Cool Science You May Have Missed in 2012

Or maybe it's like something that's really interesting but just not quite enough to do a whole episode on. So consider this kind of a sampler platter of some of the stranger chocolates from now I get to say, a poo poo platter, Yes, poop ladder of odd science from Um, we're gonna kick off with with my favorite from this this bunch and this is a worse the Immortal jellyfish

the quote unquote Benjamin Button of the Animal Kingdom. Uh. A lot of headlines had some fun with this, I mean have to fund with Most of these are the headlines. New York Times ran a story titled can a jellyfish Unlocked? The Secrets of immortality. So you have a number of I mean just pit there. Yeah, they dropped in immortality in the headline, which that's gonna that generates some interest because we all want to live live, not forever, at least maybe a little more than we have a lotted

to us. So, uh, it's it's instantly fascinating. So the jellyfish in question is the Tatopsis dorney, which to all appearances looks like jellyfish. There's there's nothing particularly amazing about but what what happens here is that, um nothing amazing about it in just appearance, but in function it does some amazing things. What appears to happen is that it quote unquote reverses an in age unil it reaches an

early stage, earlier stage of its development. Now to really understand what's going on here, you have to picture the life cycle of the jellyfish and h So what happens, all right, So you having an adult jellyfish, a medusa, all right, when it reproduces, it drops off this planny little larva. Alright, this larva floats down to the bottom of of the sea there and there it grows into a polyp and then the budding polyp emits this ifira, this little sort of mini pseudo jellyfish that then floats

up and becomes the adult jellyfish of it. Right, right, So that's the basic life cycle. Now, what happens normally is that you have an adult jellyfish that reproduces a few times, starts getting a little old, it starts to starve, or the water gets a little too hot, and then it dies. It shuffles off this mortal coil. You know. This is basically like any life form right reaches the adult stage. The adult stage is about reproducing. Now, it's worth noting that, as with many other organisms, um, the

adult stage is not the only stage that can reproduce. Uh, there's also some a sexual reproduction that takes place at the poly up stage. But but generally, in most organisms reach it reaches the adult stage, it reproduces, and then it either dies immediately or maybe it carries on a little longer, but generally its function is done. You've reached the adulthood stage. You've reproduced. That's it. You have to get off the stage and make room for the other players.

But not so with this particular jellyfish. Now it does not quite Benjamin Button, Like, that would be a wrong analogy. What would be a better analogy is that is not that like an old man grows young again. But imagine an old man walking down the street and just collapses under the weight of his like old awfulness, and then just melts into a pile of goo on the sidewalk, and then out of that goo crawls a naked, slime covered infant, which then grows up into an adult. I

like that. I like that. Pat Krug marine biologists says that when they do reach the end of this cycle, uh, they get really stressed out and they collapse to the bottom and melt, But instead of dying, they really reorganize its tissues and forms a new little polyp, so, as you say, sort of climbing from the primordial goo and

reforming itself. Um. And it's interesting because Craig says that it it's it's almost like it skips it's having the sex part of it and goes straight to the next bit in the life cycle and becomes this new polyp. And I think this is so cool because it reminds me of the imaginal cells that we talked about in

the Gremlin's podcast. We were talking about a butterfly sort of deconstructing a rather caterpillar deconstructing itself in the cocoon, and that those imaginal cells are much like undifferentiated stem cells, and that they can do any sort of job that they need to while reconstructing this new form, new life form, this butterfly um and then those cells becoming specialized when it when it actually does become the butterfly itself. This

is very much the same thing with this immortal jellyfish. Yeah, to put it in the gremlin model now that we brought gremlins and magua into it. Uh, the magua the furry little dude, the gremlin, the repulsive creature that the magua turns into. The gremlin is the adult form. The magua is the juvenile form, maybe even a larval form. However you want to look at it um and so when you know, the magua eats after midnight, turns into

an adult gremlin. But then imagine if the adult gremlin melted and then out of the gremlin melt emerged a magua. You know, it would be a a reversal, you know. So it's fascinating to think about about it that way, but but still taking nothing away from this organism. Like I said, it's not quite Benjamin Button, and it's which is I think a good thing. Uh, it's also not

quite immortal. We're getting a little carried away with that, right, there's a question mark to to what degree the tissues can continue to regenerate themselves, right, Yeah, I mean it's it's really awesome, it's really fascinating and certainly, um, something very unique is going up. Well that's also another thing because there's also the possibly there are other jellyfish species that do this as well. So it's maybe not as unique as some of the stories made it out to be.

