Portable Muon Beams, Sodium Batteries, and the Secret to Long Life

0:00Aloha internet. This is your captain speaking Lester Nar joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Chowdery. This is from first principles. We are back with three great research papers we're going to cover this week. Starting off with a new laser plasma device that could be light enough to be used in the field. We'll be going to Egypt for this story out of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs that was published in the physical review accelerators and beams. We're gonna meu on that story to our second story about sodium batteries. Are they finally cheaper than lithium batteries and just

0:40as powerful? This is a new paper out of uh University of Chicago and UC San Diego that was published in the paper Jewel, Just Jewel, >> Just Jewel, >> uh a Cell Press journal. And we will wrap up with a trip down memory lane to one of my favorite cartoons of all time, which is Kim Possible, as we talk about how naked mole rats might be the key to having a long life. This is a longevity study. This is out of Tongi University in Shanghai, China. That was published in China. This is from first principles. Let's get after it. [Music]

1:31>> My friend, >> how's it going? >> How are you? >> Well, we're done with Nobel Prize Weeks. Yes, we are back now to breaking news after several weeks of just insane >> coverage. Um, our >> the Dodgers are >> Oh, the Dodgers. Yes. >> Back in the World Series >> cuz we're in LA. >> I have my Joe Kelly shirt on. >> I was going to I think we have now witnessed the greatest >> Mhm. >> single performance as every announcer has said over the last couple days in baseball history by Show Otani. >> Yeah. >> In that last game against the Brewers. >> Yeah. I I wouldn't really know because I'm a true Dodgers fan and LA native. So, I didn't start caring until they

2:13like qualified or whatever for the World Series. So, I I honestly have no idea who they're even playing or anything. I don't even know if Joe Kelly is still on the roster if if that's how you say it. But anyways, now that we're in the World Series, dude, I'm a huge Dodgers fan. >> Like, I love the Dodgers. This is exactly why everyone hates Dodgers fans. >> Um, yeah, very excited. Uh, I think the World Series starts when our next episode will come out. >> Yeah. >> So, we will be dawned in Dodgers memorabilia uh on the pod. Uh, and we're going to start with as a hard hard pivot

2:54>> hard pivot >> uh on our first story which is about this new laser plasma device. And so the headline on this story is directional muon beam shows potential for advanced imaging technique. Uh researchers at ATAP have developed a compact source of high energy co limit limited colit >> co-imited >> co-imited muons >> columated columated sorry yeah columated muons using a laser plasma accelerator potentially enabling advanced imaging technologies. Now what's so interesting about this is it appears that this is going to be relevant for the field of archaeology especially.

3:34>> Yes. >> Again this is out of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and was published in the physical review accelerators and beams. So what is the top line on on this paper? Yeah the basic idea is in order to make muons usually you need like extremely large particle accelerators. Okay. And this guy, these guys are have done it in effectively the size of like a lab, maybe a big lab, but it's still not like, you know, the size of CERN or like Slack where it's like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of meters worth of stuff to create a muon beam. And that becomes really, really relevant if you're trying to use muons to do cat scans on very large things, for example,

4:18the pyramids or a volcano. And so that's that's sort of the stuff we're going to get into. >> Got it. Okay. Okay. But to to prime this understanding, we need to first understand what is a muon. Okay. So a muon is a central part of the standard model of particle physics. It is one of the fundamental particles that is kind of like a cousin, a heavy cousin to the electron. Okay. >> Heavy cousin. >> A heavy cousin. Now, one one of the mysteries of particle physics is that particles come in three generations. Okay? There's the electron, which is a class of leptons, and then there's this thing called the muon, and then the tow.

4:58You might have heard you're smiling because >> it just makes me think of Pokémon. >> Yeah. Yeah. But well, it's it's exactly that. And actually, it's it's one of the big mysteries that is still unsolved today, why it comes in these three generations. But in any case, that's the universe that we live in. This muon is exactly like the electron except it's 200 times as massive as the electron. So here we've got a a photo of the particle, all of the particles that make up the standard model. This is everything that we are made out of. Not just the mass, but also all of the energy that we're made out of. The light, the photons are part of the standard model. the the stuff that is

5:39massive like the up and down quirks, those are the stuff that make protons and neutrons. The electron together makes atoms. So all of these things are fundamental to our universe. >> And yet what we're most familiar with is up and down quarks and electrons, right? Those are the stuff that make atoms and then a photons and obviously stuff like that. But in terms of stuff that have mass, muons are this elusive kind of particle. They're quite rare and they're rare because they're really unstable. They have a mean lifetime of about 2.2 microsconds compared to an electron which is extremely stable, right? Um and they were first observed in these things

6:21called cosmic ray showers which are these showers that come when a cosmic ray hits the Earth's atmosphere. A cosmic ray is a really highly energetic massive particle. Maybe it's like a giant atomic nucleus. Obviously that's small but like you know in terms of like like particles it's quite big. Um when when these things come from wherever galaxies supernova whatever and they and they come and they hit our earth's atmosphere from high up they release a shower of particles because they interact with a bunch of particles in the earth's atmosphere and part of that shower goes from kons and pions. Those things then disintegrate into muons and

7:02then that's what we usually see. That's where we usually see muons. >> Is this related to the you know when folks have the charts of the sun having these large >> solar bursts and then it reaches Earth's atmosphere and everyone's like that's what's going to kill the grid. Is that this a similar concept as these cosmic rays or it's a different >> No, I mean it's similar in the sense that it's a massive gust of charged particles from our sun >> that is so massive in flux that it starts messing with our electrical grid. Cosmic rays on the other hand are very very sporadic. They're rare. They come

7:43from all over the all over the cosmos. So they're not like pointed from one direction. When when the sun releases a flare, all of those charged particles come all at the same time and then they completely overwhelm >> the electrical environment of the earth. Right? With cosmic rays, they're once once upon a time they come in and then they have these showers, right? And and what you can do is you can have detectors all over the earth that catch the particles that come in and then based on the geographic layout of all of the detectors and the timing of when each detector went off, you can be like, "Oh, it came from that direction, right?" Because if it came from that direction, then that detector would go off first, the one that's closest to that angle, and then the one

8:25that's further would go further. Um, so it's it's sort of a way that we've used muons are a way that we've used to map out cosmic rays, right? And they've been they've been coming at us for forever. Okay. They're ubiquitous. They're harmless. The flux is really weak. It's about one a minute through your fingernail. >> Okay. >> Okay. Like right now as as we're sitting here, there's there's about one muon a minute coming through our fingernail. These things don't really interact all that much because they're so heavy. They'll just like go right through right? >> So, historically, it's it's just been like something that's been nice to

9:05know about the universe that we've got this particle, right? That's the second generation. >> It's sort of it's not pop music. It's niche underground. When you're digging in the crates, it's it's cool. But >> yeah, it's cool. And it's got it's got some really cool like implications in fundamental physics research. Like for example, you can make a you can make a hydrogen atom, but instead of an electron, you can stick a muon around it cuz the muon also has a negative charge, right? And so but the muon is 200 times more massive, >> right? >> So what that means is the size of that muonic hydrogen atom is going to be way way smaller, which means you can now start probing effects of the nucleus. Like you can start asking questions like how big is the proton,

9:47>> right? with a with with a normal hydrogen atom, the electron is so the electron cloud is so big that the size of the proton doesn't really matter. But if you start shrinking the size of the hydrogen atom, this is one of the ways that in fundamental physics people start trying to figure out what is the size of the proton. They use muonic hydrogen. So it's like it's the twin of the electron, but it's just like big. >> Okay. That's like that seems to be the only thing that is different about it. >> Big big bro. Big bro. >> Yeah. Exactly. and and you know it's it's been a nice quirk up until the 1960s. Okay, in the 1960s there was a guy Luis Alvarez. He was a

10:27Nobel laureate. He was actually played by um Alex Wolf in the Oppenheimer movie, >> right? >> Um >> right, >> who's a very famous actor. Luis Alvarez. He was a in the Operheimer movie, he was a PhD student of um Lawrence who was making the first cyclron in Berkeley. And Alvarez was the guy who read um the discovery of nuclear fision and he replicated the the experiment and he was all excited. Well, um when he got older, he started re he was a great experimental physicist, okay? and he started realizing that what you could do is you could use a muon the same way that we use X-rays in medical imaging. Okay, the principle of X-rays in medical

11:10imaging is you have an X-ray source, you have a detector on the back, right? And then the X-ray is going to penetrate through soft tissue because there's not a lot of stuff that's like there. But the denser stuff like your bone, it's not going to be able to penetrate and that's going to create a shadow. So then you can image an entire skeleton >> using X-rays. Right? Now >> the same principle we can use now for very very large things because the muon is kind of like an X-ray in that the the path that it takes how far it gets through something is dependent on the density of the stuff that it's going

11:51through. Okay. Fundamentally it's most of particle physics is that. Okay. It's like so it's going through and because it's this massive cousin to the electron, it doesn't actually interact that much with matter and so it can go through a lot more stuff before it gets stopped. >> Okay. So now you can start imaging things like buildings or volcanoes or in the case of Luis Alvarez um in 1960 in the 1960s he imaged the pyramid of Cafrey in Giza which is the second pyramid. Mhm. >> Okay. That's the There's three big pyramids in Giza. The second pyramid, the one that still has its cap on, that's the one that that he imaged. He

12:31actually took a muon detector to the inside of that pyramid, put it there for like about 2 years. And you know, the flux again, as I was saying, from these cosmic rays are really, really small. So, you got to wait a really long time to get a nice statistical signal to be like, is there? And and and the question he was trying to answer was, is there a cavity inside the pyramid of Cafre? Okay. Is there like a hidden chamber? We're all we're always worried about >> all the secrets. >> Yeah. All all the secrets, right? We're always worried about hidden chambers. >> Um it was a negative result actually >> because he didn't find any hidden chambers in the pyramid of Cuffrey. >> This is interesting. This was happening in the '60s. >> In the '60s. Yes.

