Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions #46

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about tick-induced meat allergies, experiencing quantum effects, and fibroids.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Hart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Nick Titoro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Lease Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Titoro,

I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone, from Seth Rollins. What are you doing, my belt? To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now, we even have more great guests coming up,

including the great John Tutor. It's called happiness, delivering happiness. And many, many more. Open your free high-heart radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tutro. And listen now. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse.

The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika. out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Summer blockbusters are back. The Odyssey and Spider-Man, brand new day have taken over cinemas, and Raiders of the Lost podcast has all the coverage you need, including our interview with director Destin Daniel Cretton. What surprised you about Tom Holland? He shows up to every meeting early. He's the first one on set. Aside from learning all of his lines, is also a... able to memorize everybody's name on set. Download the free IHeart Radio app. Search Raiders of The Lost Podcast and listen now. Hey, Portlandia fans.

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia, AEO rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was once a happy carnivore. But after a visit from Lone Star, it's meat no more. Begrudgingly, I'm an herbivore.

And while I miss steak tartar, it's not worth dying for. I tried to get some internal rhyme in there, and I don't think it went the way I imagined it would. No, I think you're basically the M&M of science at this point. Yeah, okay. If alien brains are strange and quantum mechanical, could they see quantum effects, or was Daniel being over-dramatical?

Up to 80% of women will have uterine fibroids by the time they turn 50. But they're understudied. Wouldn't equal representation in medical research be nifty? Whatever questions are keeping you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it all right. Welcome to listener questions episode number 46. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who thinks about aliens,

and I'm the only co-host who hasn't been invited to a rap on someone's album. Hello, I'm Kelly Weir-Smith. I study parasites in space, and it is yet to be determined whether or not A, that will happen, or B, that was a good decision on that person's part,

to invite me to do so. I think you have an awesome voice for rapping, Kelly. Oh, sure. Yeah, thanks. I'm not sure the poems help make that argument, but that's okay. What is the, like,

most surprising thing you have found yourself doing as an adult where you were like, I just did not imagine I would ever be doing this. Because if I do the rap thing, that will be my answer. I've had some funny moments recording ads for the podcast in the past. I remember recording one for Starbucks Nitro Cold Brew that Katrina listened to and he's convinced her to get a nitro cold brew one day. And now she says every time she goes to Starbucks and she sees that drink, she hears my voice in her head, Nitro Cold Brew. That's amazing.

That's kind of cute, too. How it's you, Kelly? You've ended up in some pretty funny situations in your science communication career. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I wasn't limiting the question on purpose to science communication career. I mean, I remember donning a wetsuit pretty soon after the ice had melted in northern Wisconsin and swimming around to monitor the behavior of male large. mouth bass as they were guarding their nests and one of them came over and slammed me in the face

and knocked my goggles off. I mean, he's not that big, right? It was mostly just cute. But like, he was defending his nest. And I was just like amazed because I'm so much bigger than he is. And then I ended up in the ER for an ear infection. And I was in the ER for the third time. And the woman was like, you're back? Why do you keep getting into the water? And I was like, well, I'm studying the reproductive behaviors of male smallmouth bass. And it was like, she was kind of listening. And she goes, oh, okay, that's interesting. And then once she processed what I had actually said, she said, to you. That's interesting to you.

And I was like, oh, my goodness, I'm suffering. Anyway, I think that was like that whole summer. I was like, I did not imagine that I would be in this situation. And people talk a lot about peeing in their wetsuits when they have that job. And I just remember thinking, I thought I was going to med school. This is, what a strange place I've ended up. But I'm getting face slapped by fish. Wow.

That's right. That's right. So anyway, I don't know, that was a surprising path. I also got slapped by a leatherback sea turtle, and that hurt a lot. That does sound like it wouldn't be fun. Well, today we are slapping nobody, but we are answering questions that are interesting to you, hopefully. Nice. Because everybody out there is interested in how the universe works, and we have the best listeners, the most curious listeners, ones who think about how things work.

And sometimes those ideas don't click together just right or bump up against each other in an uncomfortable. way. People write in to help us sort it out. We love hearing from y'all questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. And today we're answering three fascinating questions about biology and physics, two of them from people named Zach. Yes, it's a Zachy sort of day. And so let's go ahead and hear our first question from our first Zach. Number one, Zach. Hey there, Extraordinaries. I've heard about a tick that can make you allergic to meat. I'm allergic to pollen and avocados because my dad is allergic to pollen and avocados.

It's genetic. So how the heck can you get an allergy to meat from a tick? You're the parasitologist, Kelly, so I'm tossing this one to you. Thanks in advance. Wow, number one, Zach. All right. Okay, this is fascinating and terrifying,

idea that you could like pick up an allergy to a very common food just by getting bitten by an insect, that's terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. Although ticks are not insects, but still terrifying nonetheless. They're arachnids, so we're like related to spiders and stuff. But what's really amazing to me is that we ever figured this out. Okay, so here's the deal. You get bit by a tick and then some period of time after that can be weeks or whatever. You build up an allergy to meat. And then you eat meat. And three, you get bit. three to six hours after you've eaten meat, you have an allergic reaction. Wow.

So the fact that we were ever able to connect those dots is like mind blowing to me. But let's take a step back and talk about like how we figured this out. Yeah. So over a decade ago, a bunch of allergists were getting reports from people who were saying, I've developed an allergy to meat. And their initial response was like, uh, it's probably something else. Because allergies to meats don't happen? Yeah.

