Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions #50

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about scent dialects, drilling through the ice above the oceans of Enceladus, and why some animals have penises.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Help with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. The last question on today's episode has to do with the birds and the bees, which we only mention in case there are young ears around, which you prefer to temporarily shield from this information. So, FYI. Dialects can be heard in birds from different places. Do animals have scent dialects if they live in different spaces?

Can a nuclear heater melt through the crust and dive for Europa's ocean or come up bust? Now, I'm not complaining because it's certainly as fun, but other animals lack a penis, so why do I have one? I get the best questions. Wow. Whatever questions keep you up at night, even that one, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it all right. Welcome to listener questions episode number 50. 50. We've almost hit my age in listener questions episodes.

I thought you were 100. Because you always round up. You look, you know, 30, 35. Oh, I see. Okay. Well, then I can round up listener questions, episode to 100 also. See, at some point, the differences just don't matter. That's right. Sure. Yes, we've done 100 of these and they've all been great. Just like, you know, at some point you stopped counting your baby's age in days, right? And then you stopped counting in months. So why don't we ever stop counting in years?

Yeah, sure. It's a lot to keep track of. You agree with me. Every episode from here and out will be episode 100 so that it's easy for us to remember. until we had episode 1,000. You know, it should be logarithmic. Anyway, welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe, listening or questions episode number a lot. We have some really fun questions today.

I'm excited. For those of you new to the podcast, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I love answering questions from listeners. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I am a parasitologist. I study parasites.

And I also love answering questions from listeners. Even if they're not about parasites. I got an email test this week. Go on. Somebody wrote in and said, Kelly says you answer emails within 30 seconds. So here I'm writing to you. And I wrote back in about 24 seconds and answered their question. No way. I mean, I totally believe it, but that's amazing. I happen to be looking in my inbox when it landed. So I was like, ooh, can't miss this opportunity to prove Kelly right. Amazing. And I guess unfortunately now might be a time to remind. listeners that I am not taking new questions until sometime in 2027. I'll let you know when,

but you all ask so many amazing questions that are outside of the wheelhouse of parasites that I need a little time to catch up on all of them. I'm about six months behind. Because everybody out there is just so curious about the universe. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. It's extraordinary. And it invites curiosity. You can't help but wonder how this works and how that works and why this doesn't work this other way when you just live and take in the universe. It's wonderful. It's wacky. There's lots of things we'd like to know.

And I love the kinds of questions where a listener listens to one episode and it got them wondering about something tangentially related. And so our first question today is from Zach, who heard us talking about dialects, and he started wondering, are there dialects of scent, like smells for animals that communicate by smell? Let's go ahead and hear his whole question, but I was super excited because I didn't know the answer when I read this question. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Zach from Atlanta, Georgia.

Thank you so much for taking my question. I'm stoked. I feel honored. And I love everything that you guys talk about on the pod. So thank you for all that you do for science communication and for my daily commute. So here's my question. I'm a speech therapist, so I'm often thinking about communication, in particular verbal communication where we're using our mouth and our ears. but I don't really know anything about olfactory communication and communicating via scent and pheromones and that, those sorts of mechanisms.

So I'm very curious if those forms of communication across the animal kingdom have something akin to dialects in the same way that we have variety across our spoken languages. I want to know if there are different ways of smelling or tossing our scent or shaking about and sharing our pheromones that is communicatively meaningful,

across different communities of the same species, and if there's anything that looks something like dialects in those forms of communication. I'm very excited for your answer. I've been wondering this for a long time, and I thought the pod would be the perfect place to get an answer. So thank you in advance. Great question.

You're right. I love this generalization. You know, this thing happens in speech. Why doesn't it also happen in dance or in smell or in something else? It's exactly the way we make progress in science. It's like bring two ideas. together and see do they click or do they clash? Well, and this is why I always try to encourage graduate students that I mentor to read broadly

because you never know like when you're reading something that's not at all related to what you're doing, like what questions it could bring to mind that you had never thought of that are actually very much related to what you're working on. And so, yes, you should read broadly because it gives you lots of cool ideas. Absolutely. So I don't know too much about sent communication, but I found two papers that found stink in mammals. And I was very excited. Can we back up and just be like, what is scent communication? I mean, I have an odor, but I don't like control it. It's not like I'm deciding to smell this way or that way on a certain day.

Right. How do animals in general use scents to communicate? Well, ants, I think, are famous for using scents for like just about everything. But in general, animals can use scents for things like marking territory. So, for example, lots of big cats will leave their scents so that other cats know, this is mine. Sometimes it's used for things like mate attraction. There have been some speculation that humans have pheromones and we sort of cue into each other's smell and that can impact attraction. But I think when we actually dug in and look for like scientific evidence, we don't see a lot of evidence for that.

