Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. This is where we take a
huge stack of the latest research, brand new scientific ideas,
and we really just we boil them all down.
Speaker 2: Right down to the most potent, most mind bending insights
we can find. We're here to help you sort of
navigate the complexity of it all exactly.
Speaker 1: We're talking about breakthrough findings that are actively redefining what
we even call a fact.
Speaker 2: And our mission today is a big one.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a wild one. We've synthesized a really incredible
pile of sources, all detailing discoveries that just they fundamentally
challenge what we thought we knew across physics, biology, neurology, everything.
Speaker 2: We're talking about data points so fresh they are nowhere
near the textbooks yet. This is the immediate update on
well the state at the universe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's not an exaggeration. The insights we're about
to get into come from a huge review of recent findings,
the kind of science that, once you get it, it
really makes you stop and question everyday reality.
Speaker 2: Our whole goals just to give you those back to
back aha moment, you know, but with the context so
you can see why it all matters without all the jargon.
Speaker 1: And what better way to start than with a question,
go for it. What if everything you think you know
about being alive, about standing here on Earth, even observing
the universe, what if it's all slightly delayed or just
fundamentally physically wrong. Just think about that for a second,
that lag, that basic misunderstanding of the present moment. That
is exactly where we're going to begin today.
Speaker 2: We're exploring three major frontiers. We're starting with the most immediate,
the personal right in here, the mysterious inner universe of
the human body, the secrets that are lurking in our
own DNA and our brain function.
Speaker 1: Then we're going to pivot pretty dramatically to the living
system of our planet and its neighbors. You will not
look at the moon the same way.
Speaker 2: Again, or the ground beneath your feet, not at all.
And finally, we're going to the most extreme scale, the
atomic level and deep deep space to uncover these shocking
secrets that just defy the rules of physics we thought were.
Speaker 1: Unbreakable, showing us that even destruction can be a form
of creation.
Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this starting with the most immediate discovery
you I love starting here because it's so personal. It's
about your own existence, right, And the very first fact
we pulled is it's just astonishing. It turns out that
all of us, every single moment, we are physically giving
off light.
Speaker 2: You are right now as you listen to this, a
walking light bulb.
Speaker 1: And that's not a metaphor, not a metaphor for having
a good aura.
Speaker 2: No, you are literally emitting a faint, sustained glow. This
is phenomenal because for you know, centuries, we thought of
bioluminescence as this this exotic.
Speaker 1: Thing, deep sea creatures, fireflies.
Speaker 2: Exactly, fun. Guy. Maybe we just assumed human cells didn't
have the chemical machinery for it.
Speaker 1: But the core discovery is that humans glow in the dark.
I mean, I have to ask the obvious question of
looked in the mirror in a pitch black room. I
don't see anything. So how did they prove this?
Speaker 2: That's the key, and it really speaks to how sophisticated
our science has become. The light we give off is
it's incredibly faint. It's about one thousand times weaker than
what our eyes can proceed.
Speaker 1: A thousand times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even when your eyes are fully adjusted to the dark,
our visual system just isn't sensitive enough.
Speaker 1: So what do they use.
Speaker 2: They use these incredibly specialized cameras cool to extremely low temperatures,
shielded from all external noise, which makes them so sensitive.
They can literally detect a single photon.
Speaker 1: Of light when photon, so it's like detecting a single
microscopic spark inside an entire football stadium.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's unpack the mechanism. This isn't just an
infrared heat signature we're talking about, right, This is actual
visible light.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, It's not thermal radiation. It's real light produced by
chemical energy conversion happening inside.
Speaker 1: Yoursels, just as they do their job, just as they.
Speaker 2: Go about their essential functions, the processes we call metabolism.
Every single time your cells generate energy and keep you alive,
they create byproducts.
Speaker 1: And I'm guessing those byproducts are the things we always
hear about in the health world. Free radicals.
Speaker 2: You got it, These highly reactive oxygen species, the free radicals.
They're sort of a necessary evil of being alive. They're
molecules missing an electron, and they're desperately trying to steal.
Speaker 1: One, causing oxidative stress.
