You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will? What's that? Mango? I can't believe it, but we are already halfway through our countdown to the twenty five best science ideas from the past twenty five years.
It's crazy.
So twelve and a half in exactly twelve and a half in, and I don't know about you, but I feel like these stories keep getting better and better.
I mean, that's kind of how it countdown works, but I feel like you should tell people what is coming up next, preview it well.
Today's episode has five stories, including what NASCAR does to our brains, a clock that changed the way we think about time, and our attempt to explain particle physics through music.
Is that even possible?
There's only one way to find out, so let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listener is welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm mungkish Heatikaur and as always I'm joined by my good friend Will Pearson and our palam producer Dylan is over there in the booth wearing his lucky sunglasses. So I have a good feeling about today's episode. So in case you're wondering. Yes, he does have unlucky sunglasses. We had to ask him to stop wearing them during the show.
Only the lucky sunglasses. That's right, it was a whole thing.
It was.
Anyway, Before we get into the countdown, I just want to remind you to subscribe to Part Time Genius on your favorite podcast app, which should be iHeart the iHeart app. And if you enjoy the show, which I hope you do, please give us a nice rating and review. It really helps us out. And also we actually read the comments. Someone has to do a show on three D printing and we're planning one in the works. And this week someone named Elliott wrote the best podcast My name is Elliot?
Oh I like that, which is the greatest narrative. You know, went from how he felt about the podcast to his name. You know, it was good, good stuff.
Well, Elliott, if you're listening messages on our Instagram so we can send you something fun. But let's get into the show.
Actually, it just hit me Dylan is probably wearing those glasses because you know what's next on our countown mango.
That Dylan is so clever. Okay, so the first thing we're covering today is NASCAR now. Over the years, there have been lots of studies on NASCAR to improve the safety for drivers. There have been research papers on how the car's bodies and safety measures affect injuries. NASCAR also awarded a grant to Michigan State University to study everything from heat exhaustion and drivers to figure out better exercises
and diet regimen for the athletes. And there have been studies on why fatherhood affects driver is because NASCAR drivers often drop one point six places on average the year after having a kid.
Wow, it does kind of make you wonder like if it's at all related to the fact that they're probably sleeping less.
I think that's probably part of it. But scientists also hypothesize that when you have a kid, you think about your mortality. Mon Yeah, and so you might be less prone to make risky moves on the course. That makes sense anyway. The most interesting study I read about was done by this psychologist, Guy Vidioloni from West Virginia University Institute of Technology, and it's a four year study called
quote Driving under the Influence of Nascar. It isn't so much about what happens on the track as it is how the races influence people watching at home. So, according to NPR, Vidilioni looked at all the traffic accidents that took place in West Virginia and then whittled it down to accidents that mimicked what happened on a racetrack. So these were things like pile ups of multiple cars or
accidents where there was aggressive driving. And his conclusion was that five days after major NASCAR races, there's a big spike in traffic accidents. Now Villelioni actually put in a whole bunch of controls to make sure he wasn't just saying something wild. He wanted to be really conservative about
his conclusions. But he counted about six hundred and fifty extra accidents on West Virginia roads in the days after the races, essentially because people were quote acting out NASCAR in their own driving this wild.
Although the thing that stands out to me, Mango is like, why is this on the fifth day after a race instead of like immediately after. I don't think he figured that part out exactly.
Like he theorized that maybe it's because races tend to take place on weekends and so a Thursday or Friday after it tends to be the days that you let loose after a rough week. But his study is really pointing to the subtle ways that media affects behavior in the real world. Now, NASCAR is just one example of this. Another famous case is of the MTV show sixteen Pregnant, where the reality show actually captured the difficulties for high school students trying to raise kids, and people were really
affected by it. The show led to a five point seven percent reduction in teen births, which apparently was a third of the overall decline in teen berths in the country.
Oh wow. Yeah.
Academics actually sometimes refer to it as the you are what you watch phenomenon, and it's pretty interesting to see, sort of like how MLK talked about the interracial kiss on the original Star Trek being one of the most important moments on television, or how President Joe Biden credited Will and Grace with changing America's perception of gays more than just about anything else.
Yeah, that's right. So anyway, this whole NASCAR thing won't be a problem ten to fifteen years from now, when we're all taking way Mos everywhere and getting chow for around and robotic cars. But until then, all you NASCAR watchers out there, he doctor Vilioni's advice, and be a little mindful of how you're driving the week after a big race. We want to keep you safe.
