Octopus Camouflage, Orcas vs. Sharks, Civet Coffee & Sub-Diffraction Telescope Tech

Intro

0:00Wagwan internet this is your captain speaking Lester Nari joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Chowdery we have a fantastic super episode this week with four stories quick breakdown we're going to start out with we may have figured out how to massroduce the camouflage that octopi use in their predatory adventures. This is out of UCSD. The second story is about a new beef in the ocean. There's there's a little bit of of of beef happening between orcas and sharks. >> Yeah. >> Um and the paper sort of understands or breaks down this new hunting technique that orcers are participating in.

0:42>> That one's out of an institution we'll talk about in a second. The third story out of the University of Canada >> is about some [ __ ] >> Yeah. >> That they're going to start charging $80 for you to drink >> Yeah. Yeah. >> at Starbucks. >> Yeah. I'm not being facicious. >> It's coming to Beverly Hills Starbucks. >> Uh Civet Coffee. >> Yeah. >> Uh Civot [ __ ] coffee. >> Yeah. >> Uh again, not a joke. >> Not a joke. >> And we'll wrap it up with a fascinating uh story out of UCLA where we It's I'm not saying we're defying physics, >> but there's some new technology that we're using that makes our telescope see what we didn't think was possible. That's right. >> This is going to be a great episode. As

1:24always, this is from first [music] principles, [music]

1:39[music] >> my friend. How's it going? >> How are you? Welcome back. >> Yep. Thank you. >> Uh we have a couple of housekeeping items. So, number one, the engagement continues to be unbelievable. If you're watching this on YouTube, which is probably one of the only ways you're hearing me say this part of the show, there's going to be that little bell icon where you can subscribe. It's hugely helpful. We need to get the billionaires to get us in the algorithm. So, if you hit that subscribe button, that's going to really help get this science education podcast to more people. We also are going to have our new website up soon which will have all of the research paper links, all of the

2:19episode links. We may be launching some leaderboards. >> We'll see. But we're going to get that ready for the holiday season. So keep an eye out for that. But we're going to

UCSD’s xanthomatin biosynthesis breakthrough

2:29dive in >> and start with our first story. >> Yep. >> Out of UCSD, which is a biosynthesis story. >> Yes. about mass- prodducing what octopi or octopus use for camouflage and this was out of nature biotechnology. Yeah. Uh a lot of people love talking about like octtop octopi are super intelligent and everyone's like oh that's like an alien intelligence in the ocean. Um and this has I think been something we've known about but have just now made this next step of like how can we replicate? So let's talk about this. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The idea is that we want to mass-produce something called zanthom maten. Okay, it's

3:11nature's master of disguise. It's a pigment that is responsible for seeopod camouflage. Okay, seeopods are your octopus, squid, cuttlefish. There you've got a photo. The I can't see the octopus. The octopus are incredible at camouflage. >> Oh, there's there's an octopus in that photo. >> Yeah, in that red circle, there's an there's an octopus in there. >> That's incredible. >> Yeah. But it's it's not only matched the texture, but the exact color characteristics of the coral reef or the ocean floor that's behind it. And it's it's honestly like defying >> any reason how good it is. The same the same pigment is also found in the coloration of butterflies and

How cephalopod camouflage works

3:52dragonflies in the eyes of flies. So, it's a ubiquitous biopigment. It's got a really high value because it's optoctric, which means it can change its color with a response to electrochemical potential. So that's how the octopus can sometimes become super vibrant and then also at the same time become this they look like a rock, right? They can they can be like pulsing with like >> strobe lights and at the same time do all of these other things. If we can if we can replicate this biosynthesis, right? Then we can go to next generation electronics like electrochromic displays. The main thing that's nice about this is it's biompatible. So I

4:32mean one thing that I was thinking was like what if you had like color changing tattoos >> where like if you flex then like it like just changes it, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's like Avatar, dude. [laughter] >> It is like Avatar. That's a great reference. >> So So it would be really cool, right, if we could make a bunch of this. So when you say it's biocompatible, it means that it could interact with our as as as biological beings, our our system

Why biosynthesis is evolutionarily hard

4:58directly. >> Yeah. And it's not like toxic, >> right? Got it. >> Because because it's already a sort of organic compound. That makes sense. >> Um the other thing is like it could be used in cosmetics if you have like multifunctional ingredients or like health and skincare. It's very UV protectant >> these these coatings. So if we can massproduce a lot of it, that would be really helpful for all sorts of industries. The bottleneck is a supply challenge. Okay, you can't just go into biology and try to extract it. Like how many butterflies are you going to kill, right? Or like octopus. It's just not It's low yielding. It's labor intensive. And it's not ethical, right? >> It's not like mining. Yes. >> Which you could argue is also not although for different reasons. >> Exactly. So this breakthrough here reports the first successful industrial

5:39Graham scale biosynthesis. >> Okay. >> Understood. Got it. Yep. And the way that they did this scaling and this production is actually what I think the story is about, the real science is about because the way that they produce this is kind of a plugandplay type pathway that you could use to then manufacture other challenging biochemicals. The analogy that this

The plug-and-play growth-coupled pathway

6:05makes me think of is kind of like how Crisper like was a platform for lack of a better term that had multiple use cases or functions that you could use it with. And so there's a kind of a similar platform level discovery happening here. It's not specific to just this. This is kind of like a Yeah, exactly. This is kind of like a proof of concept that it can be done. But the way that they did it >> is what's is what I think is like really really cool. >> Okay. Cuz here's the core challenge. Okay. Whenever you want to install let's the zanthamatin comes from some genomic pathway right there's some biochemical pathway in the octopus that creates zanthamatin okay the the standard

6:46approach is to take that gene or take that bunch of genes that all contribute to this stick that into a bacteria and then have the bacteria produce it right y >> you install a foreign gene and that's what you do >> got it >> the problem is there's a metabolic burden >> okay Because if you've got this new pathway that's taking up a lot of energy, it's taking up a lot of the ATP, a lot of the carbon atoms even, and it confers no survival advantage, the bacteria doesn't want to do it, >> right? >> Mhm. >> And kind of sounds a little bit like the AI thing happening right now. >> Yeah. Yeah. Like we [laughter] it's exactly and you know you can you can actually in terms of AI you can use an

7:27analogy where it's like the all of the energy budget and the carbon budget of an organism is very strict. Okay. It's had billions of years of evolution to figure out this carbon atom has to go there. This carbon has atom has to go there. This amount of ATP needs to be used for this and so on and so forth. Right? It's had billions of years of evolution to figure that out. And now all of a sudden you install on this electrical grid like a giant server farm [laughter] >> right? With no advantage, >> no, right? >> The the bacteria is not going to reroute all of its electricity, all of its energy to make this server farm when it when it makes no sense. Right. Right.

8:07>> In fact, if you have a bacterial population, you've got an evolutionary conflict because let's say a bunch of these bacteria are there. There's some mutation that cuts off supply to that server farm. that bacteria is going to grow faster because it's not wasting all that energy. And then in a population, it's kind of like antibiotic resistance where you've got a population that sort of >> there there's there's some bacteria that use up >> the resistance and and actually are resistant to the antibiotic and some that [clears throat] aren't, right? And those are the ones that are going to go ahead. But in this case, it's like those that have budgeted well and have cut off this useless server farm are going to grow faster and then they're going to

8:47dominate the entire population. >> That makes total sense, >> right? >> So that's the problem is like we're we're going against evolution. We're trying to engineer something, >> but there's all these cheaters around >> that are just going to do what they want to do because we're trying to use literal biology as the platform by which we generate this this organic compound. >> Yeah. like we're not using machines and a factory. It's we're literally using biology and there are these inherent properties underlying the evolutionary process of biology that are preventative factors from just being like maximize the output we care about. Yeah. >> Because it's not purely create the system is not purely >> uh controlled by like human engineering

9:29input. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we need to figure out a way to to make the bacteria do what we want to do, right? >> Okay. And run this server farm that like

Engineering metabolic “need”

9:40gives us enthamatin and like makes us um have this octopus superpower, right? And the strategy that they're using is this plug-and-play strategy. It came out in Nature Biotech, growth coupled biosynthesis. That's what they're calling it. Okay. What they're doing is actually quite a quite a simple thing. They're creating a fitness advantage. They're creating an evolutionary advantage for those that are using the server farm. But and what they're doing is they've created what's called an oxotroof. It's an organism that has through some kind of mutation lost the ability to synthesize some essential ingredient. Okay. >> Okay. And the only way it can get this essential ingredient is if it runs the