Speaker 2: Right, But here's where the light comes from. When these
unstable free radicals finally stabilize, when they get that electron
back or react with an antioxidant, they release a tiny
bit of.
Speaker 1: Energy, and that energy is light.
Speaker 2: That specific energy is emitted as visible light, usually in
the red and green parts of the spectrum.
Speaker 1: The source has described it so well as millions of
microscopic fireworks going off inside you all the time.
Speaker 2: It's perfect, isn't it. The energy of life itself literally
radiating out of you.
Speaker 1: But this is where it gets really really interesting. The
glow changes throughout the day. It has a rhythm, a
clear rhythm, and your face glows the brightest, specifically in
the late afternoon.
Speaker 2: What does that tell us, Well, that pattern, that periodicity,
it suggests a direct link to our internal clock, our
circadian rhythm, and our metabolism and our peak metabolic phases exactly.
The face is likely the brightest because it has such
a high metabolic rate. It's very vascularized, lots of blood flow,
the cells are working.
Speaker 1: Hard, generating more of those light emitting reactions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and late afternoon is often when our bodies overall
metabolism just it hits its beak before it starts to
slow down for the evening.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if the glow is tied directly to cellular
health and metabolic function, the potential for medical diagnostics here
is It's immense.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's huge. Imagine a camera that doesn't just see heat,
but sees metabolic stress or hyperactivity.
Speaker 1: You could map out the normal glow of a healthy person.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and then any disruption, a hot spot or maybe
a dark spot, could signal a problem. Yeah, you could
potentially spot the accelerated metabolism of tumor or an infection
long before that tissue change becomes visible on an MRI
or a BT scan, just based on the light pattern.
Speaker 1: And we have to mention the detail that light has
also been detected coming from a brain tissue. The idea
that our thoughts, our actual brain processes, are generating a
faint light inside our skulls, that is such a profound
twist on self awareness. It makes our inner universe a
literal thing.
Speaker 2: A walking, talking, thinking like bulb. Wow.
Speaker 1: But if our body is broadcasting itself, our brain is
doing something even stranger. With time itself.
Speaker 2: It really is. This next point moves us from a
chemical surprise to a deep neurological mystery, and it strikes
right at the heart of conscious reality, which is the
core discovery is that your brain is constantly living a
few seconds in the future. It's actively predicting events, not
just reacting to them.
Speaker 1: That flies in the face of how we feel. Though
we feel like we see something, we process it, then
we decide what to do.
Speaker 2: That's the illusion. The brain creates that narrative for us.
After the fact. The brain is at its core a
predictive engine. It's just too slow to wait for reality
to actually happen.
Speaker 1: The classic example is slamming on the brakes in a car.
Speaker 2: Right, it's the perfect example. If you waited for the
light waves from the brake lights ahead to hit your retina,
travel to your visual cortex for that signal to be
consciously registered as danger, and then you decide to move your.
Speaker 1: Foot, you'd have crashed ages ago.
Speaker 2: Long ago. So in that moment, your foot is already
moving toward the break before you have the conscious thought, oh,
I need to stop.
Speaker 1: The brain just ran a probability calculation.
Speaker 2: Thousands of them every second. It's constantly running this complex
simulation of the next three to five seconds of reality,
and when what's happening matches the simulation, it just executes
the pre planned action.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what's the really mind blowing detail here, what's
the timeline on this prediction.
Speaker 2: This is what's just staggering. When scientists use fMRI and
EG to look at brain activity during simple decision.
Speaker 1: Making tasks like pushing a button.
Speaker 2: Exactly choosing which button to par us, they find that
the activity in the parts of the brain making the choice,
it starts building up ten seconds before the person is
consciously aware they've made a decision.
Speaker 1: Wait ten full second.
Speaker 2: Ten seconds.
Speaker 1: That's an eternity in brain time. The early experiments on this,
like the Livid experiment, they were talking about milliseconds a
fraction of a second, but ten seconds it changes everything.
Speaker 2: It moves this out of the realm of simple reflex
and into deep, pre conscious decision making. It suggests that
what we experience as now our conscious awareness is actually
heavily edited, processed, delayed information.
