Golden Goose Awards 2026: The Science Behind the Winners (Part 1)

Golden Goose Awards trailer

0:00A noise complaint, holiday lights, and a coffee stain. What could they possibly have in common? They are the unlikely beginnings of discoveries with unexpected benefits. And this year's Golden Goose Awards honors the federally funded research behind those stories. Jan Su and her colleagues spent decades turning an unexpected lab result into a way to destroy liver tumors with sound. NASA's black marble team spotted holiday light patterns from space. The same tools that reveal cities brightening from celebrations can show them going dark after disasters and track power

0:41returning. And Sydney Nagel found deep physics inside everyday messes. Shifting sand, splashing drops, and the ring left by a drying drop of coffee. Turning those surprises into something useful took years of experiments, sustained support, and people willing to keep asking questions. Today, we're exploring the science behind these discoveries and the questions that made them possible. This is from first principles, and these are the Golden Goose Awards.

Introducing our Golden Goose special

1:19Hello internet. This is your captain speaking Lester Narre joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Chowdery. This week is part one of our special coverage of the 2026 Golden Goose Awards organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science or TripleA. These awards are meant to shine a light on federally funded research that starts out as basic research and results in incredible practical applications, hence the name Golden Goose. By the time you are watching this, we will have attended

1:59the ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and have done interviews with all three of the award-winning research stories that we are going to cover today. Those interviews along with our conversation with AAAS CEO Sudep Periq will be coming out in part two. Today we're going to be getting to know the researchers and unpacking the science behind their discoveries. As always, we are going to talk about the science from the ground up. And if you want to get the best coverage of the latest breaking science around the world, be sure to subscribe. Now for our first story,

Zhen Xu: From a noise complaint to histotripsy

2:42let's start with a noise complaint that helped set a remarkable discovery in motion. Our first story is from noise complaint to cancer treatment recognizing Dr. Jun Shu the Lee Kashing Endowed Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Umish uh in the early 2000s Shu was a graduate student in the late professor Charles Ka's lab uh unfortunately he passed away in 2020. They were investigating ways to remove heart tissue using ultrasound and the

3:24idea was to help children who had congenital heart disease without open surgery which would obviously be incredible. Uh but the experimental setup was so loud that her labmates started to make some complaints. So she tried changing the pulse sequence to quiet it down. And when she tested those pulses on pig hearts, she saw something remarkable which was that the tissue was breaking apart. That observation helped launch more than two decades of work by Shu and her colleagues to develop hystotripsy. one of my favorite names for an area of

4:05study with funding support from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. Now, this is a great visual labeled bubble cloud uh of what we're talking about here. So, historic uses short intense pulses of focused ultrasound to create a cloud of tiny bubbles in targeted tissue. As those bubbles expand and collapse, they physically break the tissue apart. All without an incision. And that's what we're looking at here, which is just an incredible visual. >> Absolutely incredible >> to understand. And the the complexity of this just blows my mind. >> Yeah. >> So, Shu and her colleagues co-founded Histoics in 2009 to help bring this

4:47technology to patients. Again, starting from a place of just trying to make the labmates happy because there's a little bit of loudness happening. Um, its Edison system received FDA authorization in 2023 for non-invasive destruction of liver tumors specifically. But the question is, how do you control something uh as violent as the collapsing of bubbles precisely enough to use it inside the human body? Yeah, I mean it's it's an incredible question that first you have to like control the collapsing bubbles and then you have to move it around. If you go back to that video that you just showed, right? There's a bubble that you've somehow

5:28engineered using sound inside of the human body which has tissue so it's not like water where the speed of sound is the same everywhere, right? You've got to control where the bubble is. It can't be too big otherwise it messes up all the other tissue that's nearby. you've got to control where it is and you have to control the duration otherwise it's going to kill or cause heat and things like that. Um, fundamentally it's kind of a physics question. >> Mhm. >> Right. Um, how do you actually do that?

The early ultrasound experiments

5:58So for this segment I wanted to go through five papers that Chu co-authored along her journey from um the 2004 all the way till now. She is obviously the um a professor now at the University of Michigan, but she's actually also an alumni. She did her masters and her PhD there. And the story starts when she was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Obviously, the University of Michigan hired her cuz they're like, "Yeah, >> she's going to win the Golden Goose Award one day." Um, so it's an early experiment where you have to control cavitation and then try to figure out how it's going to actually work. Right? So the first paper

6:40we're going to look at is in 2004. This is the um original paper that kind of puts her on the map. The original medical problem was hypoplastic left heart syndrome. you alluded to this with um the idea that some newborns the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped and if the partition you can see over there on the left is a normal heart >> and on the right hand side is a heart with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The left ventricle and the and the left atrium are much smaller than the right hand side. Right? And the way the heart works is you need both of these ventricles to pump blood in and

7:21out of the lungs, oxygenate it, and then put it back, right? There's one pump for the entire body, and that's the heart. And if the pump has like two motors you can think about, and one of them is missing, it's not very good. Y >> on top of that um the connection valve between the atrium and the ventricle often times it there's no hole >> like they're not even connected. So so >> it's it's very very difficult to even have a normally functioning heart right and that's why hypoplastic left heart syndrome it's a defect of where the the structures on the left hand side are hypoplastic meaning very small or not even formed at all. Okay. So what what

8:04we'd like to do is create a little hole in that valve so that it becomes a valve and it can open and close. Okay. So Ju's group asked whether focused ultrasound might make an opening without putting a cutting in instrument through the tissue which makes sense. It's basically can can we change the structure such that the functionality we're looking for is is a possibility. Yeah. without too much second and third order consequences or damage to the other surrounding areas. >> Yeah, that's right. And in 2004, they have this paper that comes out controlled ultrasound tissue erosion. It's in the ITE E um conference papers.

8:45And the paper does not establish a clinical treatment. Okay, it's just doing experiments on a model organism in this case canines. Um before the bubbles, let's just think about sound waves. Okay, so ultrasound is a soundwave. It's a sound wave is an oscillation in pressure and at at a point in tissue you can focus all the pressure and the pressure alternates between like some ambient value and then above and below that ambient value. Um you've you might have heard about um ultrasound therapy for cancer for example. So in this case what ends up happening is you focus the ultrasound using a transducer into a tumor and those pressure

9:28amplitudes are there away from the region they're not there. This is called acoustic focusing because you're taking sound and you're focusing kind of like a lens. Um and in this conventional focused ultrasound treatment the usual picture is heat in the middle. You just want to heat up that tumor and like burn it off literally, right? Um the tissue absorbs that acoustic energy, the temperature rises, and then the sufficiently hot cells die off. So perhaps you can kill the tumor that way, right? >> Mhm. >> Zu's group was after another outcome. They wanted the tissue to disappear from a very sharply defined region, like an actual opening. You don't want to merely patch the tissue that's like destined to

10:10die later. You want to literally open it up. M >> you want to destroy the mechanically rather than cooking it in some sense. >> Right. And you want it to be precise uh in in 3D space because you're trying to create this opening. Exactly. It's not just some generalized region. >> Exactly. And so their experience they made did a bunch of experiments where they um varied pulse duration, how often the pulses are repeated. um very short intense pulses they found delivered at suitable repetition rates eroded the tissue very effectively and you could see this effect happening. You could see in in the model organisms you can see they're creating holes in the atrial

10:50septum and then on the right hand side they use Doppler ultrasound to observe flow through it. Um, for anyone who has um been lucky enough to um you know have a have a child, you recognize the Doppler ultrasound. That's like when they you look at like the you literally use the Doppler effect. This is something that I saw when I was in the hospital like looking at the um you know the fetus that ultimately became my child. Um, but you can you can look at you can visualize blood flow by look using the Doppler effect to see like stuff that's moving out and stuff that's moving in. Like there's literally you can observe red and blue shifts and and the color coding is red and blue for

11:32like stuff moving away from you and stuff moving closer to you. And I was looking at that going that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Right. Usually I I you learn about that stuff in astrophysics when it's like red shift, blue shift, stuff moving away like but here they use the same colors >> to to to show um like movement of fluid >> and and so just briefly as we uh particularly for some of our audio listeners, we're looking at two sets of images. The one on the left is showing basically a before and after >> of this approach of the actual physical tissue. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think these are both after actually. the both after where it's now >> creating >> you're creating these cavities like literal holes in the tissue and on the right hand side you're using the Doppler

12:13effect to show that fluid is moving through that tissue >> which is ultimately the functionality that you're trying to restore >> exactly um and and the way they do this is with cavitation. So cavitation is the idea of um using sound waves to create a bubble and then precisely maneuvering that bubble, the size of it and so on and so forth. And it's a intuitive distinction between cooking versus mechanical disintegration which we talked about earlier, right? Cooking is what we do with the traditional ultrasound therapies when we want to just like heat stuff up. Here we're using a bubble to like expand and contract rapidly and that's going to mess with all of the tissue around it.

12:54And it's incredible that we can do this with sound waves, right? >> Um the the material is still there but the proteins and the structure have changed. And like with with this hystotripsy the you can use that pressure to start this cavitation. The bubbles expand and contract over these short pulses and they create mechanical strain. It's it's very very cool. >> It's it's such an interesting you know it even conceptually as an idea um to to think to do so >> as a sort of clinical approach. >> Exactly. So you you've been able to create a bubble, right? The question now becomes um

13:36how do you control it really really well? >> Right. So we said we we were able to

Controlling cavitation with microtripsy

13:42instantiate this cavitation process. >> Yeah. Now I need to localize this. >> Yeah. We now we need controllability. >> Right. We need really precise controllability for this to be a clinical application. So that's where we get into the next paper. This is um a paper again in it e explore hystoripsy beyond the intrinsic cavitation threshold >> using al very short ultrasound pulses. So they call it microy micro. Now, um here's the idea. So, like you're using sound, right? Um and sound has a particular wavelength, right? Even this ultrasound is going to have a particular wavelength, but my

14:24target region could be much smaller >> than this wavelength. >> It's a question about resolution >> at the end of the day, right? like I've let's say I've got a focused region and I want to I I want to put a bunch of pressure amplitude using the sound into this area. Um it's largest near the center and then it falls off, right? So there's going to be a large area where I could produce bubbles and it becomes a stochastic process. >> So how do I control where the bubbles happen and where they don't? I need a very nice turning on and turning off mechanism. >> That's also specific again to an XYZ

15:05position in 3D space. >> Yeah. Yeah. But but here's the idea. The only thing I can focus really is the sound waves. And the sound waves have an inherent blurriness, >> right? >> So So how do I how do I actually control where the bubbles are happening? Well, it turns out cavitation naturally is a nonlinear switch. Ah, >> okay. And that's what this this paper is about that. So on the X here's we've got we've got a plot from that paper and I thought this was very very cool. So on the x-axis is your pressure. >> Mhm. >> Okay, this is the pressure that you're creating using your ultrasound and on the y-axis is the cavitation probability.

