Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions #33

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about tongue worms, units, and Kelly's nightmares. Link: Standard reference peanut butterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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From the lung of a snake, the tongueworm steals a blood meal. Has it been so for millions of years? What do fossils reveal? They just keep getting longer. And more Shakespearean, I noticed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm trying. Very nice. We nail down light and let the meter chase time.

Now rulers run late, but the clocks are sublime. Kelly, pray tell. What are Parasites 3 that you find the most creepy? Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's Shakespearean answers will set it all right. Isn't Shakespearean in like iambic pentameter, not whatever the heck you call what we're doing? My criticisms of your poetry may not be entirely accurate, I admit. Okay, welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. Not Daniel and Kelly's literate universe.

This is listener questions number 33. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm not a professor of English. Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space. And when I was at a literature festival, I actually asked a Scotsman, well, Robert Burns is dead, right? And he died about 150 years ago.

So the answer is, yes. I married a man with a degree in literature, and I embarrass him regularly. And I've heard that he's not a fan of our poetry. He skips past the start of our listener questions episodes. All right, but today we are not talking in tongues, but we are talking about tongues. I've noticed that you've licked some very interesting topics for today, Kelly. That's right. And our first question is by Jacob, who wants to know about tongueworms.

So let's go ahead and hear his question. I'd love an episode or chapter on tongueworms. An approximately 455 million-year-old lineage is mind-bending. I keep wondering what impact something that ancient has had on the evolution of vertebrates. My naive intuition is that if a host parasite relationship lasts that long, natural selection must have pushed both sides towards some kind of stable arrangement, almost like an evolutionary game that has found a robust equilibrium, with strategies on both sides that keep getting reselected.

Wow. Who wouldn't love an episode on tongueworms? That's nightmare fuel for sure. He was really excited about tongue worms. We had a very enthusiastic conversation about whether or not we meant the pentostomid tongueworms or the isopods that eat the tongues of fish. Maybe those were the tongueworms that Jacob meant.

But anyway, no, he meant the pentostomid tongueworms. lingualids, the tongue, the kinds of parasites that you often find in snakes. Oh, fascinating. All right. So tell us what are these things and why have they been around for 450 million years? All right. So here we go. All right. So pentastoma, that means five mouths. But you know what? Fun fact. They only have one mouth. They've got like five hangy things on their head side. But actually only one of those things is a mouth. And the other five are like hooks. I think we weren't quite so good at figuring out what the hangy things were initially. So we said five mouths, but only one of them is the mouth.

All right, but give me a mental picture of this thing. How big is it? Is it long and thin? Is it a little blob? Is it gooey? It's gooey, isn't it? I mean, probably kind of gooey. I mean, it depends on what stage you're talking about.

So they can be as long as like 15 centimeters. Whoa. Pretty long. They're wormy. They're probably related to crustaceans. And so crustaceans were talking about like crayfish, shrimp, crabs, stuff like that. Right. But they are like sort of very differently shaped.

They're long. They're wormy. They've got like a head projection that has like hooks on either sides that they can like hold on to the inside of the lungs of like snakes. And then they've got like a little mouth thing in the inside so that they can like suck on blood. And so they're basically snake shaped. So like a snake might have a snake parasite in it that looks like a snake. And then does that just continue? Is there a parasite inside that one?

A parasite inside that one until you get down to like quirk length snake parasites? Add infinitum. Yes. It's snake parasites all the way down. All right. So you got a snake with a snake parasite in it and it's got these grabby things on its mouth so that it can hook into the lungs of the snake? I thought we were talking about tongues. Yeah.

So they don't have that much to do with tongues, really. But they still get called tongue worms. And so they tend to be found in like the nasopharyngeal region. So they can be like up in the nose. They can be in like the trachea. They can be in the lung sort of region. You tend to find them in like lizards, turtles, snakes, crocodiles, like herps. And essentially what they do is like they use those hooks, they hold on,

and then they bite into the lungs and they suck out a bunch of blood. Wow. So if a snake, like, has a big sneeze, it could, like, ha-choo out one of these guys. Ah, so here's the fun thing. So they're probably not going to hutchew out the parasite, but they might be hachewing out the parasite's eggs. Oh, gosh. So the parasite breeds inside, and it produces eggs, and sometimes the host will, like, cough up the eggs and swallow the eggs. And then the eggs will get out of the body through, like, the feces of the host.

I'm going to think about that every time I cough from now on, Kelly. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. There's some other parasites that do that too, and they infect humans. Oh, yay. Yay. But sometimes the parasites will get into the environment directly because the animal will just like cough them right out into the environment.

Super gross. The way these parasites harm their host, it doesn't seem like they cause anemia, which is to say it's not like they're drinking so much blood that that's how the host dies. But as you can imagine, having an issue. animal with hooks, hooking into your lungs and then nibbling into your lungs, that causes a bunch of, like, gaping wounds in your lungs.