Speaker 1: It's a lagged live stream.
Speaker 2: It's a great way to put it. When you catch
a ball, by the time you consciously register oh, a
ball is coming at me. Your brain has already calculated
its trajectory, predicted where it will land, and sent the
signals to your hand to move.
Speaker 1: You're just along for the ride.
Speaker 2: The conscious hu is yeah.
Speaker 1: But that raises the huge philosophical question. If the brain
is making these decisions ten seconds before I am aware
of it, who or what is the eye that thinks
it's in charge.
Speaker 2: This is where it gets really deep. If your sense
of self is tied to that conscious awareness, but the
brand has already decided to swerve or duck, then the
conscious eye is just receiving an update on an action
that's already happening.
Speaker 1: It's a narrator.
Speaker 2: It's a narrator trying to create a coherent story of
why you did what you did to preserve the feeling
that you are in control. But it's not the commander.
Speaker 1: It's just an efficiency thing. The brand's priority is speed
and survival.
Speaker 2: Conscious thought is slow and very resource intensive. Prediction is
fast and necessary. So the brain is willing to sacrifice
a little bit of now to make sure it gets
the future right.
Speaker 1: That is a reality twist if I've ever heard one.
Speaker 2: It is, and the complexity of that predictive mind. It
didn't just appear overnight. It was forged in our deep,
deep past, which brings us to our next genetic surprise.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if our brands are looking seconds into the future,
let's look way way back. I thought we had a
pretty good handle on human evolution, right, the story of
modern humans Neanderthals, Denisovans.
Speaker 2: We thought so, But the story of human history has
been absolutely torn up and rewritten by genetic sequencing in
the last decade. The core discovery here is that our
ancestors interbred a lot with at least four different species
of ancient humans that were previously unknown to science.
Speaker 1: Ghost species, that's what.
Speaker 2: The researchers have dubbed them. Ghost species.
Speaker 1: And the proof isn't in some dusty bones found in
a case.
Speaker 2: No, that's what's so amazing. It's purely genetic. Researchers found
these distinct, unexplained chunks of DNA in the genomes of
modern people living in West Africa.
Speaker 1: And this DNA doesn't match anything we already know.
Speaker 2: It doesn't match Neanderthals, it doesn't match Denisivans. You know,
we accept that non African populations have about two percent
Neanderthal DNA. This new stuff, it's totally foreign to that
known family tree.
Speaker 1: That is the big mystery. Then we have no physical evidence,
no idea what these ghost species look like, how they lived,
what tools they used?
Speaker 2: Nothing, no bones, no cave paintings, just their genetic fingerprints
left behind in US. The leading theory for why we
haven't found fossils is the environment, the tropics. Exactly, a
lot of this interaction happened in tropical parts of Africa,
where bone and organic material just it decays incredibly quickly,
not like the dry caves in Europe, where in the
NFL remains are so well preserved.
Speaker 1: It's like finding a few words of a lost language
woven into our own, but the entire culture that spoke
it is just gone.
Speaker 2: It's a beautiful way to put it.
Speaker 1: But these ancient hookups, they aren't just a fun fact
for history buffs. They have real biological relevance for us today.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, evolution is nothing if not opportunistic. Some of these
ghost genes were kept around because they gave a survival advantage,
like what specifically in some West African populations, some of
the DNA from these mystery humans gives a significant boost
to the immune system. It helps them fight off local
infections more effectively.
Speaker 1: So we are literally benefiting today from interspecies relationships that
happened tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't a one off thing. The genetics suggest
this was happening constantly for thousands of years across different
human groups moving around the continent.
Speaker 1: It totally changes the picture. It's not a simple story
of Homo sapiens replacing everyone else.
Speaker 2: No, it's more like a dense, tangled thicket of species
constantly mingling, swapping genes, and adapting by grabbing the best
bits from each other.
Speaker 1: So our family tree is less of a tree and
more of a woven tapestry.
Speaker 2: A very complex tapestry. It shows our adaptability came not
just from evolving alone, but from incorporating the successful genes
of others, even the ones we've lost to time.