Absolutely.
Wow.
All right, Mago. Let's say you are a clockmaker. I'm just going to say that. Okay, Now you've built a beautiful time piece that counts hours and minutes. But now you've got a problem. You want your clock to count each second with pinpoint accuracy. So how do you do it. It turns out you need to crack open the periodic table because according to the International System of Units, this
is how you measure a second. Quote. The second is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the cesium frequency, the unperturbed ground state high per fine transition frequency of the cesium one thirty three atom to be nine billion, one hundred and ninety two million, six hundred and thirty one thousand, seven hundred and seventy when expressed in the unit hurts, which is equal to s the power of negative one. You got it.
So that is the definition of a second.
Yeah, it's the definition of a second. I got lost in the reading of it, but as you may have noticed, it's a little bit complicated. So the only way to measure it is with an atomic clock. And the way this work sounds completely made out, but I promise it's
actually real. Basically, an atomic clock is a machine that shoots laser beams at caesium ions, measures frequency at which their electrons jump to different energy levels, and then sends the readings to a place called the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. So this is a real place. It's a real inner governmental organization. Yeah, and it's actually based in France.
So we've got laser clock sending data to friends. I guess I'm with you that far.
Okay, I'm glad you're keeping up. So there are around four hundred and fifty atomic clocks in the world, all sending these readings. So timekeepers at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures they crunch these numbers from the clocks and then vote on the quote official time, which they publish in a monthly publication that comes out monthly called Circular Tea.
I never thought i'd say this about anything that involves caesium, but uh, that is pretty adorably whimsical.
It is in a way, but it's all so pretty serious stuff like this process is how we determine what's called international atomic time. And a standard atomic clock made with caesium is so accurate it can keep time for about one hundred million years without skipping a beat.
Wow.
But starting in the mid ads, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or in IST, a federal lab in Colorado, they began developing a new generation of atomic clocks that could make caesium seem outdated.
Actually, so what makes these atomic clocks so special?
Well, they use aluminum instead of caesium, so basically a positive aluminum twenty seven ion. In two thousand and eight, NIST scientists built something they call the quantum logic clock.
Now.
It contains a single aluminum ion cooled to nearly absolute zero, shot with an ultraviolet laser, and the aluminum ion acts like the second hand on a clock, so it ticks by jumping up and down between energy levels. But instead of ticking once for every secondecond, it takes a quadrillion times per second. That is a big number, man, And it's so accurate it won't lose a second for thirty three billion years. That's almost triple the age of the observable universe.
That is really hard to imagine, yeah, or hard to put to the test, I think.
And this aluminum clock does more than just tell time. It's even changing our understanding of space time because researchers have used it to test Einstein's theory of relativity. According to Einstein's theory, gravity affects the passage of time, So the stronger the pull of gravity, the slower the time. And as a result of this, somebody who lives in the mountains of Colorado, where gravity's pull is slightly lower,
they'll age faster than somebody who lives at sea level. Now, the quantum logic clock is so sensitive it actually proved that a person's standing at the top of a staircase or someone standing on a stool experienced a faster passage of time. It showed that each additional foot of height adds about ninety bills adience of a second to your lifetime.
So NBA players would live longer than jockeys as well. I have a dumb question to ask, why do we need clocks to be this accurate.
It's a fair question, but take GPS for example. GPS isn't just a location tracking technology. It's also a type of clock. So if you're driving down the highway and the GPS is five seconds late telling you to take an exit, you'd be pretty mad about this.
Right.
For the GPS to be useful, it needs to show both an accurate location and an accurate time. It needs that time to be precise down to the second. And it turns out that's true for a lot of other technologies as well. Take telecommunications, satellite networks, radio signals, lots more things like this. Anyway, it's hard to overstate the importance of this quantum logic clock in the nerdy and
wonderful world of timekeeping. Those caesium clocks that impressed you at the start of this segment will eventually end up being obsolete. And while experiments with other elements are ongoing right now, aluminum is the leading contender to become the ticking heart of what we call a second.
Hey, listeners, do not go anywhere. We've got to pause for a quick break. But there is so much weird science right after Welcome back to part time Genius. When we're talking the twenty five greatest science ideas of the last twenty five years, and we're up to number. So it probably won't surprise you to learn that water is the most consumed material on Earth. But can you guess what comes in second m I'm gonna go with coffee.
You know, I might have guessed that too, but know the answer is concrete.
Oh really?
