
So once he had it up and running and got the settings dialed in, Johnny and his employees were able to process four to six million lobsters every single week. I didn't know there were that many lobsters out there. And you have to understand there's a lot of tradition in the main lobster industry and that's part of the cultural importance here. But that also meant that Johnny had to sell the idea of this pressure shucked raw lobsters to people who'd been doing things the old way for
a long time. You could see a lot of people might just take joy in that process, right, because it's like an art in itself. But luckily his raw Lobster Meet won two awards at the two thousand and seven Brussels International Seafood Show Best New Food Service Product, Most Convenient New Seafood Product. Now that was a pretty definitive seal of approval, and it helped Maynor see the commercial potential of what he was.
Up to other processors and fishermen alike. They saw, okay, this opens up another way for us to market our product. Right, we don't have to just sell live anymore. We can sell it to processes, and processes can do more value added products.
It opened up new markets now, according to Johnny, Chef's love the convenience of raw lobster. It gives them more options for cooking. Before, if you wanted a suv lobster, it had to be parboiled first, and as Johnny says, nobody buys a cook steak and then cooks it again. But there's one other benefit to this process that's worth mentioning.
The pressure actually kills the lobster within six seconds. So you know, that's pretty good when you think about the animals in the world how they're treated. I think that was very important.
If you're going to eat lobster, that is a pretty humane way to do it. Anyway, since Johnny's big new discovery, a few other high pressure processors have actually opened up in Maine, and Johnny's thinking about new ways to put the technology to use. For example, he's working with the University of Maine and research involving crab and lobster shells, which contain a polymer called kitan. Now it's already being used in agriculture as fertilizer, but apparently may have other
applications including helping with skin problems and wound healing. And when you can separate a bunch of crustaceans from their shells in a matter of minutes, it makes all the testing and advances a whole lot more possible.
That's really interesting. You know, I wonder if it's going to affect the all you can eat crabshats and like Maryland. In places like that where you know you've got all this old bay and you're often drinking beer because like it takes such a long time and like it's hard to get the meat out. It's going to be a very different process here.
It's going to have it comes straight down a shoot into your mouth.
Do not touch that dial. We will be right back with more great science ideas right after the break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about the twenty five greatest science ideas of the last twenty five years. So this one is close to my heart. Will Were you a bike rider as a kid?
Definitely. I rode my bike every day to school from really second grade on all the way, yeah, all the way through elementary school. I loved riding my bike.
And did you have to wear a helmet?
Well, I was actually talking about this just the other day to somebody that this was on the front end of kids wearing helmets, right, And of course my parents maybe wear a helmet, and I'm thankful for that, but I was one of the few in our group of friends that would ride to school that were wearing helmets. Of course, I'm glad that there's no weirdness around that today. But yeah, I was one of the few wearing them at that point.
Yeah, I feel like it is so normalized today and the helmets are so much less clunky.
Yep.
In seventh grade, with no warning, my dad went out and did two things. First, he bought his helmets and insisted we wear them, which you know makes sense and i'd of course two with my kids now. But he also found these white poles that he put on our like very thin bubbles they put on with orange flags, and so they were.
Riding above us. Wow.
It was partially because like we lived on a hill and so like if you went up the hill, you want cars to be able to see what was coming. But it was kind of the equivalent of wearing headgear to like a middle school dance, right, So like I used to bike everywhere to the local convenience store to like cull to sack. You know, it was just transportation for us, and and then immediately I start walking. For me,
helmets were really a deterrent. And one thing that I think is really fascinating is there's a company called Holdving, which has created something that's basically a scarf like technology that inflates on impact like an airbag.
So is this like an invisible airbag helmet or like, how I'm not picturing this?
Yeah, exactly. This thing is amazing and middle school me would have been so psyched to seen one of these or had one of these. But I've been watching videos online of people crashing and one second it looks like they're wearing nothing on their head, and next it looks like someone like pulled over like an airbag hoodie. The whole thing is the invention of two brilliant Swedish women
named Anna Hoppt and Teres Alston. They designed the helmet in two thousand and five as part of a master's thesis in industrial design at Lund University, and they tricked it out with some really interesting features. You do have to keep the helmet charge and you have to switch it on when you're riding, but you can change out the colors so like you can have the scarf like
thing match your outfit. It comes with a black box and it records the last ten seconds before a crash, which can actually be helpful if you're trying to determine fault in like the accident or something like that. And according to tests done by engineers at Stanford the whole thing actually protected people from concussions eight times better than traditional bike helmets. Unfortunately, however, the cost ended up being
a factor. In a twenty fifteen review from The Guardian, they said a new helmet cost about two hundred and fifty pounds and if you get in a crash you kind of have to replace it. Polving did replace the helmets for about one hundred pounds once you bought your first one, but it really wasn't cheap.