15:45Notice it is not a linear function. Yeah, >> it's not like at 10 megapascals there's like 20% probability, at 20 there's 40, at 30 there's 60 and it just linearly increases. No, there is a regime >> where it switches on and off. >> Okay. So, what you can do, you can't control the spatial extent, >> okay, >> of your sound waves, but you can control how loud they are. >> Mhm. >> Okay. And if you can control how loud they are, imagine a wave, right, that's massive. Even like take the extreme case of a wave that has a crest that is a meter big. But if I can control this the the amplitude of this wave very

16:26precisely, how loud this wave is, the the the spots, even though the wavelength of my sound wave is like a meter long, the spots where um the pressure goes above a certain threshold can be as small as I want it to be. So this is a degree of freedom where we have a level of precision and you basically use that as part of your first point of control. >> Yeah. Because you can't control the wavelength of the sound in some sense, right? Like you're limited by the technology of our time and by the physics of the thing. Like I mean if you make the sound wave too short then the bubble >> is not going to happen anymore, right? And like the focusing capability is not going to happen anymore. So there's level precision where we can know that we can create this height of the wave

17:09>> and that height of the wave is a a factor in this cavitation process. That is a good control to have. >> Exactly. And the height of the wave is the x-axis on this plot, right? And so >> suppose I make the suppose the threshold is exactly I don't know uh over here it seems like to be 25 megapascals, right? >> So if the if the entire amplitude of the wave is only let's say 26 or 27 there's going to be a very tiny region >> that goes above that 20 26 right 27. If on the other hand I want to target a very large area. I make the the sound super loud like 40 and then most of the sound wave is going to go above that threshold. You see? So I'm controlling

17:49the space based on the loudness of the ultrasound. >> So if you want to make the speaker go to 11, >> you're going to take care of everything. But if you only make it the speaker go to four. >> Yeah. Then >> it's it's a smaller area. >> It's a smaller area. And they show this with the next figure that I have. Um here they they've got um they tested this idea with red blood cell phantoms where you can clear the clearing can make the damage visible and this is again in canine tissues at lower pressures. So that's on the left hand side. >> At lower pressures, the size of the cavitation is very small. >> Mhm. >> But all I'm doing now is increasing the pressure. And as I increase the pressure

18:29and I'm focusing on this region, I get >> I can make the size of my cavitation much larger where the bubbles are happening are now much larger. And that is actually how I control localization. >> So this is interesting. So I think part of what we're saying is the knob we have that we can twist in this context is do we want small bubble or big bubble and depending on the use case you can have multiple small bubble multiple big bubble but the point is the the the there's a dial for the size of the cavitation I'm using bubble as >> layman's term >> no but there is it's a bubble yeah >> um and that and we have very the the ability to have sort of fine control

19:11over that size is is an is an important factor in again having functional control over whatever outcome we want to implement this cavitation towards. Exactly. It's like um it reminds me of like the the mountain Kilamanjaro. >> Mhm. >> Kilimanjaro is a massive mountain. Okay. The size of like like states in the United States, right? Several European countries is a single mountain. But the amount of ice on that mountain is only at the summit. >> Mhm. >> Right. And so, um, you're not breaking defraction. There's a diffraction limit similar to the diffraction limits that we've talked about on this podcast with light, right? Where it's like I can't localize the light beam to a certain small amount because of the wavelength

19:52of light. Well, in this case, similarly, the wavelength of sound prevents me from localizing the sound in a certain spot. But I can make it loud and I can control the loudness, the height of Kilimanjaro, for example. And if only the tip is above that threshold, then I've I can make stuff, you know, small enough for my for my liking. I thought that was that was pretty cool. >> No, that's quite nice. That's quite nice. >> Yeah. So So that was that was that that um >> second paper. >> Second paper. Now um our attention has been very local, right? Like where are the bubbles? Which cells are being broken up? Um now let's talk about what

Tumor destruction and the immune response

20:31happens when we try to target tumors. >> Yeah. Right. Okay. >> Right. >> What happens? What happens to the immune response? Because this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum in the body. You start messing with stuff. There's the police are going to come. >> There's a lot going on >> and be like, what's going on >> as we talk about a lot biology is uh not so simple. >> Yeah. So, we're going to we're going to jump start all the way to 2020. This is a paper um called non-therrmal hypotripsy tumor ablation promotes abscopal immune responses that enhance cancer amunotherapy. >> So it turns out that using these cavitation bubbles to take care of

21:12tumors actually o overpowers the immune response that is innate within the body. I think what's interesting too here just maybe taking a step back is you know amunotherapies are one tool in the toolbox right to combat cancer and tumors. What we're saying here is that by using this methodology of cavitation we're actually increasing the efficacy of our hammer. >> Yep. That we're using as a separate tool. And so there's this this this there's this increased correlation effect. >> Yeah. uh that it it it

21:53has a direct functional output. >> Yeah. >> But it also has this other benefit to other uh clinical therapies that we're using to solve in particular this issue uh around around cancer. >> Exactly. And and I want I want to talk about why that is cuz I was thinking like you know we've got the ultrasound therapies as what I was talking about right where you just heat up the tumor and then and then you burn it off. >> Yeah. Um, how come this is somehow better? >> Because so we have two things that both affect tumors structures >> and they both use sound ultrasound >> and they both use sound. But why is it that this >> this particular one is better? >> Okay. >> Well, it's that cooking versus disintegrating analogy that I was talking about. >> Um, with with the traditional ultrasound

22:35therapies, you heat up a tumor, right? And when you heat that up, >> that's going to burn off the tumor cells, the cancerous cells. Now, on the other hand, with this cavitation, you're going to break cells apart, but the components of those cells are still around. >> Yeah. >> And they're going to be available for immune recognition. >> You see what I'm saying? >> We're not deleting evidence from the crime scene. >> Yeah. We're not melting it. We're just like pulverizing it. But the immune cells can still that the police can still come and look at the evidence and be like, >> "Okay, >> I I probably should have been paying attention." >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. But but you know what I mean? And so some of the components of those tumor

23:16cells that are broken down >> are tumor antigens. They're molecular features that an immune response is going to learn to target. >> On the other hand, if you just burn it off, those are now denatured proteins. The >> the the immune cells don't really know what they're looking at. It's it's the melted steel versus like intact stuff. Would would an analogy for this be we have undercover immune agents embedded everywhere >> when we burn them off the undercover immune agents when the immune response comes to the crime scene. >> Yeah. >> Right. They don't see them. >> Yeah. >> And so they're like our our undercovers are gone. >> Yeah. >> So we need to do something. >> Yeah. >> With cavitation we're saying the undercover immune agents, they may not

23:57be at the spot they were assigned to, but they're in the vicinity. And so they can still >> And there's like pieces of >> and and we can still be okay. Okay. This this it's still here. Yeah. >> And so I'm not going to I'm not going to overreact in my response. >> Yeah. But I'm at least going to learn what's going on here. I am going to heighten my response. I'm going to I'm going to like >> be more vigilant. That's a good distinction. >> You know what I mean? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good Yeah. There. Exactly. Rather than being eviscerated from the from the scene, >> there's presence >> and you can then glean what your next action should be because there's some presence. >> Cuz a lot of the immune system are detectives, right? They're not just like like dumb beat cops. There's a lot of

24:38people that have like there's a lot of detectives that have memory that have the ability to to take antigens, recognize them for the rest so that if the tumor shows up elsewhere or something and that's something that we're going to get to. >> We got some immune Columbos on the scene. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so um this hystootripsy it's associated actually with the infiltration by innate and adaptive immune cells in the treated tumor >> including tumor reactive te- cell responses. So in the control you have just you know normal ablation >> and when you use hystootripsy the concentration of these T- cell receptors the CD8 plus

25:19T- cells they go up. This this is a >> the CD4 T plus T T cells like all of these guys that are like geared to learn about what the tumor is and make sure that that tumor does not show up elsewhere. It's going up. It it's it it it's it's so interesting because >> I don't know that this outcome is obvious >> you know but >> it's not I mean now that I think about it sure but like in 2000 when when or you know like five or however many 10 10 years ago when like this cavitation was being used >> not obvious at all I think and it's

25:59really it it's such a nice also because again we always talk about how there's a building block process to get to um ultimately something that is viewed as practical or functional for humanity. And it's like, hey, look, we have this new functionality. >> Just because you have functionality doesn't mean it has practical applications. >> Yeah. And this has more practical applications than what you even started out. I mean, you started out with just like why is the sound bad >> into okay, let's like try to burn a hole in the left ventricle >> to wait. This can supercharge cancer cancer therapies, >> right? Right. That that are already existing in what what folks who are

26:39dealing with this >> have to do. >> Yeah. >> To stand a fighting chance and you're basically saying, "Oh, yeah. Oh, by the way, >> it's going to make the thing you're already doing, which is is it's tough on the it's complicated. There's a lot, but it's it's going to make it more effective." That I I'm I'm just I did not expect that outcome. >> Yeah. I didn't expect this one either. And just one more figure from this paper. Yeah. >> Is um it shows that the effects on the tumors outside of the treated site. Okay. So you're treating with cavitation with this um hystootripsy in a certain spot and now you look at um pulmonary metastases. >> Mhm. >> Elsewhere. Okay. So so lung cancer

27:20happening maybe in the other lung or like there's a cancer happening here. Did it travel to the lung? Right. Um how is it moving out? because the immune response has been supercharged, right? The the ones that are treated with the hystootey versus the control night and day difference. The ones that are treated with hystootripsy have a much higher suppression >> of these pulmonary metastases. This is the the the the immune response sets up a tighter perimeter which then prevents the spread more than if it had not happened at all. >> Yeah. I mean this this is really really cool. I thought this was the most

28:02interesting conceptual turn you know and like a bubble cloud has become a biological instrument now right. It's in the first paper it was just like okay we want to remove tissue >> here the same kind of mechanical intervention >> can change the information available to the immune cells. >> Yeah. throughout the organism in the entire body. So this is like a definition of like >> a precise surgical tool that is doing way more than what we paid for. >> Way more than just the initial precise surgical outcome that you were looking for. >> That's right. So now we get to our

Histotripsy through the skull

28:34fourth paper in 2021. Transcranial magnetic resonance guided hystootripsy for brain surgery. We are not just done with cancer. We're going to go to brain surgery. This is a preclinical investigation by Zu and her colleagues. They tested whether they could make controlled lesions behind pig brains inside pig brains while transmitting through an excised human skull. This is a human skull that has been donated for medical research. So this is a preclinical experiment and the geometry is worth explaining. So you've got the pig skull which is the model organism and there's a human skull around it. So we want to test whether this ultrasound can go through the human skull and

29:16actually do brain surgery on neural tissue inside. The skull is notoriously a terrible interface. Okay, I dealt with this as a PhD student, right? Like if you do if you do um just ECOG, ECOG data is terrible. Okay, look, I'm sorry. It's not terrible. It's not terrible, but like I'm a Ephys guy, which means like it's invasive. But I had to do it on rodents obviously because I wanted highfidelity 40 kHz data. I want 40,000 data points per second so that I can localize single neurons and things like that right? >> You wanted 4K, you're getting 480p. >> Yeah. like no it's like uh 20

29:56>> 20 >> and and really like ECOG data like the stuff that you see of like the um you know patients with electrodes on their skull even if you had even even if you put that ECOG wires on a data acquisition system that was taking data at 40,000 hertz like 40,000 data points a second it would be a total waste because all frequencies higher than like 40 hertz don't pass through the brain. So you would just see giant waves like this, right? Any blip that is like a millisecond long, which is about the size of an action potential, is not going to make it through the skull. So there's no point in like taking data at

30:38that fast of a rate. And I think part of the so what I'm understanding the part of the point here is is ultimately if we want to take this from the experimental environment to being functional for humans anything that's passing through a skull matters and the human skull specifically is is the barrier that we need to make sure that this actually gets through. >> Yeah. I mean there's a very good reason right the the brain is a nice thing that we have evolved over the last 10 million years and uh the skull has been evolved to take care of that brain. Okay. So like I'm not saying the skull is a bad thing. I'm just saying it's a little bit annoying for basic science research and for basic medical procedures. So the

31:18skull is a difficult electronic device as I just told you, but it's also difficult acoustically for the same reason. So like ultrasound is there's going to be impedance >> from the skull and so and so there's going to be problems, right? It attenuates sound and the thickness and the internal structure vary across the beam. like there's the skulls can be thick here and and thinner on other parts. So different paths through the bone delay the wave by different amounts. You're going to get like weird defraction signatures when the ultrasound goes through the brain. So all of that has to um has to be dealt with. These are engineering problems as much as biological ones if you want to use ultrasound >> and precision matters as we've