I mean, allergies to meat are just very uncommon. It's not a thing that has been documented a lot in the past. And so I think a lot of people were like, okay, well, you know, you should avoid meat then. But this is very surprising and doesn't fit with what we know about allergies. So allergies in general, like I'm familiar with, I'm allergic to a cat, and it makes me sneeze or I get hives. Or I'm allergic to grass and I get a rash. Or if you're allergic to foods like peanuts, then when you eat them, your like throat can swell. what's happening when you're eating meat, you're getting like a throat constriction, or is it more

like affecting digestion where you're vomiting it? It could be all of the above, so it sort of depends on who you are. But so you can have, you know, let's call it gastrointestinal distress. You can get covered in hives or you can get anaphylactic shock where essentially your throat starts to close. So it's very clearly an allergy. Yes, very clearly an allergy. Because gastrointestinal distress after eating meat could also be caused by like e coli or something else, right? Yeah, sure, right? If you eat bad meat, you can get the runs or whatever. But this is like, every time you eat meat, you reliably get this response. And so it's probably not a batch of bad meat. It is just the way your body responds whenever it encounters certain kinds of meat. Meat from

mammals in particular. This calls up some memory I have of my younger brother eating Kemmbear for the first time. I think he was like six. And I was like, wow, this is so delicious and creamy. And he was like, creamy. This is spicy. And I was like, what? What? Spicy. What are you talking about? He's like, yeah, it's really spicy. And then I discovered, oh, he's having an allergic reaction. It was like stinging as he was eating it. And he thought it was spicy because he was only like six or seven. And so, yes, then at the ER, I had to relate this story to the doctor. And my parents were like, why didn't you say something? I was like, anyway. Oh, what was he allergic to? Cammonberry, yeah. But just the cheese? Some soft cheeses, yeah, you know, because they all have different molds. Okay. And so some people are allergic to like specific cheeses.

So if you're eating a hamburger and it's not supposed to be spicy and it is, you might have this allergy. So here's the thing. You usually don't respond at all for three to six hours, which is kind of weird. And so often when you have an allergy, your immune system has essentially decided that something you've consumed is bad, even though it's not. So for example, there are proteins made by peanuts and our bodies will produce immune cells that are constantly. circulating. Whenever they see proteins from a peanut, they decide that there is an invader that must be attacked. And they're bringing along other immune cells. And when they find the peanut, those immune cells like burst open and create like a massive inflammatory response to try to

destroy what they think is a harmful invader. But actually, it's just, you know, this thing that isn't really going to hurt you. Peanuts aren't going to start replicating and trying to like take over your lungs or something. They're just something that's there because you ate a peanut. Right. So in general, an allergic response is your immune system responding to something that's benign. Yes, right. Okay. So there was this cancer drug that came out called S-Satumic-satumab. Matt, I want you to keep all of those attempts in there. Yes, sir. Oh, come on. Satoximab or something like that. And very unfortunately, there were some people that were taking the cancer drug and they would die.

Oh, no. And they clearly were dying from an allergic reaction to the drug. So allergists were called in, and the allergist started, like, looking at the people who have allergic responses to this cancer medication and those who don't. And it turned out that this cancer medication had a sugar in it that we usually just call alpha-gal. And has a much longer chemistry name. But none of us want to hear that, least of all, Daniel. So we're just going to call it alpha-gal. Alpha-gal sounds like a teenage superhero.

It does. Yeah. No, it sounds awesome. Let's call alpha-gal to solve this problem. But now it's also become the name of the allergy. So if you have alpha-gal syndrome, you know, you don't have amazing superheroes who come to get you out of trouble. You get anaphylaxis when you have a hamburger, much less cool. That's not very cool superpower.

No, no. And so they were trying to figure out like, okay, this sugar is what's causing the allergy, but it doesn't cause the allergy in everyone. And so they started like laying maps. of different kinds of diseases from the United States over the maps of areas where people were getting allergic reactions to this drug. Such cool detective work. Yes, right?

This is like a cholera episode all over again. I know, which was such, I had so much fun researching that episode. And so anyway, somebody after looking at maps and maps and maps and maps of diseases noted that the areas where people were more likely to get allergic reactions to this drug overlapped with areas where people were likely to get rocky mountain spotted fever. which is a disease that you get from ticks. Boo. And so they reached out to a bunch of people and they were like,

do you remember getting bit by a lone star tick? And when they asked people, some of them were like, yeah, I got bit by a lone star tick, you know, a year ago. And then they'd be like, oh, well, did you start also, like, responding strangely to meat because meat also has alpha-gal sugars in it. And they'd be like, yeah, I get these hives now after I have a burger. And they were able to, like, create this correlation. Amazing.

I know. It was totally incredible. They must have been so skeptical of this connection when they first saw that like, what? How could it be this? No. But then, you know, that's the thing about science. The data speaks, right? Yeah. Well, and so one of the amazing, this problem was solved concurrently by scientists in Australia and a scientist at the University of Virginia named Dr. Platz Mills. And one of the things that he emphasizes in his career is that you need to be like open to things that are surprising. Yeah. And so when people were like, I'm allergic to meat. You know, he had. admitted that he was like, yeah, allergic to meat. And then, but he's like, but, you know, I listened.

And then a lot more people were like, I'm allergic to meat. And he, I think he was part of the team that figured out this alpha-gal sugar thing. And then it turned out that he went on a hike once and he walked through an area where Lone Star Ticks had been breeding and he picked up a bunch of baby Lone Star Ticks. And now he has this disease. Oh, no. And so he's been experimenting on himself. I found a quote where he said, I'm covered in buying.

I'm a biopsy scar is from doing research on myself. So I think he'll, like, eat a little meat and then be like, boop biopsy to collect some data. And he takes a little bit, a little sample of himself. So here's a couple additional things that are, like, surprising about this. So usually allergies are to a protein. Alpha-gal is a sugar. So that's weird. Usually you don't get allergies transmitted by organisms like ticks.