13:11>> This is quite some time ago. Yeah. And I I imagine uh Luis Alvarez, if you saw what they're doing at the pyramids now, I don't know if you get these uh videos on TikTok of DJs with these massive light shows in front of the pyramids of those. It looks like they're mapping muons with the amount of just, you know, lasers that are going and obviously that's not what's like visualizing his experiments. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. Um so he he didn't find anything, right? But that sort of started this idea of we can actually do something with muons and do a kind of muon tomography. It's kind of like a cat scan where what you can do is take um a scan

13:53with muons in this direction and then a scan with muons in this in this direction in all these different directions. Map out the shadows and then from that reconstruct the physical 3D nature of whatever is inside. So, so this was sort of this understanding that we can use, you know, muon detectors as a means by which to do mapping of large objects or spaces. Yes. Large objects. Right. And actually in in modern times, there's been a renaissance. There's been this program called the scan pyramids. In 2015, they actually used it to map out the great pyramid of Giza, which is the pyramid of Kufu. I believe that's the biggest of the three. And they actually did find a void there. They

14:34found a previously unknown void. It was at least 30 m long above the Grand Gallery. And there you see the muons are coming in from cosmic rays. And you're basically waiting for these muons to come in. And from each direction, you can map out how many muons came in from each direction. And you can say, "Oh, actually more muons came in from this middle part of the pyramid than from the outside." Which means that middle part of the pyramid must have some kind of cavity or hole where the muons had no problem getting through. Does that make sense? >> It does. It does. So it's like there's a hole. >> Yes, >> there's a hole in there and and and they actually found it. Um but it really it highlighted a limitation >> of the approach. >> Okay.

15:15>> Which is that you got to wait months to years >> to actually scan this stuff because the flux from the cosmic rays is so so low. >> Mhm. >> Okay. >> Mhm. >> Now this has applications elsewhere as well. Okay. It's not just like okay archaeology is there a hole in the pyramids that I can go find gold or whatever. And there's a lot of people who are very curious about what's under the >> pyramid. A lot of people care a lot about that, but I imagine that people living around volcanoes care a lot about um whether there's a hole in their volcano, right, where the magma could come out. And so they've actually used the these detectors on volcanoes like Mount Vuvius, Mount Etna, Stromboli. All three of those are in Italy. You also have Sak Sakura Aima, which is in um

15:57Japan. And what they've done is using these this muon tomography, they've mapped out the internal density of that volcano to see where the magma chambers are, where there's maybe less pressure. So if there's like an eruption, which way would it go, you know, cuz it would go to the path of least resistance through this like lower pressure part. So it reveals these like lava plugs, magma conduits. >> Again though, there's a limitation because we are relying on cosmic rays. Yes, >> which the flux is so low. >> Yes, >> you're only going to get a static image. You need a year to take this photograph. >> You need a year to take this cat scan.

16:38And then once you have the year, you have a static image of where the volcano is. But it would be really nice if we had so much flux, right, that I could get like a moving picture of what is happening inside the volcano using muontomography. So until this day, what we have is we've discovered a methodology by which to map large objects. look inside of large objects such as the pyramids or volcanoes. But two of the primary limitations have been it takes a really long time to get a static notion image >> of these things because the frequency by which muons pass through them is so very very very very low.

17:18>> Exactly. Okay. So that that's that's the foundation of where the story now picks up from. >> Exactly. And now we pick up with this paper. Okay, this paper came out in the physical review accelerators and beams. Um it was a team at the Bella Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Um they used the laser plasma accelerator. Okay. And they they did something very cool, which is they used they used a beam they used an apparatus that's only about a meter big >> to create a very very powerful muon beam. Okay. And in order to do that um they they they did a kind of physics

18:00that is very akin to wakeboarding. Have you ever gone wakeboarding? So, I've only gone once and I immediately almost got a concussion the first time I got up because I just fell and slammed my face into the water. >> Yeah, this is why I never go in water. So, I have never gone wakeboarding, nor will I ever go wakeboarding. Um, but wakeboarding is a very useful analogy for the physics that's going on here because it's quite incredible, right? Usually, usually to make muons, you need a massive particle accelerator and that massive particle accelerator then bombs into like something and then that something the interaction of the all of the highly energetic particles with

18:42whatever target is going to create your muons. That's usually how you do it. Here they've created an electron gun effectively that is extremely fast, very very high energy electron guns with a with with a short rifle in some sense. And and and what they're doing is um wakeboarding the electrons. Okay, so here here's what's going on. um in wakeboarding, right? What you're doing is the the the boat goes at a really high speed and then and then and then you got a surfer that surfs the waves of the wake that the boat makes, right? And and you don't even need like a rope to tether you to the to the boat. There's

19:22like I think there's like a photo of Mark Zuckerberg just like with a with an American flag, right? You know that one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so like you know you don't need a you can just the waves themselves have enough structure and energy you can stand on top of those and then just go right and you can ride that energy. That's what they're doing. That's what they're making the electrons do that. So what they do is they've got these >> they've got an ultrashort laser pulse. Okay. And they're going to fire it into a gas. It's it's hydrogen doped with nitrogen. Okay. And what this I just want to say hydrogen doped with a little nitrogen is such a funny sentence. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh it's I guess it's used a lot in like chemistry for like

20:03semiconductors. Doped meaning like you you're putting you're you're removing >> some other stuff and you're putting some other stuff in. Yeah. Um and so what that's going to do is that that laser is going to go in and it's going to create a plasma because >> the laser is going to push out a bunch of the negative charges and you're going to get free electrons >> and you're going to get these positive nuclei. Now all of a sudden you have um a bubble of positive charge. Okay? And then if some straggly electrons get trapped in that bubble, they're going to ride that bubble and because it's positive positively charged, they're going to want to get the hell out of there. And so you're going to push these electrons out.

20:43>> Yes. >> And they're going to they're going to be accelerated by these powerful electric fields. And you can get somewhere like several billion electron volts like giga electron volts in a 30 cm plasma channel. >> That's crazy. >> And versus like usually that takes hundreds of meters of traditional accelerators. Like Slack does this and Slack requires like a massive thing that goes under the freeway and you know so this is this is really cool that they're able to do this. And part of the the the insight here is this miniaturization of being able to create these these these electron beam these particle beams at like a very very small scale but still retaining

21:24>> the energy >> the energy level. >> Exactly. >> Um which is obviously meaningful because that means you can have smaller acceler smaller footprint of the accelerator. >> That's that's the key. That's the key idea. And this is this is this is a new tech relatively new technology laser plasma accelerators. Okay. And they're still sort of coming into coming into their being. Um they're still quite big, but the fact that you know we're getting to these high energies, >> right? >> And it's not like hundreds of meters is is a very promising step. Okay. So that's the first step. You got now an electron beam. Okay, a massive really highly energetic electron beam. Now, what you're going to do is you're going to dump that beam into a giant block of

22:06lead, steel, and concrete. Okay? And what that's going to do is the electrons are then going to interact with these heavy nuclei. Lead is a very heavy nucleus, right? And as it interacts, the electrons are going to slow down and they're going to slow down creating radiation. Because remember, we've talked about this a lot. If an ex if a charged particle accelerates or deacelerates, it's going to release energy. Yes. >> Right. The only time somehow that it doesn't do this is in the confines of an atom. Right. Cuz that's when stuff gets >> Yeah. All all the all the rules are off. But if it's a free electron and it's moving and it starts accelerating or

22:47deacelerating or changing direction, it's going to create this things called brestral. It's a German word for breaking radiation. Okay. So all of that energy of the electron is going into high energy photons. These are gamma rays. And now those high energy photons will interact with the atomic nuclei to create pairs of particles. Pair production is something that happens when you got a bunch of energy in one spot and that energy spontaneously splits into two particles. One that is the matter part, one is that is the antimatter part. You get the matter antimatter pair. And if the if the physics is right, then you're going to get a bunch of antimatter matter antimatter pairs that are exactly muons

23:29and antimons. >> Okay? If you tune the energy such that the energy is exactly um E / C ^2 the mass remember E= MC^² right so if the energy is exactly equal to the mass of two of two muons one muon and one anti-muan then the energy is going to dump into muons and anti- muons that field is going to take over and you're going to get a muon and anti-muan and so what this ends up being is you get a columated columated meaning it's all in one direction that's that's where that word from the headline came from >> all in one direction. It's directional and it's a muon beam. >> Yes. >> Okay. So now we've got a muon beam. >> Very cool.