Speaker 1: The complexity of our deep past really does mirror the
complexity of our present biology. Okay, let's go from that
vast scale down to a few hundred thousand cells in
a dish.
Speaker 2: This is one of the most sci fi sounding discoveries
in our stee act. It really proves that a basic
form of intelligence might be far more accessible than we
ever imagine.
Speaker 1: It just blurs the line between myology and computer science.
The core discovery is that human brain cells grown in
a lab dish learned how to play the video game Pong.
Speaker 2: They called their creation dishbrain.
Speaker 1: Dishbrain. I love it, but Pong requires prediction reaction learning.
How do you even set that up? You can't give
a dish of cells a joystick.
Speaker 2: No, the setup was ingenious. It's all based on electrical signals.
They took about eight hundred thousand living human brain cells
neurons and grew them on a tiny computer.
Speaker 1: Chip, a multi electrode array.
Speaker 2: Right, it's basically a living circuit board. So the cells
would receive inputs through the electrodes of the ball's location
and speed, and they sent outputs through their own electrical firing,
which controlled the paddle.
Speaker 1: So their own brain activity moved the paddle correct.
Speaker 2: The researchers created this closed feedback loop. The cells activity
had a direct consequence on the game, and at first
they were terrible, just random firing. The paddle was twitching
all over the place.
Speaker 1: But then it clicked. What does that even mean for
a bunch of cells.
Speaker 2: It means they started organizing their firing patterns. They discovered
something called the principle of minimum surprise. The what the
principle of minimum surprise. A brain's main job is to
reduce uncertainty in its environment. So by firing an organized
burst that moved the pal to hit the ball, the
cells were ensuring the next input they got was predictable.
Speaker 1: They were making their own world makes sense exactly.
Speaker 2: They were literally learning to predict the ball's trajectory to
optimize their own stability in this little digital world.
Speaker 1: That is a true form of adaptive intelligence, and it's
totally divorced from a body or sensory organs or anything
we think of as consciousness.
Speaker 2: It's a tiny, optimized version of intelligence that emerged just
from that feedback loop.
Speaker 1: And they tested it, right, I heard they introduced a
certain substance.
Speaker 2: They did to test the limits. They gave the cells alcohol.
Speaker 1: You're kidding, They gave the dish brain a buzz has.
Speaker 2: They just introduced ethanol into the nutrient solution bathing the cells,
and predictably, it completely disrupted the complex organization they'd built.
Speaker 1: So they got sloppy.
Speaker 2: We started firing erratically. The coordination just fell apart. Their
performance plummeted. They started missing the ball, making sloppy moves.
The researchers said they acted just like a drunk person
playing video games.
Speaker 1: First, create life, second, see how it handles a night out.
But seriously, this points to an incredible future biocomputers.
Speaker 2: The implication is massive silicon chips are powerful, but they're static.
Living cells can learn, adapt, restructure themselves in ways that
current AI can only mimic with enormous amounts of energy
and data.
Speaker 1: So this wetwear could lead to computers that learn and
evolve on their own.
Speaker 2: It's a huge step in that direction. The potential for
bridging that gap between biology and hardware is just it's staggering.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, we've gone from the faint light we emit
to the time machine in our skulls to this. Let's
shift our gaze outward now, because the ground we're standing
on and the moon above us, they are just as.
Speaker 2: Surprising, absolutely as complex as the human body is. The
Earth and the Moon are proving to be far more
active and frankly, a lot more geologically unstable than we've
been led to believe for centuries.
Speaker 1: We tend to think of the Moon as this this
ancient dead rock in the sky. It's just there, perfect, permanent,
ultimate constant, right. But recent finding show it's not just active.
It is literally shrinking and shaking.
Speaker 2: That's the core discovery. The Moon is geologically active and
it's shrinking, just like a grape turning into.
Speaker 1: A raisin, and that analogy really captures it. The cause
is pretty simple, right, It's just cooling down.
Speaker 2: It's a process that's been ongoing for billions of years.
The Moon's interior, it's metallic core, is losing heat, and
as it loses heat, it contracts.