And to be honest, we don't know why ticks are giving us this allergy. So we know that ticks sometimes when they're taking a blood meal, they definitely spit in you while they're taking the blood meal to add insult to injury. What they're spitting in there is like anticoagulants and other things to make sure the blood flows nicely into their face. But when they essentially spit into you, they have this sugar and they're putting it into your bloodstream and your bloodstream responds by creating this allergic response. But not always. So hold on a second. And ticks spit some stuff into you. I get it.

But one of those things they spit into you happens to also be a sugar that's in like hamburgers. Is that coincidence? So we don't understand, right? So that's a great question. So this sugar is made by almost all mammals, but not humans and some of our close primate ancestors. Weird. We don't totally understand why we didn't make it. But this sugar is one of the reasons why it's hard to do transplants of pig hearts into people.

because pigs do make this sugar and our bodies, our immune systems respond to pig hearts. And so one of the things that people are doing when they're genetically manipulating pigs to try to make it so that their organs can go into people is they're removing the genes that cause the pigs to make this sugar. And so does that mean if you have this allergy,

you can't eat a hamburger, but you could eat a people burger. Oh, I should have known. Bing, cannibalism! I want an answer to my question. The answer is yes. The answer is yes. Yes. You would not have anaphylactic shock if you ate a human burger.

Okay. A Daniel burger. And also, you won't get anaphylactic shock if you eat chicken, for example. And so because this is a protein that you tend to find in mammals. So pigs, cows, you know, bacon would give you hives or something like that if you have this reaction. Well, I don't eat a lot of mammals anyway, and I'm not a big fan of eating mammals. So this is feeling less apocalyptic to me. But it's still a fun science puzzle.

Well, I have some neighbors in my community who have this allergy because one of the hot spots is central Virginia where I live. And I have some neighbors who raise cows for like a living and they have this allergy now. So they can't, you know, they can't eat the cows they raise. They have to like sell that meat to other people now. And so, you know, for some people it is a pretty big problem. Yeah. And apparently if you are the kind of person who itches for more than two weeks after you get a lone star tick bite, you are more likely to develop an allergy to meat.

And I definitely have a tick bite that's been itching for more than two weeks. And so last night, I went out to eat and I was like, do I have the burger? Do I not have the burger? And like, anyway, so I'm starting to worry that I will eventually have this. And did you have the burger? I did have mammal meat and I was fine. My back kind of hurts. That sounds so unappetized.

It does sound unappetized. It's like, I'll have the mammal meat burger. I don't really care which one. Just throw in some mammals. Just some mammal. You can mix them all together. I'm fine. Whatever.

A little raccoon burger. Oh, never mind. All right. Okay, so there's a couple things we still need to figure out. Why is it that some people get bit by Lone Star ticks and don't get the allergy? Yeah. We don't really know. I mean, I guess that's sort of similar to the question for why are some people allergic to peanuts and others aren't.

But there's also lots of other immunos responses that we don't understand. And, you know, for example, like 1% of people get type 1 diabetes, but something like 30-something percent have the genetic disposition for it. There's some environmental trigger. And so there must be some combination of being bitten by a tick and something else. You also like struck by lightning or were sick beforehand or some other environmental combination. Yeah, yeah. I mean, loads of job security if you work in the field of allergies. There's a lot we don't know yet.

And it seems like there's some ticks whose bites are more likely to give you this allergy. It's not just lone star ticks. There are ticks in Australia that do it, ticks in Europe and Africa that do it. But not every tick bite is equally likely to give you this allergy. And so trying to figure out what it is that makes some ticks more likely to make you allergic to meat is an open area of investigation. And so one of the things that I was wondering when I was doing this research is like,

presumably this allergy has been around forever or like for a very long time because like Lone Star ticks have been around for a very long time, but we didn't figure this out until more recently. Right. But haven't tick bites been going up a lot? Yeah. So we think that tick bites have been going up, and we don't know 100% why,

but some guesses are because deer numbers have been going up. And tics, lots of ticks have deer as like a very important host. And since we killed the predators of deer and deer numbers are going up and they're encroaching in our habitats more, this might be why we are coming into contact with ticks like the Lone's Star Tick more often. Wow, this is like Revenge of the Wolves. Yeah, that's right. We killed off the wolves and now we can no longer eat hamburgers. That's right. Sinister. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is some nasty stuff. So anyway, stay tuned to find out if Kelly can no longer have

mammal burgers in the future and has to convert to cannibalism. And Zach, did this slate your thirst for Alfa-Gal info. Thanks, Kelly, for the dive into this weird allergy. which I feel is definitely owed a place, and Ripley's believe it or not, I was especially intrigued by the history of its discovery and the way it took input from so many different areas of science, allergology and oncology, epidemiology, paracetology. Given the usual way this allergy is framed, like becoming allergic to a hamburger,

I had the impression that it was somehow an outgrowth of industrial-intensive cattle farming, but it sounds like it might be driven more by different human behavior, namely more contact with wildlife as we encroach on their habitats and maybe climate change improving conditions for ticks. I'd be really curious to see if anyone has gone back in time to look for medical case studies on meat allergies, has this happened before, or if other parasites can cause other kinds of allergies.

Also, what purpose does alpha-gal serve in mammals and why don't other taxonomic classes of animals have it? These are good things to ponder as I toss a dry brined rib-eye steak on the grill this weekend, while I still can. I hope by the time this airs, you and Zach No. 2 can still enjoy one too. Thanks again. Check out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry. Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elia together.

I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moon, My Man, Wolf forades, I'll Believe in Anything, and tattoos all the things she said. And how they all became a part of this global phenomenon. Stream encore on IHeart Radio, Crave, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.

So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow, keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka, showing out, she beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's

talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us or rather you know them, Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland

locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody.

Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements.

We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stillard. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere, too, right? What do you think it is now?

It's images and words being spoken, captured, but. some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves Nova. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great.