24:10>> Right. Right. From from starting from this electron beam >> that now we put through this lead steel concrete substrate. >> Yeah. >> And it created had this pair production that has now resulted in this >> you know matter matter antimatter muon muon pair. >> Yes. Exactly. Yeah. So now we got a muon beam all of a sudden. Yes. Right. >> Yes. Ex Well, okay. You say it's a muon beam. How do you know it's a muon beam? Cuz everyone else is going to be like, "How do you know it's a muon beam? How do you know it's not some other random particle? How do you know it's just another not just another electron?" Right? So now you got to do the work of actually showing that it is a muon beam.

24:50So the detection system looks like this. This is the measurement room. We've got the laser coming in from the left. Then the laser creates this electron beam. The electron beam gets bombarded into this about 3 m worth of lead, steel, and concrete. And on the other side is your detector. And that detector is what's going to catch the strays, catch these muon strays that are coming in. Okay. How do we make sure that this the the the particles that are coming out are muons? >> Yes. >> Okay. I I thought this was really cool because this is like a very simple test. Okay, here's what they did. They said, "Okay, well, we know from all of the

25:32years of work on muons >> cuz we've been doing this since the '60s." >> Yeah, we know about muons for a while, right? And we know that their decay their their halflife is 2.2 micros, right? So, if we can characterize the halflife of these particles that are coming out and it's exactly 2.2 microsconds, then we're good to go. And that's exactly what they did. They collected data from 760 laser shots over two hours. So that's about five per minute. And then what they did was they they triggered on the giant amount of electrons that would come out. And then they would look for a second signal which is from when the muon would decay. Okay? Cuz the electrons are coming out first and then the muon would decay. And it would fit this exact exponential.

26:14They did a histogram. They fit an exponential to that histogram. And the exponential decay curve had a time constant that was exactly 2.24 >> microsconds, >> right? So it's like a telltale sign. You can't ignore that like cuz this this this exponential decay thing that's something that you learn about in undergrad physics, right? It's like at the end of the day like it just took like a nice undergrad graph to be like, "Yeah, that's a muon." And so what's so interesting is it's not with a lot of these stories, you not only have to create the new thing, right? In this case, how can we do muon generation at a smaller scale than like several building size accelerator?

26:55>> Yeah. >> But then everyone's going to say, well, how do you know you generated muons? >> Yeah. So, you also need to have a detection system on the tail end to validate >> your generator. >> Yeah. And not just detection, but like how do you analyze that data to make sure that like you can convince everybody out there who's trying to say you didn't do it, right? cuz the there's so many people that are that are trying to do this, right? And everyone wants to get there first. So, you got to really check your check check your work. >> Um, so that was really cool, right? So, now they they they finally found um they finally made this muon source, right? And now this gets over that cosmic ray limitation because now instead of a

27:36drizzle, >> right? >> Right. >> Right. If if I could now make this such that I can point it somewhere, I I I don't have this drizzle of cosmic rays. Now I can just have a fire hose that's like aimed at whatever thing I want to I want to look at. >> Yes. >> Right. >> Yes. >> And and the natural natural muon flux flux is something like as I was saying, it's like one one particle per square centimeter per minute, right? That's one particle through my fingernail per minute. This thing is going to be 40 times as much. Okay. And this is the LPA source. That that's that's what it looks like. It's it's just kind of a tabletop looking experiments. I mean, obviously, there's a bunch of stuff in the building

28:16that is supporting this tabletop experiment. So, it's not it's not so trivial to put this in the back of a truck or something like that, but at the end of the day, it's from this um laser plasma source. >> Yes. Um, and even at one hertz, it's it's going to be 40 times the particle delivery rate of cosmic rays, right? And it's an order of magnitude reduction in exposure time. Now, you can start doing the same kind of um muontomography of your pyramid or whatever, but instead of taking like years, it's going to take maybe a few days. >> Right. >> Right. which is like for anyone who's trying to do any of these aspects of

28:58archaeology, geology, these things where you want to look at these massive structures. >> Mhm. >> Uh that time decency >> is I mean incredibly meaningful. It reminds me very much of like the time efficiency of having like the uh the Vera Rubin Sky. It's the same kind of thing where it's like you're having more frequent highquality data that's just becoming available because of this fundamental understanding. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um and it's only the beginning, right? Because like like these these lasers now they're going to get much much better. Right now these guys are doing like the top this thing can shoot the electron beam at is about one hertz, right? But we could be getting to kilohz, which is

29:39thousands of shots a second, right? And then that's going to that's another three orders of magnitude above what we already have. And so now you can start doing okay instead of a few days now you got a few minutes we can we can and then now that's that becomes really crucial. Suppose we think a volcanic eruption is happening. We can go there and we can monitor the volcano every minute and look at the internal dynamics right and be like okay we need to evacuate now or maybe we got a few more weeks. That's actually a really uh practical uh real world use case for this you know basically as close to real time detection system that you can imagine extrapolating this if you increase that source

30:19>> uh from one herz up and then you can also miniaturaturize the rest of the supporting infrastructure to some sufficiently small thing which can be >> it could be multiple 18-wheeler trucks like that's still >> yeah crazy. Yeah, it could be like multiple 18 wheeler trucks that you then like you put it somewhere and then you assemble together. Like that's still crazy. That was not possible. You couldn't do that with a massive detector. Now you could possibly do that in the next few years if if things progress the way that they are. Right. >> There's there's there's a lot of cool um applications that I was reading about that weren't completely obvious to me, but then once I read them, it was like, "Oh, that's cool." Yeah, that's cool. So, one of them is obviously like

31:00archaeology reimagined, right? You can you can now do targeted excavation. You can like point your muon beam at specific spots. And when you're excavating, you don't want to do like a brute force approach and just excavate everything. You've got limited time. You don't want to disturb the excavation in some sense. So, you can like target and try to get to whatever cavity that you're trying to go to. Um, you can also do like you can also start imaging smaller objects like sarcophagi or like statues, things like that. Um, you just stick that right in front of your muon detector. Um, real-time vulcanology is something that we talked about. You can do near real-time observation of density changes like magma movement, gas

31:41pressure, lava plugs for the like uh Yellowstone super volcano that always comes up. I mean, it'll be huge for that because you can you we would be able to know. Yeah, we'd be able to know and that'd be really nice. >> That would be really nice. >> That'd be really nice to know. Um, there's also national security. >> Okay. >> And infrastructure. Something I thought you would like. >> So, the the speed of the this muon tomography would be such that now we can scan cargo at the ports without opening the box. >> Mhm. >> Right. Because you can't do that with X-rays. The the metal is too thick, right? But you could just stick a muon thing and then it's going to so routine inspection of these shipping containers can happen in minutes. Now you don't,

32:22you know, so then you don't have to trust the shipping manifest. You can literally be like, "Okay, is there something there?" If there's any nuclear spongling that's going on, nuclear waste and nuclear like rods and things like that are very dense. They're going to interact with muons in very weird ways because that's just nuclear physics, right? So now all of a sudden you can have like safeguards and waste management things like that. Um the other thing that was cool was uh uh civil engineering, right? Because like our >> our uh our infrastructure, let's face it, is is quite old and um needs repair. Yes. And you know, you could you could take these muon beams to bridges and dams and buildings and they could reveal

33:03hidden cracks, water infiltration, >> catastrophic catastrophic failure. >> This I I >> So, so it's it's a whole new mode of, you know, it's it's like we've unlocked a new type of light, right, in some sense, right? We've unlocked a new type of imaging, >> right? No, no, exactly. We we what's so interesting about this I mean the the NAT the NATSC implications got my my gear straight it becomes very difficult to basically smuggle a dirty bomb anywhere >> um particularly you can put these on any number of >> source platforms but the civil engineering one I think is so particularly for where you know this is true globally but especially in the US where we have now legacy infrastructure

33:45that is beginning to you know I mean the 405 has been shut down to one lane multiple weeks in a row. >> Yeah, that's been the bane of my existence dude. >> And like deciding how like what uh civil engineering projects are most pressing by having an actual data set. Yeah. >> That is not necessarily just time >> or you know citizen >> complaints but has like a data set back and again this >> we can like X dude we can X-ray concrete right you know. >> Yeah yeah yeah >> like that that's what it is. We can now X-ray concrete and stone. I I could imagine I mean imagine putting this on a This is getting a little ahead of the

34:26skis here, but we could have some sort of drone platform that you can then have and then do surveys local, you know, just in terms of >> being able to distribute this to >> like lower cost use cases. I mean, muography in that in that context would have huge impacts. >> Yeah. Yeah. The the only problem I'm thinking with the drone stuff is like cuz you need a detector. Yeah. >> Like with drones it's really nice with radar because light bounces back. Muons don't bounce back. >> You need that thing on the other side. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. To be able to even in X-rays, right? Like they always like they put like a thingy, you know, when they do the X-ray. >> No, that's fair. No, that's that's a very important distinction. Does not negate any of the actual benefits that

35:07we just talked about. No. Which are meaningful. Um, and so I, you know, I guess the the the key the key advancements here that are sort of uh that are the next steps are higher energy beams, miniaturaturization. Yeah. >> Like those are the two key >> Exactly. >> areas for improvement. >> Yeah. Yeah. Those those are the two key areas. And like the fact that this part has been solved, which is like making muons with a high energy electron beam, that part's been solved. Now the the problems is miniaturaturization of it and making it higher power, right? Like making the the hertz faster, the the repetitive nature of that laser faster.

