You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
What's that Mango?
All week we've been counting down the twenty five best science ideas of the past twenty five years, and today is exact phonology.
This is it.
We have four stories left, which makes me feel a little weird that we didn't do exactly five in every episode, but I've somehow moved on from that. And to give you a sense of what's coming today, let's say that you'll never look at a mosquito, a mushroom, or a wet book the same way. Again, you thought you were always going to look at those things the same way. And if you're unlucky enough to have a roommate or a partner who snores, guess what.
We have found a way to fix that.
Amazing, So I hope you guys are as excited as we are. Let's dive in.
Hey their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesha Ticketer and over there in the booth icing an enormous cake. Like enormous doesn't even do it justice. It is a gigantic That is our palain producer Dylan Fagan.
I had no idea Dylan was a pastry.
Chef for me either, But that is one beautiful cake. There's writing on it too. It says, make sure you're subscribed to part Time Genius on your favorite podcast app and if you like the show, please leave us a five star rating and review. Yeah, which is impressive. Yeah.
Look, I think it says johnnyus part Time Johnius for anyways. Close enough. We appreciate the gesture there. Wrote it all in frosting wine. Know, Paul Hollywood could never.
All right, mango, be honest.
Have you ever build something on a book or an important document?
Not?
Really?
Okay? Well, I was hoping free to say yes at some point.
But you've never spilled coffee or like wine on a book or something like that.
No, I am one, I'm not really that clumsy. But two, I'm actually super paranoid about that type of thing. So like when I have a glass, I tend to keep my books and my liquid separate. My kids and my wife do spill a lot of things, so I have a cleaning up a lot of stuff.
Okay, Okay, Well, our next great idea will definitely help you out in those situations as well. As librarians are conservators who have had to rescue water logged materials, And is there a lot of that, more.
Than you'd imagine.
Actually, think of burst pipes or flooding, or damage caused by sprinklers. If there's a fire in the building and wet paper is really hard to dry out. You can blot it, you can freeze dried, you can put it in front of fans. But these techniques are time consuming and laborious, and so if you're not careful, you can wind up with mildew or pages that end up rippling.
And so someone came up with a way to dry these books.
Actually, someone came up with the best way to drive books. His name is Nicki Jaeger, and he is a rare books librarian, a conservator, and an artist who's had a long and colorful career in the world of paper arts. So back in two thousand and two, a friend put him in touch with a woman named Kate Hayes, who is an information specialist with the USDA's National Agricultural Library.
She'd been thinking about soggy paper ever since she'd heard that millions of pentagon documents got soaked on nine to eleven when all the sprinkler systems turned on. And she remember the substance that was used in agriculture to help seeds germinate in dry soil. It's a cornstarch based polymer called and I'm not making this up, super slurper. And this stuff holds five hundred times its weight and water,
so it could dry anything out right. She just needed someone with a conservation expertise to figure out how it could be applied to paper. So we talked to Nicki on the phone and he told us that he was intrigued by the idea. So we asked Kate Hayes to mail himself super Slurper, which looked a lot like sawdust, And when it arrived, she gave him a call and he tested it out while they were talking.
So I walk over to the sink and put a book under the faucet soak about fifty sixty seventy pages. I take a handful of this flake and I throw it into the middle of the wettest part of the book, close the book, put it in the screw press, and talk for another minute. Pull it out and twenty pages on either side of their bone dry. I mean they're not like humid, they're dry. Eh, And that's what five hundred times is waiting water will do. I'm like, this stuff is amazing. We got to do something.
Kate agreed to help Nicky get a federal research agreement to turn Super Slurper into a viable paper conservation product, but right away they were challenges. For one thing, the super Slurper turned into a goo in the crevices of wet books, and the sawdust like flakes made dense in
the paper as it dried. So he solved that first problem by just sandwiching a layer of the polymer between sheets of lab grade filtration paper, and after destroying a coffee grinder trying to turn the flakes into dust, he tracked down a manufacturer that sold a powdered.
Version of the super Slurper.
But then the question was how do you keep this fine powder contained in its envelope of filter paper?
And somebody eventually said something about diapers, and I went, oh, yeah.
Nikki checked out some diaper making equipment, but he realized that diapers are engineered to hold liquid in without ever letting it out. They use an adhesive that lets the absorbent filling blow up when it gets wet, and then it stays puffy. Super Slurper couldn't do that. It had to dry flat so it wouldn't damage book spines. Eventually, after a ton of trial and error, he figured out how to assemble sheets of super Slurper designed for rescuing
wet books. He used the jury rigged silk screen to distribute the powder on the envelopes of filter paper coated with an industrial adhesive that allowed the stuff to swell up just enough to hold water before going flat as it dried. Plus, he left a precise border at the edge of the paper so the slurper wouldn't ooze out, sort of like an overstuffed PBNJ.