I call him Terro Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha. I don't, I never looked up if she was in this,

but I call him Leachy Sobieski. Yeah. I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenburgeon.

Why are you guys talking? to me like I'm worried why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play play game I just really I get it trying to set you up for success here listen to Hollywood handbook on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts okay next up we have a question from Zach number two the second's tier Zach let's go Hi, Daniel and Kelly. My name's Zach Wienersmith. I'm a seven-year-old girl from Indonesia.

I was listening to your discussion on inner cosmos, and you refer to this idea of an alien being able to experience quantum effects. And it was my understanding that once you're entangled with some system, you can't see quantum amplitudes. You can see, like, the effects of the interference, and you can use wave functions to predict them. but I didn't see how it would be possible to have a sensory apparatus that couples to some system without eliminating quantum weirdness.

Like, if you looked inside a Schrodinger's cat box that had two cats in it, presumably the cats don't see each other as quantum, only you outside the system do. And similar for the Wigner's friend, Vigner? Wigner's friend thought experiment. Love the pod. Thanks for answering my question. This Zach doesn't sound to me like a seven-year-old girl from Indonesia.

What do you think? Are we being pranked? You know, we might be being pranked, and I don't want to judge any seven-year-old girls for having deep voices. However, I do suspect that maybe this is the Zach that lives at home with me. Well, here's hoping that Zach number two climbs in the rankings and one day reaches Zach number one status. Well, it's tough competition, but I wish him the best of luck. All right. is a great question from Zach. Thank you very much. And some background, what he's referring to

is some speculation I've done in my recent book, Do Aliens Speak Physics, where I was wondering about how aliens might do science and if they think about the universe the same way. And was speculating that something that influences the way we think about the universe that we might not always be accustomed to confronting is our basic senses, that the way we see and the way we hear and the where we touch influences our sort of internal, mental, intuitive language, and the answers we express about the universe. And so, for example, you know, when we see images from the James Webb Space Telescope, they're shifted into the visible range. Or when we talk about what is a quantum particle, we try to express it in terms that are familiar to us. And often that's not really possible.

And so I was wondering if aliens could have a really alien experience in a way that couldn't be translated to our experience. And one way to imagine that is to think, well, we struggle to experience quantum effects. Is it possible for there to be aliens to have such a different experience that they could, for example, interact with a quantum world in a different way and have a different kind of experience, a superposition experience where you're like seeing two states simultaneously. You know, imagine like a photon that might hit your left eye or your right eye. We see it hit your left eye or your right eye. But is it maybe possible for an alien to, like, experience both branches of that wave function? And I just want to interject to say that another thing I enjoyed

about your book is that you talk about how animals experience the world differently and how we can maybe use that to think about how aliens might experience the universe differently. Yeah, since we haven't met any aliens yet. We're limited to what we can study here on Earth. And already here on Earth, we see a huge variety of senses and likely experiences. But, of course, we can't really tap into that. Yeah. And so Zach's comment essentially is like, hold on a second. Is it possible to experience quantum weirdness?

Maybe there's some constraint from quantum mechanics here that tells us already that Daniel's fanciful speculation is impossible. You know, and he says, once you're entangled with some system, you can't see quantum amplitudes. And is Zach right or is Daniel right? The short answer is that since we're talking about experience, There's a consciousness aspect to this, which means that physics can't cover this whole question, and I'm going to drive a huge truck through that loophole at the end here.

But let's back up and talk about quantum amplitudes and seeing quantum stuff. What does that mean? What are we talking about here? Let's give the background to Zach's question. And I think the first thing to talk about is like, well, what do we mean when we say seeing, right? We're experiencing the world somehow. And so simplify the whole thing from like the world and a person, whatever, and just imagine you have like a photon. That's the thing you're trying to see.

And then you have the eyeball. That's the sensor that's trying to see it. Okay. And so in physics, when we say take a measurement, what we do is we try to use some sensor and we try to use the world to change its state so that we can read it out. Right. So for example, I have this sensor that's my left eyeball and my right eyeball. and I shoot a photon that might go to the left or the right, and then I want the left eyeball to indicate if it hits the left

and the right eyeball to indicate if it hits the right, right? Very basic. Yep. And so the idea is to correlate the sensor with the photon, right? You want a correlation between the two. If it's going to go to the left, you want the left sensor to zing. And so this is really quantum entanglement. We want to entangle the sensor with the photon.

If the photon has a possibility to be left or right, then we want the sensor to be entangled with it, meaning that now we can think about them together as one quantum system with two states. Instead of it just being the photon that could be left or right, now we have the whole system, the photon and the sensor and there's two states. One state is the photon went left and the sensor red left, you saw it in your left eyeball. The other one is the photon went right and your right eyeball saw it. right? So you just align the sensor with the photon. And you're entangled them because now the off diagonals are not allowed. By off diagonals do you mean you can't make type one or type two errors?

Yeah, exactly. You entangled them, which means that like photon going left, but right eyeball seeing it is no longer allowed. In the same way we talk about entanglement from like particles, spin up and spin down. If one is spin up, the other one has to be spin down. That's just a constraint. It's a constraint on the possible outcomes. And that's when entanglement. is, and that's what's happening here. So the sensor measures it, meaning you've entangled the sensor with the system, right, with the photon. Okay. And you can just say that. It could be like, and no mistakes. I mean, especially with human eyes. Yeah, no, we're here and we're imagining a perfect sensor, but you could definitely add off-diagonal elements here from imperfect sensors,

absolutely. And so, you know, this isn't destroying quantum behavior. Entanglement itself is quantum behavior, right? This is all entanglement is. Entanglement seems fancy and spooking, whatever, but it's just correlated outcomes, essentially. And there's some subtleties there because you can have quantum versus classical correlations, but right now we're just talking about correlated outcomes. And so the idea is the sensor and the eyeball are now in a superposition of both possibilities. They're connected and they're not independent. And so if you have a system like we've just described, the photon and the eyeball, you can like see quantum weirdness. You can see interference effects between two branches of the wave function, like the double-slit experiment, right?