35:48Right? Now the laser like shoots and then it's got to recharge and then shoot again, right? But if you can make it rapid fire, >> if you make it semi-automatic, then >> Yep. Exactly. >> It becomes very interesting. It's fascinating. >> Very cool. >> Um I don't want to >> That was a cool one. >> I That's a really cool one. I don't want to meu on that story too soon. I know that's a double of the same joke. However, we're going to move to our next story that's coming out of University of Chicago and UC San Diego uh about uh sodium batteries that are finally catching up and they're cheaper than lithium and just as powerful and this is out of Juul and we all because

36:28we all have devices. >> Yeah, >> we're all very familiar with the limitations of battery technology. Yes. Everyone talks about innovation and things are getting better, but one of the jokes everyone always says is, "Well, why can't my iPhone or my Samsung Galaxy blah blah blah >> last a week?" >> Mhm. >> Why is it only 20 hours? >> Yeah. >> Um, and so what is the top line for I didn't even know that sodium batteries were like a competitive a competing platform to lithium. >> Um, >> is not >> okay. They're not. >> We don't have enough fundamental science >> to do it. This is in that line. >> Okay. >> Yeah. This is this is getting there. >> Okay. >> This is trying to get us there. Okay.

37:09The idea is that we want to This is from University of Chicago and UC San Diego. They're trying to create um a sodium based battery because that is just going to be way chiller than than lithumbased battery. Okay? Lithium has all sorts of problems. We're going to get into it. Before we get into it, let's talk about batteries. >> Okay. >> In general, how does a battery work? Okay. So a battery basically provides a electromotive force. Okay, it is um converting chemical energy into electrical energy. It's highly efficient compared to like you know converting like like a generator which or a turbine which converts mechanical energy into heat which then

37:51becomes electrical energy and so on and so forth. So so batteries function by converting that stored chemical energy into electrical energy, right? And the way they work is they've got two electrodes. Okay? They've got one part which is called the anode and that's the part that releases electrons. Those electrons then go through the circuit to the cathode which is the other part of the battery. That's why you know when you have the duracell, right? You've got one part that's positive and one parts that that's negative. You connect that to wires. You light up the light bulb. What's happening is there's some chemical reaction that's going on inside of that battery that is pushing electrons one

38:33way and sucking electrons the other way. And because the electrons have to go through the circuit in order to complete that path, they they have no choice but to go through whatever load you're trying to put on it in in some cases it's a light bulb. And so they go through the light bulb, they they expend some power and then they go back. Okay? And that's effectively what a battery does. Now the main the the main question is why doesn't the electron just go through the battery? >> Why does it have to go through all the way around the circuit? Why can't it just go through the battery to the to the cathode, right? From the anode to the cathode. And that's where the electrolyte comes in. Okay, there's something inside the battery that is

39:14preventing electrons from going through. It only lets positive ions go through. Okay, so at the anode side and this happens during discharging. Okay. So in discharging the battery is providing power. Okay. The anode which is the the positive terminal >> um sorry the anode is the negative terminal. The negative terminal releases electrons that go through the circuit and the positive ions go through the electrolyte to the cathode. Okay. And they they and that electrolyte blocks electrons. So the electrons have no um choice but to go through the circuit. >> Okay. That's the key. And then what you

39:55want to do is you want to be able to charge it again, right? And so when we charge it, we're just reversing this entire process. So now the cathode releases electrons, the positive side releases because what what the power the external power that you just supplied does is it's reversing this chemical reaction. So now the electrons travel the other way and the positive ions travel the other way. And then you're resetting this, you know, scale. Yes. where now all of the all of the chemical energy is back into the system. >> It's like a seessaw. >> Yes, it's exactly like a seesaw where you you had chemical energy and that became electrical energy and now you're providing work back to convert from electrical energy back to chemical

40:36energy, right? And to do this, lithium has basically won the race so far. >> It's the Usain Bolt of >> Yes. Lithium ions are the Usain Bolt because they are fast. Why are they fast? Well, they're super light, right? They It's number three on the periodic table. That means that the nuclei are only six atomic units big. Three electrons, three um sorry, three protons, three electrons. Actually, sometimes four, but in any case, very small. Um it's the lightest metal and because it's the lightest metal and it has the it only has three electrons, right? So the the inner two electrons are in this stable nice shell, right?

41:19The inner shell, um the helium shell, and the outer electron is just ready to go >> get the hell out of there, right? And so it's super willing to be negative. It's super willing to be an ion. Um it's also it's got this high gravimetric energy density, which basically because it's low mass, right? The the lower the mass, but you still have one charge. Yes. So very high density in that sense. Um high electrochemical potential which means that you can reach high voltage and high energy density, right? Yes. Um so all of these things make it a really good ion for batteries because it's it has no problem moving around in the

41:59electrolyte, >> right? And then just donating that electron to go into the circuit. >> That makes sense. >> Makes sense, right? Yes. >> Um >> the problem is uh it is super scarce. Okay. in the universe. It's super scarce. It since the price has been up like 700% since 2021. Um it's only like 0.0017% of the Earth's crust. Um it's in concentrated deposits in like the lithium triangle. I forget what are the actual countries. I think it's like Chile Bolivia um in South America. That's one that's the big lithium triangle. And then also Australia has a bunch of lithium. We just we just it's funny in Zimbabwe

42:41which we talked about is where my family's from. We just actually discovered like the fourth largest lithium deposit >> uh on earth >> and it's now created interesting geopolitical implications because of what you're talking about because of that scarcity and its importance for >> all of the battery powered things which is basically everything. >> Uh it's a little complicated. >> Yeah. Here comes colonialism part two disguised as capitalism. But um but yeah. Yeah. So obviously it's like it's got problems, right? And and there's two ways to mine lithium, which I'm sure Zimbabwe is going to learn soon. Um you know, one of them is hard rock mining. This is super energy intensive open pits, land degradation.

43:23Looks looks really bad. And 15 tons of CO2 per ton of lithium. >> This is what the Chinese are already out there doing. >> Oh, already. Okay, great. Yeah. And then and then there's brine extraction, which is like brine is like the the stuff you you get in these saltwater lakes high up where all of the minerals from the mountains come in and then you basically mix it with water and you evaporate it. Okay. And this is it requires 5 500,000 L of water per ton of lithium. Depletes the water, contaminates the soil, contaminates the groundwater. Everyone hates it. So lithium kind of sucks. It It accomplishes the job, but no one likes working with it. >> Yeah. Yeah. And it's like it's really good at its job. I get that. Okay. Like

44:05it's it's light. It's number three on the periodic table. It's like theoretically the best thing because like you wouldn't use hydrogen. Hydrogen is its own thing. >> But lithium is the lightest metal, right? So it makes sense, but but there's problems, right? >> Um so why would we want to use sodium? Well, I just told you, right? Lithium sucks. Sodium is the hair apparent, right? It's right below lithium on the periodic table. So, lithium is number three. Sodium is number nine. >> Nine or 11? Wait. 1 2 + 6. No, it's number 11. >> It's number 11. Anyways, it's way bigger

44:48than lithium, which is at number three. Yes. Okay. Um, >> but it's right below the lithium on the periodic table. And if you remember from your high school chemistry, everything that's in the same column on the periodic table has very similar chemical properties. So all of the stuff that we were doing with lithium, we could just do it with sodium, >> right? >> Yes. >> Because it's the same same. >> Yes. >> Just bigger. >> Bigger. >> Right. Obviously, there's going to be problems with it being bigger. But the the the good things about sodium outweigh the bad. Okay. It's the sixth most common element. It's a thousand times more abundant than lithium. It's bas like it's in salt, right? NaCCl.