But in other species, sometimes mate choice decisions are to some extent impacted by how an organism smells. And for example, like moths, we had Andy C. on the show the other day talking about how female moths can relate lease scents that then males can detect from really far away and then they know that there's a receptive female out there somewhere. I just need to follow this scent to get to her. So it's used for a lot of different things in the animal kingdom. It's a little foreign to us because we as a species don't use scent nearly as much as some other animals do. Although I realize I don't do

it biologically in the sense that I can't like control it internally, but obviously I do use it technologically. I mean, I wear deodorant to control the scent or some people put on a certain perfume to communicate X or Y or Z, and that must be cultural as well. So obviously, humans must use sense to communicate. I don't know what I was talking about. Anyway, tell us. But we're not using our biological scent. Like, we're trying to tamp down our biological scent, and we don't want that getting out

there too much. But yes, you're right, like deodorants or perfumes or whatever. So tell us about animals. Okay, so this question is trying to figure out if sense differ between the same species that live in different areas. And there's a couple different reasons you could imagine that happening. So, for example, if you have the same species living in two different environments, those environments might impact the way their scent works. So, for example, if you're in an area that has, I don't know, more humidity or different temperatures than another group of individuals in your species, maybe it's harder to get your scent from one individual to another when the humidity is like 99% and the temperature is 110 degrees Fahrenheit or something.

So are you suggesting more broadly that having dialects? having variation in the behavior across the species is always in response to environmental differences because like do people in the South have that particular way of talking and people in New Jersey speak that way because of what it's like to live in New Jersey? Or can't it also be explained by just like random evolutionary walk? Absolutely. So this is one of three hypotheses. Okay. And there's probably even more. But so the idea behind this first one is that if you live in an environment where, for example, it's hard to get your scent out there, you might,

be selected to be stinkier or have a particular sort of scent that sort of cuts through, I don't know, the humidity or whatever better. So that does explain New Jersey. You know, funny New Jersey story. I was born in New Jersey and I love New Jersey, right? And my husband loves picking on New Jersey. It's just so easy. I know.

And we stopped at a rest stop in New Jersey. And I was like, they're going to see how great New Jersey is, right? And as soon as we step out to the rest of, we're going to be. rest stop, it smells like urine. And I don't know how most rest stops don't have the overpowering scent of urine, but this one did. And then the sign that we parked in front of said something like, this is a waste cleanup area. Please stay on the sidewalks. And I was like, oh, man, totally failed here. I still love New Jersey, but that New Jersey didn't show up for me on that day, the way I wanted it to. We took our kids to Norlands once, and we like had Beny's, then we took them to hear music.

And we saw the art, et cetera. And then we asked them, what did you think of New Orleans? And Hazel said, it smells like vomit. Oh, no. I was like, yeah, that's true, too. There's a little of that also. But, all right. So off of stinky cities or states and back to animal communication.

So you said, you had pointed out that you can have like sort of random differences. So you can have like genetic drift where populations sort of change genetically over time. Maybe not necessarily in response to like an environment. pressure, but they just sort of like drift in different directions. And maybe when those populations come back together, it would be hard for them to notice each other's sense or they'd have different dialects. Right. Another reason you could have a dialect is if you have different kinds of microbes that are impacting your smell and different areas could have different microbes. Right. Makes sense. So those are some reasons why you might expect there to be dialects in stinkiness

between populations of the same species. Very cool. Okay, so I found two studies that I thought would be fun to talk about today. The first one was looking at otters in the United Kingdom. And otters have... That otter be interesting. Oh, butabum, bum, can you put in there, Matt, for us? Okay. So otters have anal sacs on either side of their butthole, and these anal sacs produce scents.

And when this scent comes out with the poop, they call that spraint. I'm sorry, they call it spraint. That's a word? That is a word. And I put that in bold in my outline because I was like, I have to make sure that everybody knows the word spraint. And it's weird that it sounds like a combination of spray and paint, but it's neither. But it does get sprayed? It gets deposited with feces.

I don't know how far it sprays from the location. Wow. But yes, it helps scent the feces. Because the feces don't scent enough otherwise? Well, I guess this is, you know, this is meant to tell other otters that, hey, this is my territory. It also has information about the sex and the age of the individual. So you can, so the spraint of a reproductively mature male otter. I know.

I love it, though. It's a wonderful, wonderful word, the sprint. Yes. Right. And so you can tell a reproductively mature male and a reproductively immature female, for example, by their sprint. So there's a lot of information. in that sprit. But the United Kingdom

tends to have about four different populations that are genetically similar. And the reason you've got these four populations is because there was a time when the otter population went way down

and it tended to recover in these four areas and then there were reintroductions and it sort of has grown back out from there. So you've got this like genetic structuring with four different populations.