But it's still pretty amazing. Uh. And ultimately how long can this keep going? Uh? Probably not forever. This is probably not a situation where it's like the Highlander of jellyfish just carrying on and carrying on. Yeah, And let me just do a quick quote from Pat Kraig again, the marine biologist. Why it is significant? He or she says that learning how to take adult cells and get them back to the early stage where they can develop into anything is a significant goal of what we want

to be able to achieve. Um, and I think in this case she's talking about in humans, it's something that this humble little jelly has a built in feature of its life cycle. Things get gross around it, it melts and rebuilds itself from scratch. So I think there is definitely the potential that we could learn some basic things that we could better apply to our own technology for

human medicine. Now, you know, it would be a dream is to talk to Aubrey Degree about this, you know, and say, like, what you know, to what extent are things like this? These sort of discoveries um helpful in in his own bio gerontology work where he is trying to get to disease before it happens in the human body and basically try to keep the body is finally tuned as possible so that with drug intervention and good health, we could possibly live, you know, upwards to five hundred

years old. Yeah. I guess one of the things about humans is we don't really we never go through a cocoon phase. We never go through a drastic of change. I mean, you know, there's there's a lot of drastic changes that go that occur between you know, being an infinite being an adult, but but like what would be the cut off line, you know, if you could? Yeah, and to what degree could you re org your your cells and your tissues. So I think that's the interesting part,

Like could we take that information and apply to yourselves practically? Yeah, I mean what makes me think of the fly because in a lot of primordial do in that. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that the Jeff gold Blooms, the character gets on about when he's you know, quote unquote gold blooming about the excitement of the science, and he's talking about, you know, being broken down in the teleportation and then reassembled, reborn, re emerging from the plasma pool.

And that's pretty much what's happening with this jellyfish, which I don't know. I mean, if you can combine that with um quantum entanglement, which which we'll talk about, maybe that could happen. But before we get to that, let's talk about junk DNA or as we have discovered this year, not so junk DNA. Yeah. So this is pretty cool, And this is just another example of you knows, as we any scientific endeavor, you'd you push a little a little farther. You you answer one question and three new

ones arive. Um just this when you know you're you're traveling across the countryside. Uh, what seems to be a very simple array of hills and trees in the distance. The closer you get you see the details, you see the the how how complex the system actually is. And so for the longest we've we've thought that there is this thing called this junk DNA, which you know, sounds kind of like a silly idea because why is it there? Right? Is there's the the the you know, the quote you

may have seen on a T shirt. God don't make no junk, right, So why would God? Because the idea that the God in his his or her infinite wisdom would not make something that was that was wasted, like everything has a purpose, something, everything kind of fits in somehow. And take the God out of that equation and fit it into a more scientific setting, then it still rings with a certain amount of true like it's there, like why would why would there be junk DNA? Like would

it just be like leftover garbage DNA? And uh, you know, the the take home here is that the more that we've we've we've looked at with the vename, we realized that it is not junk DNA, but it is a genetic material that informs UM, these various epigenetic changes in the genes that determine what genes are turned on or off. And these switches, UM, the simplified way of looking at these switches have an impact on various UM manifestations of

the human body, from various traits to UH diseases. Yeah, and UM, this is a byproduct of mapping the human genome. This discovery that junk DNA is not necessarily junking in fact of it, they say, is vital and as you say, it has UM has a pretty big implication in gene switches that reside in bits of DNA. So UM, the discovery is considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough and it really does have an effect on our ability to