10:23server farm. [laughter] It runs this mechanical biomechanical pathway that we've installed that gives it that ingredient to let it grow. >> That's that's incred. So >> it's like like if the b if if bacteria had ethics, this would be very problematic. [laughter] >> Very Yeah. Yeah. >> And I'm sure there's people out there that are making that argument. And I mean I don't I don't have good arguments about that. Okay. That's that's not my >> That's not the scope of this this this episode. Uh the ethics of oxotroofes. >> Yeah. But it's it's pretty insane. like it's it's called synthetic oxotrophy. Okay. So, the idea is you have a pathway, right? And on the on the bottom you've got your central pathway that grows the cell that does metabolism and

11:05all that other stuff. And usually the input comes in the input comes in from this side and then it it can fork into two paths. You've got let's say a bunch of carbon atoms. The carbon atoms can go to make more bacteria or it can go to do this um zanthomatin production. this engineered production. If you've got a choice, the bacteria is going to always pick grow myself. Right. >> Right. Evolution dictates that. But if it doesn't have a choice, it has to go through the server farm in order to get the carbon to grow itself. Then it's then actually those that are better >> at doing that artificial um pathway >> are going to have an evolutionary advantage. We've actually used evolution

11:47to our advantage now by creating a foreign zanthamatin production pathway that puts out a byproduct that it needs. This is interesting. We we've we've h we've hijacked our understanding of ev evolution to know that we need to create basically a need for the system to go down the path we want it to in order for it to be more evolutionarily advantaged against others. and and that it it's it's a little bit uh it's it's interesting. >> It's interesting, dude. It's at least [laughter] it's bacteria, man. >> At least >> let's hope they don't scale it up to larger uh ukarios. Yeah, exactly. But [clears throat] anyway, um >> yeah, so they're using they're using

12:27this um this bacteria called um pseudomonus puta. It's a it's a soil bacterium. >> It's got a robust chassis that has a lot of metabolic versatility, meaning that it can it can like eat a bunch of different things. It's not like, you know, there's not one pathway that it can go through. >> It's not vegan. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even though it's like mostly glucose, it can like eat glucose in multiple different ways. Okay. And um good natural toler to tolerance to substrates and products like anything that's coming out of that factory that we just installed. >> Yes. >> It's got a good tolerance for all sorts of stuff. So, they're using this soil bacterium and what they're doing is they're taking a molecule as hostage.

13:09It's the 510 mthf. It's basically um a C1 carrier. It's a carbon carrier >> for DNA and RNA [clears throat] >> and for proteins. It can't make methionine without this thing and it can't make the A and the G that's in our

Bacterial evolution & glycine withdrawal experiment

13:26DNA. Okay. So without >> Mhm. >> this pathway, it can no longer grow because it can't make DNA and it can't make proteins. This is we're creating almost this like artificial famine at this at the cell level. >> Exactly. >> Um and requiring it to go through this pathway that will generate an output we care about in order to be able to literally feed itself. >> Feed itself. >> Yeah. Yeah. And then and then comes the production line. So now how does it actually make the food that it needs? Right. >> What we do >> is we put a bunch of genes on a plasmid. A plasmid is a circular bit of DNA that we can use to change what the bacteria is producing. It's just foreign DNA that we can like plug in. Now, these bacteria are already

14:07stressed out because they can't eat. So, they're just trying to take in whatever whatever help they can. They we put in this plasmid that has genes on the plasmid to create >> this artificial pathway. Okay? Where on its way to creating zanthamatin, what it's going to do is create formate, which is a precursor for tryptophan and all of the all of the other things that the bacteria needs. >> Right. Right. Right. Right. >> And the ultimate goal is you've got like a sole carbon source which is through the factory. >> Yeah. You have to go you have to you have to pay the cost to be the boss. You literally you have to go kiss the ring >> to survive. >> To survive. Yeah. And [laughter] and

14:49even then it wasn't so simple. Okay. because you have that single carbon source, but the bacteria still the initial bug was it still needed supplemental glycine and lryptophan, which is >> two kind of expensive ingredients that you need to give the bacteria in order to survive. You can't just give it glucose. So then what they did was they had another evolutionary lab in their little lab. Okay, what you do is you say, "Okay, I need you to make glycine, right? I'm going to give you a bunch of glycine at first and I'm going to slowly wean off your entire population of glycine and you're hoping that the bacteria just learn through some mutations because of this pressure

15:31they're going to learn how to make their own glycine. >> Yeah. >> Either learn how to make their own glycine or live without it. >> Yep. >> Okay. And that's exactly what ended up happening. Y >> they they they the bacteria had a single amino acid change in the met gene and then all of a sudden they didn't need glycine. supplemental glycine. >> You're you you you were sort of basically through this uh providing withdrawal mechanism >> uh driving [snorts] evolutionary progress to basically fulfill the gap of the withdrawal of providing it directly to >> interesting and it worked. >> And it worked, right? [laughter] What's And what's cool about this is like >> this entire pathway, right? You've got

16:12the factory that's going in. Yes. it the factory that they're using that that they've put in through this plasma through this foreign DNA the stuff that they got from the octopus and whatever um that can't just be the native factory because it has to have a byproduct that encourages the bacteria to actually work right so it has to be leaky in some sense >> I understand what you're saying not all of the carbon can go into the zanthamatin >> production some of it has to go out yeah some of it has to go out in order to create formate and then become this like sole carbon source. >> Yep. Yep. That makes sense. So the the factory has sort of two functions. Both creating what we care about um and also providing enough for the the cell to

16:53continue to propagate. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then those that ran the factory more actually had an advantage because they're the ones that could actually grow. >> Yep. >> Yeah. It's pretty crazy. >> That's really crazy. >> It's really crazy. And one of the ways that they actually showed that this was happening is an old school technique where you take um you take an isotope of an atom. In this case, instead of carbon 12, they used carbon 13. >> Okay? >> And they and they fed it glucose with carbon 13 in a specific part of the glucose molecule, second from left or whatever. Um,

Carbon-13 tracing to validate the pathway

17:25>> and you can trace because this carbon is a 13 instead of a 12. It's a little bit heavier. >> Yeah. >> So, you can trace how this carbon 13 goes through that entire chemical pathway, right? Because some of those molecules are going to be a little bit heavier than the other ones. >> Yep. >> Right. Yes, >> cuz it's got one extra neutron. >> And what you can what you can show is atom by atom the carbon traveled along this zanthamatin path pathway. So through the factory you can see okay now it's on the floor now it's there. Now it's getting this you know >> there's an indicator that allows us to see the the through line of the entire process to know that we're actually routing through the factory. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can confirm that this is what's happening right?

18:05There's nothing else that's weird. And then finally, you know, you get this optimized e- puma zanthamatin strain that I in 72 hours you get a bunch of your pigment a,000 times more than what you were getting earlier for a lot less work. I mean obviously a lot of work into doing this but now that you can do it

Final yields & platform implications

18:24>> created the system. >> Yeah. 2.4 g per liter >> of zanthamatin powder. So this is this is you know >> it's not only going to transform let's say the camouflage and the cosmetics but I think what what to me what really struck was the way in which they did this >> right this biosynthetic >> hijacking of the metabolism >> right >> we we now have sort of this plug-andplay platform again I don't mean to bring up the crisper analogy again but it's it's similar in the sense that other research teams are going to be able take the insight from how you can basically facilitate biosynthesis.