45:29>> Yes, >> sodium chloride is salt. So, you can extract it from rock salt. You can extract it out of the ocean. Sodium carbonate is like super cheap compared to lithium carbonate. Um the the only problem is it's big. Okay, it's it's like way bigger. It's significantly larger. It's like um 0.3 angstrom's greater atomic radius, which and it's got three times the mass, right? And what that does is it's going to cause problems if we just substitute the sodium instead of lithium into our already existing technology. >> You can't just hot swap. >> Yeah. You can't just hot swap it because this thing is bigger and it's heavier. Right. Lithium right now was what what it does is the way that we use lithium is we've got um

46:11we've got the the anode and the cathode. The the anode is made out of something called graphite. Yes. >> Which is which is um a carbon compound. It's the stuff that you're finding in lead. And the c the graphite is actually what like holds your lithium ions. I think photo number eight shows that you've got on the left just layers and layers of graphite that hold your lithium ions and then when the lithium donates an electron into the circuit it moves into the cathode which is this lithium MO2 layer. Right? If I just if I just do a hot swap from lithium to sodium, that sodium is going to cause

46:52mechanical stress on the electrodes because it's bigger. Like those layers of graphite are now going to start >> being a little bendy. >> Being a little bendy and they're going to break and that's going to create rapid degradation, a short cycle life, right? You're not going to be able to recharge it as many times as you want. Ah, so like like life cycle, long-term lifespan also becomes >> Exactly. Cuz every time you're charging and recharging and charging and recharging, that layer of graphite is getting populated with lithium and then the lithium goes away and then it gets populated with lithium and the lithium goes away. And just like any other thing, like the movement of stuff in and out of your the pages of your book, right, is going to is going to cause

47:33degradation. So >> that's one problem. The other problem is inherently there's going to be a lower energy density, right? Because this thing is bigger. >> Yes. >> So for three times the mass >> I have the same amount of charge. >> Yeah. >> Obviously the energy density is going to be lower, right? Um it's going to be a heavier battery if if I want the same kind of charge and the theoretical energy density is at least 30% lower in comparable lithium systems. Um it's also kinetically it's very sluggish. the larger nuclei means that the sodium is going to move slower >> in the in the battery itself, right? The the the power that you're getting out of

48:15a battery is limited by how fast the lithium can go from from one end to the other, right? But if you've got a larger thingy, then that thing is going to move slower and so my total power output is going to be lower, right? There are all of these all of these problems. So despite its abundance, >> because it's heavier, it makes it less energy dense, which means you have to have a bigger battery to do the same level of output. It's going to be slower. >> Uh so you're going to actually get less ultimate power out of it as well because it's slower. It's not just that it's heavier, it's also slower. And all of this means that like the efficiency of a

48:55similarly sized sodium battery system as compared to a lithium ion system is just going to be inefficient. >> Exactly. >> And we've gotten used to our iPhones being a certain size. >> Exactly. >> And so and so the all of these problems are persisting, right? That doesn't mean that sodium could still not be valuable. >> Okay. >> Okay. Because fine, maybe not for the iPhone. Okay. >> Okay. But battery has a lot more usage than just our electronics. For example, if you thought about stationary battery power, right? If you've got like a giant electrical grid and you want to store a bunch of a bunch of power for when the electrical grid goes bad or if you're

49:36trying to do renewables, right? And and you have a giant solar panel array, but now it's like cloudy. You want to be able to store all of the all of the sunlight from when it was actually sunny to then use when it's cloudy. Right. All of these stationary storage parts, it doesn't really matter >> if it's bigger. >> Right. >> Right. If it's cheaper, >> that's what matters. That's actually a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. And that's that's what that's why people are excited about sodium. Okay. >> Right. It could be it could pave the way for um like a truly green future >> where you know we don't need to we don't need to rely on these like fossil fuels

50:18and coal and things like that. We could be a completely green economy and we just store like power from wind or from solar power from all our other things for whenever there's a rainy day, right? If we can make that really cheap, right, then we've solved that problem of like allocating those resources from when the energy was coming in to when the energy is actually needed. >> Because one of the biggest limiting factors right now is that battery storage for its level of capacity and efficiency is just way too expensive. Yes. >> To to distribute and like not as good >> and not as good. Um but but yeah, we might be getting there with this kind of stuff, right? And so this is where the paper comes in. This is a paper in Juul um by Jin Anamo

51:01and Professor Ying Shirley Mang's team. Um this is out of China. Oh no, no, no, no. This is what am I saying? This is I'm I'm confusing the next >> Oh, our next story. >> Our next story. This is out of um UC San Diego and University of Chicago. >> Um they created a novel solid state electrolyte with unprecedented performance. Okay. And this is a solid state electrolyte that can shuttle silicon. Okay. So what they did was in the lab they created a battery out of a crystallin phase of sodium boron and hydrogen. Okay. It's referred to as NBH orthoic crystal. It's got orthoromic crystal symmetry. So it's it's the solid

51:42state comp compound. Um and it's got these cage-like annions that have this really nice crystal symmetry. And the way that they created this was very cool because what they did was they combined two two substances. There was there was a boron and hydrogen BH4 and then there was a um uh sodium boron and hydrogen which was two two sodiums bunch of borons bunch of hydrogens. The two of them together um create this sort of metastable compound. A metastable compound means it's got like this this phase that is stable but only so so you

52:22kick it in some direction, you like heat it up, you like do something to it, it it it goes off and it does something else, right? And so you want to like it's it's like really like finicky. Okay? And you want you want to sort of freeze it in this nice active state without getting to the inactive state, right? So what they they they use um something called quenching, which it's kind of like, you know, if you've ever um you've like in the top ramen restaurants when they try to make um softboiled eggs. Yes. >> You want to stop the cooking. >> Yes. >> At the exact moment. So you put it in ice. >> Yes. >> Right. Yeah. You boil it. Boil the egg for like 6 minutes and you put it in ice to stop the cooking. That's what they

53:02did here. They they they got their um they got their substance, they heated it up, and then they quenched it very quickly and it stayed in that stable sort of high energy situation. And that was really cool. >> Even though they cooled down, >> even though they had cooled down to to room temperature, they had done it fast enough, right, that like the the the physics of it had sort of stayed >> Mhm. >> where they wanted it to stay. >> Yep. >> Yeah. >> That's that's really which is like just like talk to the egg. exactly you just talked about. >> Yeah, it's and I it's something that we talked about during the Nobel Prize uh chemistry stuff. It's like chemistry is a lot like cooking and baking. Those are the techniques that you use, right? But

53:42you got to be very good at it, right? And that's the magic. That's the magic of of chemistry. Um >> so this this this new compound was very nice because you know, one of the problems I was talking about was how sodium is bigger. Yes. So, it's got a hard time going through the electrolyte from one C one electrode to the other, right? Um, and the faster that we can make this thing happen, the the more power we can get out of our battery and the more energy efficient we can make our battery. Well, this particular um electrolyte, it's a solid state electrolyte, what it did was the it's got this paddle wheel effect. Okay, what's happening is the the large um the

54:26large crystals of boron and hydrogen, they can actually start spinning in their state and that spin shuttles >> sodium. >> Oh, yeah. >> Kind of like a paddle wheel. You know, >> yeah, it's really cool. And so you create these super highways for ion hopping, right? And the other thing that's cool about this is there's a really high density of unoccupied sites. So you have this like very nice highway >> where the sodium can go and then you have this spinning effect on all of the stuff around you that is creating a kind of momentum push that is like jiggling all these these sodium atoms to go through, right? And and and now you can

55:06you can have this super ionic conductivity. the entire population of actively conducting conducting um sodium ions. Yes. And then the these the the substrate itself sort of shakes loose any ions that got like stuck somewhere >> somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. So it it's it's creating some lubrication for this flow. >> Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And um and it's it's really cool because now you've got um >> you you've got a way to move forward, right, with sodium batteries. >> Sodium batteries, right? Um the the other cool thing though that that I thought was very cool is this thing can handle low temperatures.

55:46>> Okay. >> Okay. Um one of the problems that I think you've heard about probably, right? >> Like Teslas. >> It's hard to drive a Tesla in Canada. Yeah. >> In the winter. >> Yeah. Because the lithium ion batteries just like totally failed, right? >> Right. Because at that low temperature, there's not enough motility. >> It's true for all electric vehicles, not just Tesla. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Please don't sue us. Um but you know they're they're like the at low temperatures these lithium ion batteries are not performing that well. Well, as a combination of this solid state chemistry that's happening and like these spinning thingies, the motility of the sodium ions, this thing can actually have pretty good performance at 0° C.

56:29>> That's that's really interesting. So despite its um negative aspects because of the size of sodium as compared to lithium which creates uh lower energy density and slower movement uh through the circ temperatures there's with this sort of new um uh lub say lubricant that's the electrolyte that's facilitating the movement >> the sodium battery can actually perform more efficient >> at lower temperatures as compared to lithium >> than the than the current lithium ion batteries. Very interesting. So this is this is already like actually and so now it becomes suitable for like EVs in cold climates if you want grid storage

57:11>> without a lot of like thermal management like you know I'm sure Scandinavia and Norway >> would love something like this >> would love something like this right where it's like they're frozen like half the year >> or whatever >> the wherever they put the seed bank where they have all the seeds and it's buried below the ice you know you can imagine a huge sodium battery store that >> yeah that like powers that and like make sure that that's okay >> or the uh the nutrino detector in uh in Antarctica. Ice cube. >> Ice cube. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, so you know, we're we're we're far away from building like a full battery, but the architecture is there. Yes. >> Um >> and they actually did make a battery. It's not like commercially viable, but

57:51you know, it's like in their in their thingy. And like and that that's the the the Teslas on Fox News. >> Oh, they got stranded. Yeah. because of the which which is so it's so funny. I remember I've had an electric car for a while and I remember like oh you can't drive in the cold weather and like well in LA it's not that bad. >> Yeah. In LA in California it's like pretty nice. >> Pretty nice. >> Yeah. But um in the in in terms of the battery that they made, so they made this thing with the solid electrolyte and they used um tin a tin alloy for the anode and they used um a sodium chromium oxygen comp composite for the the cathode.