31:58discussed. >> Exactly. So what they what these guys did was they used a 128 element 700 kHz array. >> Okay, >> compatible with a three Tesla MRI scanner. So they've got an MRI scanner at the same time that they're administering ultrasound. Why? Because the ultrasound, they're trying to mess with the brain that's on the inside. The MRI scanner is their read cuz they want to see how what what it was like before and then they mess with it with the ultrasound. What's it like after? Can I localize my pulses? Right? Turns out they can. Um, they had successful treatment in eight pig brains and the MRI treatment regions show that they actually also did hisystologology which is the real ground truth. I think

32:40hisystologology meaning you take out the brain, you put it into slices, you stain it and then you can really see what's happening in the tissue, right? And this is a slice of that brain and there's clear demarcation. Okay, the D is the disrupted debris from my target. >> Oh my goodness. The eye is the intact neurons. And you can see just how sharp >> the interface is. >> Yeah. >> Right between the part of the brain that you wanted to ablate and sort of disrupt and the part that you wanted to keep intact. The scale bar there is 100 microns. >> This is unbelievable. >> Incredible. I mean the the thickness of that black line there, I would say tops is 10 microns. I'd even say maybe one to

33:21one to five. That's the size of large neurons. Okay. maybe groups of small neurons. >> And so we're we're now getting confirmational data that our the level of precision when going through a human skull of this ultra ultrasound approach has micron level thick. >> Mhm. >> Precision. >> Precision. >> That's right. >> And and we built this, right? Because in the beginning we were just doing bubbles and then we built, okay, how do we how do we make sure that >> the the the precision is there? Well, we can actually tune the amplitude of the pressure wave and now we can actually do it within the skull. We can deal with all of the defraction and all of the

34:02weird wave stuff that's happening on the skull. >> And it seems like the skull is a region because obviously we've targeted different parts of the body over the course of this discussion. The heart uh we obviously we're going to get to other places but the brain now is another >> and the uh the uh the TSA of the brain is pretty tough to get through. >> Yes. Exactly. And um the one one other thing I want to just touch on here before we move on to our fifth paper. Why use hystootripsy um rather than just heating for this job? >> Well, it's in the name itself. You don't want to heat the brain. >> Mhm. >> The brain is incredibly conductive.

34:42>> There's fluid everywhere. And so >> if you heat part of the brain, that heat is going to travel. Thanks to the Navier Stokes >> which we which we tune in to our last episode for that one four hour. >> There's gonna be a lot more Navier Stokes in the last when when we talk about Sydney. Yeah. Um and his physics stuff but for now >> because fluid can sort of transport energy very well. That's a really bad thing. On the other hand histori the pulses can have a very low duty cycle. A duty cycle is imagine you've got a sine wave right? A sine wave is exactly half duty cycle. It's one up one down. just up and down. Um, but you can imagine

35:22that's a really small duty cycle because the amount of time that something is on is very short compared to the amount of time something is off. The frequency can still be the same. >> Mhm. >> But the the part of the wave that is above threshold and the part of the wave that is below threshold, that ratio is called the duty cycle. And for these cavitation experiments, the duty cycle can be very low, which means that you're only actively sending this high-pressure ultrasound not that long. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> And so you're not heating up the skull that much. It it circumnavigates the skull heating problem. >> Um and you can you can really target that mechanical disruption that you're talking about without really heating up

36:03the brain tissue in the first place. The idea is a longer duty cycle would mean we're doing too much. We're causing too much chaos. That chaos creates heat, creates more destruction than intended. So the the fact that we do have a short duty cycle is actually uh a benefit to the functionality that we're trying to accomplish. >> Yeah, exactly. Um and so there there's still something that is that is lacking here, which is fully like now we're trying to do it on straight up human beings. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Yeah, like we've we've proven it in all these um model organisms. We've proven it with sort of a half model organism and a donated human skull. But

36:44now, can we actually do this very precisely? Can we compensate for the variable acoustic medium? The brain, you know, once you get past the skull, the brain is kind of same same, >> but other parts of the body, there's organs everywhere. >> Y >> right. So, there's going to be variable acoustic medium. Can you maintain a useful pressure focus and generate bubbles? exactly where you intend. >> That's actually a really good point. The all these environments have very different variables you're dealing with. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that's why the last paper that I'm going to focus on is the one in the liver. This is in 2024. It's a clinical paper. So this is, you know, um now we're getting into like human clinical trials.

The HOPE4LIVER clinical trial

37:23the hope for liver single arm pivotal trial for hystootropsy of primary and metastas metastatic sorry metastatic liver tumors. she was a co-author. This is a multi-institution study. Um, and the engineering now has changed form, >> right? We started from >> just making holes to now we're doing there's a clinical transducer. There's an ultrasound imaging probe for targeting. There's a software to describe the treatment volume. There's a robotic arm that moves the focus through that volume. This is crazy. They've got like the thing that is doing the ultrasound is like moving around in a robotic arm to like target stuff. Um, and each tiny focal treatment has to be

38:04assembled into a threedimensional area that covers um a tumor that is in the liver. >> So, and this we're now getting to let's let's make this work for people. >> Exactly. Yeah. So, you there's like margins that you have to plan. There's nearby structures that you got to avoid. This is now an intact like human being. >> Yeah. >> Okay. This is this is the real deal. like um and the technical success success the definition of technical success is whether the resulting treatment zone completely covered the intended tumor volume on the contrast enhanced CT or the MRI within 36 hours like I do the treatment and within 36 hours when I take the MRI

38:46do I see the effect right well let's see let's see let's see if we do in fact we do so this is figure four from their paper. It shows a 1.3 cm metastatic colurectal cancer in segment 3 of the liver. That's the white arrow on the top left. Yeah, >> there's a little tiny tumor there. >> Okay. Um these are MRI scans. So in B, this is 36 hours post procedure. The treatment zone is in the solid arrow encompassing the side of the tumor and there's a margin. Crucially, the smaller arrow there, that's a blood vessel that traverses the treatment zone. >> It hasn't been

39:29killed. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. The traffic is still flowing. >> The Yeah, we we just took part of took apart the riff raff around it, but the traffic of the blood is still flowing through that. And then in part C, this is 30 days postprocedure. It shows involution of the treatment zone. Meaning the the giant hole that you made has gotten smaller. There is recovery happening within the tissue. >> Yeah. Yeah. We we the the region we've targeted is now repairing and we still have our traffic flow. >> Yes. Exactly. Um it's it's it's an incredible story. I think I mean it's incredible for so you know obviously so

40:09many people in every you know many listeners um are less than two or three degrees of separation away from someone who deals with or has suffered from cancer actively or in the past. >> Yeah. And obviously this has been an area that has had in incredible amounts of human scientific research as well as financial backing to try to find ways to deal with. There's so many interesting aspects of this area of research that again the construction the building of oh hey this methodology has functional benefit. Oh,

40:52hey, it also has this like secondary outcome of increased immune response. >> Oh, hey, we can actually do it in humanike contexts. >> Oh, and now when we get to the point where we have to do this in a very precise way for clinical outcomes, when we look to see the results, we are seeing that what we thought was maybe possible at the beginning of this journey is proving to be true. Yeah, >> it's just >> it's incredible. And I mean I I don't want to oversell this thing. I do want I do want to say that you know cancer is an extremely >> 100%. >> Multiaceted disease ailment. Um you know

41:3495% they had 95% success. Um three out of the 44 patients actually did have major complications related to the surgery. So something like 7% had major major complications. Um, and one of the limitations of this is that you need to be able to image this tumor in the first place very very well. There's some tumors where it's like impossible to image because based on their placement and where they are and so on and so forth, right? So, but in its limited capacity, it could be doing wonders, right? It could be it could be the next step. And the the the the treatment for cancer in the future is never going to be a one

42:15>> right >> one thing rules them all right unless we finally like everyone gets genetic engineering somehow right like and and we all live in gatka and it's like mandatory other than that scenario like >> dealing with cancer is going to be a multiaceted there's going to be imunotherapy drugs there's going to be like chemo is always going to be around I think so But more and more tools are necessary, right? And more and more tricks that we have. The better tricks we have, the better it is. Um, in 2023, hystoics uh received US FDA denovo clearance for destruction of liver tumors based on

42:55this study because even that 7% that was like lower than the threshold that is required for the FDA to approve something. Um and this marked a clinical application of this technology developed through Shu's collaboration with these engineers, physicians, and many other researchers. This 2024 trial helps explain the evidence behind that step. Right? And this explains why now the FDA is approving this. In 2025, his sonics announced a managementled transaction valuing the company at approximately 2.25 billion. That's billion with a B. >> With a B. >> Yeah. With a B. That's the company evaluation. I don't think it's a measure of any scientist personally and how much

43:35they earned. I don't think Zu earned like a giant significant portion of that. Um, >> which is problematic, but that's for another episode. >> Yeah, exactly. But it's one sign that, you know, this approach that can begin as a difficult laboratory question, it now sits as a real medical and commercial ecosystem.

Why basic research needs time

43:55There's so many interesting aspects of this story and again part of what the Golden Goose Awards tries to do as you've seen in our first story here through the progression is when we look at and we've talked about federal funding for basic research on this podcast quite a bit. You know there is a difference between basic research and applied research. We're trying to increase our understanding because from that we are so brilliant as human beings, so creative, we have an ingenuity that when we find these unlocks >> as we've talked about, we will find the practical path >> and this has led to for in terms of

44:35folks focus on the economic outcomes of this investment of taxpayer dollars towards some of this stuff. You know, there's a $2.25 $25 billion acquisition that's happened in the last 12 months. There are huge real world a human benefits from the clinical application of this which is why it's been valued so high and it's a platform not necessarily just a single functional outcome. this the the liver cancer treatment pathway happens to be the pathway that we've gotten to the place where there's commercial and practical applications. uh are there potential

45:17practical applications in other areas of cancer and applications for imunotherapy yet to be seen but the as we kind of discussed the the the breath and scope of potential uh is quite >> it's quite wide um and it is a perfect starting story for understanding what does what is the golden what are the golden goose awards and what are they trying to highlight it's this idea that we should not lose our curiosity as we look at these things because applied research and development in the United States

45:58dwarfs by orders of magnitude basic research. >> Yeah. And had we not had funding for a project like this, as well as our the rest of our stories, um there are real world benefits that we would have left on the table, >> uh that were not necessarily obvious in this case because the roommates were complaining about the noise. As a former DJ, I know what that feels like, too. But I'm not saving people's lives in the way that >> uh this story really exemplifies. It's just it's really incredible. And the science is also super interesting on this one. Um, it's super super interesting. I we'll we'll maybe follow up on this in a future show, but >> yeah. And I just had an idea for a

46:39comment. >> Yeah. >> If if you guys are researchers um in labs or anything, can you comment about the stuff that your lab mates complain about >> in labs? >> That's a great >> cuz I've got several. >> Yeah. just just put down if if in case you're like a a PhD student or a postoc in your lab and just the complaints that lab mates do, you know, because who knows >> who knows >> you may both save people's lives and be the recipient of a future Golden Goose Award. >> Yeah. >> Um an incredible first story. Hopefully for our listeners who may not be familiar, uh you kind of get an

FFP updates and supporting the show

47:19understanding now of what these awards really are about. And before we get into our next story, we're going to take this opportunity to do some quick housekeeping. For many of you who may be first-time listeners, welcome to the best science show on the planet. Uh for those of you who are returning, thank you for joining FFP Nation and continuing to support the show. We are available across any platform you can think of. Our videos are both on YouTube and Spotify currently. For audio listeners who may be listening on Apple, we are waiting for Apple to turn on video which allegedly is happening before the end of the year. If you're interested in some of the research papers that we talk about on the show,