gain human health here. Um, and again we're talking about UM, this material that was largely mysterious for this in some ways it is, but there's an ability now to to better uh look at it and try to figure out what it is. In fact, the term junk DNA is not being tossed around so much anymore. It has now been upgraded to dark matter. Yes, something that and just a briefly about dark matter in a cosmic sense, a mystery, a thing that that we're we're not sure exactly on

the nature of, but we know it. It must be important because there's a lot of it out there. Yeah, and um, you know, there are complex diseases that appear and they appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of genes switches which are controlled by this junk or dark matter DNA. UM it really is a game changer because it can help us to understand how alterations in the non gene parts of DNA contribute to human disease, which could lead to new drug therapy. UM. It could

also explain how the environment can affect disease risk. So in the case of identical twins, small changes in the environmental exposure can slightly altered genes, which is with the result that one twin gets disease and the other does not. UM and I think this is really going to be most important, at least in the short term in cancer. UM that this is from the New York Times article Bits of Mystery DNA far from junk play crucial role. It says that as they begin to turning the DNA

sequences of cancer cells. Researchers realize that most of the thousands of DNA changes in cancer cells were not in genes. They were in the dark matter. The challenge is to figure out which of those changes are driving the cancer's growth. All right, So there you go, junk DNA not so junk after all. So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna roll through some

other potentially overlooked awesome science from the from including solar tornadoes. Okay, we're back, and we are talking sellar tornadoes, which I'm really excited about because this year they were confirmed. They've been spotted or hints of them have been spotted in two thousand and eight, but they were confirmed this year.

And it's thought that up to eleven thousand of them twist over the Sun's surface every day, and they're made of hot plasma and they are capable of reaching heights of eighteen hundred miles high, with diameters ranging from nine hundred and thirty to thirty five hundred miles wide. Okay, so that the stats aren't done there, because think about this mammoth um. It can spin upwards to about nine

thousand miles an hour, lasting only for about thirteen minutes each. Yeah, and it's a lot of the news stories about this really like the focus on these things are gonna be as big as the United States. Yeah, they're They're enormous solar tornadoes. Um, And it's important that I get a lot of space related headlines. Don't at me because I sometimes right for Discovery Space. So anytime Discovery Space does

a story, I end up seeing the headline. And it's easy to become kind of dull to these after a while because you have something happened in space, some new discovery. You know, it's the nature of science journalism. You have to spice it up a bit um. You know, black holes, that's great, but no, it's not enough today. It's gotta be monster black holes. There have to be cannibal black holes.

They've gotta so everything is sexed up to them. Yeah, so solar tornadoes on the Sun. It sounds awesome, but it was actually kind of easy to miss this one if you're if you're having to process a lot of space headlines because they kind of overstate everything. Even though the core science is always really amazing when you look at it. In this case, in point, you have the solar tornadoes. Now you probably wonder, well, what is why

is it important? Like why does it what does it matter that there are solar tornadoes aside from the cool factor, Well, it really does give us a better understanding what's going on on the Sun. Like one thing that it's important to realize about the Sun is that the the surface of the Sun is the coolest part of the Sun, which seems to counterintuitive, right, right, especially since the atmosphere, the weather of the Sun is hotter than the surface. So it's like it's hot and then it gets a

little cooler and it gets progressively hotter again. Um and uh, And this gives us little more reason to understand it because in the atmosphere of the Sun, the weather of the Sun, you have all this intense activity. Yeah and um, I wanted to point out that then wide amount Boom, he's an astrophysicist at the University of Also had said,

you know, we thought something was up. Basically, he said that we observed some unusually hot plasma above the Sun's surface, so we knew something was happening there, but we didn't know what. And it turns out that this activity, these

solar tornadoes may contribute to that variation in heat. The reason why there is so much heat in this upper atmosphere because if you think about a tornado, it's um, you know, it's well, there's there's a spiraling effect bringing heat up right, But a sort of solar tornado is unlike tornadoes on Earth, which of course are powered by