We see interference between the two branches. The photon could have gone to the left slit, could have gone to the right slit. Those two possibilities interfere with each other. We see weird quantum effects like interference, right? So that's what we mean by seeing weird quantum effects. So why don't we see those kind of quantum effects all the time, right? Like, why don't we see cats interfering with themselves or baseballs having interference patterns, etc., etc.? And the answer. And the answer is that you need more than just superposition. In order to see interference, you need something else in addition. These quantum wave functions are waves, right? They go up, they go down, they wiggle, just like waves in the ocean. And in the same way, to get those interference effects, you have to get

those phases of those waves to be just lined up. They have to go up at the right time or down at the right time so they cancel each other out or they add up together. In order to get like nice acoustic effects in a room, you need all the sound waves to be like coherent. So they like add up in the right way or cancel each other out in the right way. You have noise cancelling headphones in your ear that cancels the sound by producing a coherent opposing wave. It's like lined up just right. So you need these waves to be lined up just right. They need to not only for there to be multiple possibilities, but you need them to be like lined up just right to have the interference effect. Still with me? I think so. So does seeing quantum effect,

mean that you would also be able to like observe these waves in some way? Because to see quantum effects, you sort of need to know why you're getting one answer or not the other? Well, in the case of these quantum amplitudes, you can't see them directly. You can only see the interference effects, right? The quantum amplitudes are hidden. But you can see the interference effects without seeing the waves directly, which is why it's so cool, because that's one way that you reveal that there really is a superposition there, is that we see the interference effects.

All right. So to see quantum interference, what you need is a superposition. You need two possibilities at once, and then you need them to be coherent, not scrambled. Like if you scramble the phases of one branch, then you wouldn't be able to see any interference because it would just all be randomized. And you have to bring them into contrast, right, to bring those waves together and say, okay, add up or okay, cancel each other out. And, you know, this is how quantum computers work, is they have a bunch of qubits,

which can be in a superposition of states, and then you operate on those. In the end, you make a measurement which brings them together. You have the superposition, you have the interference, you get some quantum state. And so you could take advantage of the superposition and all the quantum weirdness, and quantum computers definitely take advantage of all that quantumness. Okay. Okay. So why can't we see cats and baseballs and whatever doing quantum interference?

Why can't Zach see quantum weirdness in his everyday life? The answer is two reasons, right? So number one is Zach is big and messy. Yeah. Right. So he is, I mean, we've all seen his office. We know about the Doritos bag and whatever. But the device I described earlier, you know, the simple idea of an eyeball that either like indicates yes or no, I've seen a photon is a very simple device. And you can entangle that with a photon and keep everything crisp and see quantum effects. But in reality, an eyeball is big and it's complicated and it's connected to a brain, which is big and it's complicated. And you cannot describe it with one internal state. It's not like the eyeball can say yes or no. It's like a huge, messy system with lots of different internal states.

And so the superposition is still there and the entanglement is still there. But it's spread out across so many internal states inside Zach's eyeball and inside his brain that you're never. never going to be able to bring these things together to contrast them in the way you need to see quantum interference. It's like washed out across too many different states. It's like if you have a teaspoon of salt, you can taste a teaspoon of salt. You put in your mouth, it's very salty. But if you add it to like an enormous vat of beans, it's still there, right? It's changed it a little bit, but you can't even really tell necessarily this salt in there. This is like adding a teaspoon of salt to a planet of beans, right? The quantum effects are small and Zach's brain is really, really big compared to a quantum system that it's essentially just lost. That information is still

in principle there, but it's basically washed out. So this is called decoherence for those who want to learn more about it when you have quantum effects, but they're essentially unrecognizable and unrecoverable because they're averaged out over a big messy system. So does that suggest that for an alien to be able to observe quantum effects, they would have to have a very, very, very simple brain? Yeah. And they're not going to be able to tell you the secrets of physics? Well, it does.

We're going to get there in a minute, but essentially it suggests that you can't have a human-like brain. Okay. And so that's one reason why Zach can't see quantum effects is decoherence. But there's another one that he raises, which I think is much more interesting, which is that he's inside the system. He's entangled with the system.

Right? And he mentions this cool experiment, Vignor's friend experiment. And so Vigner's friend says, all right, you have a cat in a box, right? Schrodinger's cat. The cat is in the box. You don't know if the cat is alive or dead. Now, let's say that Zach is doing that experiment. He has the cat. He has the box. But Zach himself is inside another box. Okay? And Kelly is outside the box. Now, Zach, inside the box, he opens up his own box. And he can tell if the cat, is alive or dead, right? Okay. But Kelly has not yet opened up the Zach box. So she doesn't know whether Zach has seen the cat alive or Zach has seen the cat dead. Okay. So according to Kelly, Zach himself is in a superposition. He's entangled with the cat. If the cat is alive, there's a

version of Zach that has seen a live cat. If the cat is dead, there's a version of Zach that has seen the dead cat. Right. But from Kelly's point, of view, both Zaks still exist as possibilities. So this is Vignor's friend experiment, and it argues that each of those individual Zax see a live cat or a dead cat. There is no Zach that sees the superposition that sees like the sum of live and dead cats somehow, even though Kelly on the outside can see the superposition. Okay. So this is the Vigner's friend experiment that he raises. And the crucial thing to understand here is that the reason Kelly can see the superposition, but Zach cannot, is that Kelly's brain is not part of the quantum system,