Yeah, and those gaping wounds then gets infected by bacteria or fungus, and so animals can die from, like, pneumonia. Or some of these parasites, as I mentioned, can get to be, like, many centimeters long, and they literally, like, can choke the animal to death by just, like, taking up a bunch of their lungs or a bunch of their trachea. So, not cool. Wow.

Sometimes the parasites have an intermediate host in the life cycle where they'll live inside of an insect. And so they'll have like a stage where they don't do any reproduction. They're just kind of hanging out in the insect waiting for the insect to get eaten by like a snake or something. Wow. And once the snake eats it, it will hatch out of the insect migrate out of the snake's gut until it finds the lungs. And that migration can cause some damage. And then it becomes an adult and does the chewing on the lung thing again. All right, so this thing is pretty gross, but, you know, it's up there in the pantheon of parasites doing its thing, right? We're not judgy here. But Jacob wanted to know about their evolution, right? Yeah. And so this is where it gets a little bit complicated. So Jacob was super excited because this is a very old parasite. So one of the papers that I was reading said that it is the oldest metazzoan parasite that we know about. And so metazzoan means multicellular. And you're yawning. And I don't know how you can yawn when I

I am bringing the, like, most exciting facts in the world. Daniel, the oldest multicellular parasite we know of. No, I'm sorry. No, I'm jet lag. No, I totally understand. And so, anyway, we have found pentostomid larva. So this is like, you know, a juvenile stage of the parasite. They were found at the Cambrian-Ordovician boundary layer.

Maybe I said that right. Maybe I didn't. But this is about like 485 million years ago. And the fossils that they found weren't associated with any host. And so what does that mean? Maybe that means that this stage was just kind of hanging out in the environment, waiting for a host to come by, and then it was going to like swim up and grab the host.

Or maybe it means that actually a really long time ago they were free living. And later they became parasitic. But it's hard for us to tell because the fossil wasn't connected to a host. All right. So we have fossils of the same critter from 400-something million years ago. How certain can we be it's the same critter? I mean, fossils don't give you, like, details often, right? How sure are we?

Yeah. So I have looked at fossils of parasites before and thought to myself, you really need to like squint and believe to think that that is a fossil of the things. you think that it is, or the thing you're saying it is. So I opened up the paper and I looked at it and I was like, that's a pretty good fossil. Oh, okay. Wow. And so this, I mean, this, like, this really looks like a pentestomid larva. So it's like, it's pretty good. Okay. But it wasn't munching on snake lungs. So we don't know if that's what it was doing yet. It could be that it was just hanging out, not being a parasite, and then later figured out a new life plan.

Well, okay, so here's the thing. It couldn't. have been hanging out chewing on snake lungs because tetrapods, like lizards, weren't even going to be existing for another 100 million years. Oh. So tetrapods weren't an option, but maybe it could have been parasitizing something else. Oh.

And so then we find a 425 million-year-old specimen that's an ostracod. And so this is an aquatic crustacean, and it's got like a kind of hard outer shell. And this time the pentastomid was like attached to that. And so maybe it was infecting this aquatic crustacean that would be like different than what we see today. But maybe it was a parasite of something totally different a really long time ago. And so our best guess is that maybe what happened is they were infecting something totally different.

and then primitive fish came along and they started eating these ostracods. I see. And this is where we are doing some evolutionary storytelling. This is our best guess at the moment. We're speculating, yeah. We're speculating, yeah, just to be clear, this is speculation. So we think that you get these early fish,

they start eating the ostracods, and the pentastomid is like, you know, this thing where I get eaten, where my host gets eaten, is kind of the pits. And so I'm going to start infecting the fish instead. Oh, I see. Flip the script, right? Flip the script.

The parasite is actually a victim here, right? Yes. Yeah, okay. What else can you expect it to do? It's being munched on. It's going to fight back, yeah. That's right. That's right.

And so it takes power over the situation and it starts infecting this early vertebrate instead. Right. And then over evolutionary time, you know, you start to get vertebrates that are moving onto land. And now you've got some pentostomids that are infestomids that are, infecting some of the early vertebrates that are moving to land. So you get pentastomids in amphibians, and we find those in amphibians today. Then the pentastomids are infecting the lizards, and it just sort of like radiates with its hosts as they move on to land. Does that make sense? Yeah, exactly. Something in the water was munching on tasty bits hundreds of millions

of years ago, not realizing that they were dooming all of their land-based ancestors to, coughing up that bits eggs hundreds of millions of years later. It's incredible. Yeah. Incredible. But again, a story. Right. It's a story.

It might be the case. Right. Is this the kind of thing we could ever know for sure? Like, what kind of thing could tell you more about this? Is it finding a fossil of one thing inside another thing? Do we ever do that? Um, yeah. I mean, we get lucky in that sometimes we will find coprolites and the coprolites will have.

Copperlites are poop, right? Yep, sorry, fossilized poop. And the fossilized poop will have identifiable eggs. And so, for example, we get pretty lucky because some kinds of tapeworms have very hard hooks that they use to hang on to their hosts. And inside of the eggs, you can sometimes see these very characteristic hooks. Oh, cool. And so, like, you know, an ancient shark might poop, and you find the ancient shark poop, and you see these eggs with hooks. And you're like, oh, that ancient shark had this certain kind of tapeworm.