Speaker 1: And when a giant solid ball of rock contracts, the
crust on the outside has to go somewhere. It can't
shrink smoothly, so it.
Speaker 2: Wrinkles and cracks, and those wrinkles are massive. They're called
thrust faults. These aren't just little surface cracks. The contraction
creates these huge cliff scarps taller than the Empire State.
Speaker 1: Building, Taller than the Empire State Building.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, And over the last few hundred million years,
the Moon has shrunk by about one hundred and fifty
feet in circumference.
Speaker 1: All that shifting and cracking must lead to some serious instability.
Moonquakes powerful moonquakes, and they're very different from earthquakes because
of the Moon's composition.
Speaker 2: It's one solid piece basically exactly.
Speaker 1: Earth has tectonic plates that slip and slide, which absorbs energy.
The Moon is essentially one giant solid rock ball. So
when a moonquake hits, the seismic waves have nowhere to go.
Speaker 2: They just bounce around inside. They bounce around like a
pingkong ball and a washing machine, that's the quote from
the research.
Speaker 1: And that makes the quakes last for.
Speaker 2: Hours, potentially hours, yes, sustained shaking. They've measured these quakes
up to a five point five on the lunar scale.
Now imagine a five point five earthquake, which is significant,
just rattling you relentlessly for two or three hours stray.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying. And if its own internal cooling wasn't
bad enough, we're making the problem worse.
Speaker 2: We are Earth's massive gravitational pull is constantly yanking on
the Moon, stressing its crust. These tidal forces trigger more quakes,
and they often make the internal stresses from the cooling
even worse.
Speaker 1: So this is a huge problem for any future lunar.
Speaker 2: Basis a major unavoidable concern. Any prominent structures we build
up there will need to be designed to withstand hours
of this sustained rattling shaking, not just a quick jolt.
Speaker 1: It's a reminder that our faithful, static looking satellite is actually,
you know, geologically stressed out and actively remaking itself.
Speaker 2: It's anything but a dead rock. And if the Moon
holds secrets, the planet right under our feet is even
more mysterious.
Speaker 1: We think we know our own planet, but it's holding
secrets hundreds of miles down that completely redefined where our water.
Speaker 2: Came from and how our geology even works.
Speaker 1: The core discovery here is to me one of the
most mind blowing of all. An ocean three times the
sides of all the oceans on the surface combined, exists
hundreds of miles beneath the Earth's crust.
Speaker 2: That's a phenomenal amount of water. But we have to
be clear for everyone listening. This is not a liquid lake.
It's not some giant underground sea you could sail off.
Speaker 1: You can't just drill down and tap into it.
Speaker 2: No, it's water that's trapped inside a specific crystal structure
called ringwoodite, deep inside the Earth's.
Speaker 1: Mantle, ringwoodite. That sounds like something out of a sci
fi movie. Where is this geological sponge.
Speaker 2: It's in what's called the transition zone, about four hundred
miles below the surface, sitting between the upper and lower mantle.
This mineral it's a high pressure version of olivine, which
is super common. But under that immense pressure and heat,
it's crystal structure just it totally changes.
Speaker 1: And that new structure can hold water.
Speaker 2: It acts like a silicate sponge. The molecular st xture
of ringuidite has these little gaps that allow hydrogen and
oxygen atoms, the components of water, to get locked inside
its crystal lattice. They're bound right into the mineral itself.
Speaker 1: So it's water in solid form essentially.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's incredibly stable under that pressure.
Speaker 1: I love the analogy they used. Ringoidite is like those
little silica gel packets you find in a new pair
of shoes, but on a planetary scale, just soaking up moisture.
Speaker 2: And we only know this by a streak of luck. Yeah,
we can't drill four hundred miles down. The evidence came
from diamonds.
Speaker 1: Pature's USB drives exactly.
Speaker 2: These diamonds formed under those extreme pressures, and they were
shot to the surface in volcanic eruptions and trapped inside them.
Scientists found tiny inclusions of this ringuidite.
Speaker 1: And it had water in it.
Speaker 2: It had measurable quantities of hydroxyl groups, proving that yes,
this crystal can and does store a massive amount of
water deep inside the planet.