right? Zach's brain is inside the quantum system. And so he can't, for example, see the two branches of the wave function interfere. Kelly could, like, cause the two Zaks to interfere with each other and have, like, weird Zach interference effects. That would be pretty awesome. Zach can't do that because he can't coherently manipulate his own memory and brain state from the outside, while that brain is the thing doing and manipulating. You can't like use your memory as the instrument that reaches in and re-superposes your memory and also observes it. Okay. So the thing that makes Zach and Kelly different in this scenario is not that Kelly has like access to anything that Zach doesn't have, it's that Kelly's observation, her memory, isn't part of the system. Okay. So there's two

separate things. One is like Zach's brain is too big and messy to keep quantum effects, and recover them. And the other one is that Zach is inside the system. And so he can't use his memory, which is also inside the system, to observe quantum effects by crossing the wave functions. Okay. And so then is Zach's question essentially, wouldn't an alien be in the system? Yeah. And then, so how could this possibly work? Yeah, exactly. So Zach is saying, once you're entangled with some system, you can't see quantum amplitudes. And so I don't think I would agree with that statement exactly. I would say, you know, once the information has leaked uncontrollably into many degrees of freedom like his brain, interference becomes effectively impossible. But let's do this point by point.

So point number one, which you already alluded to, like, okay, what about being big and messy? And so, yeah, the idea here is like, well, maybe aliens have a brain that operates completely differently, right? Like maybe number one, maybe it's very, very small, right? Because you have an alien that's effectively like a qubit, right? And so it can be in a superposition with a photon without being big and messy, with keeping all of that coherence. But, you know, if you want an alien to, like, experience that superposition, that's probably not going to do it because I don't think cubits experience anything. But, you know, already we're bumping up against what do we mean by experience? How sophisticated does a system have to be to be conscious? We totally don't know.

And that's the direction I was gesturing towards in the book, which is like, look, this whole business about experience is totally unknown. What is an alien experience like anyway? We don't even know what an octopus experience is like with their multiple brains. And so that's the loophole. I'm basically driving this entire thing through. But, you know, it's also possible to imagine not just small brains that can maintain quantum coherence, but larger brains. Like, we are currently trying to build quantum computers, which are larger and larger. and one of the challenges of that is keeping them coherent,

it's keeping them from decohering by interacting with the environment. And we're getting better and better at that. And so you can imagine perhaps there's some alien out there who's got a brain that's effectively like a quantum computer, which can maintain these phases. And so it can somehow interact with a photon without decohering. But then you still have this question of like, can that alien experience it?

the second point of like you're inside the system. Can you experience the system from the inside since your memory is also inside? And here again, I'm just going to say like, look, experience is a fuzzy thing. We don't know what it means to experience it. And our sense of experience means like you see it with your eyeball, you record it in your memory, you can then call that up, you think about it. What did I feel about seeing that photon or what did I feel about seeing that cat? And now we're speculating about what it's like to be.

an alien. And if you imagine an alien with like a quantum computer-like brain that can maintain those superpositions, then, you know, it's not important that the alien can construct interference, that the alien can like bring the two sides of the wave function into contrast with each other to create interference effects. We're just talking about experiencing the superposition. So maybe this alien brain can exist across these two branches of the wave function. And there's some alien-like experience. this is totally hand-wavy, right? This is not supported by physics, but I think it's also not a question quantum-mechanic answers because it depends on what does it mean to experience and whether it's possible

to experience a superposition if your brain is very different and quantum mechanical coherent. So I would say to Zach, quantum mechanics doesn't say that's impossible, but it's not well enough to find, I think, really is the reason why there's a loophole there. Okay, one. Clearly, your writing process involves. involves a lot of smoky banana peels. And two, so does this suggest that, like,

if you track an organism through evolution, like, when it realizes it's observing something, it would lose the ability to observe it? Because based on what you said, it's like, you kind of need to know what's going on and be, like, conscious of what's happening. So could bacteria on our planet that don't know what's going on observe quantum effects

and we don't realize it because they don't know what's happening, but we can't because we're like too smart for that? It's possible, but again, like, we don't know if bacteria experience anything. I mean, I can't even understand what it's like to be another human being, you know, not to mention a bacteria. And so saying anything concrete about the nature of another being's experience is all just extrapolation from their outward behavior. And so we don't know.

And that was essentially the point I was trying to make with my book is that, look, we want to make this sort of mental connection. with aliens, we should be prepared for the fact that their internal experience could be so alien we might not be able to map not just our ideas about physics, but our ideas about what it means to be alive and experience the world, the very basic nature of interacting with the world. They could have a very alien sense of that. And, you know, this is just part of the argument of the book of like, I don't know what aliens are going to be like, but I suspect we haven't thought it through and it's going to be much

we imagine, maybe in this direction, maybe in that direction. And so I was looking for like, which parts of this are not crisply defined so that I can gesture vaguely in that direction. Well, this was a very complicated question for a seven-year-old. This little girl is going to take over the world one day. So let's go ahead and see what little Zachie Wienersmith had to say. Hello, this is Zach Wienersmith. I'm a nine-year-old girl from my Austronesia, and I just wanted to say I appreciated the answer to the question. I was talking to some other kids here in Austria about it, and what we were wondering is, what happens if you do, like, a daisy-chain version of Weakner's friend where there's like 80 outer layers of observers,

how is it that when the topmost observer starts observing everyone down, you have causality maintained the whole way down? How does the universe do that off? We thought, But that would be nice to know. And thanks again. Big fans of the show down here. And as we say down in Antarctica, good die, mate. Hey, Zach, who's from Virginia but can seem to admit it on the pod. Great follow-up question.

But the key thing is that causality actually works the other way, bottom up rather than top-down. So remember the setup here. We have an experimenter with a cat in a box. until they observe it, the cat is in a superposition of alive and dead. Now, you put that whole experiment inside another box with Vigner on the outside. So if the inner guy opens his box first, he gets entangled with the cat's alive or dead state. And for Vigner on the outside, the bigger box is now in a superposition of two states. One, the cat is dead and the inner guy says it's dead.