19:04>> Yeah. >> By this sort of like uh this pathway that advantages those that go through the factory that produce what you want it to >> and you can apply that to any number of other >> of biosynthetic >> outputs that you're looking for and like that's >> that's the that's the key insight. No, which obviously >> yeah I think and and you know you can accelerate production of antibiotics plant alkalides polyetes all sorts of >> that's fascinating >> biochemical things and you can make the the factory itself be different right because all you need is something that releases a C1 molecule it's a molecule with a single carbon so it can be a for the formate pathway the formaldahhide

19:46pathway who knows even like CO2 you could you could hijack respiration itself in the mitochondria right it it leads to I mean that's probably a lot harder because there's so many more steps but >> you know >> knowing that there's a stage one entry point to utilizing this as a methodology >> for biosynthesis means that there are any number of other use cases that with some amount of additional research are going to be unlocks I mean this is actually really >> it's really cool I thought it was really really fascinating um so so we're going to be able to have uh uh makeup that's color changing we're going to be able to have uh uh uh all your vehicle is going

20:27to be laced with this octtopi camouflage. So if you're driving at night and you want to go night mode, >> you have a plant-based display. I don't know [laughter] like all sorts of stuff, dude. >> That's that's actually okay. So this is this is out of UCSD. >> They've they've now sort of created a platform for mass producing >> uh octopus camouflage, >> but it is a platform that can now be extrapolated into other arenas. Yeah. >> Uh, this is a paper out of Nature Biotechnology. Uh, that's a great that's a great story. >> Yeah, that was cool. I thought that was really cool. >> Fascinating story. We're going to move

Story 2 — Orcas vs. great whites

21:00on to our story number two. And our story number two now, I'm going to I'm going to do my best. >> Yeah. >> Our story number two is out of uh an institution called the Protexion E Conservation Palagasia Assass uh CSU Mterrey Bay. >> Yes. >> And this is about the new hunting techniques of orcas. Like we said, there's there's a beef in the ocean, right? And so this research study is looking at these new hunting patterns of orcas. >> Um, and you thought this was interesting, and I'm curious why why you put this in the show notes. So I want to know about the because we've seen the story about orcas attacking yachts in the Mediterranean or on the Amafi coast,

21:41wherever. Um, but it does seem like again we're in the ocean for two of our stories back to back, which is funny, but the intelligence aspect of this is interesting to me. But

First recorded predation in Mexican waters

21:52>> that's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's the intelligence aspect that's interesting to me. >> And more than even the intelligence, it's >> culture, I think, that we're getting at. Okay. And I'm going to get into that a little bit later, but that's the key word that why I got interested because to me, I'm fascinated with human culture, right? And it seems like we are there's a few papers that we're going to go through that talk about animal culture and I find that just extremely fascinating. >> So the culture wars are not human specific. >> No, no, no. In this case, they they probably have a hijenous culture compared to ours. But actually, no, that's that's not even true. Even the orcas have dialects among their populations, which is fascinating to think about, right? That like different

22:34populations of orcas might not understand each other >> if you're not on this side of the equator. >> Yeah. like the Pacific ones and the [laughter] Atlantic ones are going to be like, "Why do you talk funny? He looks like me, but he talks really funny, [laughter] >> you know." Um, it's a groundbreaking paper, I think, from um, Higua Rivas, published in November this year, Frontiers in Marine Science. The idea is they've it's the first ever recorded orca predation on young great white sharks in Mexican Waters off the coast of Baja California. Okay. Um, it's actually the second time that we've seen orcas attacking great whites. The first time was off the coast of South Africa, so it's pretty far away, but the technique is remarkably similar.

23:16>> Okay. >> Okay. Which is kind of weird. >> Yeah. Meaning it's trans it transcends. >> It may be. Yeah. Yeah. We're not I'm not going to say that it does and the paper does not claim that it does, but I just find it kind of funny. Right. Um, but that's that's a tall order to make. But I will show later on that whales have done this. Okay. >> Okay. So, >> the first encounter was on August 15, 2020. They found a pot of five female orcas, one adult and four subad adults. And what they did was the one orca

Coordinated hunting: tonic immobility & liver extraction

23:47pushes the shark up to the surface. Then another orca just like punches it, okay? Causing bleeding. And then there's two others that swim around the shark to make it go upside down. M. >> And then once the shark is upside down, you get this thing called tonic immobility where the shark can't really move. >> And then while that shark can't really move, the other orcas then eat out its liver and like they bring out its liver and that photo had the liver there and then they share it with the kids. Inter Oh that are kind of in the waiting in the wings. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That have sort of been like a part of this but not really. >> Right. Right. Right. >> Right. And then and then they had a second encounter two years later at the

24:28same exact spot which suggests that it's predictable. It's seasonal hunting pattern. This time it was an adult male, adult female, two subad adults and a calf. And this time the kid did nothing. Just like wait until juvenile white shark again. Uh much smaller than the orca gets wrecked. And then shark starts bleeding, liver is exposed, they eat the liver and only the liver because the liver is super nutrient-rich >> and has a bunch of like, you know, bang for buck. >> Yeah. And it's per pound. And it seems like they're trying to give it for the young. >> Yeah. They're saving stuff for the young. >> I thought that was really cool. >> That's really interesting. >> Yeah. It's it's a pretty cool toolkit. I mean, they they obviously they're on boats, but a lot of the video and a lot

25:09of the analysis comes from the video from uh DJI Phantom 4 Pro, which is one of those, you know, one of those drones. So, drone photography has really >> revolutionized marine ecosystem behavioral monitoring, right, and sightings. Cuz it looks like there's there it was a multiplatform observation system. There were surface, aerial, underwater, and photo identification. So, it's a multimodal Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And and and the the the trick that they're using is kind of interesting. They're using they're weaponizing tonic immobility. If you've seen like the shark, you know, people who like go in the middle of sharks and they're like nothing's going to happen because I'm going to poke its nose. What they're I

25:49think a lot of times what they're trying to do is like turn it upside down and then it just like freezes and like there's like tricks. But it's cool that like orcas have like figured this out

Predator competition & seasonal patterns

25:58>> or they're both Yeah. They're both apex predators, right? the the the juvenile sharks and the orcas, but >> because they're competing, one could argue that like they're just trying to take out >> the other guy who's trying to compete for the same paying for the same food supply. So like if you're eating my food, like you're you're now my enemy. >> Yeah. And these these orcas only go after juvenile white sharks. >> I mean, I was actually going to ask that because like clearly they're like going after the little ones. >> Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Cuz the older ones when they see an orca, they just get the hell out of >> They're like, "I'm out." Yeah. cuz they I guess they know they they've got some learning capability and they don't return. We've seen white sharks see an orca and then they don't return for like 2 or 3 years. >> Oh, they wow. >> They'll just leave. I'm good.

26:39>> And they're like, "Oh, so that's a bad neighborhood. >> I'm not going to spin the block here. I >> I'll find I'll find my seals elsewhere." [laughter] >> That's actually really interesting. >> Yeah. And so now I mean there there's reports in South Africa where the the original report happened. the seal population there has gone a little bit out of control because there's the the great white sharks just like avoid that area >> because the orcas have kind of >> Yeah. And the orcas, you know, they swim around all over the ocean, right? >> And so there's not a constant supply of predatory pressure, >> if that makes sense. >> And the seals have have have kind of exploded. >> Yeah. Which is which is crazy to think about. And the the the reason why I was talking about this being something that

27:20reminded me of culture >> is because it reminded me of a study that came out like a long time ago. There used to be so culture is something that we know animals do. What does culture mean? culture means that you've got effectively

Orca dialects and culture

27:39some type of strategy that is conferred through behavior and through social constructs like groups of individuals. It's not something that is innate, >> right? >> It's something that's learned from your peers. >> Yep. >> So, you get the benefit of their experience, right? Mhm. >> Like >> you don't have to live through an orca attack, for example. If you're a juvenile shark and you can learn through culture, I don't know if sharks can, but I'm just giving you the example here. You don't have to go through that firsthand experience. Yes. >> Right. Of like, oh, that was bad. No, your your parents tell you that was bad. Don't do that. Sometimes we're just like, I'll try. >> I'll try. >> But but there's other things where like,

28:20okay, clearly that's like bad, right? >> So, >> um there's there's examples of this. For example, Shark Bay bottl-nose dolphins. They use a sponging techniques where they carry around a sponge like one of those uh like Spongebob, like the natural sponges, right? And they use that to probe the seafloor and that protects their bottl nose, >> right? When they're like foraging the seafloor. >> Yeah. Cuz it's almost like >> And it's Yeah. And it's passed from mother to calf. >> So, it's a vertical cultural transmission. Okay. >> Right. Yep. >> And then we've got Japanese macaks. They wash their sweet potatoes. a little Mac. >> Yeah. They wash their sweet potatoes before eating it. And that's something that's culturally passed down because