And you know that this goes back over a decade now, so I'm curious, like, can I get a hold of a whole thing now?
Not easily. So the founders left the company in twenty fifteen and the company went bankrupt in twenty twenty three. But what Anna Andrees did actually opened people up to new ways of thinking about bike helmets. There's an incredible company out of Germany called in Flabby that actually has an ultra thin geometric helmet. You fill it with a bike pump and it fills these air pockets to protect
your head. And the best part is you can actually fold it up and scrunch it up so you're not carrying this clunky helmet around it just kind of like sticks in a bag or a pocket. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tries to improve on the last released version of the whole thing and then comes out with a better inflatable helmet. Also, just for the record, I want to make clear that I do wear a helmet. These days, I'm a little less worried about what kids
in my neighborhood think about me. But I do wear it when I bike around New York on city bikes with my family, so you don't have to worry.
Okay, I'll check that one off the list, all right. Well, I think it's safe to say that VR hasn't quite taken off in the way we might have expected it to, at least not yet. But one use of it that's really interesting is in pain management, so more specifically having patients virtually swim with dolphins. That's actually helped patients manage their chronic pain better. Have you heard about this?
No, that's incredible.
According to a piece on the radio station WAB, a seventy year old military vet told reporters, it's fantastic. I really feel like I'm there. I get a strong feeling of pleasure, relaxation and peace, just nice to think about. So basically, he swims three times a day for ten minutes a session and it's had a remarkable effect on his ability to manage his pain. That is really cool,
and it's really that effective apparently so. And the truth is, doctors like Brennan Spiegel at Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles, they've been looking for alternative ways to help patients manage their pain and reduce their reliance on heavy prescription pills for a long time now, and VR actually seems to have an impact, at least according to the paper he
published in the journal Plus one Now. In his study, Spiegel took patients who were either experiencing pain from cancer or maybe had severe orthopedic pain, and he divided these patients into two different groups. So one group got VR headsets and was told they could use as much VR as they wanted, but they were asked to do it at least three times a day for ten minutes a session. Meanwhile, the other group got to watch a wellness channel on TV. So, as Spiegel put it, VR is thought to create an
immersive distraction that restricts the brain from processing pain. And what they found was that when they used a zero to ten pain scale, the group that us VR three times a day actually saw a drop in their pain levels by two full points.
That is pretty remarkable, And i'd actually heard of VR being used for immersion therapy, like people have a tough time with heights, having the VR stimulate like you're looking out of a tall building, or people who are afraid of public speaking, you get to talk to a virtual crowd and build up a stamina or muscle skill. But the idea of swimming with dolphins is just so beautiful. It's so different from like facing your fears.
Yeah, it really is. And scientists are looking for how VR might be useful in other painful conditions, you know, from managing labor pains to distracting patients when they get painful infusions for cancer treatments. It's pretty remarkable what can happen here. It's awesome.
So here's a quick one that gives me a lot of empathy for that character pig Pen in Nuts.
Is the one with the dirty cloud around him all the time.
I love pig Pen, but it turns out he is not alone. Apparently we all have a swarm of bacteria that we're constantly shedding in the space around us. It's known as a microbial cloud, and according to a team of scientists at the University of Oregon, everyone is surrounded by a unique cloud. It's about ninety centimeters wide, made up of millions of bacteria. And when we walk through each other's clouds, our clouds mingle and we actually change each other's microbiomes.
Just a little wow.
The way a BBC article put it was a little grosser than that. They're right, quote, walk through someone else's cloud and it'll rain bacteria on your skin and be breathed into your lungsaw.
That is really gross. And I think the thing that stuck out to me is ninety centimeters Like that's not tiny, you know, like that's actually a meaningful But yeah, that's a really gross description.
I mean, the article quotes one biologist as saying the findings were quote simply gross. Microbiologists are disturbed. That's pretty great, Yeah, But I think it's just one of those things that you live with forever, you don't really think about, and then when you happen to, like peer under a microscope, it's more complicated than you could ever imagine it.