Speaker 1: This just completely rewrites the story of Earth. The old
dairy was that all our water came from comets crashing into.
Speaker 2: A dry planet accretion theory, and while commets definitely contributed,
this discovery suggests a huge portion, maybe even most, of
our water was here from the beginning, locked inside the planet.
Speaker 1: And it's been slowly seeping up over billions of years.
Speaker 2: Right, the Earth might have been wet from the very start,
And this hidden ocean, it's not just sitting there. It
has a critical job.
Speaker 1: It's a lubricant.
Speaker 2: It's a giant lubricant for our tectonic plates. It's the
wd foty for plate tectonics. Without this water, the deeper
parts of the mantle might be too thick, too viscous.
This hidden water reduces friction, allowing the continents to slide around.
Speaker 1: And it drives volcanoes.
Speaker 2: It plays a huge role in the convection currents that
drive volcanism. It's the fundamental engine behind our planet's dynamic geology.
Speaker 1: Astonishing to think that the very forces shaving our world
are lubricated by a hidden ocean three times bigger than
the one we know. Okay, from the movement of continents,
let's talk about the subtle communications of the plants living
on them.
Speaker 2: This is one of those discoveries that just makes you
look at your houseplants completely differently.
Speaker 1: For years, we've joked about plants screaming when you.
Speaker 2: Cut them, right, we anthropomorphize them. Well, the core discovery
is that they actually do make ultrasonic sounds when they're stressed.
Speaker 1: They are screaming, just in a register that's way too
high for us to hear, higher than a dog whistle.
So when a plant is thirsty or its stem is cut,
it starts making these tiny, rapid popping sounds.
Speaker 2: The mechanism behind it is really physical. It's called cavitation. Cavitation, Yeah,
plants pull water up these tiny tubes called a xylum
using powerful negative pressure. When the plant gets dehydrated, or damaged.
That continuous calumn of water breaks and air bubble forms
and then pops.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's like the slurping sound in the bottom of.
Speaker 2: A straw exactly, but microscopic and an ultra high frequency.
It's the sound of the plant's internal plumbing failing under stress.
Speaker 1: But it's not just random noise. It's a kind of language.
Speaker 2: That's what's incredible. Researchers found that different kinds of stress
produced distinct sounds. A thirsty tomato plant sounds different from
one that's been damaged.
Speaker 1: You can tell what's wrong with it just by listening.
Speaker 2: You can, and this opens up a whole new world
of ecological communication. The key is that certain insects like
moths can hear these.
Speaker 1: Sounds and they use that information.
Speaker 2: They absolutely do. Moths looking for a place to lay
their eggs will actively avoid plants that are screening too much.
Speaker 1: Of course, why lay your eggs on a plant that's
already struggling. It's a poor environment for your kids.
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant, highly effective defense mechanism we never knew.
Speaker 1: Existed, and the practical application for farming must be huge.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a game changer right now. Farmers wait for
visible signs of stress like wilting, but by then the
plant is already suffering, its yield is already reduced.
Speaker 1: But with this, you could put sensitive microphones in the
fields and you.
Speaker 2: Can listen to your crops. You can hear when they
reach a certain threshold of stress signals and water them
precisely when they need it, before any visible damage.
Speaker 1: It means that every time I've mowed the lawn, I've
been conducting a grass schoir of terror.
Speaker 2: You have been creating an absolute symphony of ultrasonic distress. Wow.
Speaker 1: It just makes you realize the world is so much
noisier and more communicative than our limited senses can.
Speaker 2: Perceive, a world that is always talking even when we
think it's silent.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've covered the inner life, the planetary life. Now
let's go to the most extreme scale, the cosmic and
atomic frontier, where the rules we thought governed reality are
just breaking.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If the first two parts were surprising, this final
section really veers into straight up science fiction. We're starting
with a discovery that breaks a core assumption of material
science that things fall apart.
Speaker 1: That wear and terror is inevitable. The discovery is simple,
but its implications are civilization changing. Scientists watched solid metal heel.