I mean this all sounds so time consuming.
Yeah, and this is taking years.
He's bouncing around rented commercial workspaces and USDA research labs, getting by with small grants. It was slow going, but he was homing in on the details that would make his product, which he decided to call Zorbis, work just right now. The problem now was finding a way to manufacture this stuff instead of pasting it together by hand. But the industrial experts he spoke with didn't understand the science of zorbis or books the way Nikki did.
Every engineer I spoke to for ten years kept trying to re engineer it to their standards. No one was able to comprehend all of my very specific needs and challenges and answering their questions. I was learning myself what the form had to be and why it had to be the way it was. So during that period I also figured out that if I put the sheets of zorbix about every twenty or thirty pages, then I'm not
swelling the spine of the book. I'm not increasing the books interior space such that it ruins the spine.
Now, the other problem was money.
So by two thousand and nine he'd built up a small customer base of librarians and conservation experts. People in the book business knew the value of zorbix, but finance guys couldn't quite get it.
I'd managed to get a couple of people investing in this. I was able to manufacture small batches of it by hand, and whenever any library saw this stuff, they loved it. They were like, this stuff is great. But I had a hard time describing how it was useful. Like, I tried to go in front of Angel investors, but Northern California is a high tech industry and this is essentially be low tech, and nobody understood the importance. So I'd done research on how many books get wet in a year.
There's over two million books a year in libraries that get wet from non catastrophic floods, water breaks, leaking roof, spilling coffee, whatever. Went to these investors and they were like, well, that's two million books, that's not that big a deal.
He ended up having to take a warehouse job to support himself while he continued looking for ways to mass produce sorbis, all while keeping up with the orders he was getting from librarians. By twenty fifteen, he had hit a wall.
I called all of my investor and I said, I'm done. It's you know, it's from two thousand and two to twenty fifteen. I just I can't do this anymore. And they went, yeah, well, you prove feasibility, you got a mark, you built the machine, you wrote the patent, you got a market. It just didn't succeed financially. Bit just succeeded in every other way. So I said, all right, I'm going to celebrate my failure, and I went on a motorcycle trip around the country.
On his way through ann Arbor, he stopped to say hi to one of his longtime customers, Shannon Zachary, the head of conservation and book repair at the University of Michigan, and he told her about his decision.
She goes, what, He goes, see the stack of book series? Yeah, she should. We had a flood in our rare book vault. It was a water leak and we had all of this mostly nineteenth and twentieth century kind of avant garde types of materials that couldn't freeze dry and they had to be flat. She goes, that stack is the last stack of these, you know, seven hundred books or whatever it was. And we used zorbis and was great. I said, I can't keep going. I need ten grand just to
buy a paper. She goes, oh, well, you can't go out of business.
Shannon rallied the conservation community to place ten thousand dollars worth of orders back home in California. Nicky got to work fulfilling them by hand. He plugged away in a Bay Area industrial building with no heat, sharing this space with a bunch of burning Man fans who were there building art carts for the plout, and he set up his fourteen foot modified screen printing system, his racks, his
stock of filter paper, and powdered super slurper. He covered it all with plastic sheeting because the roof was leaking no, but he was still no closer to getting Zorbis into a proper manufacturing system. After a while, he looked around and was like, why am I still doing this? You can imagine the frustration.
Yeah.
Do you know what the difference between being stubborn and perseverant is? Well, stubborn is what they say about you when you're doing something and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. When they write about it after you succeeded, they say you were perseverant, and I just said I'm stubborn. Time to quit.
Well, I guess that is part of science, right, I mean, sometimes the world just doesn't make space for great ideas.
Yeah, that's pretty much how Nikki felt. So he called up an old friend from the book world who agreed to buy the business, But that guy got busy with other projects, so Zorbix this incredibly complicated, beautifully simple way to save what books was put on the back burner. That means it's been a long time since any Zorbis was produced, but since it's reusable, it is actually still
out there. So we heard from one conservator who's hung onto her sheets for years because she says it's just so good at what it does.
It's pretty amazing. So where does this all stand now?
Well, there may end up being a happy ending to this story. So right before we recorded this episode, actually got an email from Nikki who said that talking to us reignited his passion for the project. He's decided to start writing the story of Zorbis for his blog and put some demos on YouTube so more people can see how it works. He's thinking maybe it can turn into sort of an open source effort. And here's some even
more good news. He was kind enough to mail us some sheets of Zorbix from his personal stash, and we're giving them away today on Instagram. So people are going to go start spelling stuff in order to be able to use least there, right, So go follow us at Part Time Genius and find out how you can win some Zorbis.