You had a bottleneck and now the populations are based on those surviving small populations. it, okay. Plus some reintroductions and maybe some other introductions and stuff like that. And so there are these four different genetically somewhat distinct populations in different parts of the United Kingdom. And so they thought that maybe you would get dialects. And so what

they did was... Sprint dialects, we're talking about here. We are talking about spraint dialects. We are indeed, yes. Presumably they thought that it would be a bit rude to catch the otters and express the spraint from their anal glands. And so what they did instead was they sit. serendipitously took advantage of situations where unfortunately an otter had died, they managed to get their hands on the carcass before the otter had started to decay, and they put everything in a freezer. And then when it came time to do the analysis, they removed all of the anal glands from these frozen specimens, and they analyzed them all at once. And what they found was that there does seem to be dialects in spraint scent between these four different populations. And they took. tried to see, does it differ geographically? So like, you know, within a population, how much variability is there? And if you're looking at two different populations, is the Sprint

profile more different for individuals that are farther apart in these two populations relative to individuals that are like living closer together, even though they're in separate populations? And there wasn't a clear sign of geography. And so it looks like something about genetics has resulted in different spraint dialects in otters in the United Kingdom. So, for example, if you took an otter from one of the populations and put it into another one, it probably would retain its original dialect. Its otter friends would be making fun of it at school for the way that it sprints. Yes, that is a reasonable hypothesis.

But this study did not look at behavioral impacts of these differences. So does that mean that we don't really know how important it is? like, you know, we haven't seen otters from one population reacting weirdly to New Jersey otters or the equivalent. And so it might just be like ignorable differences. Yeah, it could be. Or at least if there were follow-up studies, I didn't find them. But, you know, I don't think that New Jersey otters are crossing the ponds to go to the United Kingdom. But there could be, you know, communication implications within the United Kingdom for these different sprint profiles. Well, I wonder if they find, you know, foreign spraints exotic and attractive or just, like, weird enough pudding.

Could be. Could be. I don't. Well, we have the answer to that question in Himalayan Leaf Nose Bats because they did do those follow-up studies. Tell us about the bats. I would love to. So here, the sense are not coming from glands on either side of the anus. These bats have glands, like, in the middle of their forehead, where they secrete this stuff that is kind of stinky. It's a, the paper said it was a thick black secretion and so gross.

But it's used for things like territorial defense. Life on Earth can sometimes seem so alien. I know, but I love it. I mean, and that's why it's so much fun studying this stuff, you know? You think, like, these animals have such different social lives, you know? Like, if I was talking to you and I got too close to your house and you started secreting this black thing from your forehead to let me know that I got a little too close, I would call the cops or something, you know?

It's very different. That's just how we roll here in California, Kelly. You've got to get used to it. Well, I prefer Virginia, I guess. And so I know how to communicate with people here a little bit better. And so do bats from different populations secrete different stuff? Yes. And so they looked and they found that there were distinct compounds that were produced in bats from different areas.

And so, like, there was still some overlap and some of the scent stuff. But there were a handful of populations where there were very distinct things. that were being produced in those populations. Of the same species, though? Of the same species, yep. Yeah. And so they wanted to know, does this seem to be genetic? Is this a response to different environments?

Or is this the result of their microbes? And their evidence suggested that actually this is probably because of different microbes that they harbor, that, like, ferment the ooze coming out of their head in different ways. It's kombucha. That's, oh, face kombucha. Amazing. Katrina has to try to sell that. But then they did some follow-up questions to ask,

does this matter? And it does look like males can discriminate between the scent that comes from their colony and scents coming from other colonies. And if you give females the opportunity to interact with sense from their colonies or scents from other colonies, they prefer the sense from their own colony. And so it does seem like there's a behavioral implication of, these dialects where in this case they're sort of preferring what is familiar. Is there a cool scientific name for this or is it just face secretions?

You know, I didn't find a word like spraint. And so let me see. They have a forehead. Well, then let's call it scambucha. How about that? Oh my gosh, it's scumbucha. Or is it fumbucha for like face scumbucha? Because I feel like you want to get the face part because that sounds super gross.

Yeah. Sfumbucha. Spambucha. Amazing. I found another paper saying that song sparrows also have a glands that produces these oils that they use when they're preening and the microbes that they have seem to impact the scent. And so this microbe impacting dialects thing might happen in other places. But it's worth noting that I found another bat species paper on a closely related bat species. And they didn't find that the changes in scent between populations were associated with bacteria.

So there's probably a lot of variability in why different populations. Stink in different ways, and I think we're still trying to understand the implications of this, at least in mammals. But the answer is, there are stink dialects, which is cool. Well, it's really fascinating if the male secretes a certain flavor of sloombocha, grapefruit or whatever. And a female from the same population prefers that because that makes you wonder if there's like a code genetic source of that, like the same gene codes for the male to secrete the flavor that the female likes. Oh. Or if that's a learned thing, you know, culturally, you grow up smelling grapefruit spangucha until you look for that, you know, in your mate.