Right. What? And then you throw a party because it's awesome. Ancient parasite poop. Yay. That's right. That's what my people get excited about. So maybe you could find some similar evidence with pentostomids, but it is a little hard because they tend to be internal parasites.

I don't know how much their hard structures fossilize in poop, like their eggs fossilize in poop. Maybe. But at the moment, we don't have all of those connecting bits. But then Jacob's question, in particular. was about co-evolution between the vertebrate hosts. And so first of all, I'd like to note that, like, Jacob was excited because these are super old parasites that have been around for, like, over 400 million years.

But the hosts haven't been around for that long. So co-evolution has been happening for less long. So, for example, lots of folks are excited about these worms in snakes. But snakes have been around for, like, you know, more than 100 million years, but, like, around there, which is way less than the 400-plus million years that we've had. tongueworms around. So that's like a longer period for co-evolution. But to be honest, so I started looking for papers on like co-evolution pentastomid and host. And I didn't find like a lot of

reviews that had like looked at a bunch of, you know, relationship between pentastomids and their hosts and looked at what traits were changing. And to be honest, when I was taking parasitology or when I go to parasite conferences, I don't remember hearing about these parasites much. So, like, first, thank you to Jacob for asking this question so that I had an opportunity to read about this stuff. Yeah. But honestly, I think because these parasites tend to not be a big problem for our livestock, at least not in the United States. They tend to not be a problem for our pets, at least not in the United States, although some dogs can sometimes get these parasites. They tend to not be a huge health problem for people, again, in the United States, in some areas where people eat snakes, they are a health problem there.

In the U.S., we don't tend to spend a lot of money on them. And so I think there's not a bunch of money spent answering these kinds of questions. And so maybe I missed it, but I didn't find the kinds of studies that would need to be done to give Jacob the kind of answer that he was looking for. What I can say is that people have been releasing Burmese pythons in Florida and there's a pentastomid parasite from Asia that is spreading into our native snakes and is also spreading into our non-native frogs that have come here from like Cuba. and they have been hitching rides on cars because these are tree frogs that kind of stick to stuff. And it has been spreading out of Florida and it's spreading around the United States.

And that's not great. And so I don't know, maybe we're going to be caring a lot more about this parasite in the near future as it decimates our native herptophana. Do you think there's not a lot of study of this topic because it's impossible and the data is just so rare or because people aren't curious about it or just speculate for me about why you think this hasn't been explored. I think it's because it's in species that are not our pets, our livestock, or us.

They're just in like species that are financially not super important to us, I guess. I mean, like, I love snakes. I love lizards. I love turtles. There's not loads of money in them. Not until we get some sort of snake lovers in Congress. Sure. I mean, like, yeah.

Yeah, something like that. I mean, I think there's like a lot of money to study avian malaria or malaria in lizards in the hope that understanding it there might help us understand malaria in people. Yeah. But this is, you know, not a huge global health problem like something like malaria is. And so I think that there's less money to study it, unfortunately. But I hope we learn more about it because it's very interesting and very gross. All right. Well, let's hear if that answer scratched Jacob's Itch.

Oh, you don't, you set us up for a serious. of lick jokes earlier. You haven't come up with a lick joke to a because I tried and I couldn't come up with anything that was appropriate and involved licking. All right. Well, I'm disappointed that that didn't involve as many tongues as I was expecting. But let's hear if it licks Jacob in all the right places. Oh, no, no, no. I'm sorry I couldn't answer your question, Jacob. I was licked. Is that? There we go. There we go. All right. Gosh, that's kind of gross and yet so extremely neat.

I think I was hoping to find some deep redeeming quality there in parasites. But instead, I found my favorite thing in the universe, curiosity, and in a question rarely asked, I'll definitely be developing a toy model. Who knows? Maybe we've just inspired a listener out there to warm their way in also. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

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app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him. Hi, Dad. And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen. She says, I have some cookies and milk. This is a badass convict. Right. Just finished five years.

I'm going to have cookies and milk at my mom. Yeah. On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered, conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail, talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with the guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.

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and it comes from Alka. Alka didn't want to read it themselves, and so I asked Hazel to read the question for us. I recently read about the redefinition of SIL units in 2019. For the public, a visible kilogram, a visible meter was something everybody could relate to. That is not the case with the new improved SI. A meter is now the distance of light travels in a vacuum in the time it takes the cesium-133 atom to change its transistiniscretion frequency. And where the original idea was to have a meter be the circumference of the Earth divided by 40 million,

with the miscalculated a bit. Why not do it correctly now? And how arbitrary is this anyway? What's going on here? Is this an academic exercise for physicists with two months? much time on their hands and not enough funding for their worthwhile endeavors, or with the previous standards so half-hazard that we have had to redo every calculation and measurement that was done before? Oh, this is fun. I am so glad that there are people on this planet who get super

excited about making sure that we have good standards for weights and other measurements. I couldn't be that person. But we need those people. Because you're not organized and precise enough, or what's the issue? I would get bored. I'd be like, we are close enough. And that is not, I'm not the right kind of person. I'm not the right kind of person. There is definitely a kind of person who works at like the National Institutes for Standards and Technology.