That is pretty cool. Hey, listeners, do not go anywhere. We've got to pause for a quick break. But there is so much weird science waiting on the other side. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about the twenty five greatest science ideas of the last twenty five years. If you've ever gone hiking or camping in the US, or even if you've just tried to enjoy a nightcap on your Porsche, chances are you've had an annoying encounter with a mosquito. But that's usually all it is,
an annoyance. Now, in other parts of the world, mosquitoes are a serious health risk. In fact, the CDC calls them the world's deadliest animal. About a million people die for mosquito born illnesses each year. For example, despite all the progress we've made with malaria, the WHO reports that there were two hundred and sixty three million cases and five hundred and ninety seven thousand debts in twenty twenty three. Then there are diseases like denge, which are not often
lethal but can make you really, really ill. We actually, when I was recording my other podcast, Colin Drive, my aunt and uncle in India caught it and it truly sounded miserable. But the worst part is mosquito borne illness is on the rise worldwide, and here in the US we're actually starting to see more cases of West Nile virus Zeka and denke.
So why is this problem getting worse?
Climate change is a big part of it, right, I mean, as temperatures rise and places get more humid, it's a literal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Also the lack of adequate healthcare infrastructure in many parts of the world as a factor.
But the other problem is money.
Like in twenty twenty three, the WHO and It's partner set a target of eight point three billion to battle malaria around the globe, but total investment only reached about four billions, so partners on the ground couldn't buy enough essential gear like things that are pretty simple like mosquito nets, also medicines and insecticides, which is why the next breakthrough
is both hilarious and exciting. So in twenty nineteen, a multinational team of researchers from Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, and Indonesia discovered that exposing mosquitoes to music can disorient them enough to tack less and breathe less too.
So you just crank up the tunes and the mosquitoes kind of freak out and people are less likely to get bitten.
Or how does it work?
Yees? I mean the study puts it in much more official scientific terms, but yeah, that's pretty much it.
So is there is there a type of music that's more effective than another?
In fact, will there was a particular song that they used. Okay, this study used the twenty ten dub stuff Smash Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Scrillic Cryllics.
Right, that's a Scrillics hit.
Here is a little reminder of what it sounds like, which I'm sure takes you back your MySpace days, right, But for mosquitoes, there's no nostalgia, just confusion. So here's how the experiment worked. The researchers restrained a hamster in a mesh cage, then unleashed ten hungry mosquitoes, and they used a stopwatch to track how long it took the bugs to start biting and how many times they bit
the hamster. So when Scrilliics wasn't playing, some of the mosquitos started biting just after twenty one seconds in the cage, and individual mosquitos bit the hamster as many as eleven times and ten minutes, but when the music was playing, they didn't start biting until at least sixty nine seconds had passed, and the highest number of bites from a single mosquito was seven. They also found that mosquitoes exposed to the song were slower to initiate mating.
Wow, So what do we think is the science behind all of this?
Research suggests that noise causes stress in insects, like enough to change their normal behavior. The other thing that might be causing delayed biting is the vibration from the sound. Now, in the Scrillics study, the scientists were careful to set up their equipment so the speaker wasn't touching the cage. But all sound is vibration, right, And it turns out that the mosquitoes have to make a whole series of
super precise calculations before they suck your blood. First, they need to locate you, Then they probe for a suitable blood vessel. Then they insert their style it which is actually what it's called, and grip your skin while they feed. And it seems like consistent vibration, so the kind you might experience in the twenty ten dubsteps Smash scary monsters
and nice brites can really throw these calculations off. There was another study in twenty eighteen where some researchers played acdc's back in Black to a group of beetles and it reduced their feeding as well.
And when you say group of beetles, I assume you're talking about insects.
Yeah, I don't think ACDC would stop Ringo and Paul from eating their dinners. But at any rate, it's amazing to think that blasting music could someday be part of an affordable and effective global mosquito control strategy.
All right, Well, at the risk of branding myself as the fungus guy, and I'm I'm always nervous about this, I'm championing another fungal breakthrough for our count h and this one has to do with their eating habits. So for a long time now, we've known that fungi are basically the garbage disposals of the natural world. Elie practically anything from the wood of a violin to asbestos to
even jet fuel, which is super weird. In fact, there are now at least four different species of marine fungus that can even break down carbon based polyethylene, the most pervasive form of plastic waste in the Earth's oceans.
That's pretty awesome.
But as helpful as all of this is from a human perspective, there is one dish on the fungal menu whose consumption stands to benefit us the most, and that's actually radiation.