29:00like the youngsters see the elders doing it, they're like, "Okay, that's the way to eat this thing." Right. >> Very. Yep. Yep. >> So, orcapods, they've they've shown to have cultural things. For example, complex stable vocal dialects that I was talking about, almost like languages

Whale culture case study: 19th-century whaling logs

29:15where different geographic >> populations will have different dialects and those are obviously learned socially. There was one paper that is honestly one of my favorite papers um in animal behavior. Okay, it was in 2021 out of the Royal Society. What it did was analyze 19th century American whaler log books in the North Pacific Ocean. >> Okay. And these whalers kept meticulous lab notes when they went out in the field to try to kill sperm whales. Okay. >> Love to see it. >> And back then, I think sperm whales were used for all sorts of stuff. um not only their meat, but this was before electricity. So all of the oil was being used to light up our streets and that actually caused one of the big epidemics

29:56of near extinction for these whales all across the ocean. Um and the process was whailing was as follows. In the 18th 19th century, >> you'd go you you'd go with your ship, which was um powered by a sail. You'd spot some whales and then you'd go out down in these duffies and try to harpoon them. the whales. Yes. And then if you harpooned one, you would bring it back to the ship for extraction. Yes. Okay. >> What they noticed was >> whenever they went to a certain spot, >> the success rate plummeted from when they first got there. >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> So, they go to a certain spot. On the top, you've got a map of of all of the

30:38spots that they've been in the North Pacific. This is between Japan and America. Mhm. >> And there you've got the rate at which you're you're able to kill whales. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> And the rate was diminishing. Now there's four hypotheses. Okay. There's four there's four ways we can think about it. One is just the first guys who went to that particular spot were just good at it. >> They were LeBron and you're not LeBron. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so everyone, that doesn't make sense because we have the log books from the same whalers that go to other spots like the North Atlantic and they get the baseline rate. Okay, the fact that this is new, right? This is the North Pacific. So this has this is a harvesting ground for whales that hasn't been extracted before, right?

31:20Whailing has been around for for centuries in the North Atlantic, right? Europeans have been at it forever. >> Yes. >> Uh so that's the first hypothesis. The first whalers were good. That's not the case. >> Yep. Second one is um the first whales that were taken out were these juvenile sort of slower, let's say, or or they they weren't they weren't very good at getting away. >> Yeah, >> that also is something that we can model, right? We can model we can we can have some type of population model that says, okay, like the the slower whales in a population die out, how would the rate decrease then if if it's some sort of random strategy? Okay, the third one is the whales learned from personal experience. Meaning

32:01>> I'm part of a pod that had this crazy thing happen to me where a bunch of our pod >> got shot. >> Yes. >> In the ocean and then and then got extracted. And so now I'm never going to have that happen to my pod again. >> This is literally I think the plot of the second or third Avatar movie. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of those. >> Like it's one of them where the the ocean thingies Yeah. And then they were getting hunted and then they didn't go back to the spot. Exactly. Because that's where we lost all our people. Exactly. And then the fourth one is the is the best one. >> Okay. That I want to be true. I'll just be honest. >> And it's that the whales learned between unit learning. Meaning >> there was a pod that I ran into yesterday. >> Yeah.

32:41>> That had that experience. They told me about it and they told me how to get away. The idea is you're on the block. your your block is block two, but the but the cats from block one pull up and they're like, "Yo, yesterday was block one. >> This happened, so y'all >> watch out." >> Yeah. >> And so there's there's a transferring socially of learning without having to physically or literally experience. >> And that's the culture part. >> That's the culture part. >> That's the culture part, right? So the question is, do the whales have culture?

Learned defense strategies & yacht-ramming behavior

33:11Is the fourth hypo hypothesis true or any of these? And what they did was modeling. They did mathematical modeling to see how that rate would decrease based on these three hypotheses. And the one that had the best fit was the one where the whales adapted, learned, and shared defensive knowledge too rapidly for genetic evolution. >> The point is the the rate of decrease of efficacy of the hunting was so steep that it couldn't have just been from personal experience because there wasn't enough volume for personal experience to to be the the the trigger. there's not enough juveniles in the population spread of whales for it to just be the juveniles. And it can't be that they're just that good because in other areas they were doing just fine. And so like

33:51these other three things don't account for the rate of decrease in >> and and so the entire population in the Pacific learn >> that okay when you got these whales and here's what they would do. Um usually they do defensive huddling. Okay. So if orcas come up, >> what you do is like kind of what elephants do where you huddle around your young and you try to bite the the people around. That slows you down and that is super effect ineffective against boats, >> right? You come up on a boat, they're already slowed down. Great, just, [laughter] you know, go at it. So pretty soon they realize that's not going to work. And in their wher journals, they showed that the whales abandoned that traditional defensive huddling and they went for new tactics. For example, if they know which way the the wind is,

34:33just swim opposite the direction of the wind. >> Oh, cuz they know we can't >> they figured out that these guys that these guys can only go in the direction of the wind with their big ship, >> right? And so they they just like swim in the other direction. Evasive deep diving >> resurface like many miles away. >> Yep. >> Away from the ship. >> Yep. >> Right. And some people just started doing aggressive defensing. If like they they were cornered, they would just like start attacking. You know, the best defense is the attack. >> You know what's funny is the social learning from this era might still be persisting, which is why the yachts are getting >> Yes. I was going to say, and that's the final that's the final photo. It's like

35:14it's like now we've got we've got [laughter] this thing coming back where the orcas are now all around Spain and Portugal. They're just like attacking yachts, right? And it's become like kind of an epidemic of orca on yacht violence. Yep. Right. Yep. And we don't have harpoons on those yachts. >> And that also looks like it's a cultural thing because it started one day and then everyone started doing it all across the North Sea, all across the the Portugal through the Straits of Gibralar. I wouldn't be surprised if not all of the Mediterranean is starting it, you know. And what's interesting is at the time of when whaling was happening, >> you have sort of a a reason for the behavior change that's identifiable. >> Yeah. It's not necessarily obvious or

35:57clear in this recent >> Yeah, it's not necessarily obvious. There was there was one hypothesis that was saying that like, oh, because we have like so much tuna in the ocean now because we've curbed fishing >> that the orcas are just getting bored and so with their time they're doing this. I don't buy that. I think that's a fisherman lobby >> like [laughter] paying some special interest group to be like, "Hey, we have too much fish and so we can just like start fishing again." Uh, another one that I thought was pretty likely was that like they've recognized that boats are fisherman boats. And the same reason why you go after the shark is why you go after the boat. It's a competing predator that's like depleting my resources. Like I was going up against a school of tuna and now half of them are gone and there was a boat right there.

36:37>> Right there. Yeah. So like screw that guy. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. No, that makes a lot of sense. >> That that makes a lot more sense to me. Um, but I I just think like these kinds of stories are so interesting at and so capable of sorting sort of putting humans in their place when it comes to uniqueness. >> Yeah. >> Like we always think that like oh culture is very unique to us, right? Cognition cognition is not unique. >> Yep. >> Um more and more I I mean I think it's pretty obvious that consciousness is not unique to humans. I think a lot of people out there agree and now culture is not unique, right? Feelings are not unique. We can see animals in pain,

37:18>> right? >> It's Yeah. It's it's quite humbling that like and we've got now scientific backing. >> Yeah. Right. Right. For for that. I mean, this is the whole there's a whole sort of culture of no longer eating like calamari >> because this the idea is like you have this highly intelligent conscious >> Yeah. >> creature. Yeah. And there's now this like ethical sort of piece to this like well like you know we don't eat other humans. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Generally speaking. >> Generally speaking. Yeah. It's I mean dude it's it's interesting to me. I mean I I'm I'm a selfish person so I will eat the calamari [laughter] cuz it tastes so good. But at the same time I will acknowledge that like yeah it's there's

37:58it's iffy here. And you know it's it but this is I I think what's interesting is like we're now getting more research studies particularly because we also like again have like this multimodal >> systems that are able to sort of track in ways where we get a more robust data set where we can now draw more deeper conclusions uh because of that. And it's it's not surprising to anyone who watched Free Willie um that uh orcas are incredibly intelligent. >> That's exactly right. >> And potentially have culture. Uh it's why uh >> or if you've seen that documentary um >> about the SeaWorld Orca, that's just like grueling. I I haven't visited a single aquatic theme park after watching that.