Speaker 2: Itself, specifically tiny pieces of platinum. They saw small cracks
literally close up and fuse back together at the atomic level.
Speaker 1: Which should be impossible. Metal isn't supposed to do that.
Biological things heal, but inert solid metal, it's governed by
entropy damage. It's supposed to add up until it fails.
Speaker 2: That's the basis for our entire manufacturing and engineering world,
planned obsolescens, replacing parts. It all assumes metal breaks down.
Speaker 1: So how did they even see this happen?
Speaker 2: It was an accident actually at Sandia National Labs. They
were running fatigue tests, watching these tiny pieces of platinum
with a transmission electron microscope which lets you see down
to the atomic level.
Speaker 1: And they were just wiggling it.
Speaker 2: Wiggling it back and forth hundreds of times per second
to create tiny fractures and watch them grow.
Speaker 1: Except they didn't grow exactly.
Speaker 2: They watched these cracks, which were smaller than human hair,
spontaneously close up and fuse back together. The atoms literally
flowed and reorganized themselves, erasing the damage.
Speaker 1: Like watching a paper cut on steel just heal itself.
What's the mechanism Why would atoms do that?
Speaker 2: The current theory involves something called stress induced material flow.
Because a metal was being constantly pushed and pulled, that
energy input was enough to get the atoms near the
crack to rearrange themselves into more stable, lower energy state.
Speaker 1: And the more stable state is.
Speaker 2: Whole again, the whole again. They fuse back into a
perfect crystal structure.
Speaker 1: Now there has to be a catch. This isn't happening
to the bumper on my car right now, not yet.
Speaker 2: The big constraints are scale and conditions. This only happens
at the nanoscale right now and requires a vacuum. But
the fact that it's possible at all, that's the transformative part.
It proves self repair and metals can happen.
Speaker 1: The future implications are just staggering. If we can figure
this out and scale it.
Speaker 2: Up, self repairing infrastructure, buildings that last for centuries, engines
that never wear out, airplanes that are inherently safer because
metal fatigue is no longer a given.
Speaker 1: You're giving Wolverine's healing power to inanimate objects.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. It challenges the entire economic model of
our world.
Speaker 1: From the ultras small to the ultra large. Let's talk
about the universe's greatest rebrand, the black hole. We thought
we knew its job description.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. For decades black holes were cosmic destroyers, gravitational
vacuum cloners, the end of the line for matter.
Speaker 1: But the discovery here is of a massive, lone black
hole that's acting as a cosmic creator. It's actively seating
the birth of new stars.
Speaker 2: Which is a spectacular reversal of its function. And this
wasn't found in the middle of the galaxy, which is
where you expect a black hole to be. No. No,
This is what makes the observation, which was made by
the James Webbs based telescope, so spectacular. This black hole
is naked. It's cruising through intergalactic space all by itself.
Speaker 1: How did that happen?
Speaker 2: He was likely ejected from its home galaxy during a
massive galactic collision. A huge three body gravitational slingshot just
flung it out into the void.
Speaker 1: So it's a cosmic rebel and its new cause is
making stars. How does something that eats matter create it?
Speaker 2: It's all about speed, not gravity. This thing is moving
at several million miles per hour through the cold gas
and dust between galaxies, and it's creating these immense shock.
Speaker 1: Waves like a sonic boom in space, exactly like.
Speaker 2: A cosmic speedboat, creating a massive wake. And that wake
is so powerful that it violently compresses the gas clouds
that passes.
Speaker 1: Through, compresses them until they collapse and ignite.
Speaker 2: Until they reach the critical density to collapse under their
own gravity and become stars. It's a vast stellar nursery
being dragged across the cosmos, and the scale of this
is immense. The wake of newborn stars behind it stretches
for two hundred thousand light years.
Speaker 1: That's twice the width of our entire Milky Way galaxy.
Speaker 2: Twice our galaxy. It just forces us to change our
fundamental understanding of what a black hole does. They aren't
just endpoints. They can be violent, fast moving engines of creation.
Speaker 1: So we definitely need to update the job description. And
their complexity isn't just visual, it's auditory too, as.