differences in temperature and humidity. UM. The twisters in the Sun are a combination of hot flowing gas entangled magnetic field lines, ultimately driven by nuclear reactions at the solar core. So at the surface for the photosphere, cooled plasma sinks towards the interior like water running down the bathtub drain, and this creates vortex is that magnetic field lines are forced to follow, and then the line stretch upward into the chromosphere where they continue to spiral up. So it's

just one big death metal album up there. Big. Yeah. Yeah, it's why you It's why the corona, this upper atmosphere of the Sun's atmosphere is filled with all of this heat because you have these massive tornadoes of plasma just throwing themselves around. UM. And then as for the eleven thousand per day statistic um. It has been said that there may not be as many in the future because we've seen a glut of these huge sillar tornadoes because the Sun has been ramping up toward max and activity

levels in its current cycle. So you know, still it's a tremendous amount of activity, and one that people weren't necessarily aware of. They suspected, of course that something was going on. But you know, I think it recasts the whole idea of the Wizard of oz. I think someone needs to to write with sort of the oz uh based on the Sun. Really, so so Dorothy would go to the Sun instead. Yes, there's there are a lot of logistics to be worked out there. But imagine the

twister that comes through that cancel. Yes, yeah, of course, of course, the solar twister. I like it. I like it, all right, all right, well, now let's turn our attention to the quantum world. Now, of course, quantum things happened in because quantum, quantum happens. Quantum happens. It looks great in the headline um and so there there continues to be some interesting headway in the field of quantum teleportation.

Now I know what you're you're you're you're wondering. You're either wondering, well, what is quantum teleportation or you're thinking, oh God, I hope they don't try and explain it. Uh. And we're we're not going to go to in depth

on quantum teleportation. That's really a subject for another time, but but we can sort of speed you through the simple version of it um because what what we have here, what we're dealing with, essentially, is quantum entanglement, in which two sub atomic particles thousands of light years of party

and then can instantly respond um to each other's motions. Uh. So we've this started off is something that was you know, merely theoretical that we figured was possible, and then scientists observed the phenomenon at at at the particle level and uh and in two thousand and nine they managed to

produce the effect with linked superconductors and uh. And it's an exciting topic because you know, it helps us certainly, it involves a greater understanding of what's going on in the quantum realm, but also it has enormous possible applications, uh for faster than light signaling, for as sending data, for encrypting data, um but particularly and in the in the area of quantum computing. It's it's pretty big medicine. Yeah.

In the past year, a team from China and another in Austria set new records for quantum teleportation using a laser to beam photons through the open air over sixty and eighty nine excuse me, sixty and eighty nine miles respectively for context, just you know, just to let you know. The first efforts to do this resulted in sending the particles mirror inches. So the fact that they're already up

to eighty nine miles is pretty amazing. So the idea is that quantum teleportation could be used to transmit particles and information from an orbiting satellite eventually to relay station on Earth. So this information in the process by which

it is transmitted is what is called quantum encryption. So, according to wire dot COM's article the Race to bring Quantum Teleportation to your world, quote, if developed, quantum teleportation, satellites could allow spies to pass large amounts of information back and forth or create unhackable codes. Should we ever build quantum computers, they would need quantum teleporters in order to be networked together in a quantum version of the Internet.

This is very cool stuff, you know, just from a sci fi perspective, you can imagine the implications of a quantum infrastructure in our world. Yes, to say nothing of all those scenarios in which got vaculate might wear address. So that's sort of the Pine the Sky idea. And if you think that's too pine the sky though, just consider this. China plans to launch a satellite with a quantum teleportation experiment payload in two, with a quantum communications

project being estimated to cost fifty to one million dollars. Okay, so China obviously thinks that this is an important technology. Uh. Europe UM, UH, Japan and Canada are all their space agencies are hoping to fund their own quantum teleportation satellite projects in the coming years. So the US is a bit behind in this, and some of this has to do with bureaucratic shuffling between DARPA and IOPA. UM. But it's interesting because it's definitely a race to get as