I feel like I've heard about this right. It's some kind of black fungus at Chernobyl.
Yeah, that's right, And years after the nineteen eighty six meltdown, scientists discovered patches of black fungus growing on the walls of the Number four reactor. Surprisingly, the fungi seem to be growing toward the various sources of radiation, and his later studies showed it actually the most where the radiation
was highest. Now, for a long time, nobody knew how the fungus had managed to survive much less flourish, but in two thousand and seven, two researchers at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine shed some light on the subject. Their study revealed that the fungus had not only adapted to what would normally be seen as a lethal level of radiation, It also developed a way to feed on the radiation as a way to fuel its own growth,
kind of like the fungal equivalent of photosynthesis. The fungus absorbed the radiation and then processed it harmlessly to produce usable energy, just like a plant does with sunlight.
That's pretty amazing. So so what's their trek?
Well, the secret turned out to be the fung guy's melanin content, the pigment responsible for its dark coloring. These researchers that I mentioned, Ekaterina Dottakova and Arturo Cascidovol, discovered that exposure to radiation had changed the shape of the black fung gui's melanin molecule, making it much more effective at processing radiation than fungal strains that don't contain melanin.
It's anathing we've talked about and twice on this yeah, this series. So does that adaptation exist in other strains of black fungi or is it just the one that's found at Chernobyl.
Now we actually know of a few different strains that can do this. Now.
They're called radiotrophic fungi, and the hope is that we can use them to help contain and possibly reduce radiation levels and other contaminated sites around the world. Now, to be clear, the fungi's abilities could have useful applications in far less extreme places than nuclear disaster sites. For example, there are a lot of medical and manufacturing devices that
safely use smaller levels of radiation. These can be treated with radiotrophic fungus to further protect workers from ambient radiation or maybe help to power them, since the fungus produces energy. There's also a chance that we could someday harness the genes possible for the fungui's resilience to radiation and then use them to create other materials with the same ability.
In the meantime, though, NASA scientists have already fast tracked another important use for the black fungus protecting astronauts from cosmic radiation.
Cool i sometimes forget. In addition to the lack of oxygen, spaces radioactive. So you know, whether you're walking out in a spacesuit or chilling inside the rocket, you're being hit with some level of radiation.
Right, Yeah, it's not exactly a hospitable environment for humans up there. And the same strain found that Chernobyl was sent to the International Space Station back in twenty twenty, and the experiment conducted with it showed that the fungus was able to block some of the incoming radiation. The finding could have major implications for future missions, including long term voyages in a deep space where radiation levels could
be much higher. If further studies pan out, astronauts could soon be wearing suits and living in habitats shielded with the layer of this protective fungus.
That's really an incredible journey from like the soil to Chernobyl to outer space. Like it's a pretty huge evolution. Okay, listeners, you've got to pay for the show with some ads, but we'll be right back after this quick break. 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 well, this is it our last story of the countdown, Dylan, can we get a drum roll for Lise? All right, let's do it, Mango.
What is the number one best science idea of the past twenty five years?
So this comes from a two thousand and six study published in the British Medical Journal concerning the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea or OSA, and this is a huge deal. According to the National Council on Aging, nearly a billion adults worldwide are thought to have at least a mild case of OSA.
Yeah, and I know most of us have heard of sleep apnea, but let's take a minute just remind me what it does exactly.
The condition occurs when the upper airway in the throat collosse during sleep, and this blocks the sleeper's airflow and causes their breathing to repeatedly stop and start. So you know, it results in like snoring, gasping, sometimes choking. Not to mention sleep deprivation and not getting enough sleep really has serious health consequences. Lack of sleep is linked to diabetes, heart disease, plus mental health problems like brain fog, irritability, anxiety,
and even depression. But luckily, a team of Swiss researchers came up with a treatment for sleep apnea that is totally safe and proven to work. It involves a medical device that produces a very distinctive sound. So I just want to play a clip of it for you in your headphones and see if you can place it. Wait, is that a digital do I mean, what else could it be? That one of a kind drone sound right there is pretty incredible?
All right, So that's cool and all, but how does listening to it help with sleep apnea?
Listening to it probably won't help. The sound has been found to promote relaxation and reduce stress in some people, but the real medical marvel comes from playing the instrument.
Now.
According to this two thousand and six study, the airway collapses associated with sleep apnea can be caused by a variety of factors, ranging from obesity, to alcohol consumption to simply having a large tongue. But whatever the case, the key to treating them is to find a way to keep that airway open at all times. Now, the traditional
way to do that is with a seapap machine. This treatment uses a machine to deliver a steady stream of air pressure through a mask so that the soft tissues and the wearer's throat won't close in and block the airway.