58:33It retained 80% of its initial capacity after 100 cycles. Pretty good. It's not commercial grade, right? commercial grade is goes through like thousands of cycles. But um an average colomic efficiency of 99.8 to 99.9, which means it's a stable system. There's not that many side reactions going on. The sodium isn't going off and doing something else. It's really getting recycled every time, >> you know. Um, and there's a lot of broad implications to this kind of stuff because, you know, one can imagine you can like totally start reshaping the grid right >> around a capability like this, >> right? If you have the if you have a way to create a battery that's 100 times

59:16cheaper than lithium, right? And it's going to be crucial for gawat scale batteries, right? And it's all solid state. There's no flammable liquids. So, it's inherently safer if you want to make buildingized versions of this. >> Don't let the uh AI overlords get a handle on this. >> Yeah. >> Because I mean, that's a big aspect we've talked about with AI is the power generation issue. And it's not only the generation, but also storage as it relates to that. It's both problem sets. >> It's both both problem sets. And now we can make it cheaper. So, I wonder right like is this is this >> maybe >> going to going to make that better? Is it going to make it worse? I'm not sure. >> I would be interesting to It would be

59:57interesting to see if there's capital uh that starts to move cuz I know that new battery technology is a buzzword that constantly gets brought up in venture capital, you know, meet cutees and all this stuff. >> And so when you when you have like signal, this is signal. Does that create now sort of this arisal of a couple of these hardware upstarts that are trying to take this take the funnel of VC cash money and try to operationalize it more quickly. I'm not saying that that's feasible, but we've seen it in other areas that are interesting where once someone has sort of identified that there's some minimum viability because of the importance of power to what is

1:00:39viewed as this great power battle on AI. You're seeing private capital move earlier in the cycle of research to insert themselves in order both to accelerate it and control it earlier in that process. >> Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the grad student who's the first author in this gets hired by Tesla or Rivian or someone, you know, I'm going to be I mean, we know people who who who did exactly that. Okay. >> You know who you are if you're listening to this. Um so the other you know as you were saying like in terms of like now that something like this is possible people like moving towards that that capability even in electric motility right in um electric vehicles this isn't

1:01:21just because it's like a little bit it's yeah okay it's not as energy efficient as lithium because it can never can be lithium is just the gold standard it's got three instead of 11 thingies um you can still the fact that it's going to cheaper to make these kinds of batteries is going to be huge for places in the developing world, right? If it's cheaper, that's what matters over there, right? People aren't care. They don't really care about the environment. They're trying to get from A to B and like they want a car, right? Totally. I can totally understand. I've been there. So, it's like if you have this lower upfront cost, that could accelerate adoption. >> Yes. >> You could also have these things called hybrid battery packs, right? where it's

1:02:01like you can combine the lithium ion and the sodium ion, right? So, if it's like super cold, you can have your sodium ion battery turn up, >> right? >> Heat up the car and then the lithium ion battery like comes up. So, so it's not like moot, >> right? There there's there's there's a lot of >> um there there's a lot of good points here. the the hybrid battery pack was my initial thought and I totally agree with you on the you know whether you want to call it short range EV urban EVs but for for I can imagine right like you know where my my grandmother is now uh in you know in Yanga and Zim you know having things that are lower cost this the

1:02:44cycle issue is not not relevant right if it can do the job that it's needed to do efficiently and you and a reasonable size scale. It will have huge implications for a variety of developing economies which don't have the luxury of the be having to worry about the environment. We didn't have to worry about the environment during our industrial revolution. Why does everyone else need to x y and z and so um very interesting. >> Yeah. Yeah. And then there's obviously the geopolitical um aspect to it, right? Which is like China's making all the batteries. the extraction of lithium comes from very few countries that might turn sour on us. So, if we can make it out of sodium,

1:03:26that'd be that'd be pretty nice. >> That'd be pretty nice. I I already know we've lost the battle in Zim and that's unfortunate cuz I was begging begging the US ambassador to Zimbabwe to pay attention about what was happening there and >> yeah, >> we needed that anyway. >> Yeah. Um very very interesting and so so scaling this to like gigafactory level like it's there's a path. >> There's a path. There's a path. >> Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I mean you got to optimize the entire cell design for cost and manufacturability and all this other kind of stuff. But it's and it's not going to be like sodium or lithium. It's like sodium and lithium. It's going to be both. But um

1:04:08the global energy demand is 100% going to exceed >> the amount of lithium we have on planet earth. Right? Even if we took off every bit of lithium as developing countries become developed, right? As um the billions of people want more and more power as they rightfully should, right? Like if we live like this in America, everybody else wants to live like this too. They want ACs. They want they want cars. they want mobile phones blah blah blah. So, so the having the sodium ion >> as a as a battery pack is a critical >> step. It makes total I mean this is you

1:04:49can't you can't have infinite growth in a finite system. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And it's sort of trying to continue to address that like you know look I I'm not anti- capitalism but like you literally can't have infinite growth in a finite system. So like what's the plan? >> What's the plan here? Yeah. Yeah. and innovation seems to be the one thing. I mean obviously I think I think we're also going to get to a point where we're going to seriously start thinking about sustainability and again sodium sodium battery is is a path towards that right if we could be completely reliant on renewable resources which are transient that seems to be one of the biggest problems transient and they're far away well if we have really nice batteries that can like you know store stuff

1:05:30around everywhere be pretty nice >> and there's clearly the amount the land mass I mean you could create you take the, you know, massive swaths of California, make the massive battery facilities, sodium battery facilities, power the whole US, North America just with a not like you don't we don't need to disrupt normal human living and >> stick it in the middle of nowhere >> and then just pipe it. Or again, because it's so cheap, you can create the cheap thing that you can have at home and you just >> Yeah. Yeah. It's disposable. >> Piping it is hard >> because we we lose a lot of power on the pipe. >> Yeah. But just have a bunch, you know, everywhere. everywhere cuz it's so cheap. So, it doesn't doesn't matter. This is a great moment after we've talked about batteries and all the

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1:07:34means and what this wave function means here. Again, standard modelbs.com. You can get your own. We ship all over the United States and we are available in certain locations in Venice, California and the Bay Area. Check out our website, standardmodbs.com. If you're looking to support the show, check out standard model. And as we get increased demand, we can make it more available in your local grocery and other retail stores. And again, the support for the pod has been incredible. We are going to continue with our core format which is again looking at and talking about >> core science and research stories from

1:08:16first principles which brings us to our last story of the day uh which is about a naked mole rat aging research. Now for those of you who may not know uh Kim Possible the Disney Channel cartoon >> I I used to love that show. >> It's one of my favorite cartoons of all time. We usually get that in India, too. >> That's how good That's how good it was. Global. >> Not only is it one of my personal favorites, so when you sent me the show notes, I was like, "Oh, we're going to talk about Rufus." >> The ringtone to call me beat me Kim Possible is my literal SMS ringtone currently right now on my iPhone 16 Pro Max.

1:08:58>> Dude, that that triggered like so many childhood memories when you did that. It's like you know that that's so Raven when like the the camera goes into her eye. Yeah, that's what just happened. >> Same same exact thing. So this this is a longevity story ultimately um that we're going to talk about. Now this story as we've talked about in previous episode is out of Tongi University in Shanghai, China. >> The headline was naked mole rat's DNA could hold the key to long life. >> Yeah. >> And it was published in science. Mhm. >> And so what's the top line here about the con the connection between this this naked mole rat and now understanding longevity generally? >> Yeah. I mean longevity is something that

1:09:39we've been after for a very long time. And it turns out the naked mole rat's DNA could hold a secret to how to live longer. Okay. Um >> I told you. I told you guys. >> Yeah, dude. Naked mole rats are incredible animals. And we're going to get right into it. Okay. So, um, there's a grand challenge when it comes to aging, right? And the quest for living longer. There's there's two main theories when it comes to aging. There's the programmed theory, which means that aging is a deliberate genetically determined mechanism that makes us die, right? It's programmed into our genes such that the the hormones kick in at a

1:10:20certain age. there's some internal clock that kicks in and that sort of it's it's part of evolution. It's it's it's a way to make sure that no one's living too long. Okay. >> Then there's um damage or error theories which suggest that aging is actually just a cumulative result of environmental insults and imperfect repair. And if we were to somehow take care of those environmental factors and get rid of that imperfection in the repair of our body, then we will be able to live longer, right? And the naked mole rat discovery that we're talking about here supports the idea that

1:11:01longevity is actually might be an evolved trait of superior damage control. It's it's not a program thing. And actually, if we could do this damage control, there could be a way for us to live a lot longer than we are right now. >> Don't tell don't tell Peter Teal. >> Yeah, exactly. So, okay, there's there's a few hallmarks of um aging that I want to talk about. This one is telomeir attrition. Okay, telomeirs are the protective DNA caps at the end of our chromosomes. They're a bunch of repetitive DNA that's basically nonsense. It's just there as a cap to make sure that the inner part of our chromosome gets replicated. Right? Every single time there's cell division, those

1:11:42tieumirs get shorter and shorter and shorter. Okay? Because the way DNA replication works is you have DNA polymerase that goes down and then and then replicates, right? But the binding and unbinding of that DNA polymerase is a stochcastic process. It's happening just based on some probability. And so the probability that goes all the way to the end is low, right? And that's why you have a bunch of nonsense telomeic DNA at the very end. It's just a bunch of at sometimes GC. I guess GC is on the other side. You get what I'm saying? Right. It's just like it's a bunch of repetitive DNA that doesn't actually code for protein. It's just there to make sure that I get everything in the middle. Yes. Right. So it's it's these caps at the very end. Now short tieumirs