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have poured nearly nine hundred billion tons of concrete, and nowadays we're pouring the stuff at a breakneck speed, especially in the developing world. For example, in the time period between twenty eleven and twenty thirteen, China poured more cement than the US did during the entire twentieth century. Oh wow, isn't that incredible? But all that concrete has a big downside. It's responsible for eight to nine percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
I never thought of concrete as being such a big pollution problem. I know, it's not a great thing. I think of, you know, the sidewalks and things that cars drive on, but I didn't think of it in that way.
Yeah, I didn't realize it either. But apparently making concrete is an energy intensive process. So it starts by taking limestone and baking it to temperatures over twenty six hundred degrees fahrenheit. That kind of heat requires powerful kilns fired by fossil fuels, and that's just to make cement. To turn cement into concrete, you have to add aggregates like sand, and really lots of it. As a result, sand mining is a big business around the world. We've actually talked
about this before. There's even a burgeoning black market for sand, backed by a so called sand mafias. Anyway, this dangerous mix of pollution, mining and mafias got scientists wondering how to make concrete production more green, Like what if we supplemented sand with something else, something more sustainable, something that could reduce concrete carbon footprint. And it's something that you
mentioned just a few minutes ago. Wait, coffee, Yeah, I so coffee nic Every day humans drank two billion cups of coffee and most of the coffee grinds just end up in a landfill. But in twenty twenty three, Australian engineering researchers had an idea, what if we used those ground up beans to make concrete. So that's what they did.
They scorched coffee grounds to about six hundred degrees, which made the grounds break down into a substance called biochar, which is basically charcoal, and when they began testing, they discovered that if you replaced just fifteen percent of the sand in concrete with coffee fueled biochar, the concrete becomes thirty percent stronger.
And how does that actually work.
It turns out the biochart retains water better than sand, and as a result, the concrete dries slower than usual, which reduces the risk of shrinking and cracking, helping it maintain its strength. There are actually two benefits to this discovery. One, by using spent coffee, it reduces the demand for sand, and two, by making concrete stronger, it reduces the amount of cement required for each bag, and with less cement and sand required, the total carbon footprint of each bag
of concrete could drop significantly. As it happens, a major industry group called the Global Cement and Concrete Association has pledged to go carbon neutral by twenty fifty and thanks to those coffee loving Aussies, they've got a really strong foundation to work with.
It's an incredible discovery and asoso pun mego, I'll take it all right now, mego. We happen to be living through one of the most polarizing moments in recent history if you've noticed this, But I think one thing we can all agree on is that dinosaurs are really really cool. It feels like this should be the thing that brings us together. In fact, that might be some of the firmest common ground we have left at this point. What do you think.
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to think a little more positively than that, but in general, yeah, I mean, everyone loves dinosaurs exactly.
And it's always struck me that, even though we're dealing with creatures that are over one hundred million years old in some cases, to this day, we are still finding new things out about them. In the last quarter century has been particularly generous. We've onearthed so many new fossils and developed so many breakthrough research techniques that some scientists are now calling this the Golden Age of paleontology.
Huh.
There are way too many of these dino revelations for us to cover today, but singling out just one didn't seem right either, So instead I thought I would walk us through some of my favorite highlights and they can kind of all share this spot together. What do you think.
I love it like a big heap of Dino discoveries is exactly what this science series needs.
I'd absolutely I thought you'd approve of this. So what stuck out to me most is all this research that sort of challenges what we thought we knew about dinosaurs, which for most of us is just what we saw in the Jurassic Park movie. For instance, in one of the most famous scenes of the original movie, we see a t rex chasing after a speed jeep and nearly catching up to it. So that didn't happen in real life.
That was the movie, Yeah, exactly. In fact, she was even closer than she appeared to remember because of that whole mirror.
Yeah, I think we all remember that.
That scene was considered plausible for nearly a decade after the film's release, with many paleontologists speculating that a real t rex could run as fast as forty five miles
an hour. But in two thousand and two, researchers John Hutchinson and Mariano Garcia used some clever math to show that the res likely had a much slower role than we previously thought, so, using biomechanical data from the dinosaur's closest living relatives, those would be birds, Now was able to extrapolate just how much muscle mass it would take for an animal the size of a t rex to
actually be able to run. As a general rule, no more than fifty percent of an animal's body mass is composed of muscle, and only a fraction of that muscle is allocated to the legs. But for a t rex to run forty five miles an hour, its leg muscles would need to account for eighty six percent of its total body Some real.