I guess that's kind of like one of those inflatable tube guys at the car dealerships right picture those.
I guess so. But the problem is, seapap machines are expensive, they're bulky, their covers nearly half of all people prescribe these machines by their doctors eventually quit using them. Plus, the machines make a worrying white and I sound, which some people will find soothing but would drive me nuts.
Yeah, it's not nearly as soothing as a digital do.
Well again, listening to a dijerdo will not help you. But these Swiss researchers found that playing the digitaldo or the ditch as those of us in the no Call, it is actually a great way to strengthen the muscles of the upper airway. And the key to that is the circular breathing technique used by wind instrumentalists. This allows them to create a continuous, uninterrupted tone by inhaling through
the nose while maintaining airflow through the instrument. Now, this is a tricky technique to master because you kind of have to alternate back and forth between stored air in your cheeks and air brought into the lungs through the nose. Amazingly, it's actually how the rapper Black Thought from the Roots can wrap like ten minutes straight without sounding like he's taking a big gas for air, and he has like
a steady flow. But once you've mastered the method through daily practice, the muscles in your tongue and throat will be much stronger and your upper airway will be much less likely to collapse.
It's super interesting, but I'm curious that, Like, how did the researchers figure this out? Like what made them think that digitido might have an effect on sleep apnea?
So, according to the study, they were tipped off by a digido instructor who happened to suffer from sleep apne himself, and he reported that he and a few of his students snored less and weren't as tired during the daytime after practicing with the instrument for several months, and that convinced the team.
To take a closer look.
So they recruited twenty five people, all of whom had a moderate sleep apnea, gave them several weeks of lessons on how to play, and then have them commit to practicing daily for about four months. And so, how could they tell whether it was working? So they used several different measures to gauge the results, but the primary outcome was something called the Epworth scale, which measures daytime sleepiness
from zero to twenty four. Now, the average Epworth score at the start of the trial was eleven point eight, so pretty much in the middle between zer and twenty four. But after practicing digidoo for about twenty five minutes a day, six days a week for several months, the test subject's average score dropped to seven point four, so almost a
four and a half point difference. In addition, the partners of the participants reported far less sleep disturbance from snoring during the same period, suggesting that the collapsibility of the upper airway really had been reduced by playing this digitidoo.
And I'm curious how did those improvements stack up against the SEPAP machine.
So overall, the effect of the digiidoo was slightly smaller than the typical results of SEAPAP therapy. But as the authors noted, one of the major hurdles with SEPAP is no one really likes using them right, and that leads to poor compliance. But that wasn't the case with the digido Like the people who participated were super into it and even practiced more often than the researchers had asked them to, so in the long run, the ditch my
be the better choice for some patients. Also, while we're talking, about the dijid Did you know the name is an automatopoia.
I did not, actually, just I don't know what I thought the origins were. I just assumed it was an Australian Aboriginal word.
Yeah, I actually thought the same thing. But it turns out the word doesn't exist in any of the local languages. Like They've got their own names for it. They call it the yadaki or the mago. So while the instrument itself is thought to be one of the oldest on the planet, the name dijidoo was likely coined by Europeans who settled around the turn of the twentieth century, and
they called it that to mimic the rhythmic sounds it produces. Anyway, I was so curious if there was any sort of anecdotal evidence to back this up, so I went on the sleep Apnea subreddit, and sure enough, there are a whole bunch of posts from people who report improved sleep after learning how to play the digerdoo. There's just one drawback, and what would that be? The digitdoo sound is loud.
So it's true, while your sleep might be getting better, your relationship with your neighbors might get work.
Oh you know, Mega, We've been doing an Instagram contest every day of this countdown, and I already mentioned that we're giving away sheets of Zorbix today, but since this is the grand finale, we're also going to give away a digital do sleep Apnea kit comes with everything you need to become a well rested digital player by our neighbors Samir Plugs. Go to our Instagram at part Time Genius to get all the contest details.
Yeah, it's been really fun doing these contests and maybe we'll do more of them in the future, But that brings us to the end of our great Science Ideas countdown. We really hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And in addition to Gabe, Mary and Dylan, a shout out to Lucas Riley, who also helped us research a bunts of this Calypso Rales is mailing out all the gifts and helping us with social media. And we also want to thank all the inventors and scientists we spoke
with for helping us make this happen. But from Will and myself, thank you to all those folks, and thank you to you. We feel so lucky that we get to make this show, and we're really thrilled you're listening. Part Time Genius is the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongaishatikler 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 Norbel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, 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.