1:12:26leads to cellular scinessence which is like the cell goes into a kind of com like state >> and it can lead to apoptosis which is when the the cell programs its own death. Okay. And it's been shown that it's a key contributor to organismal aging. So the telomeic DNA getting shorter and shorter >> correlates to the organism at large getting more and more aged >> which which sort of makes sense like your buffers that are protecting this replication process are disappearing over time >> and so and yeah and like maybe you're losing genes on on the you know and things like that. Yeah, there there's some mechanistic view there. Right now

1:13:06there's another one there's deregulated nutrient sensing. So this comes from the mtor pathway which is for mamalian target of repammyosin. So this is something that controls cell growth and metabolism and sustained activation of this pathway is linked to accelerated aging and you can inhibit it with a drug called repamyosin and this you might have you might have heard about. It's like this like deaging drug unlocking the secrets of youth. People are taking this reposiain. Well, it's it's literally targeting this pathway called mamalian target of repamyosin mtor because it's literally named after the drug because a lot of times in biology like you like find the thing that is affecting it and then that's a good way

1:13:47to to say the name of you know so so if you inhibit >> this pathway with repamyosin it can lead to extended lifespan in various organisms. >> Interesting. So there's there's two separate things here. there's preventing the tieumirs from from being >> from getting shorter. That's something that we might want to do. >> So that's one piece. And then the other piece is there's this mTor that accelerates aging. So if you inhibit it, >> then you know you you don't have this accelerated aging. >> Exactly. Exactly. And then the third there's a third one that I want to get into which is the role of certuins. They're kind of like the guardians of the genome. >> Guardians of the genome. >> Yeah. Exactly. I love that name. They're they're a family of seven mamalian

1:14:29proteins. They're found in mammals. Um they go 1 to 7 and they regulate cellular health. And what they do is they um regulate the histone complexes around DNA. Histones are these proteins that wrap the DNA around themselves to create the chromosomes. You must have seen the chromosomes in these cells which are these like bulky little things. Most of what you're seeing are actually these histone proteins. The DNA is the tiny little thread that you wouldn't see, but it's wrapped around these histones, right? And the certuins are the ones that regulate these histones. Okay. Now, the the the activity of these certuins gets

1:15:09increased during caloric restriction, which has been shown to be something that can um lead to less aging, right? If like I mean people go way ham with this and go with the intermittent fasting where they're like you know they're like like not eating for like 2 days or whatever. Now >> that it's it's iffy there. Okay. Don't do too much of a good thing but caloric restriction has definitely been shown to cause very good um good things in terms of like deaging. Okay. >> Okay. So, so one of the key threads in all of these is that it has to do with

1:15:49the genome. >> Right. >> Right. >> Like aging, all these factors are correlated to >> the genome. The DNA. >> So if we want to talk about aging, we have to talk about the genome. >> Yeah. If we want to talk about aging, we want to talk about the gen genome. Specifically, we want to talk about genomic instability. Right? The idea is the more stable your genome is, all three of these things that I just talked about are basically making the genome more stable. The more stable your genome is, the the the less aging you do, right? Genomic instability is the most fundamental driver for aging, it seems, right? And what we want to do is we want to prevent DNA damage. And if there is

1:16:29DNA damage, we want to repair it. >> Okay? The worst kind of DNA damage is something called a doublestranded break. That's DNA is a double strand. It's got two um two strands interlocked in a ladder. If you break one, it's fine because you can use the other part to sort of repair it. But if you break both, then you've effectively split the chromosome in two, >> right? >> So that's really bad. >> Yes. >> Um >> not great. >> It's the most catastrophic way of doing things, right? And accumulation of these unrepaired um doublestranded breaks can cause cellular scinessence. it can cause apoptosis. Too much of this in your body and you're aging a lot. Okay? So, the efficiency and fidelity of this doublestranded break determines your

1:17:10resistance to aging. And usually what happens is if you get a double stranded break, remember you have two copies, right, in your cell of the chromosomes, especially in the S like during cell division, the the the cell makes two different copies, right? So during the Sphase of of um of your cell cycle, there's going to be two copies. You can use that other copy, >> right? >> To to be like, "Ah, crap. Where does this fit?" Yes. >> Right. And did I miss anything? Because if the if the tube broke. >> Yes. >> And some of the DNA fell off, I don't want to just like attach it and then like delete an entire gene. So, I can get the copy from my sister chromatid, like the copy of it, and then uh I shouldn't say sister chromatid cuz that's the other pair, but you from your

1:17:51homologous chromosome, which is the exact copy. Bring it over. compare the two strands and then be like, "Oh, I'm missing an A here, a T here, a G here, put it all together, and then I I can repair my double stranded." >> It's like that movie with uh Ewan McGregor the island where every human had a copy clone that was on this island. And so when you got injured as real human billionaire, they would take your copy that was on this island and then they would take the parts they needed from the copy and then give you like an organ transplant or all this other stuff. So, it's like a perfect copy of you, but the copies had no idea that they were copies. It's a whole another story. >> Holy cow. >> But it's a great It's a great movie, dude. I got to watch that movie.

1:18:32>> It's a class. It's like a little bit older. Um, but this just this idea that there's a reference if you have a double standard double stranded break, there's still a reference. Yes. >> That you can then rebuild that uh that break from that is independent of these two strands. >> Exactly. Together. >> Yeah. Yeah. And you can make sure that you're not missing anything. You you didn't like staple things wrong, right? you know. Um, so that's so so so all of that is background about sort of what are the things >> the levers >> the levers that that we can pull. Okay. And the main thing that we want to do is we want to fix um DNA instability. We want to make our genome more stable and that is where the naked mole rat comes in. >> Let's go Rufus.

1:19:12>> Okay. Rufus comes in. The um biological name is heterosphalis glabber. Um, it's probably the ugliest mammal I have ever seen. I'm going to be honest. Okay, we got some photos here. Uh, it's it's pretty bad to be honest. I think Rufus like they they they really the cartoon guys, they they deserve a raise because they they they made a really cute cartoon from that. >> They did. It looks so bad. Um, >> they kept the teeth though. >> They did. They kept the teeth. They kept the teeth. >> Yeah. Um, these things are incredible though. Okay, they live in East Africa. They um they live in large communities.

1:19:54Um, and they live for nearly 40 years. >> Okay. >> Okay. That's insane. I remember when I was in um in my lab at UCLA, we were doing experiments on rats. Our our rats our our lab rats lived max 2 three years, right? And that's like max because in the wild rats are going to live like >> you know there's rat on rat violence right but they lived a pretty good life in the in our behavior lab. We weren't one of the you know other labs let's say but like you know tops 2 three years. These guys are living 40 years. >> That's actually crazy >> right? >> Naked mole rats live 40 years compared to 3 years for a mouse. Anything that is

1:20:35that size lives around 3 4 years. Dogs live only 10. >> Right. These things are living 40. So clearly >> orders of magnitude. >> Yeah. Clearly they're doing something. >> Right. Clearly they're doing something. They've evolved some potent biological mechanism that is delaying aging. Right. >> Okay. And so they've been a really great model organism to try to figure out what is going on. Right. Okay. Um they are resistant to diseases. So not only do they live long, they live really healthy lives. They don't get cancer. They don't get neurodegradation. They don't even get arthritis like every other mammal does. Right. And it suggests that like

1:21:15the fact that they don't get these age related ailments suggests that there's some fundamental underlying process. Yes. >> That they're doing. They're not like fixing every little thing with a custom >> fix. There's one underlying fix that they're doing >> that is that is sort of fixing all of the rest. >> Right. That's why it's so it's so interesting, right? And >> they sort of have like the the janitor at the school that has the admin key that unlocks all the doors. >> All the doors. >> You don't figure out and pick every lock on every door. You just have the master key. And and for for the longest time,

1:21:55it's been like, what is that? >> What is that key? Right. Um the other really cool thing, it's it's very relevant to humans because um there are transcripttos. The transcriptto is basically all of the mRNA that gets transcribed from the DNA. Um, and their protein coding sequences. So the parts of the genome that actually code for the protein, those are very similar to humans and they're more similar to humans than mice are to humans. Okay? So um it increases the likelihood that whatever mechanism is happening in the naked mole rat, we could maybe translate that to human longevity. So, we're we're saying that we can make Iran unstoppable.