advanced in this technology as possible. Yeah, if you think back to the episode we did on an interseller Internet the idea and the interplanetary Internet. Uh, because as we as we continue to expand out into the cosmos. If we you know, as we we show up on other worlds, we're gonna have to deal with communication, and we're going to face the reality that we're dealing with such distances

that that instantaneous communication just isn't possible. So you end up with it with ever growing lag times, and it's more of a return to an age of instead of you know, instantly connecting with a loved one or or or just employers or mission team members, you would have to send off missives into the void and then wait for one to return and you know, hope that nothing

went long. One of the big exciting things, here's the possible possibility of instantaneous communication between planets by use of this quantum teleportation. And it's because we're talking about data being reproduced in one place through quantum entanglement. No, it's it's very interesting and I particularly that the spy part of course, just kind of makes me sit up a

little bit taller and take notice. And there was an interesting, uh analogy of this of how this might happen with quantum teleportation to send this controllable signal, say to a satellite and I'm going to take a stab at it, a game for it. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. This requires three subatomic particles, say photons. In this case, two of the photons are entangled with one another, and the third contains the bit of information you want to send. Okay.

So just know that the sub atomic particles, let's say they're a vertical orientation, okay. And once you test that and you figure out that these the two that are entangled are vertical. You know, the other ones in vertical no matter where it is in conjunction to the other one. Okay, So these are like paired Dakota rings. Yes, So you take one and I take one. Yeah, okay, And then there's that third bit right that has the information. So

it says. For a simple example of how this works, let's say you place one photon from the entangled pair in Los Angeles and the other in New York. In Los Angeles, a scientist measures one of the entangled photons and the third particle at the same time. She doesn't find out their exact properties, but just their relative ones if they are the same or opposite of one another, for instance. And the particles get destroyed during this measurement.

So the scientists has measured figures out. Let's say it's horizontal. Let's say that she discovers that the particles are opposites, meaning that the one that is entangled, Okay, that the one of the pair is opposite from the third particle. That bit of information, they're opposite from each other. And she relays this information to her New York colleague. He then measures the entangled photon and knows that the opposite of that measurement is the bit of information he was

meant to receive. Yeah, there you go, clear as clear, clear as is mud. Right there. Um. It makes me we ran across a number of different quote unquote simplified explanations for this stuff. When we're looking at it, like there's one that involves like a secret like police investigation involving detectives, Romulus and Remus and Alice. It it gets very complex even when you're trying to do a very simple explanation, and a lot of it kept. It kept.

Made me think of the movie Labyrinth in which uh Sarah encounters the two doors with the with the the muppety creatures behind them, where one of them says that they both informer that one of them always tells the truth, and one of them always lies. And then one tells her you know what the other one would say, and you have to try and work out in your mind what that answer means and which doors you should take

based on that answer, and it's it's really a mind work. Well, the problem with a Romulus and Remus example that we did not talk about for a good reason is because it also brings cultural drink into the conversation. That's not relevant to it, right, because Romulus and Remus is an entirely different thing. All they wanted in this analogy were twins. Yeah yeah, um so, but I got to attach their characters. They had to name them. Suddenly they were invested in them,

and we're just trying to understand plans. All I want to know is this entangled pair, how are they behaving? And what is their behavior? Tell us about this third particle? Right, don't kind of distract us by telling a good story, right, good stuff? Um, but it's it's again. This is uh, this cryptography, right, This this key that is inserted to give you a bit of information, and this essentially is

what these entangled pairs are doing. Real quick, just to mention another story that we discussed briefly, but we ended up not including. There was a really cool article about dissonant music and what happens when animals listen to it, or more importantly, what's what happens when people listen to it? And this is a u c l A team that looked into this, and they found that that just distorted and jarring music is really is so evocative because the

mechanisms are closely related to distress calls in animals. So the idea here is that everyone, like you know, perks up at Woodstock and listens to Jimi Hendrix playing the national anthem because it's jarring and there's distortion, and you know,

it calls out to our our deeper animal selves. So I found that found it interesting and they were also they also did some studies in like two thousand and ten where they're looking at and classic movies and various genres including horror and looking at UH at the soundtracks and how they differ and the kind of emotions they evoked. And and they did see that like horror films tended to to use more screaming females and distorted vocals UH