And two, the cat is alive and the inner guy says it's alive. There's no cross term there where the cat is alive and the inner guy saw it dead. That's the crucial thing. The quantum evolution here is linear, so it acts on each term separately and can't mix them. When Wigner opens the outer box, he either sees a live cat and an experimenter saying it's alive or a dead cat and an experimenter saying it's dead. So that's why causality goes bottom up. The correlation starts when the inner guy entangles with his box, and Vigner just joins a chain that was. already consistent. You can do this 80 times and daisy chain them, but it doesn't change the basic

setup. Still two branches, just a lot more guys entangled. Okay, but maybe does it depend on the ordering of the box openings? We describe the inner guy going first. What if you do with the opposite direction? Well, that's not as interesting. If Vigner opens his outer box first, he finds the inner experimenter sitting next to a still sealed box, just an ordinary guy with a superposition of alive and dead inside the box. The die he sees is not in a superposition. And now Wigner is basically just part of the inner box experiment. And whoever opens, the cat box entangles them both.

So there's no causality issues. Causality still works bottom up. Hey, I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Encore. Check out our Brie. Brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry. Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elya together. I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moon, My Man, Wolf forades, I'll Believe in Anything, and tattoos all the things she said,

and how they all became a part of this global phenomenon. Stream encore on IHeart Radio, Crave, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist, Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real.

Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game

and somehow keep going all. week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out she beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened.

We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us or rather you know them.

Tony and Kearer. Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative

process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about. about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody.

Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of, technology. Danny McBride. He loves Nova. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own.

That's great. I call him Terro Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobieski. Yeah. I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenbergin.

Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried. Why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play game? I just really, I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Our last question of the day is from Sinha about fibroids.

Dear Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for an awesome podcast. And thank you for taking your time to looking into my. question about fibroids. I just finished listening to your episode on perimenopause. I want to thank you, Kelly, for being so open about your own situation and for talking about this important topic. I'm 38 years old, and I have a uterus and ovaries, so I'm especially concerned about this topic. I have a personal history with uterine fibroids. I have had severe problems for seven years or more. I've had surgeries and hormone therapy, and I've seen a lot of different doctors. They all seem to give very different answers to my questions about why

we get fibroids and how they might affect fertility. Fibroids seem to be very common. To my understanding, it's estimated that 70 to 80% of women by the age of 50 will have fibroids. And that's just basically most women. Yet we seem to know so little about them. So, like, did Mother Nature plan for this condition? Or is there a relationship with our modern lifestyle? And how come we know so little about a condition that is so common? I would love to learn more about this if you have the time to investigate.

Thank you again. Bye. All right, Kelly, what is a fibroid? Well, first, I would like to prudently start by reminding everybody that I'm not that kind of doctor. I do not have a medical degree. So if you are concerned about any of this for yourself or your loved ones after hearing this segment, please go talk to an OBGYN or your family practitioner. Okay, so what are fibroids?

So fibroids are growths, and I think when most of us hear the word growth, we immediately think cancer. These are very, very rarely cancerous, but these are just places in the uterus where you start getting rapid growth of cells, and sometimes these growths, they can be small. They could be like, you know, poppy seed, whatever, you totally don't notice you have it. But sometimes they can be as big as, like, grapefruits or even bigger. Grape fruits? Great fruits.

Yes. That sounds uncomfortable. Yes. And sometimes you have one, but sometimes you have many. And by the time you are a woman who's 50 years old, about 80% of us have these. And the number is higher for African American women than it is for Caucasian American women. But yet, these are very common. And so when you say they're benign, they're not cancerous.

I understand cancer is sort of like a category. It's not a single pathology. and it has to do with cells growing out of control. And so here we have cells that seem to be growing kind of out of control. What makes them non-cancerous? So one, they're not going to metastasize. And two, so I am not a cancer doctor. I'm guessing that a part of the issue is that if you have uncontrolled growth in something like your liver,

it is likely to cause problems that could kill you. Whereas if you have uncontrolled growth in your uterus, most of the time it's not going to cause problems. A lot of us who have fibroids experience no problems from it. And so, you know, it might be interesting to have a cancer doctor, an oncologist, on the show at some point. But to me, what's important is that, one, it's not metastasizing. And two, it's probably not going to cause, like, a life-threatening illness. It does sometimes cause problems.

So if it gets too big, then it can, for example, push against your rectum and cause issues with constipation or it can push against your bladder and cause issues with urination. In very rare instances, it can cause infertility issues. I hear that that's not very common, but it does happen sometimes. It can increase period bleeding or increase the frequency of bleeding in between periods. And so some of these things are things where you can be like, well, that's annoying. I can ignore it. And then some of those are problems where you're like, I absolutely need to deal with this.

And so this sounds like it's never good, but it's not always bad. It's just sometimes uncomfortable or there are some other issues. But if a lot of women have this, like 70 to 80%, then like, is there some benefit to them? Is there some reason we have them? Yeah. So as far as I can tell from my research, I have never found a benefit. So I think what's happening is that in the uterus, you have a lot of cells that have receptors for estrogen and progesterone. So these are hormones that we think of as being important for females.