Yeah. They have all the standards there. They even have, Katrina tells me, a standard peanut butter. What? You could buy is like an example. This is the definition of peanut butter. Okay. Huh.

Is that like the astronaut ice cream that has actually never been to space? Is it just a like plot to get money from parents? No, I think, you know, there's like a definition of things. Like you can only call it chocolate if it's got a minimum amount of cocoa. And so probably they produce example chocolate that people can use in their like chocolate detectors or something. And I'm sure there's rules about what you can call peanut butter and what gets called peanut cream or whatever. And so they have to produce something that they can, you know, put into their measuring devices. Anyway, that's how NIST ends up making peanut butter.

All right, all right. Peanut butter is delicious, and I love it, but let's get back to the matter at hands. So Alka is asking about how we measure things, which is super fun because there's really interesting history here, but also there's deep physics and philosophy about how we measure things, what we measure and what we define and what that all means. We're going to dig into all of that. And what they're referring to in their question is that we've changed these definitions. We used to define a second, for example, as one 86, $86,400. of a rotation of the earth. And you're like, well, that's a weird number. Where does that come from?

That's 24 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds. That's literally the number of seconds in a day. So we were defining a second to be in terms of the Earth's rotation, right? So how long does it take the Earth to spin? Call that 24 hours and then divide those up into little bitty slices, which we call seconds. So that's an example of how we used to do things. Or the kilogram used to be like, rod of metal in Paris and we'd say this is a kilogram and everything is measured in relation to that.

I think the rod in Paris makes sense to me. That's like a physical thing, although it probably changes over time. But like the rotation of the earth, that's like not something that most of us could measure. That's probably something that most of us can't measure. That seems like a hard way to measure a second. Well, even the original meter, the rod is a reference, but it's supposed to come from a measurement of the earth. It's like one 10 millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris. Oh, Paris is very important in standard measurements. Well, you know, French used to be the language of science, and a lot of this stuff was done in Paris by people speaking French. So these things are defined in terms of earth-based measurements here,

and then you create like a rod as an example, and then that becomes the reference. And the issue is that like this method is not super robust. You know, physical objects are not great at being perfect references because they're not perfect. They don't stay the same way. They're not eternal, right? They wear down. They get contaminated.

They shrink. They grow. They lose atoms. They gain atoms. I feel personally attacked right now. I'm not talking about you. You are the prototypical Kelly. You will always be.

If you gain or lose atoms, you're still one Kelly. Okay. All right. Thanks. Does that make you feel better? I guess. I'm not sure why. Whereas, for example, we used to have an international prototype kilogram, which was this

cylinder of platinum and aridium. It was stored near Paris. But over a century, it drifted in mass by 50 micrograms. Maybe it gained some, maybe it lost some. We don't actually know because it's the reference, right? And so, you know, we have a bunch of these around the world. And sometimes you bring them back together and you measure them, you realize, oh, they're different from each other. Well, what does that mean? Which one is a kilogram? Well, this one,

we've defined the kilogram to be this one. And so it's always a kilogram, even if the number of atoms in it changes. And so it's just not a great system. It's okay when you're getting started and you're like, look, let's just write down when this is and start from there. But in an era of like high precision measurements, do you want your fundamental units to have that much fuzziness in them? It limits your ability to measure the universe itself. Like, if you don't know the speed, of light to better than one part in six, you can't measure anything that the speed of light is connected to better than that. There's an inherent fuzziness in everything. And so people realize this and said, all right, let's upgrade it. Let's try to come up with a new system where the

units are defined by properties of nature, things that we think are really not changing or that, you know, define the context of the universe itself, not just like, hey, some guy named Girard, cut a piece of metal this long, and now that's the length. Okay. All right. But I'm guessing the new methods are going to be harder to understand by the general public, which is kind of the point of the question, right? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go ahead. What did we come up with?

The new methods are more precise, which makes them less accessible. Yes, but they are the foundation of physics, which is why you get like cool iPhones and stuff. Which is inherently inaccessible. Is that your point? No. I'm just saying the public benefits from physicists doing their job better, right? Okay.

Yeah, yeah. All right. So in 1983, we transitioned from this old system of like physical objects to this new strategy of defining units in terms of invariant properties of nature. So the second actually got an upgrade before then. The second used to be this like slice of a rotation of the earth. But of course, the rotation of the earth is changing, right? Every year, the earth's rotation slows down.

But a second is still a second, right? But today's second is not the same as last year's second. You can see already this is a headache. And when we meet the aliens, it'll be embarrassing to have like a second defined by like, oh, this planet we used to live on a long time ago. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. And this kind of stuff really concerns, Daniel. Yes, it's important. And so in 1967, they redefined the second and they used something I thought was really, really precise, which is the cesium 133 atom.