38:39>> You know how they're solving you know how they're solving their uh because there's they're clearly struggling for business. But um the uh the SeaWorld the SeaWorld or AJ whatever the brand is in San Diego >> this summer they had a summer series of concerts with like Bow and Lil like all these OG like so you have like these rappers like on the stage that's on the water like at [laughter] SeaWorld. Oh god. Sold out. >> Unbel Walk a flock of fame. Like it was >> it did look fun. And so look, if you want to change the venue from holding animals in captivity to a concert venue.

39:19>> Oh yeah. Then Okay. I thought I thought they were doing it with >> No, no, no. Yeah. I was like, jeez. [laughter] >> Waka flocka. I know you got flipping over. >> Yeah, >> because they have no they're not getting people to come for that. I'll come to those. >> I think that's a great offramp. Yeah, >> we would love to see more summer series and converting these places into concert venues. Fantastic. Um, story number two. That was a great one. >> Yeah, it was cool. >> Uh, Frontiers in Marine Science. >> Uh, we're moving on to our third story, which is about civet [ __ ] coffee. >> Yeah. No, literally [ __ ] out coffee. >> If you go to Starbucks and you think inflation has made your coffee expensive now there's $80 cups of coffee.

Story 3 — Civet-processed coffee

40:00>> Yeah. >> It's [ __ ] coffee. >> It's [ __ ] No, literally, I don't know about the taste, but it's literally [ __ ] coffee that's coming from the [ __ ] [laughter] of something called a civot. This is out of the University of Kerala. Uh, and it was in Nature Scientific Reports. >> Um, I when you put this in the show notes, the like title was, you know, copi luok, the paradoxical luxury of biological processing. >> Yeah. >> And I had not yet >> Yeah. No. And then I had another civet [laughter] [ __ ] coffee. And they're like, is that [ __ ] Like like [ __ ] And I was like, "No, no, like the biological term." [laughter] >> So, tell me about I mean, so I think I've literally seen this on some billionaire podcast about how they've

40:42moved to Civot Coffee cuz it's exceptional. >> Yeah, apparently it's Apparently it's exceptional. Um, it's a bizarre luxury drink. Cost $30 to $75 a cup. Um,

Kopi Luwak origins

40:531300 per pound. You see the You see the coffee and it's all lomerated, you know, in a little clump. That's cuz it it came out of of the of the anus of a civet. Okay. I I'm sorry to our uh listeners, but I really I saw this and I was like, we try our best to be uh uh PG13 rated on the show. >> This is biological. >> It's literal. >> It's literal. I'm not I'm not I'm not comparing something poop to [ __ ] It's literal. Yeah. >> It's literal feces. It's literal feces. Okay. All right. All right. Let's get serious. All right. So the market value is $7 billion for this civic coffee. The real chemistry behind this bizarre

41:34luxury drink. And that's what this paper is about. It's about describing the chemistry behind why when coffee beans go through the gastrointestinal tract of this animal. They taste better when they come out of the other side. Okay. It's a it's it's a coffee called Kopi Luak. It began in the 18th century because classic colonialism. Okay. The Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia, >> they had coffee plantation workers. The plantation workers were forbidden from drinking the coffee that they were

Colonial history & modern luxury market

42:06collecting. >> Okay. >> Okay. Because, you know, white people. >> So, so, so instead they collected the undigested beans from the droppings of Asian palms >> to to drink those. And then when the when the white plantation owners found out Yeah. and they tried some, they were like, "Oh, this actually tastes really good." And it became a new expensive export for the Dutch because the Dutch back then were always after getting rich. >> This is so funny cuz there's so many as like so many things in like like oxtail being 30 bucks a pound or whatever. Now it's kale salads being $20. Like oxtail and kale were eaten like when we were grow because it was cheap and it was the

42:46stuff no one else wanted and now it's been rep. >> Yeah, dude. I think it's the same with like IPAs. Honestly, there's no one who actually enjoys IPAs. All right? No one can convince me in a blind tasting that they like IPAs, okay? But they need everyone else to know that they drink IP. Anyways, so I first actually heard about it in the Bucket List movie with um Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. This is one of the things that that he wanted to drink before he um died of cancer. So the the the civet is this Asian common palm civet. It looks kind of like a raccoon to me. >> It looks like a hyena mixed with a raccoon. >> Yeah, it's it's Yeah, it and it consumes

43:27the ripest berries and the beans pass through in about 12 hours and and they become uh 10 times the value somehow. [laughter] Um, and the digestive process, it's thought that the digestive process modifies the beans chemical composition, refining flavor precursors and giving a janiqua. And there another awesome civot dropping. >> This is funny that this episode we did our first story on biosynthesis because this is another [laughter] kind of biosynthesis. Exactly. Yeah. And um you know it's actually led jokes aside it's led to a lot of unethical cage farming of these civets because obviously if you have something that is

44:07a commodity that is highly valuable and it comes from an animal humans don't care about the animals welfare and so it's it's led to like cage farming driven by the demand. So there's cage that there's demand in Japan, South Korea and USA. And the cage farming has happened in places like Vietnam and those Southeast Asian countries. So it it has become a real problem. >> I mean this is literally what we just talked about about the ethical issue of doing biosynthesis with bacteria. Yeah. >> But like this is now like you're scaling it up and it's the same problem set. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's the same problem set, right? And um this particular paper focused on wild civets. Wild civets not

44:47in captivity. in the western guts which are these mountain ranges on the western side of the Indian peninsula. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. One day we will go >> with um with our wives and whoever else. And it's in nature scientific reports.

Gut microbiome fermentation chemistry

45:04>> It's wild, meaning that there's coffee plantations there, but then there's wild civets that go and eat some of the berries and you can collect the droppings. >> Yep. And what they wanted to figure out was what what actually is going on here chemically. Okay. Is there anything going on or is it just placebo? Okay. So first thing what they did was they actually you know what you can do with coffee is you can roast it and when you roast it you get this thing called a myard reaction which generates that final aroma and taste profile. They wanted to look at the coffee bean before the roast, right? Cuz you you don't want anything that is volatile or >> anything that requires some kind of

45:45heat. You want to look at the raw naked chemical composition, right, before you treat it to to that heat. And so that's exactly what they did. Um [clears throat] they figured out that there's in the civic gut there's there's a bioreactor. There's just like we have gut bacteria, the civets have gut bacteria. And we're pretty sure that um gluconobacttor which is highly abundant in the civot gut that's linked to some kind of fermentation. It metabolizes like sulfur containing amino amino acids. It metabolizes hydrogen sulfide. So that could be some kind of chemistry that's leading to this unique taste >> that happens in the civet. Right. >> Mhm. One thing that they did notice was that the beans that came out of the gut

46:28of the civet

Larger beans, selective feeding, and medium-chain esters

46:30were significantly larger than the manually harvested beans. Really? And that might be because the civet has some natural way of like >> picking which ones to eat. >> Oh, you know what I mean? It's it's not necessarily about what's happening inside. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've just they're selective. They're selective about it. Um the other thing they realized was capryillic acid methylester and capric acid methylester. These are two types of medium um mediumchain fatty acids. Their name is derived the capric and the caprillic. Their named is derived from the Latin term for goat >> or capra. And they're basically these chains of carbon compounds that impart a desirable dairy or milk-like aroma

47:12>> and flavor. Okay. And and the compounds that came out of the civic gut had a higher concentration of this. So, we're saying Civet [ __ ] coffee is the goat. >> Yes. Very nice. Very [laughter] nice. Apparently, it is. Yeah. Um, so there's two things that can happen with the study. One, you can >> you can um target fraud. You can test for these compounds and be like, "This is not >> this did not come out of a civet."