Speaker 2: Our final discovery shows.
Speaker 1: Yes, this one is amazing. It connects this cosmic scale
to something so human sound. We've all heard the cliche
in space, no one can hear you scream. Well, NASA
recorded actual sound waves a sustain hum coming from a
black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster two hundred and
fifty million light years away.
Speaker 2: The core discovery is that this supermassive black hole has
been singing in a low B flat for billions of years.
Speaker 1: Okay, the pitch is what gets me. The actual note
is fifty seven octaves below middle C. How do you
even comprehend that?
Speaker 2: For context, the lowest note on a big concert piano
is only about four octaves below middle C. This black
hole is singing fifty three octaves lower than the lowest
note you can physically play. We literally cannot hear it.
Speaker 1: So how do they make it audible for us?
Speaker 2: Through a process called soonification, they take the actual data
from the pressure waves rippling through the gas and they
just transpose it up. They raise the frequency by fifty
seven octaves.
Speaker 1: Turning this ultra low wave into an audible hum.
Speaker 2: Right, But you asked the key question earlier, how sound
needs a medium.
Speaker 1: Space is a vacuum, So how is it broadcasting this
this cosmic horror movie soundtrack?
Speaker 2: Well, while the space between galaxies is a vacuum, the
area around this black hole, the Perseus galaxy cluster is
filled with immense clouds of hot, dense gas plasma. The
black hole's activity is constantly sending out these massive pressure
waves that ripple through that plasma.
Speaker 1: So the hot gas is the speaker system.
Speaker 2: It's a giant galaxy sized speaker system. The ripples in
that gas are the sound waves. We can measure them,
and the frequencies just it's mind bogglingly slow. A full
cycle of the wave, one single beat of this cosmic
rhythm happens only once every ten million years.
Speaker 1: That's rhythm on a geological scale, sound of deep time itself.
Speaker 2: It is. It shows that even the most seemingly static,
silent things in the universe are vibrating, communicating, interacting, just
at a pace we needed incredible technology to finally detect.
Speaker 1: We have covered so much ground today, from the micro
to the macro, challenging assumptions at every single level.
Speaker 2: Let's do a quick recap. We covered our own unexpected
internal reality, that we all faintly glow with the light
of our own metabolism, and that our minds are constantly
predicting the future, forcing us to rethink what consciousness even is.
Speaker 1: Then we looked at the planetary scale, a hidden ocean
three times the size of our own acting as the
lubricant for our entire planet's geology, and a moon that's
actively shrinking and shaking itself.
Speaker 2: Apart, not to mention the silent ultrasonic screams of plants
showing this whole other layer of ecological communication.
Speaker 1: There. Finally, out on the cosmic frontier where the rules
just don't apply, we saw self healing metal star creating
black holes, and we heard the deepest note in the universe,
a b flat hum, vibrating once every ten million years.
Speaker 2: The relevance to you, the listener, is just that these
discoveries make your own existence so much richer and stranger
and more complex. Science isn't about a set of rigid facts.
It's a thrilling, constant process of being wrong and finding
something new.
Speaker 1: Exactly what we call a fact is always shifting. The
familiar world, the metal in your phone, the ground you
walk on, the stars you see. It's all just superficially understood.
Speaker 2: And what seems impossible today could very well be a
routine piece of science tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I want to end on that idea of the brain's delay.
We've seen that our experience of reality is always slightly
in the past. The universe is always a couple steps
ahead of our understanding. We are just observers, perpetually trying
to catch up, and.
Speaker 2: That's the perfect way to frame it. Your brain is
predicting the future before you know it. The ground beneath
you is lubricating a hidden world. The rules we thought
were fixed are breaking, both atomically and cosmically.
Speaker 1: So here's our final question for you. Given all of this,
that your own brain is making decisions seconds before you're
aware of them, that the moon is shaking, that black
holes create stars, which of these new realities changes your
perspective the most? On the simple concept.
Speaker 2: Of being alive and what's unexpected discovery, internal or cosmic.
Do you think is waiting just around the corner.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think.
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear it.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us for this journey on thrilling Threads.
We will see you next time.