EP 22 · 40:27

ReForm — a synthetic pathway that turns electrochemical CO₂/formate into acetyl-CoA

From Cloud9 Dark Matter Halo, Jellyfish Sleep, and String Theory Hidden in Nature

Episode
6/16
String-theory geometry shows up in real biological networks, jellyfish sleep may be DNA repair, and Cloud9 could be a starless dark-matter halo.
Transcript

520 words · auto-generated from the episode video

40:27basically the idea is like as you hit the asteroid if it's full of iron, it's going to like ring, >> you know, and and sort of dissipate its energy internally, maybe heat up a little bit, but it's not going to totally >> break apart. >> Yes. The the context analogy for this one is it's similar to hitting a pool of obl, which is cornstarch and water. If you poke it slowly, >> yeah, >> it's soft, but if you punch it hard, turns into a solid wall. And these asteroids essentially have this hardening response to an impact, making them tougher to move. So, if you're in planetary defense, we can't just bomb and shoot our problems away. Yeah. Uh, >> you got to get a little bit clever, but

41:08>> the asteroid could do some of the work for you. >> Uh, Armageddon was a great movie. >> It was a good movie. I like that movie. >> There was uh one of uh Ben Affleck's greatest works was the DVD commentary on uh >> I have not watched Armageddon because if you remember, it was like a bunch of guys who work on an oil rig came into NASA and they were like, "We have no one else on the planet who can do this job other than a bunch of guys from the oil rig rig." which Ben Affleck was making fun of in his DVD commentary. He's like, why would NASA not know how to drill, >> right? Oh, yeah. It's like, why [laughter] couldn't we just train astronauts >> to do oil rigs? Maybe that's easier than training oil riggers to be astronauts.

41:49>> Yeah. >> And he was h having a fun time taking the piss. Our story number two, reform an artificial metabolism for carbon. Uh this is a synthetic biology story. Uh January 5th, 2026 headline, "Synthetic biologists transform waste CO2 into the building blocks of life. Scientists have created an entirely new artificial metabolism that bypasses natural evolution to turn waste carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals. And this is out of Stanford University and Northwestern University led by Michael Jwitt." Yeah,

42:31this one's a pretty interesting one. It's using like this cellfree system. So, they remove all of the enzymes from a cell. They put it inside a test tube and then what you can do is screen thousands, I think 3,000 enzyme variants to create what they call the reform pathway. And what it's doing is it's a synthetic system. So, it's outside of a living cell. And it's taking formate, which is a chemical compound that's derived from CO2, and converting that into acetal co-enzyme A, which is a universal molecule found in all living cells. It's part of our metabolism. Mitochondria love it. So on and so forth. And it provides a path for sustainable carbon neutral manufacturing because if we want to take CO2 out of

43:11the atmosphere, we got to get clever. Maybe this is one of the ways that we do it. >> Mhm. The for those who were lost in the

From the episode
  1. EP 22

    Cloud9 Dark Matter Halo, Jellyfish Sleep, and String Theory Hidden in Nature

    String-theory biology, jellyfish sleep, and a possible naked dark-matter halo.

    String-theory geometry shows up in real biological networks, jellyfish sleep may be DNA repair, and Cloud9 could be a starless dark-matter halo.