And this is basically what goes into atomic clocks. It has this oscillation where the electron switches between two energy levels. called a hyperfine transition, because the difference between them is really, really small, and so it just oscillates between these two things extraordinarily regularly, right?

This is basically a clock of the universe. And in about 9.191 billion oscillations is what we used to call a second. So then they redefined the second to be 9,192,000, 631,770 oscillations of the electron between these states in a cesium.

133 Adam. Holy cow. That's what a second is. And is there like a Sessium 133 Adam doing its transition somewhere that it's being counted and the seconds are counting according to that? And is it in Paris? Bien sur, madame. I don't speak French.

I don't know what that was. Oh, but you do accents. That was good. No, I don't. Now I'm embarrassed. No, all cesium atoms do this and they do the same because all cesium atoms. are the same. And so you don't need a prototypical French version in a cafe somewhere. Anybody can capture CZ1-33 and use it as a clock because it's a property of the universe.

That's sort of the idea. Okay. So that was the upgrade for the second. That happened in 1967. The meter has a more hilarious history. The first one was 1799. They made the prototype meter in Paris, according to that definition, 1.10 millionth of the distance between the equator and the North Pole if you go through Paris. But in 1889, they were, realized that they hadn't done a great job and they upgraded it. So number one, they realized it was a little too short. And like, again, you have to ask like too short compared to what. It is the definition of the meter. But they had another way to measure this distance between the pole and the equator. And they realized it was a little bit longer than the basis for the

previous measurement. So they needed an upgrade. So the 1889 upgrade was supposed to be an exact copy, but instead they made it a little bit longer. They also changed its shape. a little bit. Instead of just being like a flat rectangle, they made it an X shape, which was supposed to reduce the flexing during measurements and increase its rigidity, you know, rather than just being a blob. And they changed it from just being platinum to being a platinum iridium alloy to trying to make it more durable.

And you see already they're struggling against the fundamental failure of this system, which is you have a blob of metal and you're using it as your reference. And it's absurd because it's still getting it longer. and shorter. You know, it warms up in Paris. The rod gets longer. Does the meter change? According to this system, yes, that's insane, right? The speed of light goes down when it's warmer in Paris. Does that really make sense to anybody? No. And in 1960, they tried to get away from this, and they redefine it to be the certain number of wavelengths of Krypton 86 emission. So remember, atoms have energy levels, and electrons can go up and down, and when they go down, they emit light, and that light reflects the energy level.

So like that's a pretty basic thing in the universe, the gap between those energy levels, and therefore the wavelength of light that's emitted. So they redefined the meter in terms of these wavelengths. And that's cool. But then they had another issue, which was that now we have a definition of time in terms of cesium atoms, and we have a definition of distance in terms of Krypton 86 emissions. Fine. And they both seem pretty basic, but now we have to measure the speed of light, right?

Because we have a definition of meter, and we have a definition. of time. Now we have to measure how fast light is. But light is a fundamental constant. It's part of the universe. It's not something we should have to measure. And we're pretty good at measuring time, but measuring length is hard. You know, being really, really precise, like down to one part in 10 to the 8 or 10 of the 10 in length measurements is tough. And so that fuzziness in the length of a meter gets translated into fuzziness in the speed of light itself. Right? And so now the speed of light is like something we're measuring, we're not sure about, but we know that it's fixed, right? The physics tells us it has to be fixed. So we have a system of units, which is a little bit

at odds with a system of physics, which treats the speed of light, not as like some number we have to measure, but like a conversion between time and distance, right? It's really deeply ingrained in our understanding of relativity. So then they had another idea. They were like, look, we're good at measuring time. We're not so good at measuring length. Why don't we just define the second? And then we can use the speed of light itself to define the meter. Okay. So they said, okay, take a second. And now a meter is how far light travels one 299,792, 458s of a second. Naturally. Because we define the speed of light to be 299, 792, 458 meters per second, right? And so you can define two of these things and then measure the third one. And so we decided let's define time, because we're good at measuring

that, and let's define the speed of light. And then we'll measure the meter in terms of that. Right. So the meter is not something we define anymore. It's something we measure. Instead of measuring the speed of light, we're measuring the meter. And that way, the speed of light can remain perfect and absolute and invariant. And when we measure like the mass of the top core can try to get that precision down, we're not carrying along in that measurement somebody's fuzziness of the measurement

of the length of a meter, which got propagated into the measurement of the speed of light, which now pollutes everything in our system. Awesome. So, you know, one way to think about it is like you can either paint tick marks on a physical ruler and hope that it never changes,

or you can define distance in terms of how long something takes to travel at a fixed speed. and we chose that second option, and we use the most invariant speed in the universe. And so what Alka is referring to is a recent change in 2019. In 2019, they slightly redefined the length of a meter to include the definition of a second. Before that, they refer to a second, but they didn't expressly say what a second was, than another definition of a second. So they just updated it a little bit to make it more complete.