1:22:37>> We're moving from stoppable to unstoppable. >> Yeah, I I told you I'm going to crush the like Impossible jokes on this one. >> Yeah, that was a good one actually. So, all right. So, now the problem is we got we got to figure out like what what exactly is going on, right? And for the longest time, people actually thought they maybe knew what was happening, which is the seag protein, the seagass pathway. I don't know if you remember, but this was one of my predictions >> for the medicine prize this year. The seagass pathway. >> Yes, it was. >> It didn't win, but it's coming back and maybe it's going to come back and win the Nobel, you know, in the next few years. You can already see that it's

1:23:18like a very a very big deal. Okay, so the seagass protein has a primary function with innate immunity. The let's just do a little bit of review. >> DNA lives in the nucleus of our cells. We are ukarotes. And so there's not going to be any DNA in the cytoplasm of the cell. Everything is going to be compartmentalized in the nucleus. Which means if you ever see a DNA molecule in the cytoplasm, something has gone wrong. Either a virus has come in and infected you or something that should have been in the nucleus has now strayed out and the cell is like straying into cancer territory or like doing weird stuff and it needs to be dealt with. Okay. So the

1:23:58seagass protein the primary function is to detect that cytoplasmic DNA bind to it and then catalyze some reaction that activates an inflammatory response or an antiviral response. M. Okay. >> So, it's basically looking for intruders in the cytoplasm. >> Yeah. >> Identifying it and then bringing in people to deal with. >> Yes. Yeah. And those intruders are always just double stranded DNA. If I see double stranded DNA in the cytoplasm, you're not in the house. What are you doing out here? You know, there there's a problem. Either you're from out there or you're like supposed to be in the house, right? What's going on? Um, >> now that's great for the innate immunity part, right? It's it's detecting stuff

1:24:39in the cytoplasm, but it also has a paradoxical role where it starts detecting stuff in the um nucleus of our cells. >> Okay. >> Okay. And when it does stuff in the nucleus of our cells, it can actually suppress that homologous recombination. You know that the the part I was saying where you got the double stranded break and then the homologous chromosome comes in and then it does this whole thing. Well, during that whole part, there's going to be like a lot of naked DNA >> hanging out, right? And the seagass protein is just looking for DNA to bind to, >> right? >> It's just lock and key, >> right? So, the seagass doesn't necessarily have the like flight list of everyone who's supposed to potentially be in transit during this recombination.

1:25:21>> Exactly. Yeah. It's just like if you're out here, you're a problem. >> Yeah. If if I see you, you're a problem. Most of the time they're hanging out in the cytoplasm, but every time they're in the nucleus, they get it starts getting confusing, right? Because there's a bunch of DNA in the nucleus and it's not always surrounded by histones and things like that. So >> the seagass can actually inhibit that repair >> process >> repair process. And so that's kind of weird, right? Because like you can have this. So why is it doing that? Well, it could be just an evolutionary trade-off where you've got a rapid immune response and okay, to have the rapid immune response, maybe you do need long-term um maybe you you let go of the long-term DNA efficiency, the repair efficiency.

1:26:03>> You can't do both, >> right? You can't do both. This is already working, right? But with a mole rat, >> you need both because you're living that long, >> right? >> Right. So there was evolutionary pressure for the mole rat to fix this problem that maybe other mammals didn't have. Okay. >> And that's what this paper is doing. Okay. So this paper that was out in cell it's unraveling the naked mole rat's genetic secret. They found the seagass mediated mechanism in that naked mole rat and they showed why that that DNA the part of the DNA that codes for the seagass is different than the humans and

1:26:44how that difference actually manifests within the cell. >> Fascinating. >> Okay, so they're they're actually doing that. So there's an unexpected function. The first thing they did was they used GFP, which is um green fluorescent protein. It's a great tag for whenever you want to see stuff that's going on in the cell, you tag it with GFP. And um what they can actually see with the GFP is this activity that's happening inside the nucleus. And what they found is when you have the naked mole rats seagass version versus the human version or the mouse version, the naked mole rat seagass version had three-fold higher concentrations during this homologous recombination >> than the human version. Yes. Okay.

1:27:25And so and if you if you take crisper cast 9 and you cut out the the naked molerat version then those cells can no longer do this homologous re combination. So not only is the the the naked moler rat version not inhibiting this homologous recombination it's actually helping. So they went in so somehow evolution went into the naked moler rat genome and made the changes to switch the behavior of seagass to something that was from from something that was inhibiting to something that is actively helping this highfidelity DNA repair a >> as as independent from the job responsibility of dealing with rogue DNA

1:28:06within the side >> yes it still does that job that >> it still does that job but inside the nucleus now it's doing an additional job it's actually helping this homologous DNA repair and not having this sort of conflict of it it it now has access to the the like classified. >> Exactly. And so so they they did a bunch of different um you know molecular biology techniques to pinpoint the domain of the seagass protein that was different. Once they pinpointed the domain that was different, they went in and looked at what were the amino acids that were different. They found 16 different amino acids. Then they went in and made chimeic proteins where what you can do is you can put in this amino acid and this amino acid and see which of

1:28:47those because some of those 16 might just be like random evolution type stuff right? >> But four of those 16 were specific substitutions that caused this switch. What you can do is you can take the human version and you can put in those four instead of our human version and then that protein now becomes the the naked mole rat version. So we've pinpointed exactly what are the are the genetic changes that cause this. Isn't that insane that we can actually do that dude? That's so man unreal. >> Yeah. >> To think about down to literally the amino acid. >> Yes. like the four individual amino

1:29:30acids that make the difference. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. >> And it's like it's like a it's like a a consequential difference. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Uh it's the difference between 3 to 5 years and 40. >> Yeah. I mean with just four with just four with just four. It's it's pretty insane. And then so so now we have this difference right between human seagass regulation which what it's what human seagass is doing is it binds to the DNA and then it kind of prevents all of the other repair mechanisms from coming in. What the the naked mole version is doing is it binds to the DNA and then it actively recruits all of the other chromatin binding aspects to like make this thing go faster,

1:30:11>> right? And and have higher fidelity instead of being a absolute firewall and blockade. It's It sort of basically has it's a little porous for specific helpers that it knows are actually there to facilitate a job >> function. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane that we can do this. And then the real nail in the coffin for me was like what they did was they could they could now introduce the the mole rat version of this gene into model organisms like the Drosophila. And the fruit flies lived longer and they were they were more robust and and and they could climb up walls faster, right? All of the ads all of these assays the fruit flies were doing, right? They they went to maximum lifespan in mice. The mice were living

1:30:53longer and they were they were living more healthy. And so now we we start thinking, okay, what are we going to do with the humans, right? I mean, we can't genetically engineer, but what you could do is you could have um you could have well gene there there's obviously gene therapy, right? But you could always also have small molecule drugs that mimic what the naked mole rat version of the protein does. So you got the human version, right? And let's say the human version has a particular shape and we we can take a small molecule molecular drug that binds to that human version to make the make it mimic the shape of the moler rat. >> Right. And then now it's going to do all

1:31:34the recruiting that the the moler rat version was doing. So it's it's sort of like we create a therapy that like mimics the seag process. Yeah. Uh the four amino acids specifically. >> Yeah. We know exactly what that difference is, right? Because we know these are the four amino acids. >> Right. Now we can now we can start doing structural studies which I'm sure is going to be next. Like what is the exact structure of those four versus these four? Yes. >> You know? >> Yes. like and how do we how do we engineer a drug that that looks exactly like that that binds exactly the way I want it to and then and then and then all of a sudden our DNA repair mechanism can be what the naked mole rat had >> which is which is now the idea being you

1:32:17know there are a variety of factors that impact aging and the one that this is solving for is the sea gas which is meant to be a protection mechanism for like rogue viral DNA being inside the cytoplasm, >> but then also sometimes can be inside the nucleus and doesn't have the right instructions. So, it can disrupt a normal process of >> double stranded broken pairs needing to be repaired. >> That's another problem. The problem is that double stranded brake is a driver of aging. Yeah. >> Seagr

1:33:00>> which is getting confused. >> And we sort of are now like we can just give you like four amino acids and now you can still do the viral cytoplasm stuff >> but not just only not screw up the the repair, you can actually make it more efficient. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> That is crazy. >> Yeah, dude. That is actually crazy. And again, to not to know, to understand, to be able to draw the through line through all of those things, >> all of those things like >> to get to that level of precision to be able to now mimic it in uh naked mole rats, in fruit flies, in mice, like >> it's going to continue on on the journey. >> I mean, that's, you know, for we we >> It's working.

1:33:40>> It's working. >> Yeah. Uh and we talked about longevity in a in a previous episode in that you know these two these two theories is it error or is it pre-programmed the fact that there's indication that it's not pre-programmed and it is it's because of this >> and it is this error thing that maybe we can mitigate >> this is just one >> of many avenues of attack to sort of deal with the quote unquote aging problem >> and this might not be the only secret that the naked wool rat has >> has right it's just it's again it's just it's just one >> it could be it could be As you said, the janitor with the master key, but there might be, you know, groundskeepers with the master key as well. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Yes. This is truly truly fas. This was a

1:34:20great series of stories this week. Um, we are starting off the fall >> with a bang. We hit at the top. Uh, not portable yet, but new laser plasma device that could be light enough to be used in the field. This was around muon uh generator and you know the implications that it has for a variety of fields that came out of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and was published in the physical review accelerators and beams. We mute on to the second story about sodium batteries the sodium batteries uh how they can be cheaper than lithium but just as powerful what the limitations are where we kind of are in the frontier. great

1:35:02paper uh out of University of Chicago and UC San Diego in Juel. It's clearly there's clearly going to be pickup on that story. There's so much there are so many incentives for a variety of nation, state, and private sector players in addition to academic community to want to push that forward. And we ended with our story about Rufus out of Tongi University in Shanghai about unlocking longer life by this key understanding from the naked mole rat DNA which was very fascinating. >> That was cool. >> Uh very very fascinating. So this is the conclusion of our episode 13. My name is Lester Nari joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna

1:35:45Chowdery. This is from first principles. We'll see y'all next week. [Music]