distorted sounds in their soundtracks. Um So anyway, I just found it's, like said, there's not a lot of meat really there to chew on. But it's interesting to think about that in terms of of music that we find. Please maybe they did a study and and uh and everything. We're like, you know, subjects were rating music that they listened to, uh on a negative and positive scale. They were listening to stuff that was distorted and stuff that was more you know, serene and uh and more melody

to it. Uh and it. But it did make me think about music that combines both because they're certainly there's straight up noise music you can listen to straight up you know, just extreme electronic distortion and stuff that sounds uh in my wife's words, like someone throwing a xylophone down a set of stairs. And then you have you know, more stuff that's all the way on the on the

serene level. But then you have music that sort of incorporates both, like like some of the groups that I really like that that toy with the nose, that the

nose the noise uh section here, like like Autecker. They they use a certain amount of serene and sounds and a certain amount of melody, but then also a lot of you know, unpredictable um uh, distorted noise as well, and it sort of comes together in this sort of interesting place that that it makes you think, what's it's touching based with the you know, the part of my mind it wants, you know, calmness and serenity, but also in this this animal part of my mind that is

responding to something that might be the sound of an animal dying. Yeah, it's stimulating, right, So it's interesting to have both of those um I also wanted to mention, and I don't have the information right in front of me, so this is off top of my head. I believe it was a chimp in Germany, a zoo in Germany.

Have you heard about this chump um That was remarkable for a couple of things, but mainly because he would take rocks, put them nearby him, and then sit there and wait for zoo visitors to come by and will be act very relaxed, and then just when when the zoo visitor sort of didn't realize or was distracted by something,

with launch an attack with those rocks. And I thought it was fascinating because not only does it show premeditative behavior, which we know systin animals, particularly in chimps, but it shows the ability for these chimps to actually enter into the realm of acting and in order to pull off this subterfuge against these zoo visitors. And uh, the video on it is fascinating. I thought that was an interesting

bit of animal behavior from this year. All right, well, there you go, just some overlooked, potentially overlooked, but really cool bits of science from that we wanted to clean up there and present to you. So let's call over the robit for a little listener mail. Before I read some of these, I do want to point out real quick.

In a previous episode, I mentioned pugs, the breed of dog, and I talked about how useless they were, uh, you know, because the largely you encounter a pug, and the pug is just this slightly you know, this kind of poorly put together dog that has trouble with with heat and too much exercise and is ultimately just a lap creature. Uh. Or at least that's the way I used to think about it. But just yesterday I was on Marta, Atlanta's

public transportation system. I saw a young lady in a wheelchair and she had a helper animal that was a pug, So it's recast your opinion. I have to come back some of what I thought about pugs, because here's a pug and he's uh. I think it was a she actually, But there was that pug and she was doing her job, representing calmly there by the by the wheelchair as a train roared by. So how did you know she was she? Well,

I mean I could sort of. She was slim, so you could sort of tell what was going on under there. You know. It's like you picked the dog up and turned her over the idea I rolled her Alpha roll the dog. No, it's always a no no. Don't alpha roll a helper an, especially on public transportation. Exactly. All right, Well, um, here's a little bit of listener mail from our listener Brad. Brad writes and says, hey, you guys are awesome. I am at a party right now. And that's the thing.

This first time anyone has written this from a party that they've mentioned it. But he says, I am at a party right now, and it was just plugging your biology of Gremlin's episode. The crowd here were so excited. We got to pondering the biology of zombies. Hint, you need to do an episode on the biology of zombies. That's all I'm gonna say, Bratt. I don't know what I have to think about that one. The potential there, I know there are some. I mean, it ultimately comes

down to are their real world biological analogs? Because that was the fun of the Gremlins, was taking something that seems wacky and stupid and totally just made up without any real regard for the natural world and pairing it with things in the natural world that are just as amazing. Um, And I think there's some parallels with zombies we'd have we'd have to explore. Speaking of have you seen a trailer for the Zombies Love Story movie that's coming out?