There's no real change in 2019. Okay, so it wasn't an academic exercise for physicists with too much time on their hands and not enough funding for their worthwhile endeavors? No, it was an important exercise for physicists who are doing important work and don't have enough time for other worthwhile endeavors, but took some time out to do this anyway. And could use more money. And could use more funding, exactly. But it goes to show you how important it is to think clearly and crisply about these really foundational questions. you know, what is a meter, what is a second? You might blow these off as like silly philosophical endeavors,

but if you don't do it right, then you're spreading fuzziness through all of your physics, and that has real consequences. You know, how are we going to make chips in your iPhones if we can't measure things down to the nanometer, right? Like, it's important that we get these things right. That's right. All right.

So let's see what our listener had to say. Are they still disappointed in physicists, or are they convinced by your argument? Oh, wait, I didn't get to make my Bob Dylan joke. the times they are at changing. Oh. Mm, good. That's the only reaction.

Golf clap. All right. Well, in this case, both the length and the times have a changed. But I think we have a good system now. All right. Well, let's send us off to Alka and see if Alka is satisfied with our answer. I heard back from Alka. He didn't want to record his own voice, but here's his response.

Hi, Daniel. Thank you for your effort. I decided a year and a half of a week. that I wanted to know more about physics and then I found your podcast. I don't think I will ever have an understanding of biology. It's just one weird fact after another gross fact, but I have learned so much about physics during this time. Therefore, I loved the answer.

Thank you very much. It completely measures up. Well, thank you very much, Alka. Really glad you're enjoying the podcast. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

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Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Last question of the day is a super fun one from Mark, from the greatest of our 50 states. Asking again about parasites and tongues. Let's hear the question. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Mark from Virginia. I recently read about a parasite that attaches itself to a fish's tongue, consumes the tongue, and then becomes the fish's new tongue. And I thought to myself, oh my gosh.

how horrible for that poor fish. But it got me to wondering, as a parasitologist, what do you think are the three most nightmare-inducing parasites that are out there? I mean, the things that really make your skin crawl, you know, perhaps literally. I look forward to being repulsed by your answer. Oh, man, all right, Kelly gets to be creepy today. So I should say that the answer to this question kind of varies to, depending on the day that you're talking to me.

And we've already talked on the show about screw worms, which totally creep me out. We've already talked on the show about Ascris Lumbroquities, also known as roundworms. We talked about them in our dirtworms episode. Those really are very high up on my list of nightmare-inducing parasites. So I'm going to talk about three other parasites that creep me out. And I don't mean to glorify these parasites. Some of these are like really horrible for people. But these are parasites that like when I hear about them, they make my skin crawl and they make me feel uncomfortable.

Does that mean that you don't root for them? You know, it's the classic like Cheetah versus Antelope. Who documentary are you watching who you're rooting for? Do you find yourself incapable of rooting for these parasites? When the parasites that I'm talking about are not in humans, I am able to root for them. But I am a big fan of the humans. And so when they're in humans, I am not rooting for them. Well, even though Kelly doesn't seem to care, I feel bad for all the other hosts that have to suffer through these parasites.

All right. So what's the first nightmare topping parasite? Loa Loa, which is a kind of beautiful sounding name, but it is the African eye worm. I think Loa means worm. So it's actually wormworm. And you find this in like central and West Africa. This is a neglected tropical disease. It is a nematode that gets injected.

into you when you are bitten by a certain kind of fly. The adults migrate through your body, and they have babies that end up. They're like tiny little worms that move through your blood and they get sucked up by flies when they take a blood meal. But the adults are what causes the symptom that really kind of makes me very uncomfortable, which is that they can migrate, including they can migrate through your eye. Oh, man.

And so sometimes people will be able to see a worm. moving around the outer part of your eye? Like you can see it from the inside. Like it's part of your vision. Is this like worm like swimming across your field of vision? I don't think it's moving across the part where you detect things. But like people can see it in the white part of your eye. Wow.

Imagine a worm though like looking back at you from inside your eye. Not cool. Not cool at all. Wait, I have a question first about the earlier part of the life cycle because this is something I never understand. A fly bites you. and it's previously taken some blood that has these worms in it. And now it's biting you and the worms get into you. So number one, the worms have to be really, really small because they're going through a fly bite.