47:59you can check out our website ffpod.com. Every episode page always includes the research papers we discuss in each episode. There's a lot of great other features on the site, including particularly relevant to this episode, uh, uh, the US funding tracker for research and development. And so, you can really dig into several different components about >> decades worth of funding as it relates to R&D across dozens of agencies. You can see how it's increased or decreased over time. You can see how the current funding cycle is shaping up for fiscal year 2027 with explainers, graphs, charts. It's actually a really great way

48:40for you to ground yourself in how much are we spending uh in these areas and where is it going to? Because interestingly, as we've talked about recently, many people think of the National Science Foundation as like, oh, all this money is going there. And from a research and development perspective, they're actually a very small slice as compared to some other agencies. I would have you guess which those other agencies may or may not be, but we really appreciate you all who are listening and joining us, especially for this super special episode in what is going to be an incredible couple of weeks. We are going to jump into our second research story for the Golden Goose Awards. Our next story is tracking

NASA Black Marble: Holiday lights from space

49:22holiday lights from space recognizing NASA's black marble team. In 2012, researchers studying satellite observations of Cairo noticed an unexpected jump in nighttime brightness. They traced it to Ramadan when meals, shopping, and social gatherings shifted into the night. And they also found holiday brightening around Christmas in US cities. patterns of human activity were showing up in satellite data. With NASA's funding support, which is one of the most popular federal agencies currently in the US government, the team's broader work produced Black Marble, a system that turns nighttime

50:03satellite observations into consistent measurements of lighting on the ground. And the same ability to measure those changes also helps to know, for example, when the lights go out. And this next image here is comparing Fort Meyers before and after Hurricane Ian in 2022. Areas that had been brightly lit became much darker as the storm knocked out power. And this kind of makes intuitive sense conceptually. By following these changes over time, researchers can map outages and track recovery, helping identify communities that may need support. Obviously, if the lights come

50:43back on, you don't have to send first responders into that area necessarily because we've now restored power. But how do you tell whether a place has actually lost power or whether clouds or moonlight or other atmospheric effects are changing what the satellite sees? This is the setup for our next Golden Goose Award winner. >> That's right. So, in September 2017, if we take another specific example, Hurricane Maria crossed Puerto Rico and the electrical grid failed across much of the island. And you can see a before and after. It's almost like the whole island goes dark. And from orbit, the change is immediate, right? Places that

51:24admitted light after night suddenly go dark. Now, scientifically, there's an interesting question, and it's not simply whether the island went dark. It's how the power returned, >> right? Street after street, month by month, and whether some communities were left waiting longer than others. Now, that question can't be answered simply by taking a before and after and after and after photo because there's a lot that happens between a satellite getting light from an area and that light being attributed to human activity. Okay. So Miguel Ramon, Eleanor Stokes, Zushen

52:07Wang, Virginia Calb, and Ranj Fista and their collaborators, they've been working on a way to measure artificial light from space with enough care to answer questions like that. How much of this is because of humans? And this is NASA's black marble. It begins with a remarkably sensitive satellite camera. And the real work is actually taking the measurements from the satellite camera and turning it into how much of this is human activity, how much of this is a different moon phase, how much of this is a cloud, a different viewing angle, snow on the ground, all of these other effects, taking all of that out and focusing directly on human

52:49activity. So, in the same tradition that we talked about the previous one, we're going to do five papers that are connected to this group. Um it's an incredible incredible set of papers and we'll keep the distinction in mind throughout that the satellite measures light but what we are interested in is human activity. Right? There's a longer history here because military weather satellites have revealed city lights decades before black marble. There's a joint NASA and NOAA Suomi NPP satellite that had the VIRS instrument. This was launched in 2011. And this has a day and night band. Okay.

53:30Its sensitivity made a new class of nighttime observations possible. And in 2012, we got this striking image incredible >> of Earth at night. I remember actually this was one of the first big images of Earth at night. And you could see some very >> stark differences based on geography. One of the big ones that was very famous was that if you looked at North Korea versus South Korea, it was massive. like South Korea has lit up so much city lights and then there's a band which is the demilitarized zone which is an extremely bright ribbon in between South Korea and

54:10North Korea and then in North Korea there's just really one kind of tiny pocket compared to South Korea and that tiny pocket is Pyongyang which is so much smaller than Seoul which is just across the border and you could just see the stark difference between the lighting that tells tell you so much about the economic activity and about the people and the regimes there, right? Um, so that was an early wonderfully specific observation and Ramon and Stokes studied how this nighttime lighting changed during Christmas and New Year's in the United States and during Ramadan as you were saying and they showed that lights during Ramadan and Eid the green in this plot is an upscaling

54:54of nighttime lights and you can see that in Aman Georgia and in Cairo >> there's a giant upscaling of lights that happen during the nighttime, during Ramadan and during Eid, >> Mh, >> which shows so much about the people who live there and like their ways of life and things like that. So, this already tells you that like there's variations between places that these satellite observations might capture and these satellite observations can tell us about human activity, the locations of cities and it's an open scientific question how far that idea can be taken. >> Yeah. >> Right. And so that's where we're going to start

Turning night lights into reliable data

55:30with paper number one in 2018. This is Rammon. He's the first author. Um Roman, sorry. Roman is the first author. He was um called NASA's Black Marble Nighttime Lights product suite. It's a it's just a product suite that showcases all of the capabilities that this team has created. Ultimately there were sort of especially as a public agency right being backed by NASA they're always trying to create things not necessarily open source might not be the right word but creating platforms and tools that can be utilized >> by whoever >> for endeavors that are fruitful for

56:11their function. Yeah exactly and this is kind of like a methods paper um is what we would call it in the business because this is something that provides a technical foundation for everything else in this episode. So let's start with what exactly a satellite sees. Okay, so it's actually a lot more complicated than you would think. Imagine a patch of ground that's hundreds of meters across. The dayight band in that satellite collects light from the direction of that patch, right? Like my my sensor is pointing over there. It's collecting light from there. Now what arrives in the instrument is something called radiance which roughly speaking is the optical power per unit area per unit angle in that particular range of

56:52wavelengths whatever range of wavelengths the satellite instrument is sensitive to. So it's not a count of illuminated houses. >> It's not an electricity bill for that patch. It includes light that's emitted upwards from artificial sources. That's light that's reflected from the moon. There's light that's reflected through the atmosphere. The atmosphere can absorb light. It's can it can scatter light on its way out. And what the instrument sees depends on the angle relative to the ground as well. >> Right. >> Right. Like if it's looking straight down or if it's looking like sort of towards the curved side of the Earth. And the measured radiance

57:34equals the artificial light that's getting attenuated by the atmosphere plus the reflected moonlight plus all of these other contributions. There's a variety of it. Again, as someone who's not done something in this area, >> in my head I just think, oh, you just point it and everything is perfect. >> Yeah. and I can just have very clear resolution on what I'm looking at. >> Um, but I think as you've eloquently described, >> there are a number of variables between the light that between where the light comes from and it then ultimately being received on the sensor on the satellite. >> Exactly. And so that is where the meat of why these guys got the golden goose

58:16>> Yeah. >> is coming from. It is this. >> It is the black marble algorithm. The job of the algorithm is to estimate and screen those other contributions using the satellit's geometry like where it is in space and where it's pointing and all of these additional measurements like on a cloudy night the ground can be hidden. That observation should be flagged rather than treated as a real power outage. Um on a moonlit night a field may appear brighter that's interesting >> than before. >> Um snow can amplify reflected light of course >> trees can hide light seasonally. That depends on the seasons, right? Because trees in the winter in the in the deciduous forests are not going to highlight as much as So that's not

58:58>> If you were to just not take care of that, you'd be like, "Oh, winter is brighter than summer." No, that's just cuz the trees don't have any leaves, >> right? So there's all of these other >> factors that come into it. And the 2018 paper describes these corrections from the atmosphere, from the terrain, from the vegetation, from the snow, from the stray light, and all of the strategies to fill the gaps in that record. >> This is a a combinatorial problem. >> Exactly. Um, and that's the first major conceptual step. Um, a nighttime photograph, for example, on the left hand side, that's the raw data. >> Mhm. >> And after it runs through the algorithm, we have the stuff on the left. This is in France.

59:39>> Stuff on the on the right. >> Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. The stuff on the right is after the algorithm. The stuff on the left is the raw data that we're getting from the satellite. And you can already see there's so many clouds. >> The Pyrenees have this massive band. That's cuz of the snow there. >> When you take all of that out, then you get the actual cities of France. >> I just can't even imagine. I mean even just in the variables you talk through um because it's not only a function of the different things happening but it's also the different things happening over time. >> Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a Yeah. It's a time varying phenomenon >> that you have to take out. The noise is extremely dynamic. >> Yeah.

1:00:19>> Right. Um the next one we've got a photo of the north of the Scandinavian provinces. There's an aurora happening right in the raw data. that's not real. You got to take that out, but you got to be careful because there's lights lurking underneath. >> That you'd want to account for. >> And so taking out all of that is the job of the black marble algorithm. >> Unbelievable. >> And the last one, this is for you, Lester. >> Okay. >> Uh this is Raleigh, North Carolina. >> Raleigh. >> Raleigh. Sorry. Yeah, I always mess that up. Um but this is the US East Coast. The moon has a fraction of 83%. So that means like 83% of the moon is

1:01:00illuminated and that's why the the clouds are illuminated in that way. You got to take that out. >> And now you can see Raleigh, Richmond, Virginia, Washington DC, Baltimore is up there. Northern Virginia is also >> this is incredible, >> right? But but but taking all of that data out, that is the job of the black marble algorithm. And that's what the 2018 paper was all about was laying out the foundations of that black marble algorithm. We're taking a raw data set that's not clean >> for this specific use case of identifying

Hurricane Maria and unequal recovery

1:01:36uh artificial light driven by human activity and removing everything that is not that. >> Exactly. Yeah. And so in the next paper published in 2019, we use the black marble algorithm to talk about what happened after hurricane Maria. >> Mhm. >> This is Roman and Stokes. They shared first author credit. All five of the people that are being awarded the golden goose are also on the author's list here. The paper asks how nighttime lights can be used to estimate the geography and duration of electricity loss after hurricane Maria. And the first step is you just want to establish a baseline, right? You want to say this is what Puerto Rico was like before the

1:02:17hurricane came about. >> Mhm. >> And then you can ask, okay, what is it looking like afterwards? Now, there is a subtle question here that has to do with resolution, which I thought was very cool. So, look at the top left. >> The top left is actually the resolution of the satellite. >> Okay. And so, for audio listeners, this looks like uh a 8bit pixel video game or whatever the correct number is, but highly pixelated. >> Highly pixelated. And there's a reason for that, right? There's not a lot of light >> Yeah. coming at night. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Which is a a challenge in and of itself

1:02:58to capture in the first place. >> Exactly. Like in the daytime there's so much light coming in there that you can really resolve things very very finely. At night time there's not a lot of light coming in and so naturally your resolution is going to be not that great. How do you get over that? Well, you can combine it with LANCSAT and Sentinel 2 images which are separate >> which are separate satellites that tell you about the distribution of houses and during the daytime. During the daytime they have all of this resolution. If you combine these two then you can ask things like okay um you know >> there's a pixel there's a giant pixel

1:03:38let's say >> y >> from the nighttime a 500 meter x 500 meter pixel that's covering a town. So, this is half a kilometer wide. Um, but that town, that same pixel has a town. It's got a wooded hillside and it's got part of a reservoir. The satellite might report the pixel that's lost most of its light, but that measurement alone is not going to pinpoint where exactly the light came from. If you combine it with the LANCET images and the Sentinel 2 images, then you can the finer daytime resolution is going to give these researchers a guide and you build that in into your algorithm. So, >> right. So, in practice, what they're doing is interpolating in some sense the