Yeah. Or it could be that like maybe you don't even recognize as a mate bats that smell different because part of just like how you recognize your species is by this like particular smell. And you're like, no, you don't smell right. I'm not sure what's going on there. and they just avoid them for that reason. But yeah, there's lots of different possible explanations. It's fun to think about. I have a friend who works on Fruitfly meeting, and there they sing songs, and they're very regional.

And so, like, the male has to sing the right song for the female to choose them. It's fascinating. And the females, do they prefer the songs that they grew up with, or do they prefer songs from males that have new interesting tunes? Yeah, they don't like those weird. New Jersey imports. Actually, wait, no, all of this research is happening in Princeton. So it's all, New Jersey is local there. So those are the good ones. Those are the good ones. Yeah, it's a way to select your population. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, totally. All right. So let's go ahead and send this answer to Zach and see what Zach thinks about Svabhya. And sprints. And sprints.

Thanks for the fun question. Naturally, I'm going to try my darndest to include the word Sprint and all of my future Scrabble games, just for the opportunity to explain to my friends what that is. And I'll try to throw scumbucha in there as well. So thank you for that. And especially thank you for providing me with that fascinating answer. It got me thinking about how useful these forms of communication must be for the organisms that use it across the animal kingdom.

It's really helpful, of course, that we can use our voice to speak and our hands to sign, but those types of communication are very fleeting. And so for animals that in some cases can use communication that literally sticks around, has to be so informative for those species. So thank you very much for giving my question a sniff. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations.

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Download the free IHard Radio app today. Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast. Lots to say with me Bobby Bones. and Matt Castle. We also bring in friends, they're mostly Matt's friends, who are current or former NFL players,

some of the biggest names in music and entertainment, and then we have some really great conversations that can pretty much go anywhere. The great Pac-Man Jones. After the game, the whole national task force for police officers was at the stadium. Like, hey, buddy, yeah, you, Adam. Come up.

And one of my favorite segments we do is called situational awareness, where Bobby and I give each other real-life situations and figure out what we'd actually do. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you, week one. How do you handle this?

You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archive. We're talking iconic moments in broadcast history. I'm not just a boxer.

I'm educated. I can talk all week on millions of subjects. And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I mean, when I go on stage, I like to dress as sluggies as possible because it makes me dance better for some reason. I'm Immanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright.

And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians asking them your burning questions. and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life,

but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything. I never used to forget things. They're concerned that, one, they have dementia, and the other one is, do I have ADHD? There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids. to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood, and also to have better day-to-day life. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening now.

Dear honies, this is goodbye. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patramathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know that they had died by suicide. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. next stop, Wonderland. Patra and Michael were by all accounts, healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they do it?

And what did it do to the people they left behind? I would have given a million reasons to not leave this world had I known. I keep coming back to, I truly hope that Petro was a thousand percent on board with the plan. Do you think of him as having killed her? Yes, I do.

I hold Michael responsible from her. other stuff. I'm Leon Nafeck. And I'm Alice Gregory. Together we set out to interview everyone who got one of Patriot and Michael's letters as one married couple trying to understand another. Listen to death of an artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back and we're answering amazing questions from listeners that give us a chance to go off and read about things we've also always been curious about, but never had an excuse to dig into. And so were literally going to drill in to a listener question. Or things that we did not know that we would be interested in,

because it hadn't occurred to us before. So many reasons to thank the listeners for sharing their curiosity with us. And let's go ahead and do a question for Daniel from Paul from Lamore, California. Hello, Daniel and Kelly. I'm Paul from Lamore, California. My question is, when humans finally land on icy moons like Enceladus are Europa, with something similar to a fuel rod for a nuclear reactor be used to melt through the icy crust instead of using a drill. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to my question. Thank you.

Do you think Lamour is like French, like Lamour? La Mour? I don't know. Yes, I imagine it is a very romantic place to live. Let's hope so. But today we're not speculating about the romantic lives of Californians. we are taking our brains out into the solar system to imagine where aliens might be living and where they might be having their own kind of romance right in our backyard. Daniel, I want to know what's happening on Enceladus so bad.

Like, I really want video from underneath the oceans and Enceladus. Right. Let's spend a minute to remind people why we might go to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. And the reason is that they're an excellent, excellent candidate. for life, for alien life, right here in our solar system. You might be thinking, aliens, if they're out there, are way, way out there. We'll never find them because you have to travel to a distant star. But the truth is, we haven't finished looking in our own backyard.

Yes, we've driven rovers around Mars, and we think Venus is probably uninhabitable. But if you look a little bit further out, there are places where life can start that are very different from the brackish waters of primordial Earth. And these are under miles of ice on these frozen moons. Can you imagine there being like, I don't know, fishy type things swimming around under there? Like, how cool would it be to see that? Yes. Oh, yeah, of course you have.