Yeah, and I'm guessing a shower doesn't help the situation.
Now you cannot scrub this away. But the way the scientists rand the experiment was pretty fascinating. So they basically had people hang out in a room where Petri dishes and suspended air filters inside the room, collected the floating microbes, and then they analyze these personal clouds. And what they found was that every cloud is really like a fingerprint. But also, I do think there's something poetic about the fact that, like, when you hang out in someone else's cloud,
you take back a bacterial souvenir. Like there's almost this record of your life and how you spent your time that you're constantly carrying around with you, and the idea that you're changed a little by everyone you meet or interact with. It's just kind of human and wonderful.
I agree.
Okay, listeners, we've got to pause for a quick break, but we'll be back with more Part Time Genius very soon. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're continuing with our crazy countdown.
All right, semengo, what would you say if I told you I could fix the cracks in your phone screen? Just by covering it with a damp paper towel.
I mean, I'd probably think you were lying or it was a prank.
Right, Well, it's actually an innovation that is just around the corner. Once this new quote self healing glass hits the market, we really will be able to repair cracks by just adding water.
That's amazing. So how exactly does this work? Because I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but like glass needs heat to repair, not moisture, right, Well, that's definitely true of traditional glass.
But what I'm talking about is something called peptide glass. And in case your chemistry is a little rusty, here it is. I knew it would be. A peptide in short, is a chain of amino acids, which are chemical building blocks of proteins. So peptides can self assemble into all kinds of useful structures, including endorphins and insulin. But because they're crystalline in nature, they aren't typically associated with glass.
Because glass isn't crystalline.
Right, And in crystalline structures, the atoms are arranged in a rigid repeating pattern, so when the crystal is subjected to stress, it tends to fracture really easily. Glass, on the other hand, is what's known as an amorphous solid. That means that atoms are arranged at random, which allows it to absorb stress more evenly, making it harder to actually break.
I love how they are like different types of solids, different types of liquids. Ketchup is a certain type of liquid that doesn't move or flow right right, and then you have this type of glass. But how is there something called peptide glass. It seems like a bit of a contradiction.
Well it is exactly that, and that's why researchers at Tel Aviv were so surprised last year. They found when a certain peptide is mixed with water, it can self assemble into this rigid, transparent, glass like material. Now this wasn't something that they set out to find either, and that's always the fun in science of these accidental discoveries. But in fact, they were actually studying entirely different properties
of peptides when they made this discovery. But that wasn't even the best part, because it turned out this new kind of glass also had the ability to heal itself when it was remoistened.
That's awesome.
So, according to one of the studies, authors quote. We found that although the peptide glass cracks under dry conditions, it can easily repair these cracks. All that needs to be done is transfer the glass to a more humid environment. As soon as you do that, water molecules re enter the material, repair the cracks, and allow the glass to reform.
That is so amazing. And I know you said this was just discovered, but what are the commercial prospects or something like this? Does it seem like a viable product?
It definitely does so far. So conventional glass requires a ton of energy to produce because you have to gather all the different raw materials and you melt them together at extremely high temperatures. But with this, you actually just take some peptide powder, mix it with water, and voila. Like it's instant glass. It's pretty amazing. It's as strong as silicate glass too, so it could be used to make just about anything windows, doors, optical lenses, and of
course the thing we're all thinking about phone screens. I mean, it really does sound like it could revolutionize like a bunch of different industries and also save you so much money on repairs. Imagine like getting a crack in your windshield and just like waiting for the rain to repair it. Yea, it's amazing. Yeah, and you wouldn't necessarily have to replace your existing glass either. You could just add a thin coating of peptide glass over the top to sort of act as a barrier.
You know who's going to really benefit from this as anyone with a glass bottom boat.
Yes, those are the people that we really want to look out for. You know. It's like how people say we should make an entire plane out of the same material as the black box, Like, just make the whole boat out of peptide glass and it can never spring a leak.
I think you just came up with the best sign of the year.
Nailed it all right, Well that does it for today. Be sure to tune in tomorrow as the countdown continues. I don't want to give too much away, but tomorrow's episode involves NASCAR dinosaurs. Sounds like, really this is a tough guy episode and a very special musical number. That's right, that's right, And of course don't forget the head over to our Instagram at part time Genius to enter our copy bar contest. We're from Gabe Dylan, Mary Mangush and me. Thank you so much for listening, oh.
And Lucas Riley, Thank you, Lucas. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongschatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gate
Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.