Fraud detection & synthetic ethical alternatives

47:38>> So, anyone who's branding $80 cups of coffee in LA and San Francisco that's really just selling offtheshelf Colombian coffee beans, >> you can actually have like a Yeah, you can have actually have a test. The other thing that I'm I'm more um excited about is, you know, you do have this ethical crisis with the um caging and mistreatment of these animals. Well, if you could like >> identify the key microbial players and the chemical output, you could make fake ones of this, >> just how we make fake diamonds now, so we don't need blood diamonds. Yeah. Yeah. >> And you could you could then sell these for a lot less and without the ethical dilemma >> without cing >> knowing humans they'll still play the

48:18pay the premium for the real [ __ ] >> For the real the real stuff >> as they say. >> The real stuff. The real the literal real [ __ ] >> The real the literal real [ __ ] That's what I mean. Yeah. And uh but but I think I think it's still pretty cool. >> No, that that that is so I again I think I'd only ever heard of this one time and I was like I think coffee is terrible. Well, I mean, I was from a colonial country, so tea >> is my >> Yeah, same same is my thing. A little chai tea. >> I'll take a little Earl Grey, a little oolong. However, um I understand uh coffee is what most people like to drink. >> Mhm. >> Uh as their hot drink. >> That's right. >> Or their cold drink. >> Yeah. >> Uh a nice iced chai tea latte is is

48:59quite nice. But this this is this is it's good to know because I will never be buying a cup of civic coffee. >> Yeah, I don't think it's needed. Um but we now have like the path to move from this >> un maybe if they make the fake I'll get it. Right. Right. And and also being able to call out frauds. >> Uh funny great great heartwarming story. >> I thought that was funny. >> Just make sure >> this is out of nature uh scientific reports. Look even they were like yeah this is pretty good pretty good [laughter] pretty good coffee.

Story 4 — UCLA’s sub-diffraction telescope method

49:28We're going to wrap up with uh a nice physicsdefying story out of our local favorite UCLA. We literally can almost not go through one week without the UC system being one of our stories. This week it was two of our stories. >> That's right. >> We started with UCSD. >> This story is about new tech that's making our telescopes see things >> that really shouldn't be possible. >> Yeah. And this is out of the astrophysical journal letters. Um, I'm super excited about this story. Yeah, this is this is a pretty pretty crazy story. It's out of the UCLA astrophysics

50:08department along with a bunch of other institutions. What they've done is hack the telescope and have sharper views into the universe. >> Okay? And they hacked it to the point where even I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Okay? They have they have a line that I'll get get to in their paper that I was like, "What are you talking about?" Um, okay. So, the goal is always higher angular resolution. You want to be able to resolve smaller and smaller things. The epitome of that is the event horizon telescope, which gave us that beautiful view of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the black hole in M86, which is a far far away galaxy. You're looking at uh a thing

50:49that's about the size of a solar system, maybe several solar systems, but it's millions of light years away, right? It's insane. >> It's not close. >> That Yeah, it's not close. It's something like I I mean, I think somebody was saying something like the head of a pin or they're resolving a quarter on the Empire State Building if you're looking from Los Angeles, right? Resolution is what what that means. How how fine detail can you resolve something in the night sky? And we want to always push this as far as possible. >> This is new work that came out of the UCLA astrophysics department. [snorts]

Rayleigh limit and why resolution is hard

51:24>> What they've done is demonstrate subdefraction limited astronomical measurement. Okay. And that key thing is what got me subraction limited. So what does that mean? Okay. There is a limit when it comes to the resolution that you can have with light. Okay. It's dependent on the wavelength and it's dependent on the size of your aperture. Okay. >> It's called the rally limit. If you've got two points of light that are really close together as they are on the right hand side, >> Yes. >> then they're going to look like one point of light and I won't be able to resolve them differently. >> Mhm. >> On the other hand, if I have two points that are a little bit farther apart, then I can resolve them because they're gausian peaks. This sort of like envelope of stuff. It's not technically

52:04gausian. It's like this other function called the airy function. But in any case, they don't overlap enough. I can resolve the two as separate things. Separate things, >> right? >> Yes. >> How far apart they need to be in angle. It's not actually distance, right? Because if something's closer, then they need to be closer away. If they're farther away, then they could be really far. It's the angle that matters. It's like the angle between them, right? And how far away they can be in terms of angle is determined by something called the rally criterion, which is what we just saw. >> It's it's a ratio between the wavelength >> and the diameter. Okay? wavelength divided by diameter times some constant which has to do with the the shape of your aperture. Usually it's 1.22 because your apertures are usually round. Um

52:47>> so the bigger the wavelength, the larger this angle has to be. And that makes sense, right? Because if the wavelength is really large, then you know you we've we've looked at >> large waves that try to go across a rock, they get unbothered because the large waves will just go through. The smaller waves are the ones that'll bend and that bending is what actually gives us any type of information. Um also the larger the diameter of your lens >> the smaller you can resolve. Yes. Right. That makes sense. That's why we have big telescope big big mirrors and lenses. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the reasons is light gathering. But the other reason is so that we can have uh a giant sort of

53:30defraction thingy that like lets us resolve. Yes. >> Okay. And the the one that they're doing here, they're using the 8.2 m Subaru telescope in Hawaii, >> that thing >> um you know, if we take if we take the wavelength of light to be around 656 nanome, the defraction limit there with the 8.2 m Subaru telescope is 20 mill arcsec. >> Okay. >> Okay. And to think about arcsec it's like you got degrees from degrees then you get minutes from minutes you get seconds and then from seconds is divided into 1,000 arcsec. So it goes 60 60 then 1,000. Okay. It's extremely small. Means if we were to look at Pluto right now from from Earth.

54:11>> Yes. >> Um Pluto would be a fifth the size of that angle. So Subaru telescope could actually tell Pluto and Karen apart. >> Oh yeah. >> The two the Pluto and its moon apart. Right. That that's that's >> because because its resolution is is smaller than Pluto's. >> That's that's >> right. Pluto's about 100 arcseconds and this thing's resolution is 20 millc2 times 100, right? Yep. It's a fifth of that. >> Yep. Okay. >> Okay. >> There's a bunch of problems, right? The other problem that gets to us is not just rally rally thing, which is just physics, right? Like even the Hubble has this problem. James Web has this problem. The other thing is we're under the Earth's atmosphere and the Earth's atmosphere causes the twinkling of

54:51stars. It also causes the twinkling of distant lights if you're on top of a mountain, right? Because all the Earth's atmosphere has this turbulent packets of warm air and then cold air and highly dense and then lower dense. So the light is going to is going to start moving around before it gets to your detector >> interacting with the atmosphere on its way to the whatever you're capturing it with. >> Yeah. Exactly. And so and so the resulting disc of your point source, let's say if you're trying to look at a

Adaptive optics & fake guide stars

55:20star, it's going to go up by 500 to to a,000 millarch seconds, right? It's going to be 25 to 50 times worse than that theoretical limit. Okay? And so what we can do is we can do something called adaptive optics. We can correct by making a fake star here. What you're seeing is the KEK telescope and there's two lasers pointing out at where the telescope is looking and it's creating a fake star there. >> The trick is the following. >> You've got a fake star that looks like any other star. >> But we know that it came from our laser. So, it should be stationary. >> Right. >> The star and the stuff that I'm looking at could be moving and it could have dynamics. >> But I know that the laser that I'm

56:02pointing is definitely straight. >> Right. >> Right. And the laser is going through the same bit of atmosphere that the starlight is coming in. >> So if I can change >> if I have some kind of deformable mirror >> right that is taking that starlight and right in the middle I have like little ways in which I can >> change the shape of that mirror in order to keep that laser stationary. That's going to cancel out the effects of that column of the atmosphere. >> Makes makes total sense. I I have to say this because I would be remiss if we didn't. We're in between photos six and seven on the show notes and you literally anyway. >> And I literally [laughter] did say, "Oh god."

56:42>> But still don't understand that. But >> but the but the point you're saying is because we have a a fixed point from the lasers in the sky that we can then measure and basically remove the impact of the atmosphere on how we're detecting the other stars because we have a fixed point that we control that then can remove the noise that comes from the atmosphere. >> Exactly. And then we can finally get to that defraction limit. >> Got it? >> Okay, we can finally get to what the telescope is truly capable of given rally criterion. And here what we're seeing is the center of our Milky Way in infrared. >> On the left is without adaptive optics and on the right is with adaptive optics. >> My goodness, >> you can see the huge change. This is why

Milky Way center before/after comparison

57:22this is how Andrea Gaz won the Nobel Prize. >> This is crazy. For listeners who are not watching the video, and I encourage you to go to YouTube because we always have graphics for this. On the left, it basically looks like a gradient, a red orange gradient with blobs with just it's just a massive 20 blobs. There's no discrete shape of any kind. It's just like a sauce. On the right, you can see very discreet points of light, multiple. There's maybe even in the zoomed in version, right, there's an inset. And you can see in the inset, there's like >> it's incredibly high fidelity comparatively. And and here you're looking you're looking at something called Sagittarius A star and the stars around that compact object.