Masks, those are monster legs. It feels like the leg muscles would be up to its eyeballs. But uh, you know, in that case, there's no room for anything else.
Yeah, it doesn't add up there. So even though the researchers had poked a giant hole in one of Jurassic Park's best scenes, the filmmakers didn't hold it against them. In fact, Hutchinson was even hired to consult on one of the Jurassic Parks sequels based on the strength of this breakthrough.
That's pretty awesome, But I'm curious, do we know what a t rex's top speed would be?
Well, the two thousand and two study concluded that t rex would have had a hard time topping twenty five miles an hour. According to a twenty seventeen study from the University of Manchester, they probably can only reach speeds of around twelve miles a mile, so any faster and the seven ton predators would risk shattering their bones.
Actually wow, so it's almost like at speeds that a human could outrun. At this pace.
Yeah, and remember that's the top speed. The t Rex was even slower when walking. Exactly how slow remained a mystery until twenty twenty one, when Dutch researchers built on those earlier findings and used computer modeling to prove that Rex walked at a leisurely pace of between two and three miles an hour. Now, another point of departure from the Jurassic movies is that the predatory dinosaurs, including t Rex,
did not have permanently exposed teeth. Researchers and artists have long believed that bipedal carnivores have lipless mouths where their upper teeth would hang over their lower jaws, not unlike you know, maybe like a crocodile or something like that. But according to a twenty twenty three study from the University of Portsmouth, the dinos actually kept their choppers, this greatly covered with a pair of thick lizard lips. Isn't
that kind of funny to imagine? So the researchers found that toothwaar and lipless reptile groups was much different from that of carnivorous dinosaurs, and based on computer modeling, it would have been impossible for a lipless t rex to close its mouth without the lower jaw actually crushing the very bones that supported it.
That is really interesting, and you know, I feel like with all these breakthroughs, they've kind of defanged this idea of a really frightening t rex right like suddenly they're like only strolling around at two miles per hour. They're like they don't have those goofy grins anymore, right, you know, bearing their teeth and a dinosaurs supposed to have feathers, right like on top of everything else, they're fluffy.
Actually, I've got some good news on that front because while many dinosaurs are now believed to have sported feathers, including raptors and a few of the t rex's cousins, the rex itself is thought to have had smooth, more scaly skin. The exception would have been juvenile t rexes, whose small bodies may have needed feathers for thermal insulation. By the time they reach adulthood, though their forty foot long bodies were so good at retaining heat that they
no longer needed those downy coats. So, if anything, an adult t rex may have had a stripe of bristles on its back and shoulders, but those would have been used to attract a mate rather than to keep warm.
All right, so that's at least one thing the movies seem to have gotten right.
Yeah, and there's still room for improvement on that front too, because while the t rex was scally, they likely weren't the drab uniform color they're often depicted as. You know,
you always picture that exact same colors. Recent analysis of t rex fossils have turned up evidence of melanin, the same pigment found in human skin and bird feathers, and that suggests that the rex's skin may have had patches of several different colors, possibly even like a camouflage pattern, which makes sense you think about the stripes and spots of modern predators.
That is crazy, you know. I imagine like being given like a t rex as a kid and told to color it, and like, you know, you pinted with fancy colors, and that seems completely wrong, right. I also had no idea that melanin could fossilize.
Well, paleontologists didn't either until two thousand and eight, and since then discovery has led to all kinds of new insights about the appearance of dinosaurs, including some pretty solid guesses about the exact colors of their skin and feathers. Now More than anything, though, all the advances we've talked about show us that the dinosaurs weren't the straightforward terrors that we often see in pop culture. Like any other animal,
they live full lives. That included some quieter moments as well.
I like how you're trying to make it seem like we should all be adopting them from shelters that feel like it's the right thing to do. I would still be terrified one, Oh totally mean you know me, I'm terrified when I see a cat can imagine dinosaur? All right, Well, because dinosaurs are so cool, we decided today on our Instagram we're going to give away some super special, scientifically accurate dinosaur action figures. It is important to call them
action figures. I called it adults earlier. Gabe got very does not like that. I didn't like it.
He is our resident toy expert, so I'm going to have to lean on that, and I will agree to call it an action figure. So head over to our instagram at part Time Genius and find out how you can win.
Okay, listeners, you've got to pay for the show with some ads. But uh, we'll be right back after this quick break. Welcome back to part Time Genius, where we're listing out the best ideas in science at the last twenty five years. Nay, okay, Well, so how much do you know about sub atomic particles?