1:04:18nighttime data >> onto a 30 m grid from a 500 meter grid to now 30 m, which is, you know, the size of communities, big houses >> kind of thing. M um it it's it's an incredible thing that they've done. So let's see how they how it worked. Right. The the paper actually reports an approximately 80% reduction in the island's total observed lights immediately after Maria. >> So crazy, >> right? Because there was just so much devastation caused by this hurricane. And it was on the news that the recovery from that hurricane, especially in terms of the power needs of the people of Puerto Rico, it was not

1:04:59that great. Right. What this actually shows is a resolution depth of which communities fared better than others. >> Oh, that's quite that's quite nice. >> Right. So here we're looking at a color-coded graph where the color represents the number of days without electricity post Hurricane Maria. >> Okay. >> Okay. The brighter yellowower spots means that almost immediately within 30 days, within a month, the power was back. The really dark spots, that's 150 days. That's like 6 months plus. >> Unbelievable, >> right? And you can see different parts of Puerto Rico have different amounts of

1:05:40power loss on the order of months we're talking. And even if you look at the aerosibo, which is the first row, third column, you'll find parts that the power returned immediately and then other parts where it didn't. You can then go into the data and say what is the difference between the parts that returned early and the parts that returned late. And almost always it has to do do with poorer rural communities. The urban communities got it first. The poor rural communities got it second. And so the poorer residents often bore long interruptions. >> I mean it's a story as old as time. And

1:06:20the what's interesting is you're you're getting this empirical data related to disaster recovery that uh makes it very black and white because it's also happening on over time. >> Yeah. >> And so you get this level of granularity where like you talked about earlier where it's like 150 days versus almost immediately. And I can just imagine in my mind, you know, if I'm thinking of, you know, something like in the U, like in FEMA in the US in terms of responses, like that data, if I was someone who was trying to plan to do make disaster recovery more improved in the future, >> uh, just something as simple as that

1:07:02context, >> um, you know, cuz then I could then go as someone who's in the disaster recovery space and say, okay, well, in these areas, are our processes different. Did we access them later? Do we have enough coverage from like a resources and human capital perspective? Um, and in theory, what you would want to be able to do, I'm just extrapolating over time, is look at because obviously these weather events continue to happen. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> they might be happening more frequently because of climate change. >> Correct. M >> you could start to at least look at this as a way to make progressive progress

1:07:42because you can see how it happened in X year in the past, look at Year, and then say, okay, have we increased have have some of these communities decreased in response time? And then you can then have real data to say we've done better. >> Yeah. >> Um just as an example, that's where my mind goes. >> Totally. I mean, it's it it's I I think it's a really cool way to look at empirical data from satellites and then like answer these societal questions about like do we do we is this okay? Right. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um so we move on to our paper number

COVID-19 and changing nighttime activity

1:08:14three which is 2022. >> This is Eleanor Stokes and Miguel Roman. This is in scientific reports here. rather than a hurricane cutting power, we've got governments that impose restrictions and people are altered because of the first months of CO 19, the pandemic. And the paper examines hundreds of urban areas across the Middle East um using this black marble observations over several years. And it's it's I think an incredible paper. The the study actually found that nightlights often captured the onset of curfews and lockdowns. I was literally just thinking like, oh, when the curfew started, it probably lit up.

1:08:54>> Yeah. >> Or no. Uh, yeah. Lit up. Yeah. >> Yeah. Because people were >> Yeah. They were at home. Yeah. And the response varied within and between countries, but it was a little more nuanced because even when the curfew started, that means there's less traffic lights. >> So, you know, it's it's a bit more complicated than that. Um, so in places that were a affected by conflict or weak governance, the patterns could be very very different. M >> and the authors also considered Ramadan which happened around the same time which provided a stringent list. We need like a familiar annual change of social activity which we've observed in other >> years right cuz you've got this backlog of activity. So you know what a normal

1:09:35Ramadan looks like in these Muslim countries and then you can say okay what is Ramadan plus CO look like in these Muslim countries. I imagine that's going to be a valuable also co the co data set will have similar baseline value for other questions later. >> Yeah. >> Um Oh that's >> Yeah, I think it's it's a really cool way to do like >> data science in general, right? is like because there's a natural oscillation and a natural rhythm to human life in these areas and you have a record of that from the previous data and now all of a sudden you've introduced the co9 pandemic how does that affect right >> mhm

Mapping access to electricity

1:10:16>> um I I it's it's a pretty in incredible paper that came out so now let's go to paper number four this is the fourth paper published in 2025 who has electricity >> right >> is the idea idea. It asked the question that sounds pretty straightforward until you look at it closely. Can a decade of nighttime imagery tell us where people have access to electricity? I mean, consider like two dark locations. There's one that's an empty tract of land and another one with a settlement of thousands of people and very few outdoor lights. A darkness map cannot alone tell you which is which. So these rearch so these researchers combined the

1:10:58black marble time series with the settlement mask and the population estimates that they have from other data sources and they can classify lighting evidence over time with a scale of 1 kilometer which is you know the stuff that you get from the the black marble and then they use the population layer to estimate how many people live in those areas that are assigned to all these different access categories. And the logic is that you first determine whether people plausibly live there using population data that you have from all these other sources. And then you examine whether the night signal is consistent with electric lighting for that number of people. >> And then you estimate the population affected and compare broad totals

1:11:39against these surveys. And that's kind of that's kind of the theme across the Black Marble >> papers is like how do I combine disperate data sources about humans on this planet, right? You have the data source from this satellite >> about nighttime lights, but that can't be enough, right? And and that's what the story is. >> The story is one of data aggregation and data analysis. It's it's pretty cool. It it it's also such an interesting set of questions that were not necessarily intuitive to me >> like if I if you were to give me a million years to think about ideas to think about. Um but it makes it is

1:12:20clever and makes obvious sense in retrospect now. >> Yeah. that, you know, oh, this satellite that we're using to do nighttime surveys, um, something arose out of that, which is like, oh, actually, like we could look at human activity because of light. >> Yeah. And one of the one of the cool things they did with the next figure is they looked at um what the countries reported their access was for their population and what they estimate was the >> access level >> was the level of access. Now one of the

1:13:01one of the interesting things is Africa seems to be underestimating how much access their population has to electricity but at the same time Africa has a massive variance. >> Yeah, >> this is delineated by continent and you can see that there are some countries that where the actual access according to black marble is a lot higher than what they report but then at the same time Africa has some that are like -10%. what um what what they're estimating the population has access to. All of the other continents are a little bit sort of constrained. >> Um Europe >> very interestingly is overestimating.

1:13:43>> Uh so do with that what you will. Um North America is very fairly on the zero. >> We estimate exactly how much >> American precision. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, it could just be that like I don't know this, but like what if the estimate is also related to the satellite data? >> That's something that I'm going to ask Miguel. Actually, that's one of the questions I have. >> That's that's a part two question. >> Like, yeah, look, >> there's a little bit of uh we got to ask. >> Yeah, I got to ask, right? Like, it's it seems like a fair question. Anyway, so um another map that's useful is the

1:14:24underserved places. like where are the underserved places? This shows a percent of population with access to electricity for each country. And you can see that the highest gaps are observed in Africa and parts of Asia and Oceania. >> Yeah. >> So um the application is pretty concrete. You can have grid planners and public agencies then know where the demand is unmet for example. It's it's huge right? >> I I I mean my brain is just going in a million different places of applications for this context. M I mean you you could have a field day. >> Yeah. >> Um in terms of uh there's no shortage of agencies, organizations at local,

1:15:05municipality, state, even national levels that can use this in ways that are extremely relevant to a number of their mandates. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. >> That's quite good. >> Yeah. So our final paper, paper five,

Where Earth is brightening and dimming

1:15:20it's a paper that's published in nature proper of this year. Here's what they did. So using daily observations from 2014 through 2022, nearly a decade, they asked whether the familiar story of an ever brightening Earth survives the actual data. >> Yeah. >> That we've taken. Right. There light pollution is getting bad. >> Yeah. Right. Right. Right. That's what everyone says. >> Uh who who says it the most? Was it the uh the astronomers were trying >> astronomers were trying to say that. I mean they're complaining about the star link that that's up there. They've like but also they're also saying that light pollution has gotten bad and right and like all the um you know people who want

1:16:01to live by the stars are saying that light pollution has gotten very bad and I can't see >> Cassopia anymore right from New York City. It's like maybe don't live in New York City. I don't know >> what does the data say. >> Yeah. So let's see what the data says. Here's what it says. It's not a simple story as nothing really is when it comes to human civilization. Right? The paper applies continuous change detection to every single pixel >> that the satellite looks at for the past >> 10 years, >> right? And it looks at a sequence, not just pairs of annual screenshots. >> And the techno the technical idea is to fit an expected pattern that includes

1:16:42seasonal cycles. So you got to take care of the seasonal cycles. You got to take care of like trends. You got to account for the viewing angle as I was saying. You've got to examine observations persistently when they depart from some model that you've created that's based on the moon, the seasonal cycles and so on and so forth. Um and the headline result is more interesting than a single net percentage. Okay. So across the study they showed that a brightening contributed a radiance gain of approximately 34% of baseline in 2014 but there was a dimming offset of 18%. Some areas got brighter other areas got dimmer. It's not that simple >> is the idea. >> Everyone's moving away from the coast.

1:17:23>> Yeah. So here over here um what we're looking at is the the color actually codes the year of the most recently detected abrupt change >> in luminescence. Okay. >> The bluer year means it's closer to 2014 and the redder year means it's closer to 2022. And what we're looking at is within a year was there a significant change >> in how much activity was happening. So from here we can actually see specific spots on Earth that will show kind of interesting stories. So in the next photo we'll see these are panels that have very specific spots on the Earth highlighted. I'm

1:18:05going to go from left to right so you can kind of understand what we're looking at. On the left is Guangha, China. This is the urban area around Hong Kong. That's right outside of Hong Kong. You can see urbanization happening. >> Yeah, >> very very tightly. Let me just go through the colors real quick. Blue means that there was a net reduction and red means there was a net gain in the amount of light that was coming through. You can see the Guangha China is insanely >> Yep. >> lighting up. Okay, the next one. Armed conflicts in Kiev, Ukraine. That's the second row. You can see it's mostly blue. >> Yeah, >> right. Yeah, >> because there's a lot of dimming that's

1:18:46happening. The third row shows development of dragon fruit architecture, agriculture in Vietnam. >> Interesting. >> So, you're seeing a little bit of lighting up and a little bit of dimming based on like where that's happening. Environmental policies in Paris, France show a lot of dimming because they they've changed the lights that are in the city. Okay. The next one is gas flare changes in the Middle East region. massive massive flare-ups and also massive massive shutdowns. Yeah. Of where the gas is happening. Um next one you've got power outages in Puerto Rico as I was showing. A lot of that is blue and then there's some of it is red

1:19:27because it came back up. >> Mhm. >> Um urban expansion and decentralization in Charlotte, North Carolina. >> Y >> is the one right after. >> Y >> Charlotte's changing a lot apparently. >> Shout out Tabo who's in my brother who's in Charlotte right now. Yeah. So that's the second to the second to last column. And then finally, the economic collapse of Valencia and Caracas in Venezuela. >> Yeah. Wow. >> A lot of dimming happening in Venezuela as you can see, right? A lot of blue, which means there's a lot of dimming that's happening in Venezuela. And this is before 2022. So this is before any of the recent shenanigans that have been happening. >> Yep. >> Um, but you know, it tells a compelling