And we can go there. And the reason this is so exciting is that under that ice is not just like some frozen rocky core, but oceans. We think miles and miles of water. And that's because these things are close to giant planets, so Jupiter and Suss. Saturn, and they're squeezed by the tidal forces of those planets. Remember, a tidal force comes from gravity, but gravity doesn't just pull on the whole planet or the whole moon. It pulls on the closer bit harder because it's closer and the faraway bit weaker because it's far away. And so it tends to make something like into a football, the way that like the moon makes the oceans

on the earth kind of into a football shape. It piles them up near the moon and on the opposite side it makes the oceans thinner on the edges. And then as the moon moves around the earth, the tides follow. In the same way, as these giant moons around Jupiter and Saturn move, they get squeezed by Jupiter and Saturn's intense gravity, and that imparts a lot of heat. And so these oceans can stay unbroken. They can stay liquid under this thick crust,

which means that, you know, it's a great place for life to perhaps begin. Yes, but unfortunately for us, it's not an easy place to get to. Because you have to get through, as you said, kilometers of ice. After you go through billions and billions of kilometers to get there, right? Right, right, yes. Yeah, so what do we have to overcome to get ourselves to that ocean? Yeah, so, I mean, just to get there requires getting to Jupiter or Saturn, which is not easy. And we recently had a whole episode about chemical rockets and et cetera, et cetera.

First, you've got to convince your government to build this thing. And the whole thing is going to cost hundreds of millions. and then you've got to get it there. But even once you get there, let's just skip over all the political issues and the launch issues and the space travel issues. Say you are lucky enough to land on Europa. Now you're sitting on kilometers of ice

and the amazing alien payload is on the other side of that ice. So you've got to drill. And drilling is hard. Even here on Earth, drilling is hard. You know, if you've tried to drill into your wall, you know, or if you work like on an oil, rig or whatever. It's dangerous. Mechanical drilling is really hard. You have to have a drill of bit. Drill bits can break. You have to have an engine, but the engine can choke if you hit something hard.

And so you need like transmissions. And like basically no drill works without some expert babysitting it and constantly repairing it. But we're not sending people to Europa or insolatus, not yet at least. So we need some sort of autonomous drill. And that's why the fact that this is ice and not rock is actually a big advantage. Because you can melt it. You can melt it, exactly. So instead of mechanically trying to cut through it, you just melt it. And then it becomes liquid and you can slide through it. And you might think, that sounds crazy and it extra hard.

And shouldn't we figure out how to do that first here on Earth? And the answer is yes. And we've done it. We have done this in the ice of Antarctica. We have this amazing experiment called Ice Cube. That's a great name for a project. Did ice, oh no, it's ice tea. I'm getting my, I'm not very cool.

No, ice cube is a rapper, yes. Oh, wait, there's iced tea and ice cube? There's ice tea and there's ice cube, absolutely. Nice. Is there ice pops? You know there's some rule of the internet where like, whatever you can imagine, there's probably a rapper with that name. Okay.

That's not how I remember the rule going, but. I adapted it for this family-friendly conversation. Okay, right, great. But ice cube is an experiment that instruments a cubic kilometer of ice in Antarctica. Wow. It's to look for cosmic ray neutrinos and muons and all sorts of stuff where you have super fast particles going through the ice faster than light can go through the ice and making this churinck off radiation, this blue cone. And to capture it, you need cameras in the ice. So you've got to drill down through a kilometer and leave these cameras in the ice.

So you've got to drill through a lot of ice. tough conditions, right? And so they've done this and they didn't use a big mechanical drill. They used high pressure hot water. Basically, they just melt the ice and then they have this string of cameras that's a kilometer long. It's basically like a long tether and it's got these glass spheres on it. Inside the spheres is all the delicate particle physics detectors and experimental devices and electronics and stuff. And so they melt it and then they drop this tether down and then they just let it refreeze. Wow.

So that you have this equipment down through the ice and they've instrumented a cubic kilometer. It's amazing. It's such a huge experiment. I love it. It's like science fiction. But it's real. And the hole there goes through two and a half kilometers of ice and it's about 60

centimeters wide. Wow. And so are our plans on Enceladus? Do they involve hot water? Because Paul wanted to know if we were going to use like radioactive materials. The Antarctica solution seems like it would be difficult to ports over to. to install it is. Yes, exactly. I mean, it teaches us that this is possible that you can do it as long as you have a heat source. And the crucial thing to understand is that you're just letting it

refreeze. You're not trying to keep the whole column liquid, right? Just the part that you're digging out as things slide down. And that's going to turn out to be crucial. And so in the case of drilling through one of these moons, you're not going to have some easy source of hot water. You need to bring some sort of power with you. And so, of course, the best option is some kind of nuclear power because that's the densest sort of fuel. And there are a few different options here. One is you can have just like direct nuclear heating. Like if you have some sort of isotope like plutonium 238, it just decays and it gives off particles at like 10,000 miles per second. And so if you surround that with, you know, some sort of liquid, it will get heated up. And that's like

directly nuclear decay turning into heat. No power generation. no fission, just like directly radioisotopic decay into heat. And that's pretty cool because you don't need complicated fission equipment. You don't need to send a nuclear reactor. You don't need to generate electricity, which is very inefficient. It's very nice and it generates heat. And so that's like a really strong option, just like directly produce heat. So I've got two questions.