All right, Well, my knowledge of subatomic particles would, if I'm being honest, probably fit inside a subatomic particle.
Yeah, that's why I thought. So here's a quick overview that will help you understand our next great science discovery. So let's start with protons. These tiny particles hang out in the nucleus of every atom, and they're made up of even tinier particles called quirks, which in turn are held together with even tinier particles called gluons. Now, gluons have no mass, but they do carry energy, specifically something called the strong force, and in terms of nuclear physics,
it basically means it holds stuff together. Now stay with me, because I'm sure you know that deep in a tunnel near Geneva there's something called the large Hadron particle collider, and a hadron is any clump of two or three quirks. And what this thing does is it blasts particles like protons at each other at insane speeds, so scientists can find out what happens when they crash into each other. And even before this technology existed, scientists have been thinking
about the outcomes of proton collisions. So one hypothesis they came up with was that protons might exchange a couple of the gluons that hold them together, creating a super weird, massless little particle made up of only gluons, which they called And this is true a glue ball.
A glugall. Is that the actual scientific time, though it is so woh way.
In nineteen seventy three researchers put forward a very specific version of this theory. They said that it was possible for three gluons to briefly stick together after a collision. Now, at the time, there was no actual proof of this it was just an idea, and they called this hypothetical particle the oderon.
All right, so I want to make sure I understand. So an oduron is what like a triple glue ball. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's weird. I had never thought of particle physics involving this much fun vocabulary. I feel like I might have majored in it if I had known all this. But all right, so are you going to tell me that someone finally proved this odoron thing is real?
So in twenty twenty one, a group of scientists using the Large Hadron Collider in fact find evidence of odon. So, yes, when protons collide in this thing, about three quarters of the time they get smashed apart, but about twenty five percent of the time the protons survive intact. They just kind of balance off each other. And that's because at the point of impact they exchange gluons, sometimes two, sometimes three, and those gluons keep them together. So are you still with me here?
I think so?
Right. So, quirks carry a charge kind of like a positive or negative electric charge, but this is expressed in terms of color, so they can be red, green, or blue. And when you have all three of those stuck together. The charge is said to be white or balanced. But there's also something called an anti color, which is the property of anti quarks. Is this like antimatter, Yeah, so the antiquirk is the antimatter evil twin of the quirk, and it's either anti red, anti green, or anti blue.
But what's interesting is gluons have both colors and anti colors, So you could have a gluon that carries red and anti green, which sounds like a very strange Christmas ornament.
A spokesperson for the Oderon experiment told Gizmoto that the math of Vaultier is quote too hard to explain, but suffice it to say, researchers observe frequency differences in proton proton collisions versus proton anti proton collisions, and they realized the difference had to do with changing color balances that could only be explained by the existence of a triple gluon clump the otter on.
I'm trying real hard here, Mango, but I gotta be honest. This is making my head heard a little bit.
I know it is complicated stuff, but it's also an incredible discovery. But to make the story a little more personal. We asked our pal David Nagler, who is an incredibly talented musician and composer, to write a song about it.
Yeah, I was hiding in plain sight.
Now I'm in the light light because of a proton proton and a proton anti proton condition.
I was the difference between the two three glue on stuff like glue.
Thanks to the particle physicists for clearing up being decision.
I'm an out, but I'm not that odd and out a roun. I'm a real hot rod. It's not monochromatic light. I'm red, green and blue making white. It may seem like a fax, it's only quantum chromo dynamics. Folks deepen the particle.
Exceleerator, keeping proton longevity greater.
So how can the green The force is strong in me strong. I'm an autoba, but I'm not that ard and auta. I've got a real hot bond.
And it's squaw.
Wow.
It seems so complicated, but you know what, Mengo, it also makes me want to dance.
Yeah, the song or the science that you know, all of it.
I'm just feeling good after this.
I couldn't agree more. And big thanks to David Nagler for helping us out with this. We'll put a link to his website in the show notes so that you can check out his music. It's not usually about physics. Okay, that's it for today's episode, but be sure to tune in tomorrow when our countdown continues with a scientific secret, lurking and home depot, some lively molecules, and a medical
treatment that began in a really, really gross place. You won't want to miss it, And if you'd like to win that realistic dinosaur action figure, head on over to our instagram at part Time Genius to check out today's giveaway contest. As always from Will, Gabe, Mary and Dylan, thank you so much for listening.