1:20:07story. each of these locations. It's it's also important to like also recognize that and it it kind of reminds me a little bit of our Navier Stokes episode. You have the larger system and then you have the systems the smaller systems within that larger system. And depending on what >> level of zoom you look at >> different stories can be told cuz when you look at the whole thing >> it's one story but when you kind of you can tie these real world social political economic cultural events or happenings to again this empirical. This is so good. >> It's so cool. This is the the most recent paper that they have. So I just

1:20:47want to go on a little bit of a deeper dive here. So this is figure two. How often does a place change and why? So um first point if you look at the small pie chart on the lower left that shows that roughly 80% of places with an abrupt change have it in a single year. >> Things happen fast. Okay. >> Only 20% >> have it over multiple years. So things happen fast when it comes to lighting and when it comes to human civilization, which I think is interesting. And then they label these like sort of labeled boxes in the world map. You've got the gas flares in central United States. That's the box that you see in the central United States. That's centered around Texas. >> Um those are the the the Peran basin in

1:21:29Texas that has all of the oil. You've got the grid failure in Venezuela. That's the next one. >> Um then you've got conflicts around the Middle East. So a lot of changes happening in the Middle East and then you've got construction and demolition happening in India and in China. One of the interesting things that I found about India was a lot of the change was concentrated in the northern part of India in Uttar Pradesh and Hariana and like that the Ganges Valley. Um, now now I'm talking completely out of my you know what I the the the time period is 2014 to 2022. >> And I wonder if this has something to do

1:22:11with Modi >> and the BJP coming to power, >> right? M >> and a lot of their strength is centered in northern India >> and they want to like they diverted a lot of resources into the >> construction and >> you know upsurgence of those areas in India because I don't see the similar things happening down south and down south is where Hyderabad is Bangalore these are tech cities >> what's going on >> but I'm not seeing >> I'm just saying no it's >> now this is again there's yo if there's like Indians in the comments who who are modi worshippers come at me. Okay, I don't care. All right, but I'm just saying that it seems maybe correlated

1:22:51>> and it's a worthy hypothesis that now this data set allows us to actually ask that question because people have been saying that independent of you bringing it up now. >> Yeah. And if there are alternate explanations, let me know. But this seems to me the simplest sort of explanation like why is it all centered around the Ganges Valley? >> Yep. >> Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jarand. Like I know my stuff. Okay. Hariana, like these are all BJP strongholds. Like why is all of the lighting up happening in BJP strongholds? Sorry, I I think maybe I spent a little too too much. >> No, no, no, no. It's great. >> But I mean the this I think this gets back to what I was saying earlier, which is you can the the data gives you a reference point to ask a whole variety

1:23:32of questions. >> Yeah. >> And because we can now see this, it's happening. >> Yeah. >> Like this, it's happening. >> Yeah. and the and the time period the 2014 to 2022 right this is right around when when Modi was elected as prime minister and like his first few >> decades I guess the first decade in power right so I don't know >> we can start asking these questions >> yeah um so figure three why the global average is deceptive you can't just take a global average right cuz the original question was oh like the the world is getting brighter >> right right >> n you know as we just saw stuff is getting dimmer, stuff is getting brighter. This figure, um, it's a large

1:24:14map. The red is accumulated brightening and the blue is accumulated dimming, and the pale and whitish areas are substantial amounts of both. >> What's going on in Europe, >> right? I didn't mean to cut you off, but the immediate thing I see you some areas you expect, >> but the thing I'm looking at is like, what happens? What's >> a lot of dimming, right? That probably has to do with policy changes in the types of lights that they're allowed to make, right? That's fair. Um, maybe they're doing more efficient street lights, things like that. Uh, maybe the headlights themselves are more efficient and lower power so they don't bleed out into the night sky. >> Um, so I think that's what's happening. But if you look, that's a very different

1:24:55situation than Venezuela. >> Yeah. >> In Venezuela, there's the same amount of dimming, but that's actually because of the economics and the economic collapse. >> Right. And what's interesting is like the economics of the region is not necessarily correlated to a brightening or dimming. Exactly. >> There there can be a number of other reasons. >> It could be policy, >> right? There's so many multiple faceted things. And in Europe actually, we see a 33% reduction in France, 22% reduction in the UK, and 21% in the Netherlands over this study period. And that connects to this broader pattern of lighting technology and policy. Venezuela, as I said, strong dimming dimming, >> but that's probably because of economic and infrastructure decline. The a few

1:25:36things that I want to mention here, um, the United States, there's a difference between the western brightening >> that's happening >> and the eastern parts that are dimming. In the west, you've got the the Peran Basin in Texas. You've got Backan in North Dakota that has the oil fields. >> Um, extraction and flaring can create these alternating increases and decreases. And those are some of the stuff that you're seeing in the North Dakota and the Texas areas. Um again in India and China you zoom in onto the eastern parts of China and and then India again big northern part all I'm just saying the authors describe strong development related brightening >> with different timing in northern and south southern India. So the authors of

1:26:17this paper are noticing what I was noticing which is that northern and southern India have a difference that is pretty stark in the data. I I I think this also for folks who you know may be into uh larger geopolitical conversations right there's this there's been this um conversation around you know reonshoring in the United States as an example because we've offshored so much of our manufacturing capacity >> uh to a variety of areas in regions where we're seeing the brightness increasing significantly the rise of China, a lot of these other

1:26:57again conversations and narratives, but the data is very like it's it's so interesting. The West, you know, is in a very different place. >> Yeah. >> As it relates to the data set, you can make you can extrapolate a variety of things from that. Yeah. >> areas that people talk about all the time bricks, you know, and this and it becoming a a block that is challenging on the world stage. And it is interesting for me as someone who's sort of like a >> uh a political junkie to see empirical data that kind of has interesting implications as it relates to how people

1:27:37think about that conversation. >> Exactly. Yeah. And you can see the stark difference between like sort of the west and the BRICS nations and the and the developing nation. If you look at the aggregate top plot and the the aggregate >> plot on the right hand side. So those are showing by is this I've always longit this is longitude. >> Oh we got we got a comment on this last. >> No this. Yeah. No this is longitude. This is latitude right. And so by longitude you're seeing the the western hemisphere >> like America and South America don't have that much change. compared to the the massive changes happening because of the Middle East >> 100% >> and it's happening because of China. >> Yep. >> On the on the longitude scale and on the

1:28:18latitude scale well China, India and the Middle East are all on the same sort of longitude. So you're getting massive longitude like in the tropics in the northern hemisphere and nothing elsewhere. >> And then the global south in this context is effectively in both both >> in both views is and again this is the conversation where the global south is trying to become a part of the conversation. Again, there is I think the interesting thing you note here is the Middle East on both axes >> is just massive >> is massive. >> But that's that that's a that's a factor of the fact that they have oil. So like the refineries and the and the oil fields are extremely bright at night, you know, >> and as well as a whole variety of other things that are not necessarily uh

1:29:00>> net positive. Exactly. Uh so it it's it's it's complex. >> Yeah. >> But I think >> but it's incredible that we have the data, right? We can >> because we we are no longer bound by what we gather from satellites. We have now a very sophisticated algorithm that can take care of all of the riff raff and tell us what the human activity actually is. So we can start answering these questions and know that is it is not because of artifacts. It's not because of the moon. It's not because of clouds. It's not because of snow or the aurora borealis. No, this is human activity that we're seeing >> from from space. Yeah, >> it's that's quite it's quite nice. >> Quite cool. >> Yeah. And the last thing I want to do is

1:29:41just return to the first image that we have of Puerto Rico after Maria. >> It's visually arresting to see the darkened island. It tells us immediately that something terrible has happened >> and it tells us the potential of this kind of technology. If there are future disasters like this, this is something that we have an immediate data access to right? >> 100%. >> So, um it's it's actually incredible the stuff that we can do for the betterment of humanity, not just to study how humans are living on this planet, >> but you know, as this algorithm gets more and more sophisticated, as it starts incorporating more and more data,

1:30:21I mean, right now it's just incorporating satellite data and some population level data. Imagine it can start incorporating like localized data, right? >> That was immediately what I was thinking about. >> Yeah. Like the more sophisticated this algorithm gets, the more granular we're going to have an understanding of human disasters, human influence on the environment, human influence on our natural environment like forests, forest deforestation, like all sorts of stuff that I really care about. Uh actually because you talked about the the the trees earlier, deforestation seems like an obvious one that is going to be very easy to see. >> Yeah. And um the other one that I I I

1:31:03didn't really talk about because it's not like one in highlighted in one of the papers, but they were talking about how offshore fishing, illegal offshore fishing is something that they've >> like literally caught >> where like there are countries that will, you know, >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:31:27>> We've all agreed to protect on the open ocean. And this kind of data has access to, you know, finding out whether whether that's actually happening and if we can actually do something about it. >> What's what's and I'll make this the last note here. What's interesting about that is, you know, folks have seen the imagery because a lot of it's a lot of times it's night fishing and so they need these Yeah. >> They need lighting. >> They need lighting. Yeah. >> Um and it's over the ocean. >> Deadliest catch. >> Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. And it's over the ocean versus land. And so >> and that's like obvious. What do you >> Where did Where did this come from? >> There's no land there. >> Um and that's an >> and they usually travel in packs packs.

1:32:08Oh yeah, you know it it would be the the the fundamentals of how they do it make it actually very visible in this data set. Uh congratulations to the NASA black marble team uh on the golden goose. Uh again we will be having a conversation uh with Miguel about some of these questions. Very interested to dig into it but I think we did great coverage. we're gonna move into. We somehow always find a way to be making two to three hour episodes despite our >> This was supposed to be a short one. Sorry. >> Despite our endeavor to try to make it tight, but there's just so much interesting things to talk about. We will be back with our last Golden Goose

1:32:49Award recipient and talking about something that's a little bit different than our first two stories, which is disordered systems. Our final story is

Sidney Nagel and the physics of everyday life

1:32:59everyday phenomena and finding beauty in nature's disordered systems. Recognizing Dr. Sydney Nagel, the Stein Fryer Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago, Nagel has spent decades investigating things that we rarely stop to question every day. Why does spilled coffee leave a ring? Why can sand pour like a liquid and then sit in a pile and hold its shape? a question I've never asked myself. With the support of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, he and his collaborators have turned everyday puzzles into these

1:33:39experiments that reveal deeper physical principles. And this is something I've certainly never thought about, but is a very interesting question. What we're looking at here is a dried coffee drop about 2 cm across from the team's original research. As we can notice, there are these darker regions around the edge. Those particles all started out spread through the liquid >> in some contiguous fashion. So why did they ultimately end up concentrating and creating that outline? Nagel and his colleagues showed how evaporation can flow inside

1:34:21the drying drop, which I've never thought about, but now makes total sense. Carrying particles through towards the edge and concentrating them there. Understanding that process matters for things that actually matter to us every day, like inkjet printing. Mhm. >> If you want to drop a liquid ink on a paper, you need to know how it's going to ultimately land and spread so you get actual the actual letters that you want uh when the ink dries. And across his work with droplets and grains, there's a bigger question. How do we find predictable behavior in materials whose parts are not neatly arranged? Which is a very very interesting

1:35:02question. Yeah. And physics has a reputation for not caring about that. Okay, physicists have a reputation for not caring about neatly or for not caring about not neatly arranged stuff, right? We care about stuff that's near zero Kelvin like quantum properties. We've done the quantum computing stuff like nice systems that obey >> nice laws. You know, the cow is a sphere is a is a favorite sort of comic that we talk about. the formation of the universe. Everything is nice and isotropic. Collisions of black holes, again, black holes have no hairs and it's just like two little bodies. Okay, fine. The equations of GR are a little