Yep. And how do the worms go from the fly to you? Like the fly is drinking the blood. Is it backwashing into you? Like, how does that happen? Yeah. So when the fly takes a bite from somebody who's infected, the parasites go into the gut of the fly, and then they, like, infect the fly and they go through like multiple different stages.

inside of the fly. I'm not an expert in what happens inside of the fly. I'm not an expert in what I'm about to say either, but I know a little bit more about it. But like when malaria gets into a mosquito, it also goes through multiple stages and then it moves into the salivary gland of the mosquito. And so when the mosquito goes and takes a blood meal

and injects a bunch of like chemicals into someone so that you maybe don't feel the bite, so like mosquitoes inject like anesthetics and stuff in there so that you're less likely to feel it, you get the parasite injected in also. I don't think that when flies bite, it's exactly the same, but it could just be that like some of it gets left behind, or, you know, some saliva gets left behind,

and then the parasites sort of move their way in. We talked about how with kissing bugs, they just kind of like poop and then you scratch it in. So there's a variety of different ways for insects to make it into your body after a blood meal has been taken. Okay, so it gets inside your body and then what does it do when it's in there? If you get two adults, they find each other, they mate,

they produce these tiny little offspring called microfilaria, and they start moving through your bloodstream, and they are small enough that if a fly bites you, they can get picked up by the fly and the cycle starts again. But in the meantime, the adults are sort of moving around your body, including sometimes into your eye. And is that the thing that freaks you out? Is that the part that makes the nightmare is the eyeball part?

The eyeball part is what freaks me out. Yeah. I mean, imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a nematode moving around in your eye. And does that mean that they have to like pull the worm out of your eye? Like eyeball surgery to remove worms? Yeah. Yeah. So actually it's like moderately good news if you see it in your eye because now somebody can get it.

Oh. Now somebody can put a knife on your eyeball. Yay. And extract the parasite. So now it's not in your body anymore. And so it can be removed surgically. So that is, that's, that's parasite number one that Kelly finds creepy. All right.

So we wake up screaming from that one. We get ourselves somehow back to sleep. And then we have a nightmare about parasite number two. All right. What's the nightmare number two today, Kelly? Nightmare number two, we can enjoy a little bit more because it's not infecting people. This is a copepod. So this is another crustacean.

So another thing that you can think of as being kind of. related to like crabs and crayfish and stuff like that. It has a name that I will absolutely butcher, Lernao Sarah Brankealis. I don't know what it is with biologists and Latin names. Like, why do you guys have to share Latin names? They mean nothing to anybody. Nobody can pronounce them.

They don't help anybody understand. Like, seriously, why are we carrying all this baggage? Okay, some of them have common names. There's a system for this. I actually went through all of the paperwork once to register a common name for a species so that you wouldn't have to bother saying the Latin name. It has an official common name now. But anyway, this one doesn't have an official common name.

It has a Latin name. We are going to call it the, what are we going to call it? Blood-sucking copepod. Although a lot of them are blood-sucking copepods. But anyway, here, listen, all right. We're going to move on. We're going to move on. It's a marine copepod that infects a bunch of different kinds of fish,

including Atlantic cod. Part of why we know a lot about it is because people eat Atlantic cod, and so it's a, you know, fish of importance. We're going to skip a lot of the life cycle. It has like a free living stage. It has a stage where it lives on a different kind of fish.

But what you need to know is that at some point, males and females mate, and then the females go off in search of a final fish to parasitize. And when the females go off in search of that final fish, she finds, and we don't know exactly how she finds the host in other copepods we've looked and it has to do with like chemical cues, stuff like that, but we don't know in this case.

But she finds the gills. And so in fish, the gills are, you know, the way that fish extract oxygen from the water. But she finds the gills and she attaches to part of what's called a gill arch. So the gills kind of, you know, they have this like arch shape. She finds a part of the gill arch. where there is an artery that goes from the gill arch to the heart. Oh.

And she has this appendage that she sticks into the artery. No, she doesn't. Yeah, she does. No. Yeah, she does. Don't do it. Don't do it. She doesn't.

And it grows into the artery until it ends up in the heart. Oh, my God. And she starts drinking the fish's blood from its heart. Straight from the heart. heart. And so she's got like, she's got like a mouth in the heart and she's drinking blood from the heart. And then she's got like her back end sort of sometimes outside the fish's mouth, but like the back end has a bunch of eggs. And like every two weeks she produces a clutch of eggs that then she like, you know, she's able to produce because she's drinking all of this fish's

blood. And then she releases these eggs to produce more of her babies. And she can do this like almost every two weeks. And so anyway, she gets her energy from the fish's heart directly. And what do you think it feels like for the fish? Awful. So like these fish, they... I know. So they, you know, they have anemia, which means they're, like, low on blood, which is not

surprising. They lose weight. They have sores. They have, like, fewer babies. A lot of them die. If you're a smaller fish when this happens, you're even more likely to die. Sometimes the fish can't close their mouths because the, like, you know, the moms are so big that their back ends are like making it hard for them to close their mouths so

their mouths will become kind of like deformed. This parasite is like really gnarly and creepy and wow. Yeah. So that's number two. Oh, boy, you made me feel bad for fishies. Yes. All right. So that's number two.

And we're going to shake that off and ready to get freaked out about the next one. What's the next one? All right. The next one is raccoon roundworm. And I know how you feel about me saying, Latin names. So for your sake and mine, I won't bother. So this is a nematode. It reproduces sexually in the guts of raccoons. What a romantic place to hang out. Wow. I know, man. Friday night in the gut of raccoon? That sounds great. I know. If only we were nematodes, you know. So raccoons tend to

poop in places called latrines, which essentially what you need to know is that they poop in like the same place and often groups of them will poop in the same place over and over and over again. They're so organized. Well, they're like sort of clean. Yeah. You know, like, I appreciate that. These are the animals that like wash their food, right? Yeah, right.