So one, you said something about we're not going to have an easy source of hot water on Enceladus. But we didn't have an easy source of hot water probably in Antarctica. And so how did they make the hot water? Did they just bring like a generator fueled with gasoline to heat it up? Yeah. So the point there is, of course, you don't like have geysers. It's not like Iceland or something where you have an easy source of hot water that way. But you are connected to some kind of existing infrastructure, right?

There is power. You can get fuel delivered. It's not that far away. As you guys point out in your book, Antarctica is actually like a lot easier than space. Yeah. Even though it's uncomfortable and unpleasant and I would never want to go there. it's a lot easier to live there than it is to go to space. And in the case of Ice Cube, they use fuel power generators to run heaters and melt the snow

and spew it out in high-pressure streams. And that's not an option. You can't send diesel fuel to the moons of Jupiter. But you can send a radio-isotopic heat source. And so then my other question is like, so for the Antarctica experiment, they had to, like, heat quickly, like all the way through and then put their equipment in and then let it freeze. Yes. Does a radio isotopic heat source, is that going to heat all the way through fast enough

so that you can put your equipment in there? Like, does it give out that kind of heat? No, but it doesn't have to. Okay. And so it just needs to melt the part that's in front of it, right? And so he can refreeze behind it as it goes. So it needs to unspool a tether. So it needs to bring with it like three kilometers of line and then unspool it as it goes

and let it refreeze behind it. And so it only needs to be able to melt the bit that's right in front of it. So it like melts a device and moves into that liquid. And the liquid it was just in refreezes behind it. So like there's no going back. It's pretty claustrophobic experience. But we're such a clever species. That's awesome.

Yeah. It's pretty amazing. The issue with radioisotropic decay is that it's efficient because it turns a lot of the original energy into heat. But you also need power for other things, right? You don't just need heat. You are a little device. You need electronics. you need electricity.

And so it's tempting to also include something which will produce electricity. And you don't even have to go all the way to fission reactors for that. You can just use an RTG, which is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. So again, not yet all the way to fission reactors. You use thermocouples. So these have no moving parts. It's just essentially solid state. And it turns radiation directly into electricity.

But it's very inefficient. It turns like 6% of the heat into electricity. But, you know, if you need, some electricity, then that's a nice addition. So you might have both a radioisotopic heater and you might turn some of it into electricity to run your system. Or if you want to go whole hog, just build a full-on fission reactor. These days the fission industry is really focusing on miniaturization, building small modular reactors. And so the idea is to bring a small one that can actually generate enough electricity that you could both power a heater and you could power

the device itself. But it's like a lot more mechanical complexity and weight. And you know, you can't repair it if it's not working. Well, and do we have actual like plans on the books to go do this or is this all hypothetical? I wish that we had plans on the books, you know. We do have some plans to visit these planets. Like there's the Europa Clipper, which is on route. It's like heading there right now. and it's going to arrive in 2030, yay. But it's just going to do flybys. People are curious about this moon. Like, let's take more pictures.

Then there's the juice, which stands for Jupiter, icy moons explorer, which is going to go into orbit around Ganymede in 2013. Also very, very cool. But again, these are just orbiters. They're going to take pictures. We're going to help us understand the surface. We want to get on the surface and dig down. We want to meet those alien octopi, right?

We want to see what alien spraints are all about. Drill, baby, drill. And so now we're into the regime of proposed experiments. There's the Europa lander, which is supposed to land on the surface and, like, scoop up some of it and study it. Because, like, we've never even been there. Who knows what it's made out of? Even more exciting is the Insulitis Orbalander, which is not going to land. It's going to sample the geysers because Insulitis has a lot of activity.

It sprays its innards out into space. So you might capture, like, an alien microbe or something, just. by flying by and flying through one of those plumes and gathering it and then analyzing it on board. Very cool. Not yet approved. So neither of these two, the lander or the orbillander are approved. There are plans for something called Prime, which is a lander with a driller. And also, as it drills, it brings a miniature submarine with it so that it drills down through this hole. It has a tether to go back up to the surface so you can send data, right? And then when it gets to the, through the ice, it releases into the water a submarine to go off and explore, which then communicates

back with the lander, up the tether, and sends us the glorious information about everything it's discovered. I need that to get approved. I know. Write your congressperson or your member of European Parliament or whatever because we can do this, people. We have the money. We have the technology. We know how to do it. We're just choosing not to know these things about the universe because we want to build more aircraft carriers or whatever. So this experiment is called Prime. It's not yet approved, which means we haven't started building it. We haven't.