58:03>> And if we were to make a movie out of this, you'd see all of the stars going around >> around an invisible point. >> Right? And that invisible point is our super massive black hole. >> And that's that's this is why Andrew GZ at UCLA won the Nobel Prize. UCLA has had an incredible history of um imaging >> techniques. Okay, they've they're really good. They've got like two floors dedicated in the um Newton Hall, I think, to just getting imaging to the next level. And this is the next sort of >> I mean LA is the home of Hollywood. So >> it is right. Yeah. So [laughter] that that is that's pretty funny. >> So So you can see now, right? Adaptive

58:43optics is insane. >> Yes. That that's that's a big The the other thing that we can do is not just adaptive optics. We can make the telescope size bigger without actually make the teles making the telescope bigger. The effective size. You've seen this the VA. You've been to the VA. Very large >> um array. Yeah. Very large array in New Mexico. A giant 27 mile long radio telescope made of smaller telescopes that are all coordinated and they can sense the time in which the light came. They can have them interfere. And so the light gathering power is not as much. You're not gathering as much light, >> but your resolution is limited by how far away

59:23your telescopes are. >> Mhm. Mhm. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Now, with radio, it's easier to do because the radio waves are slower. >> Yes. >> With visible light, it's harder. But actually, the gold standard right now is in Mount Wilson. It's called the Cara Array. It's a six six 1 m telescopes all along the mountain that you can see over there. Yes, >> the baseline is 330 m. So about three football fields wide. >> You've it's it's effectively a visible optical light telescope that is 3 football fields wide. >> And with that, >> you can achieve an angular resolution of 0.2 micro arcseconds, which is insane because you can now image other stars

1:00:03like this. >> Like this is a this is a star called Altter. It revolves really fast on its axis, which is why it's got this like really big grapefruit bulge on the equator because it's revolving so fast. >> And because in the equator, you can also see that it's dimmer. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Because like that gas is farther away from the equator compared to the pole. So it's it's a little bit dimmer, >> right? This is a single star that we're imaging like this. >> Yeah. That's that's incredible. >> It's incredible. We've also with um with the Cara array, we've been able to see sunspots on other stars. So, star spots on other stars with the car array. And it was really cool because the last time

1:00:45I went up there was for um one of these

Optical interferometry & CHARA array

1:00:50they have classical music concerts at Mount Wilson in the telescope dome. >> And I for the longest time thought that nighttime astronomy was dead. >> Mhm. at Mount Wilson because of the light pollution from Los Angeles. Nighttime astronomy had been retired and all they did was solar astronomy. But no, Cara was up there. Six small 1 m telescopes all along the mountain. They route their light through vacuum tubes. >> It was just crazy. >> And then and then they have a central array where they where they make them interfere and actually get that resolution. It was it was cool. >> Yeah. that um you know astronomy cutting edge astronomy is still alive and well in Mount Wilson >> in in beautiful sunny Los Angeles

1:01:31>> Los Angeles where it all started. [laughter] >> Um so this paper's profound claim so we've got we've gone through you know >> rally limit which is just the physics of light waves. >> Yes. >> And we've gone through the atmosphere and so on and so forth. >> Yes. The core claim that got me thinking about what this paper was they said the rally criterion is not fundamental. So it's like Jack Sparrow being like it's more like guidelines, [laughter] >> right? Like not like like I was like what are you talking about? Like I thought the rally criterion I learned this in undergrad and I thought that was it. >> Yeah. Right. Right. >> Insane. So here's the thing. >> The idea is like there previously this

1:02:12was viewed as a fundamental limitation at a physics level. at a physics level. Right? Then I started reading. So the rally criterion assumes the following. The only thing that you're sensitive to is the intensity of the light. >> Okay. >> Okay. >> Mhm. >> You've got a telescope. You've got a CCD in the back. The telescope creates an image. The CCD then tells how much intensity of light is coming from this direction, this direction, and it creates an image. >> Mhm. >> Okay. >> But light is an electromagnetic wave and there is phase information. >> Okay. >> Right. Because the electromagnetic wave

“Rayleigh is not fundamental” — extracting phase

1:02:47is coming at you. At some point it's going to be up. At some point it's going to be down this way, right? There's a phase. There's a timing >> that the light is coming through. And if you can extract the timing, >> then you have both parts of the wave. You have the amplitude which is the intensity which you already had. And you also have the timing in which that wave packet came in. >> Right. >> Yes. >> And so now it's kind of like with a complex number, right? A complex number as I said the other day, it's a clock that has a length and it has a phase. >> Yes. We were only sensitive to the length of this thing with the CCD. >> What these guys are doing now is they're getting sensitive to the phase of that light, [clears throat] >> creating much more information out of that single >> Mhm.

1:03:27>> resolution >> out of the existing system that's already there. >> Yes. >> It which is like a key. >> Yes. They're adding another little piece of equipment, >> right? >> Instead of the CCD, they have this thing that we're going to talk about, but that thing is now going to capture all of this additional information. And what's happening is they're dividing up the light into its notes, >> okay? >> Into its musical notes. Like when when you when you listen to a a musical note, let's say a chord that has a, C, and a

Mode decomposition & fiber-based waveguides

1:03:54G. >> That's that's three different piano keys that are put down, right? How does your ear hear it? Your ear actually hears the three different notes. The way it's doing it is there's hardware inside of our ear that's in the cookia. The cookia is this curled up little thing. That's a hardware part of our ear. And what it does is it's made out of cells of different thickness. Okay? The lower frequency, the bass notes are going to vibrate the cells with the big thickness. And the higher frequency are going to vibrate the thinner, smaller cells. So where in this spiral the cells are getting excited tells you which piano notes are being played. >> Okay? Our ear has hardware that is

1:04:35breaking down the sound that is coming in into its respective modes as you would say into its respective like components. >> Okay. >> We're going to do the same thing with the light that's coming through a telescope. >> Okay. >> Okay. What we have is we've got a wave guide that takes in the light that's coming in from the telescope. >> Yes. >> Okay. And then what it's going to do is make it go through this fiber optic sort of chassis. Okay. >> And all of that multimodal the the sound that's coming from an instrument is going to be broken down into these modes. >> Yes. >> Into each individual fiber optic cable. >> Yes. >> Okay. And so you're decomposing the

1:05:15light field >> into a basis of what are the notes that make up that light field >> which also changes over time. >> Yes. And each of those notes has a certain phase to it. >> Right. >> Mhm. >> Because some of the notes are going to be arriving a little bit later. some of them earlier, some of them going to be louder than the others. And so if you go to the next one, we'll have this is what the light notes look like on the on the on the left hand side over here, we've got >> the actual image. Let's say it's it's a dot with a ring around it or something like that. That can be broken up into a dot in the center. Yes. >> Then there's maybe two loes this way. There's two loes this way. And what we can do is we can say what are the what

1:05:56are the modes which are these individual notes. How do they add up to make the image that I'm seeing? That's what that's what that deconstruction is doing. >> You know what this looks like for any video or film editors that are listening? It looks like the uh color panel on Da Vinci Resolve when you're color correcting your video footage. It gives you the color wheels of all these different permut literally looks just like it. It's actually >> it's it's kind of similar in that sense, right? It's like it's extracting this like low information, right? All the stuff that makes it up. This is only really possible if you look at very simple objects. For example, a single star or like stuff around a single star.