1:35:44chaotic but >> it's not really disordered in a sense. And Sydney Nagel >> was curious about much more modest things in his life. the texture of our world, the physics of a raindrop as it stretches and falls from an overhang, the spill of a coffee cup. And you know, in one of his interviews, he says that no one thought you'd find basic truths by looking at these sorts of things. But the fact that we don't know how to think about answering these questions means that there's some fundamental physics that we don't know. >> And that's the questions, those are the types of questions that he's trying to answer. What's the mechanism? What

1:36:24carries coffee particles to the edge to give us that nice black marking? And the answers require us to look at flows, forces, geometries, and time scales that maybe our everyday intuition barely ever registers. >> Now, Nagel is a physicist at the University of Chicago and one of the pioneers of a field called soft matter physics. In 2023, he received the American Physical Society's Medal for Exceptional Advancement in Research. And the work that we're going to follow spans about three decades of work, many collaborators. I want to again trace five papers in order from the falling drop in 1994 to the stuff that he's been

1:37:05doing in 2025. We're going to start with

The science of a falling drop

1:37:08the falling drop. The first paper we will cover actually got him on the cover of Science. Woo. Um, still a a great white buffalo for me. Not just a cover. I mean, I just want to get into science. >> Uh, many of you may have noticed uh in between us, someone who made it to the cover of Nature. >> Yeah. >> Uh, happens to be behind us in studio, >> but that's not what we're focused on this episode, but it is there. >> But it is there. So, yeah. So, so he's been on the cover of Science, and this is what it's been about. Um, it's about what how drops disattach or deattach from a faucet. You

1:37:51know, like imagine you've got your faucet and you turn it up to just a tiny bit so that like individual drops are coming out of the faucet. >> You drip drip. You get a little drip. >> You get a little drip drip. >> What is the physics behind that? in the 1994 science paper. It's called A Cascade of Structure in Drop Falling from a Faucet. A >> great great title, by the way. >> We talk about titles a lot. >> This is a good one >> on the show. >> Yeah. So, what he ended up doing with his with his um students there is photographing drops made from mixtures of water and glycerol. Why glycerol? Because glycerol has a really high viscosity compared to water. The

1:38:33question they're asking is, does viscosity affect the dynamics of how this drop >> deattaches from the parent drop that's on the faucet? >> How drippy is my drip? >> Yeah. And this is a classic golden goose type of award because at first anyone would be like, >> really, >> really, why do we care? Well, there's a lot of really interesting physics that's happening there that I didn't quite appreciate, I have to say. So let's take a look at this particular image. Okay. This is figure one from their paper in a that's pure water. Okay. And you can see that the the drop is kind of deattaching. And these are all photos

1:39:14that are taken with a high-speed camera. There's a strobe light behind him that's illuminating the stuff and then the camera is kind of taking photo photographs that way. Um in a you're seeing a water droplet disattached. This is pure water. And you can see that the the the sort of trail the the part of the part that's hanging between the faucet and the droplet that's before it >> before it pinches off. >> Before it pinches off. >> Yeah. Before it deattaches is very short in E. That's pure glycerol. >> Look at how large the

1:39:54trail is. >> Oh yeah. the little the spittle the little >> which and again would you think who who thinks yeah and and this shows clearly that the more viscous the liquid the neck we're going to call it the neck the neck is going to be very long and thin and near the the lower end the smaller the neck appeared >> this is the key thing he showed that as the drop approaches the spot of separation the neck doesn't simply disappear there's a lot very cool dynamics that are happening right at the instant where the deattachment is happening. Okay? And it has everything to do with viscosity. The reason why we want to start introducing glycerol is

1:40:35because it increases the viscosity, but it doesn't increase the surface tension in the same way. >> Okay? So now we're sort of disentangling >> viscosity versus surface tension. And you would think that surface tension is everything when it comes to making a drop what it is. I mean, that's sort of what we learn about in high school and undergrad physics is like surface tension is what keeps a drop spherical. The fact that like um a water water wants to minimize the amount of surface area and the best way to do that is turn into a sphere. >> Is this when you've seen probably the memes of people playing the game of they try to fill the cup of water to the top and then whoever makes the first drip go over the edge and then there's a little bit and it's like everyone's always so

1:41:15shocked at how much water is still on the top before it drips over the edge. That's a classic experiment where you get like a penny and you try to jam as many drops as possible, right? And the classic the classic explanation and it's true is that it's because of the surface tension of the water that you don't want the water doesn't want to break >> the um the drop. >> This experiment is showing is surface tension is not everything. Okay, viscosity has a lot to do with it. We've talked a lot about viscosity in the previous episode, so I think you'll get a kick out of this. So, Here we're seeing a mixture of glycerol and water. And what they're doing is zooming in on that moment of separation.

1:41:57It's kind of like in the last episode when we talked about how we can rescale time as a countdown clock >> to some critical phenomenon. In this case, there's a critical phenomenon that's happening, which is the moment that the water droplet separates from its parent water droplet. as we get closer and closer to that moment, what happens to the neck? Okay, on the left hand side, we're seeing a sort of zoomed out picture. And on and the other two, B and C, we're seeing timestamps getting closer and closer to that moment of separation. And here's what I want you to notice. In the middle, you've got a single neck. >> Mhm. >> As we get closer, the single neck forms

1:42:40an even smaller neck. >> You see? >> Mhm. It's kind of like a fractally >> self similar type of behavior that's happening in in a there's a one long neck, but the one long neck >> creates a smaller neck and then that smaller neck is going to create an even smaller neck, right? There's this critical phenomenon that's happening that's it's like a fractal-like cascade. Uh I'm going to be annoying. As to approaches zero, we're going to infinity. >> Yeah. Yeah. the number yeah you could you could think about the number of uh the number of cascades is going to go to infinity in some sense now obviously this is it's not going to happen till

1:43:20infinity because just like the Navier Stokes equations at some point you're going to run into the molecular barrier and you're going to be like you can't get smaller than the molecules and things like that but it's still very cool that you know for the regimes that we care about there is this self similar >> type of response that's happening >> that's and it's so funny we just did the >> and the scale is shrinking and so in that paper he one he showed the experimental evidence of of this type of stuff happening and then he solved numerically the Navier Stokes equations and he showed that this does happen but only if there is noise in the system this is what's kind of interesting um if there's no noise then the neck becomes this self- similar sort of power law thing

1:44:00>> that doesn't have these discrete >> types of you know >> tuck tuck and then it becomes smaller and smaller >> it's not this rhythmic uh construction >> but if If you introduce noise into the system, then on the right hand side, you see the self- similar thing where you've got a big thing and then you zoom in. That's the second panel. And then the second panel has an inset that zooms in over there and you see a even more self- similar sort of tiny neck >> happening, right? >> And the details change from run to run, but you can repeatedly create these necks and that is robust. the details can change, but the fact that these necks exist and they're self similar, smaller and smaller and smaller, that is a robust phenomenon.

1:44:40>> We we love to see again it's it's these um these signals in observation of something interesting. And then a lot of times I feel like when we talk about it, it's like who zoomed in more. >> Mhm. >> To just double click to make sure that just because we see it like this on the outside, it actually looks like that on the inside. And >> I mean from a physicist perspective, this is already very cool. >> Yeah. Okay. Like this is a phenomenon that like you're seeing like a fractally nature happening in like the disentangling of droplets. That's kind of cool. Um, from practical standpoints, it's not just like inkjet printers. You

1:45:21can have sprays, micrfluidic devices, which are used a lot of times in biomedical applications when you want to like separate out cells, you want to separate out DNA, small little um micro thingies for lack of >> We got a thingy in this episode. You did four hours last time with not a single thingy and people are >> Yeah, people are Well, you know, there's tremendous applications here. So, so it is it is quite interesting that like such rich phenomenon can come from something that never really thought about. Um 1997, this is the next paper that we're going to talk about. This is the coffee ring effect. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it. >> Mhm.

1:46:01>> Um the idea is that when you have coffee

Why coffee leaves a ring

1:46:04stains and they dry out, the edges of the coffee stains are always much darker than the interior. I've actually always wondered this but not actually thought about it. >> Yeah. I've like noticed it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then now because of the golden goose I'm like diving deep and I'm like oh this is quite interesting. Um so they came out with a paper in nature that was had another amazing title capillary flow as the cause of ring stains from dried liquid drops. Here is the idea. So let's imagine a liquid drop with a bunch of coffee stains with with with like coffee liquid drop with coffee.

1:46:45What is going to happen as it evaporates? That's the question we're trying to answer. Okay. So, if we look at a coffee stain on the upper left, that's a liquid drop. Let's say >> on the bottom left, what they've done is introduce micrflu microsphheres into the coffee and they image it to track how the microsphheres are moving around in the coffee. And what they notice is all of the microsphheres are moving out to the edge. There is movement that is happening towards the edge of this coffee stain. Now why is that? Here is the idea.

1:47:26Picture the drop as a low dome like you know the experiment that we were talking about with the penny and then you drop like water on it. Similarly coffee just on a piece of paper or something like that. The boundary is going to be established based on how much coffee you spilled, but as it evaporates, the the coffee stain doesn't shrink. The area stays exactly the same. So, what's going to happen now? If the area stays exactly the same, the the liquid is leaving and by conservation of mass, you need to replace the liquid at the edges,

1:48:08right? And so if we go back to photo number 58, I just want to show you the model that they have. Yep. And there the liquid is leaving, right? It's evaporating. On the right hand side, they've got this figure that shows the liquid is evaporating. But because the liquid is evaporating, >> you need a flow from the interior to the exterior >> that is going to replace that liquid >> because the surface area of the drop has to remain the same. >> Oh man. Right? And because of that, you see these microphones move towards the edge. Well, that also means all of the coffee grounds or whatever that stuff that makes the coffee is moving towards

1:48:49the edge. And by the time that everything evaporates, all of the stuff has concentrated >> to the edge, >> right? Uh it makes total sense and it's like obvious in retrospect. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's such a it's such a clean argument. >> 100 100%. Yeah, 100%. This is something that I could imagine in an advanced undergrad class of fluid mechanics. Like this is something you solve like this is a homework problem that would be very nice. >> That's so good. >> You know, um the contact line is pinned basically and then the evaporation removes the solvent. So mass conservation creates this outward flow. >> Yeah.

1:49:29>> Um there this is the first treatment. Their later treatment which is this paper over here. Um this was in the physical review E in 2000 3 years later they had a much longer treatment where they developed the flow and deposit theory in much greater detail and what you can do is you can change the pinning you can change particle interactions you can change the internal flow and then you can change the pattern of the coffee state. So, so they developed it a lot more further in that paper and I think that quantification is very very important because if you're printing with some kind of functional ink, right, you might want a uniform deposit. >> If you're trying to print with an ink printer, you don't want only the edges

1:50:09to show up. >> So, the next question obviously becomes how do we prevent this >> from happening? And the way we prevent this from happening is we change the characteristics of the coloring the the coffee grounds or whatever that is inside the liquid. Um what we end up doing is in order to suppress this outward flow, you can engineer the shape of the particles inside that will that will create traffic jams >> inside the flow that will make the particles your ink or whatever thing that is coloring it >> stay put and not actually move. So maybe the water will move, right? The other fluid, but the stuff that is creating

1:50:51the coloring doesn't move because it's jammed up. You're sort of engineering the outcome >> by creating differences in the substance such that >> the only outcome that arises is the desired outcome. >> Mhm.