And I think they're super cute. I like raccoons. They are cute, yeah. But never take them as a pet. And we are going to get back to that at the end of this discussion. So they poop in the same spot, but the eggs produced by the nematodes are deposited in that poop. And if a squirrel or like a rabbit consumes that poop accidentally, like, you know, maybe a nut falls by the latrine and a squirrel picks up the nut.

And when it eats the nut, it accidentally consumes some of the eggs. Those eggs will hatch. Pro tip, if your nut falls by the latrine, let it go, man. Let it go, man. It's gone. Find another nut. There's another nut out there. That's right.

That's right. But it hatches and it starts migrating. And it can migrate through the eye, it can migrate through organs, it can migrate through the brain, and it starts causing like tremors and like just sort of nervous system symptoms. And it could be that that makes the squirrels more likely to die so that they get scavenged by the raccoons. But that's what it does. But unfortunately, every- Raccoons will eat dead, like infected squirrels? Yeah.

There's a lot of bad decisions going on here. I'm feeling less and less sorry for these hosts. Yeah, well, um, you eating poopy nuts? You eating dead squirrels? Like, what do you expect to happen? Man, Daniel, I think you shouldn't learn any more about nature because you're going to stop being sympathetic about anything. And maybe you should know less about nature. But every once in a while, unfortunately, a human will get infected because sometimes, for example, the raccoons will set up their latrine in a kid's sandbox. And a kid will play in the sand and then stick their hands in their mouth. And the parasite will migrate through their eyes or through their organs or through their brain. And I know.

I know. And cause. And there was no bad decisions there. That's just a kid in a sandbox. That's just a kid in a sandbox, right? And so that is very upsetting to me. And I learned about this parasite like a few years before I had kids, but it really stuck with me. And so anytime my kid wanted to play in a sandbox, I would like first,

dig through with my hands and look for anything that looked like poop and my kid was like you're such a wet blanket aren't you? I am I know my daughter was like mom you're embarrassing me and I was like I won't be embarrassing you if you've got parasites migrating through your brain and she's like you are absolutely embarrassing me but oh wow and to be okay so just before people start like absolutely freaking out there have been fewer of 25 cases according to the CDC of this disease documented in the United States only because moms have been cautioned and careful like you were. Congratulations. Thank you. Yes.

Some cases might have gone undiagnosed. You know, probably not a lot of cases. Good news is that eggs take two to four weeks before they become infectious. So like if you see a raccoon latrine being like formed in your sandbox or in your attic or something like that, you've got time to do something about it before it becomes infectious. The CDC has instructions for how to deal with this safely. The instructions include using a propane flame gun. So it could be fun. But it's definitely more fun than getting raccoon roundworm.

Yeah, way more fun. Way more fun. But again, do that safely or call in a professional. Make good choices, people. Make good choices. And if it's a latrine in your attic, probably you shouldn't use the propane flame gun. Again, make good choices.

But another thing that was kind of funny but not funny, morbidly funny, the CDC website said, you can get raccoon roundworm when you consume infectious eggs, usually accidentally. And I was like, usually, CDC, usually, who are the people who are consuming these eggs, not accidentally? Not people making good choices for sure. That's right. That's right.

But anyway, bottom line here, I see a lot of Instagram videos of people who are like feeding 20 raccoons in their backyard with like cat food every night. And they're like, look at all my cute raccoons. And dudes, raccoons are so. super cute, but if you're bringing them to your backyard, they're going to be pooping near your house. Yeah. You really, like, wildlife should be respected at a distance. And I get it because I really love wildlife. Raccoons are super cute. But you need to keep your distance. Yeah. And if you really want a nightmare, you should Google Raccoon eats baby's face.

And, yeah, that maybe it already tells you everything you need to know. Don't let raccoons in to your house. What the heck. Daniel, that's horrible. What a horrible note to end on. Well, Mark, I think what I had to say was pretty creepy, but what Daniel had to say was even creepier. Let's see what you have to say about all of the creepiness that we just brought your way. I hope that was the nightmare you were looking for. How could it not be? Hi, Kelly. Thanks for that truly terrifying answer. Every time I look in the mirror, now I will be checking to make sure there are no worms wriggling through my eyeballs. I will not be Googling raccoon eats baby's face,

but I'm kind of excited about taking a flamethrower to any raccoon latrines I come upon to make sure I don't accidentally eat to poop and get nematodes in the brain. As always, thanks for making such a truly awesome show. All right, thank you very much to all of our questioners and everybody who writes in, we love, love, love hearing from you. We are like parasites and we suck energy out of your curiosity.

Okay, that's not the energy that I thought you were going to go for, but let's lean in. Thank you, everyone, for sharing your questions. You don't suck. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows.

If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at Questions at Danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D&K Universe. Don't be shy.

Write to us. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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