1:06:38If you wanted to, you know, image the Eagle Nebula or something that this wouldn't really work. But the mathematics is simple because the source is simple. And because the source is simple, I only need to worry about the first like 20 notes. >> I got I don't need to worry about cuz you can I mean in theory you can recreate any image using like just a bunch of like notes like this but in practice it's going to get difficult with a simple >> objective which is just we we're looking at a star we want to resolve the stuff in the star and around the star very very nicely that's what we can do and the key principle is the phase information of that input is now converted into a measurable intensity difference between all of these different notes right if the stars position for example it shifts then one

1:07:20of those fiber optic inputs is going to be brighter than the other. If it ships the other way, then another fiber optic input is going to be brighter. Right. >> Yes. >> And the raw data has gone from being a CCD >> to now it's not a picture of the star, but it's 38 different spectra in each of these different modes. >> Okay. So, it's like how how >> how loud was this note at this frequency? >> Yes. >> So to speak, >> so to speak. Right. Right. This is but but that's the best way that I can describe it. >> They're trying to distill it into an analogy that doesn't require us to go through more. >> Yeah. Go through all of the all of the data, but it's like it's like they've basically got 19 different notes and two

1:08:02polarizations because polarization is also important, right? The electric field oscillating this way or this way tells us something about this what the what the thing is that is producing that light. So, it's 19 different nodes all in two different polarizations to get 38 different spectra. The the idea is before we were looking at just like one box and now we have like 19 boxes with two flavors >> uh to analyze the same object we were looking at before that was just one box. >> Yes. Exactly. And the and the one box sure it had the direct information of how bright this thing was. But now we're just sophisticating it right. We're no longer taking let's say just how loud the sound is but what are the thingies

1:08:44on top? The another analogy this makes me think of is like uh for DJs you when you get a track, right, the track is like one audio waveform and it has the drums, it has the vocals, it has everything as one waveform. >> Exactly. >> Now there's all these AI tools that allow you to separate out the drums from the vocals from the synths and now you have it as these indiv and like there is information when you're looking at just the individual instrument that is hard to decipher when you're looking at the single >> waveform. Yeah. Yeah. And this is very similar to that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think I think that's a good analogy, right? It's taking that aggregate light and it's decomposing it into these individual modes, you know.

1:09:24Um, >> and what you can do now, the the the second thing that you can do is this star it's >> it's got two different So, this star specifically, what they're looking at is um a star in Canis Minorus, Beta CMI. It's 162 lighty years away. It's surrounded by a gas of hydrogen. Canis Minoris is one of the two dogs that are the hunting companions of Orion the the hunter. And so this star specifically, it's got a gas of hydrogen around it. And that gas is spinning so fast that we can see a Doppler shift where on one side there's it's blue shifted cuz it's

1:10:05coming at us and on the other side it's red shifted cuz it's going away. Right? So what we want to do is resolve this gas cloud. Okay, there's two ways to do this. There's two steps. The first is to say, okay, all of the light, most of the light is coming from the star, right? >> There's going to be some jitter >> because of the adaptive optics. Remember when we talked about um the episode

H-alpha subtraction to resolve hydrogen disks

1:10:29about AI being used for LIGO for the gravitational observatory and I told you that when you have these control systems you can eliminate low frequency noise but you're going to inject high frequency noise right this thing is injecting high frequency noise right so that there's going to be some jitter >> of the star there right what you can do is you can capture that response map of a single star that's basically telling you how the instrument and this modal system that we have is responding to that jitter at every single point that the star is at. Okay. So, you've got a response map effectively being like this is what the astronomical jitter

1:11:11>> from the star is. >> Yes. Yes. >> That's from all of the light. >> Yes. >> Then what you do is you look at something called the Halpha emission line. Okay. The Halpha emission line is because of quantum mechanics. Hydrogen has discrete levels. Yes. Right. And whenever the hydrogen atom trans whenever the hydrogen atom goes from the n= 3 to n= 2 energy, it releases this red light that's right at 650 nanome about I think 656 nanome. Okay. So if we look only at that frequency of light, we're going to see the gas cloud >> the the accretion the the disc of

1:11:53hydrogen around the star. >> So what we can do is we can take an image in the Halpha line. >> We can take an image with all the light subtract the two and we'll get a nice >> hydrogen gas cloud >> that is surrounding the star. And so it's like not just that. Okay. We're now able to basically make the stars structure and the gas cloud structure discrete >> using this methodology. >> Yes. Exactly. And we can do it because this is subdiff defraction, right? >> This is we're we're going way inside what rally even thought was possible. >> Yes. Okay. Yes. That Okay. That tracks >> it's pretty cool. And and what they found is with this with this technique,

1:12:34they founded that the the disc was lopsided. >> It's not completely like a plate. It's it's not symmetric. There's like a little bulge to it that they actually saw. And there's a nonzero shift >> in that accretion disc. And that means that now the modelers can go and be like, "Okay, how do we how do we get something like this?" Right? >> What is causing that non-zero shift? >> Exactly. >> Yeah. I mean, I think I think it's really cool. It proves that, you know, you've got this compact. It's cost effective. You just like stick it in the back of the telescope. >> Right. Where the light was coming in. Now, now it goes through this other thing. >> It's It's a bolt-on. It's like a bolt-on. Yeah. Like you don't have to rebuild any of these systems from scratch. You can add this as a as a as

1:13:15an add-on and it just receives the existing feed and then processes. >> Yeah. And then process it in its own way. And there's there's I mean there's so much more that we can do with this. You can put this on a space telescope for example cuz those guys are also limited by rally but maybe not anymore. >> Um and and the last photo that we had photo 19 I just wanted to >> dwell on a little bit. There you can see the gas cloud. You can see the clear Doppler. >> Yes. Red blue shift. >> Red blue shift right between the part that's coming away from us and the part that's coming towards us. The blue is where it's coming from towards us and the red is where it's going away. And that scale bar is one >> micro >> arcsec. >> Arcsec right and I told you before that

1:13:55it used to be 20. Now you've resolved stuff to to that

One-microarcsecond resolution & lopsided disk discovery

1:13:59>> to one. And you can even see the lopsidedness that you were talking about earlier in this too. This is this is un >> so it's it's I think it's it's a new dawn of like you know higher than rally resolution. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Which is I mean >> I think it's going to be really really cool. Again this is the where we talk about this all the time. There's a compounding happening right now of these fundamental either techniques, methodologies tools >> combination of these things that are now not only allowing us to take our existing tooling and make it better. take our existing data sets and analyze it differently. Yeah. By giving us a totally new way in which we see the world around us. Yeah.

1:14:40>> Um this was this was a good story. I think it's really cool. No, that that

Weekly wrap and closing notes

1:14:43that's this was really cool. We covered uh this was a super episode. We hit four stories. >> Yep. >> Uh I don't think we're going to hit two hours this episode. We we went through it quick. We started with UCSD. We're mass-producing camouflage from octopus octopi. >> Yeah. >> Uh this was out of UCSD. By hijacking bacteria, >> by hijacking the factory, the biosynthesis, we're now telling these organisms, you got to go through the factory to make what we want before you can make what you want. >> Which is crazy. >> Crazy. >> We This was not This is not an ethics podcast. [laughter] >> Um that was a nature biotechnology. Our second story was about these new hunting techniques and orcas. um both out of CSU Madre Bay and the Protex Conversion

1:15:24Pelagasia Associ AC that was in frontiers of marine science. That was a cool story because a lot of news there's been a lot of news about the yachts being crushed by all of the all the orcas but understanding culture >> might not be specific to human beings. There's this non >> you know this cross pod communication process happening. Our third story was about civot [ __ ] coffee and nature nature scientific reports out of the University of Catala. Um that was >> that was hilarious. That was fun. I'm never buying $80 coffee. I barely buy $9 coffee, which is what it is now in LA. >> And we ended with our second UC story of the day out of UCLA. Uh we are now able

1:16:07to take our telescopes and see more and deeper into the universe in a way we have not before. The imagery difference that we showed was >> was crazy. Yeah, because it's it's like obviously you don't have to be someone who knows. You can look at one and look in the other be like that, >> oh wow, that's crazy. >> That's better. >> Yeah, that's really far away and okay, we can see it that well. >> I I know when I'm trying to zoom in on my iPhone and I see all the Samsung Galaxy commercials about how you can go zoom into a skyscraper. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um, fantastic episode as always. We appreciate you guys joining us. Please, if you've made it this far, there's very few of you, but if you have made it this far, I want you to comment either Civot

1:16:49uh Wagwan or we love you Krishna in the comments so we know you've made it this far. Please subscribe, share it with a friend. We're trying to really push science. The shutdown is over. Yes. >> Which might mean we'll get some scientific funding back in the in the mix. >> We still need to do more. >> We cannot fall behind. always >> um I'm joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Chowy. My name is Lester Nar. This [music] is from first principles. We'll see you guys next week. [music]

1:17:33>> [music] [bell]