It's not on its way, which means the earliest this could happen is like, you know, unfortunately 15 years away. By which point we'll all be 100. That's right. That's right. Well, let's go ahead and send this answer to Paul and see if we have answered his question. I hope he lamoors it. But a bumch.

Hi, Daniel. Hi, Kelly. Daniel, thank you for explaining a few different ways of melting through ice to explore the subterranean oceans of the icy moons of our solar system. I'm looking forward to reading about the Europa Clipper mission in the next few years, but I agree with Kelly and I'm wanting to see some video footage up underneath the ice. I like to imagine bioluminescent alien creature swimming around in the black background of the dark, sunless ocean. Thank you again. I appreciate both of you for taking the time to answer my question.

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Download the free IHart Radio app today Hey it's Bobby Bones Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle Every Wednesday On our podcast Lots to say

With me Bobby Bones And Matt Castle We also bring in friends They're mostly Matt's friends Who are current or former NFL players Some of the biggest names In music and entertainment

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And one of my favorite segments we do is called situational awareness, where Bobby and I give each other real-life situations and figure out what we'd actually do. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session

in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you, week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out of it. out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health.

I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. 100% of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life, but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it?

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on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening now. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archive. We're talking iconic moments in broadcast history. I'm not just a boxer. I'm educated.

I can talk all week on millions of subjects. And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I mean, when I go on stage, I like to dress the slutty as possible because it makes me dance a bit for some reason. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives.

Listen to Big Lives on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. Dear honies, this is goodbye. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mather's and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know that they had died by suicide. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Patra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they do it?

And what did it do to the people they left behind? I would have given a million reasons to not leave this world had I known. I keep coming back to I truly hope that Petro was a thousand percent on board with the plan. Do you think of him as having killed her? Yes, I do. I hold Michael responsible from my mother's staff. I'm Leon Nafok. And I'm Alice Gregory.

Together, we set out to interview everyone who got one of Patriot and Michael's letters as one married couple trying to understand another. Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We're back and we're answering questions from listeners. And the one next is super fascinating. He asks a really penetrating question, don't you think? Oh, my God. Right. And this is where we remind people that we are about to talk about sex. So, yes, Josh had a very penetrating question. Let's go ahead and hear. what Josh had to say. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I was thinking about the way that humans, and I guess probably a lot of other species, have sperm cells and egg cells, and the fact that some of us

have a penis and others a vagina. I'm also familiar with some extreme examples of this, like the pigs corkscrew penis and the arms race of convolution in duck sexual organs. But this made me think, how do we get here? What are the evolutionary stages to get to each reproductive strategy? What are the different ways to do sexual reproduction and what evolutionary drives mean some creatures such as plants just sort of spray their sex cells into space and hope while others have these interlocking parts and specialized cells? So I followed up with Josh to make sure I understood the question and pretty much the question is where did Wieners come from? Which is a great question. Especially to somebody named Wiener Smith. That's right.

I am clearly the right person to send this question. to. And so I will note that my research for this question involved reading a book called Fallacy. And Autocrrect turned the spelling correct, but the book is P-H-A-L-L-A-C-Y, or something like that. Anyway. You know, I've been to the Fallis Museum in Iceland. It's quite impressive. I really want to go there to see. They've got the penis bone from a whale there, there, and I, amongst other amazing penis-related memorabilia, and I would like to see all of them. There are so many things to mention from that, including, for example, they have molds of the penises of Iceland's most successful Olympic athletes ever. Wow.

Which is, I think, the Icelandic handball team who got the bronze medal or something, and then they have a picture of the whole team, and then they have molds of all the penises arranged in the same order as the team. So you can be like, oh, interesting. I feel like that's totally unrelated to handball. ball, but congratulations to those people. I mean, there's an obvious handball joke to make there. But I think the most interesting sociological part of that museum is the history of it. It started in some guy's garage and then apparently took over his house and his wife was like, out. I cannot have this in my house.

And so we have to move it into a museum. Wait out to him and the specimens or just the specimens? Didn't say at least the specimens of the minimum. Okay. But back to the biology, tell us, Kelly, how long have we had penises on Earth? When was the first penis? I did not get when was the first penis because actually what is a penis is a complicated question. And so instead of talking about penises in particular, we're going to talk about intermittent organs.