They're important for maintaining your menstrual cycle, your estrus cycle. So maintaining like the cycle of things that happen. to the female body every month. And one of the things that your uterus does is at certain times of the month, it produces a lot of uterine lining where, you know, eggs can implant in this. And then it releases all of that once a month during your period. And so you have cells that are used to getting the message that it's time to reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, make a lot more of me. And then they also get messages that it's time to stop doing that. And so I think what's happening is that some of these cells get the message that it's time to start replicating. And

And they replicate a little bit out of control. And that might explain why this is a problem that is typically not experienced until after you get your first period and stops being a problem after menopause because your body stops like producing a lot of estrogen, for example, to induce these cycles. So is this something people have been dealing with like throughout all of human history? Do we have like records of it from ancient Egypt and stuff? Ah, okay. Yeah. So I did not come across records of it from ancient Egypt. It is possible that this is a problem that we are dealing with more now, because a lot of the risk factors for getting this are things that happen more in our modern life. So, for example, if you have a higher body mass index, you are more likely to have fibroids.

And higher body mass indices were probably not a thing that was happening to our species thousands of years ago when food was much harder to come by, but is more common for people to be experiencing now. earlier onset of menstruation, so the age that you get your first period as a predictor, and if you get your first period sooner, you're more likely to experience fibroids. And over time, young girls have been getting their periods earlier and earlier. So that might contribute to why we're seeing this in a lot of women. Late age for menopause is a contributor, but then there's also some like quintessential, quote, modern life issues that might be at play here.

And one of them is that a lot of the stuff that we put into plastic, has chemicals in it that mimic things like estrogen. And so it's possible that our estrogen receptors are getting bound by stuff more often and are getting the message, hey, replicate, replicate, replicate, more often than they did in the past because our environments are now sort of inundated by these chemicals that look like hormones

but are not things that were made by our body to actually send a message about something that should happen. So as far as I can tell, there's not a benefit to fibroids. For most women, having fibroids is not a problem. You may not even notice you have them. You may never have to get treatment for them. If you do need to get treatment, sometimes those treatments are things like, hey, I'm going to take some pain medications because I feel a little uncomfortable. Or maybe they are like birth control pills to help deal with the problems of excess bleeding. Sometimes it'll be a surgery if the fibroid is big

enough and it needs to be removed because it's causing problems. And in very extreme cases, you might end up wanting to get a hysterectomy where you essentially take out your whole uterus so you don't have to deal with the problem anymore. But that means you can't have children anymore. So that's a pretty extreme option that a lot of folks decide to not go with unless they are done with their uterus and are ready to yeat it into the sun. And I'm getting close. And has there been enough science about this? Have we studied this as well as we need to? No. No, we have not. Yes, right. So the last part of the question is like, why don't we know more about this? And the answer, unfortunately, is that women's health problems are very understudied. In fact, in general, when you study medical issues, it's much more likely that men are part of the experiment relative to women. For a long time, women were thought of as something like a complicating factor. Let's just study it in men so we don't have to worry about the fact that women have cycles that, you know, change over the course of the month, and we'd have to, like, control for that. And then sometimes women might be pregnant.

so we don't want to be like testing drugs on them because, you know, what if we end up messing with the fetus in some way? And so for a variety of reasons, some of them nice, like trying to make sure that fetuses don't get exposed to chemicals we don't intend to expose them to. And some of them just sort of overlooking women in general, which is not so nice, is how we got to this place today. Yeah. And so if I can make a book recommendation, Invisible Women, Data Bias in a World Design for Men by Caroline Creado Perez. This is a great book that goes through a variety of different places where data has essentially been collected for men and the thought that data on men will tell us everything we need to know about humans in general and how this has sort of harmed women in a variety of ways. And she has a great chapter on how this has impacted women in medical settings, which is where I learned, you know, that we are often, even today, even today when you do rodent studies, they're more often done on male rodents. Sometimes even when they're related to questions about female reproductive health, you'll do them on male rodents. And so anyway, totally blows my mind. This book won the Royal Society Science Book Prize. And so it's got,

you know, like the science. And only the best books win that prize. Oh, that's not what I was going for. But thanks for saying it. Anyway, so yeah, in a lot of domains, women are simply understudied relative to men, and that includes medical research. And so we don't know a lot about this issue that affects something like 80% of women around my age and a little bit older. So I'm sorry to be giving sort of a sad answer, but I think that's exactly what you. what the listener expected when they sent this question. And let's go ahead and hear what Sinha has to say. Hello again, Daniel and Kelly.

Thank you for looking into my question about fibroids. Thank you for the book recommendation. I will look into that. But yes, it's more or less what I expected. We don't know so much. We haven't done much research. So I just try to stay positive that we can talk about this problem

and that there are go-finding. fund me campaigns and stuff like that to try and collect money to do more research. For instance, there is the project called Make Fibroids Count. I was curious to hear that there has been an like earlier onset of the first period for young women. I wonder if that is also tied to modern lifestyle or if there's some other reason for that. Yeah, thanks a lot. Your podcast keeps me thinking and challenging my ideas about the world. So please keep it up. Thank you. Bye.

All right. Thank you so much to everybody who sent questions into us. If you have a question, you can shoot it our way at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can join us on Discord and share your questions with the Discord community. Even if your name is not Zach, you are very welcome to send us a question. Even particularly if your name is not Zach, no. We answer every question and some of them end up on the show. Write to us, we'd love to hear from you.

Until next time. Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D&K Universe. engage with us. You can email us at

Questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www. www. danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe. And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an I-Heart podcast. Thanks for joining us. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week

the news gets worse. The world gets crazy. and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nick Titoro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Least Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Tatoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing my belt? To Bill Burr.

I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness, delivering happiness. And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tutro. And listen now. The Masters are back.

The Odyssey and Spider-Man. Brand New Day have taken over cinemas, and Raiders of the Lost podcast has all the coverage you need, including our interview with director Destin Daniel Cretton. What surprised you about Tom Holland? He shows up to every meeting early. He's the first one on set. Aside from learning all of his lines,

is also able to memorize everybody's name on set. Download the free IHeartRadio app. Search Raiders of the Lost podcast and listen now. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back

the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysler, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that.

Listen to Podlandia, A.A.O. rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.