Jamming: When grains become rigid

1:51:04>> This is interesting. Yeah. I know this is good. Um so in 2023 um sorry 2003 they wanted to start understanding jamming cuz this they've sort of introduced this idea of jamming and fluids. So what does jamming actually do? So imagine this is what jamming actually means. Like have you ever held those hourglasses where sometimes the sand gets stuck. >> Mhm. >> Now it's sand. It should flow like a fluid, but sometimes the sand gets stuck and you got to jiggle it a little bit to have the sand fall from the top of the hourglass to the bottom of the hourglass. The question he's asking is why, right? If the spheres occupy only a small fraction of the volume, then why is it jamming? Well, that's exactly the

1:51:46case. If the spheres are occupying only a small fraction of the volume, then they can be re rearranged like it's nobody's business. Okay? >> But if the packing fraction of how much sphere there is versus how much empty space there is, if that is higher than some certain amount there's going to be jamming. And he quantified exactly what the statistics of that jamming is. The the idea being we have in an hourglass there's a narrower space where the jamming arises and so the actual dynamics of the amount of space those smaller particles are in there's some >> XY

1:52:27>> smaller space higher jamming potential >> and we now have a effectively the formula to understand >> at the rate at which jamming >> increases. >> Yeah. And that's why if you have hourglasses that have a fluid in it, you almost never have jamming because the fluid creates a lower packing ratio one and the fluid has tiny bits of turbulence that'll like move around the jamming. Right? This is the kind of physics that he was focused on in this next paper that um we're talking about here. It's in the physical review e in 2003. Jamming at zero temperature and zero applied stress, the epitome of disorder. Zero temperature meaning no jiggling. >> Yep. and zero applied stress, meaning

1:53:08you're not like pushing it in any way. How does the jamming actually happen? And the control knob happens to be the packing fraction. Now, what are the practical uses? This is one of the craziest things that I've seen actually, and this is actually quite old. Um, this this next paper that I'm about to show you, 2010 pen out of Cornell University, they used this idea to create a robot that can pick anything up.

A robotic gripper filled with grains

1:53:35>> Okay. Okay. So, here we're looking at a video of a robot that's built from a human hand. It can't pick up those random items, right? But instead, they've got a sphere with a bunch of coffee grounds that they can control whether it jams or not. The key idea here >> is that because you've got a sphere with all of these little tiny grains >> and you can you can tune the transition between whether it's jamming or not >> using some kind of external drive. >> You can now fit that sphere. You can fit it to any arbitrary shape and you can pick up anything you want. Here it's

1:54:17picking up an LED light putting it. Brilliant. >> Yeah. Here it's picking up a spring. This is notoriously hard to do and you like we used to think that you know the solution to creating like random hands is like emulating the human hands but mate we've had millions of years of evolution >> right it's incredibly difficult to do this I mean now with the advent of AI and modern robotics sure but this is 2010 this is 16 years ago >> they had figured out >> it's also clever how they got there because it's not intuitive to me that >> yeah a ball a ball of coffee grounds cuz that's what this is ball of coffee grounds, >> right? >> It's like a hacky sack. >> And it's it's a surface that basically can arbitrarily based on whatever the

1:54:59object is that it comes in contact with create the exact construction in order to be able to lift it. >> Yeah. Yeah. And there's there's other examples. And here those are the objects. This is a standard hand back in the day. It couldn't lift those up. But this a single thing is just going to go and lift it up. >> Brilliant. >> Isn't that cool? >> That is very >> And this is directly from that jamming transition. Yeah, that's very >> we had understood using >> using using this mathematics. >> That is very cool because again it's it wasn't intuitive to me that that's where you go with it. >> Mhm. >> But obvious it makes again in retrospect it's like oh >> yeah exactly. So the next paper that we're going to talk about is 2005. This is in physical review letters. Um and

Why air pressure changes a splash

1:55:40how it's about how the air decides whether a drop splashes or not. This was a little bit non-intuitive to me actually. >> Can I just say he's on a heater? He's on a heater. Yeah. The the the the ju just in terms of like the questions. >> Yeah. And and they're like fundamental questions. >> The drip, the stain, and now air. And like these are >> these are these are like fundamental questions that people ask like what causes a splash and then you just move on. >> Right. This guy's like, "No, no, really. like I'm going to >> and and so here's an experiment that they do where they have drops of water splash onto let's say a petri dish or a

1:56:20table or something but in different air pressures so the ambient air pressure is different and what they notice is that at atmosphere that's 100 kilopascals at the top you get a lot of splashing those are all the drips that you're seeing like in the third column but as you lower the pressure no more splashing this is very non-intuitive to me because I would have thought from our Navier Stokes episode and from what I know from fluid mechanics that you know >> the the Navier Stokes equations tell me everything about what the fluid is going to do >> right I've know the viscosity I know the pressure around but the interface pressure right the the the difference in

1:57:00pressure between the the ambient air outside and that interface is actually what's causing this >> right you >> this is a reworking of some fundamental mental physics. >> You know exactly what my brain is going to when I see this. This is how the UAPs do their trans medium travel. >> Yeah. Ah, there it is. There. Just like I how I didn't have a thingy. You didn't have a UAP in a while. >> I haven't had a UAP in a while. I had to squeeze it in there. >> There it is. Yeah. But, uh, it's I think it I think it's pretty cool because like >> I wouldn't have thought of that. I wouldn't have thought that like pressure had something to do with splashing. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> But it turns out it does. And the authors themselves they point to

1:57:42applications of this. They show that like you know fuel sprays, spray drying, inkjet printing, washing and coating there settings where splash behavior matters. >> Yeah. >> And to say that you know putting all printing lines under a vacuum, maybe that's not the idea, but the experiment gives an engineer a variable that they previously did not account for. Right? No one was thinking about ambient pressure when it comes to splashing. And again the the paper is not just oh there's a threshold pressure right he goes into the physics and he talks about why exactly the pressure matters and there's a scaling argument there's a threshold of

1:58:22pressure for different viscosities like for a certain viscosity a certain pressure is the threshold pressure where it goes splash no splash I reduce the viscosity the pressure threshold changes right and there's a systematic relationship there we the the cookbook is being written written piece by piece and engineers hope have hopefully picked up on uh a lot of because I I again I I can immediately as has already happened and will continue to happen see the practical applications to these fundamental understandings. >> Yeah. Yeah. And um that brings us to our

Materials that can be trained and retrained

1:58:55final paper 2025. This is a training and retraining liquid crystal elastimer metamaterials for pur potent functionality. That word pur potent I've only seen in the context of plur potent stem cells same right and so now I'm seeing it in metamaterials and I was obviously pee I was like what what exactly are we talking about so this is a paper >> about disordered lises cut from liquid crystal elastors and elastor is like a rubber-l like polymer okay so it's like it has some kind of deformability in some sense um the liquid crystal component is because you've got all of these little um crystal subunits that

1:59:40can be kind of liquid in that they can move around and that's how we get LCDs like LCD displays, liquid crystal displays. That's because you have these pneumatic liquid crystals that can like change orientation based on some type of electric field that will let through light and block light. That's how we get like the calculator LCD displays. So, it's it's a it's a crystalall-like nature that is not rigid but can sort of move around. That's why it's liquid in some sense. Um, so the network is a sheet of these connected struts and nodes and the researchers make a flexible irregular lattice and they hold it compressed so it adapts to this compressed >> environment and then they test whether it bends different differently afterwards. So there's a memory here and

2:00:22that's where the pur potent part comes in. >> Okay. >> Okay. because you can change how the material is going to behave based on the stresses and the environment that you put it through. Very similar to how in plur potent stem cells. >> Yes, >> you can change what the stem cells become based on the types of transcription factors and the environment and the genetics that you expose these stem cells. The same stem cell could go on and become a bone marrow or a skin cell or a blood cell so on and so forth based on the types of genetic factors that you put it. >> We're giving it multiple uh multifunctionality based on environmental factors which obviously

2:01:03has it makes it a lot you could do more. >> Exactly. Yeah. So let's look at figure number one. Okay. This is what the lattice is made out of. um the blue elongated shapes there, there's reg they're regularly aligned liquid crystal units within some kind of stretchy polymer. Okay, poly domain means different little regions that have different orientations to begin with. That's again akin to like the liquid crystal displays that we were talking about. And this is again in pen. The chemical structures on the right show how the researchers could make these cross- linked elastors. So they can like actually interact with one another but not be so rigid that they can't move around. >> Okay. >> And on the right hand side we're

2:01:44actually seeing how this elastimemer interacts with this environment and remembers the environment that it was in. Um before training on the top row you you push down and the sides move outward. Right? And this is the usual behavior of a material under compression. On the bottom row this is after training. you put push down and the lattice actually moves inward. >> The lattice contracts in both directions. This is called an osetic response. So, it's actually a little bit different than what I just stated, which is like it retains its original construction or connections under different compressed or pressure environments versus versus becoming victim to the

2:02:26external Yeah. >> uh force that's being applied to it that then changes its its construction. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It has a memory and it can like now that you've compressed it already, it can now do the thing that you want it to do, right? It has like a memory and for an engineering op audience like the implication is very appealing because these are materials whose response can be customized >> after fabrication. So you just get it from the factory. You can enact stresses to this material and you can customize it and perhaps you can adapt it to structures or soft robotic components like the robotic component that we just saw. Um, and it demonstrates a lab route

2:03:06to retrainable mechanical function, right? Because you can take the same polymer now and reuse it. You can heat it up and it'll come back to its original shape and then you can do something else with it. You can put different stresses to it that'll make its response different >> in some sense, right?

The payoff from curiosity

2:03:26>> I'm actually the through line from the fundamental question we started with on this story and then the applications that delta for me is the largest. >> Like I never would have >> thought that you could get to because these are all very practical like units of something. Yeah, >> it might not be unlike the other stories where the end product is is so discreet or well defined. This is like a platform for any number of >> ideas. Soft matter, soft matter physics, right? And at the time that he started, soft matter physics was definitely looked down upon. >> Now it's very much a field in its own

2:04:09right. >> Um and he he was a big pioneer in that field. He he helped establish the legitimacy of it. You can you can tell just from that last one, right, with the retrainable lattice, like a disordered network now becomes a way to specify a mechanical response rather than an obstacle to precision. >> Yeah. Right. Like the deformable network is the point. >> Exactly. That exactly right. >> Exactly. >> Um and so these practical outcomes they differ in their maturity. Obviously, the the coffee ring mechanism, it started out as just a super curiositydriven, but now any aerosol paint, any any liquid deposition, it's going to matter, right?

2:04:50Um, it it's it's pretty incredible. So, so this guy I'm I'm very much looking forward to um >> doing my interview with him. the the these again, we have pre-recorded these under embargo. Um this episode under embargo as we prepare to make our way to Washington DC. Uh big thanks to Triple A for um allowing us to have some time with all three of the either either individuals or teams that came forward with these stories. I just my brain is I know you're going to have a field day. >> Yeah, I'm so excited. >> I know you're going to have a field day. Um, this was part one of our coverage,

Coming in Part 2

2:05:31our special coverage of the 2026 Golden Goose Awards. Hopefully for some of you who may not have heard about the Golden Goose Awards before, you have a appreciation for what they're trying to uh elevate in terms of some of our best and brightest federally funded basic research stuff that is imp has impacted and will continue to impact so many of our lives. And it's an incredible stewardship um that tripleas has taken over the responsibility of making sure that those who have committed decades, this is decades of work here um and >> uh are creating things that really again

2:06:12are going to have and will continue to create great impacts in our lives. >> We are going to report to you live from Washington DC in our follow-up part two for this episode. But don't forget, we are also a week away from one of the greatest other events of the year. Another opportunity to highlight many of the best and brightest among us, the Nobel Prizes. And so this is going to be an action-packed October. Yeah. >> As we have backto backto backto back banger episodes. If you've not already smashed that subscribe button, please

2:06:52do. My name is Lester Nar, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD continuing to blow the minds of myself and the rest of the listeners in FFP Nation. We will see you all next

Outro

2:07:06week.