Telling is it? Does it look good? Yeah? Somehow they well, I don't know, it looks kind of hokey too, because somehow the zombies seem to heal themselves through the powerful of If I was actually paying attention to this trailer, um in a meaningful way, but we might be interesting, all right, We'll look out for that one. We also received a number of cool contents from people who listen to our teen Angst episode, we were talking about the the science of teen ankst. Well, what's going on with

the teenager's brain? Why? Why did teenagers seem so different? And why as teenagers do we feel ultimately so different about the world and about our social life than uh, than we did when we were younger, and then we do when we get older. So we heard from a number of people. Here's one from listener Jordan's. Jordan rights in and says, Hey, they're just finished listening to your

podcast on teenage angst. I just wanted to let you know that, being a teenager myself, I have experienced some of these tricks the mind plays, but most of the time I can overcome the brain's way of tricking me. Like when one of my friends desired, uh that he no longer be my friend, I myself didn't care, but I started having bad dreams about this non friend of mine, and I would wake up and I would think to myself, I don't really care care. Why is this person's Why

is it so important to me? Thanks for explaining this to me. Keep up the great podcasting work. Regards Jordan's. We heard from Drake. Drake wrote in says, hello, I just listened to your Teenage Teenager podcast and was interested in a change of consciousness. I was absorbed in all of the facts that you guys stated because in a few months, I too will know what, uh what it's

like to be a teenager. I used to think that taking risk and rebellion were just things that teens did to fit in or to look cool, But now I know that there's some science behind it. Besides, I never really knew how to fit in any way. Keep up the great work, and I'm happy you've got this message. And that's from Drake from Nevada. So we received a number of other comments and it's all I wish we

could read them all. Um. A lot of the cool moments where people either were reevaluating the teenagers they were or took a close look at the teenagers they were becoming,

also wanted to mention. We got an email from Isabelle and she took us to task for not exploring teens who exercise great amounts of self control, because she said that she believes that there are a good subsection here of teenagers who are honest and who um, who can kind of control their states of rebellion and so on and so forth, and I thought, you know, she makes a really interesting point, and that might make for a good podcast in the future here talking about self control

and teenagers and why some teenagers are successful at that. Um, Like, ultimately we could do like a how to guide for for teenagers, the teenager the teenage brain owners guide. Yeah, like, what you know, is it higher functioning? Why are some teenagers more mature than others? Because I certainly thought of examples of teenagers I know in my life who are who do seem very responsible and have a good amount of self control. So I thought she's got a point there,

perhaps something we can pursue here in the future. Yeah. Well, I was talking about this episode with with my wife and she brought up to that It's like, it's kind of a little disturbing to think about how the the range in which one has the teenage brain. You know, it can it can hit pretty early, and then it can it can also hit kind of late and last

up until you know, basically in mid twenties. And at that point, like we we were already sitting and sending these individuals to to college, We're already sending these individuals to war. Um, you know that they're they're voting. I mean, they're all these these things that are happening and uh and but there's still you know, potentially in this uh, this state of development. So yeah, Well, we also got an email and just thinking about that that have different

states and experiences that teenagers going through. We've got an email from a woman named Michela who is twenty three years now, uh, but she became pregnant at the age of eighteen, and she depends that this really insightful, interesting email about how that experience may have changed her brain as a teenager in how she looks at her sister and her sister's behavior and start contrast to her own. So that was a very interesting email that we don't

have time to read. But thank you MICHAELA for sending in. Yeah. Yeah, we appreciate all of the email feedback that you guys send in. Uh and also though the comments on Facebook and UH and Twitter, we don't we don't necessarily have time to respond to all of it, but just bear in mind, we do, we do read it, we do check it out, and if you would like to reach out to us, you can find us on Facebook, you can find us on tumbler, we are stuff to blow

your mind on both of those. You can also find us on Twitter, where we go by the handle blow the Mind, and you can also send us a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, Is It how Stuff Works dot com