And so the point here is there's a couple different ways of mixing sperm and eggs. A lot of fish do what's called external fertilization where a female will essentially like excrete some eggs into the environment and a male will plop some sperm on top of that. and that's how everything gets fertilized. When you do that, those fertilized eggs now need to be guarded in a lot of cases because they're like delicious snacks for a lot of other organisms. So it's not very safe for the offspring to do things that way, unless you've got someone who's willing to stay there and watch them. Another problem is when you're doing external fertilization,

when the male releases his sperm onto the eggs, often other males, called sneaker males or satellite males, will, like, come by and deposit their sperm as well. It's sort of unwanted, but they snuck in there and they got it. So this is another problem with external fertilization. A third problem with external fertilization is that it works really well in wet or moist environments. But if you have eggs and sperm meeting together in an open area like on land, they dry out really quick. And so the way that amniotes have solved this problem is that fertilization happens inside of the female.

and then we can either like slap a, you know, a calcium shell on there for the birds and then send it out into the environment and it's fine. Or, you know, in mammals, we've got a placenta and everything sort of happens inside the mom until the baby's ready to go. So we have found solutions for that like environmental problem by having a lot of the stuff happen inside of mom. And that's what we call internal fertilization. There's a couple different ways to do internal fertilization that don't involve anything that's weaner like. one of them is what's called a cloacal kiss which is not as romantic as you might imagine so some birds have openings called cloaca

which I think is the Latin word for sewer because not only do sperm and eggs come out through here but also so does feces and urine and all of the waste it's like an all-purpose hole for birds and when they want to reproduce they will stick the cloacas together and the male will, you know, excrete some sperm and then just kind of hope that it ends up

where it needs to go up inside of the female. But you can imagine that having an appendage that allows you to place the sperm in a little bit more specific way could be helpful for increasing the probability that your sperm actually fertilize an egg. Aim it a little bit. Aim it a little bit, right.

And so throughout the animal kingdom, there are lots of different ways that animals accomplish this. So anybody who's like cleaned a bathroom that men use know that having a penis does not mean you can aim. No, no. I mean, if you're paying attention, you can aim. My first job was I was a bagger at Kroger's and my job also was often to clean the restrooms. And there is just there's feces in places that you just, I can't even fathom how they got there.

Our species is disgusting. And, you know, I always, I didn't like cleaning the ladies room. but I really didn't like cleaning the men's room. You guys are gross. I don't know what's happening in there. It was like a different species. Criticism accepted. I have no defense.

Okay. Absolutely. Totally agree. Dudes are gross. Yeah, super gross. All right. And so millipedes, for example, have what are called gonopods, which are like wiener feet. And so their eighth pair of legs actually is able to take sperm and insert it into the

female. And so that's not like technically a penis, but I don't know, maybe it is. There's actually some debate about, you know, how do you define the term penis, but the broader term is intermittent organ. So are there conferences where people like have shouting matches about this? I mean, probably.

I don't know. We get upset about all kinds of stuff. Whatever it is, there's some academic conference where they argue about it. That's the new internet rule. Absolutely. Yes. Then there's other ways of getting the stuff up there. So, for example, males.

So it's such a delicate way to put it, Kelly. Thank you. I mean, I went to school for animal behavior. We just, we don't take this stuff very, I mean, we take it seriously, but we don't, like, have any reverence for the topic. But so you can make things called spermatophores, which are packets of sperm, plus other stuff that can be, like, placed in the environment temporarily. And then the female will, in some cases take it up by, like, I don't know, squatting over it

and then sort of pulling it up into her body. Or males have, like, organs that help them sort of insert it into her body. And so that's another way of like getting sperm inside of a female. One of the benefits for the female of internal fertilization, though, is that females have evolved very complicated ways to either store sperm for when they need it if they found like a really great guy, but they're not really ready to have babies yet. They can hold on to that stuff for when the moment feels right. What? Yeah. Wow. For how long?

It depends on the species, but definitely days for some species. I think there were somewhere where it was weeks or months. Amazing. It can be a really long time. And then there's also some that have, like, extra compartments where they can choose, like they can mate with multiple males. And afterwards, they can pick their favorite and use the sperm from that one and not use the sperm from the others. Wow. Dating is so complicated.

And in other species, it's even more complicated. Although, you know, you don't really know if you were rejected in that case, right? And so that's nice, I guess. So the lady can swipe right or left or whatever it is, even after you're done. That's right. That's right. Life is good. And I should note that in this book fallacy, Emily Wilmingham makes the point that we've studied penises a lot. Viginas are almost certainly equally interesting, but have been massively understudied relative to penises. So I wanted to get a plug in for vaginas while we were here and the fascinating things that we learned about animal behavior when we study female vaginas. If you are a young scientist trying to figure out where in this wide world you want to devote your energy, Kelly suggests the vagina. I think we have loads left to learn about vaginas.

Cornucopia of data left to collect there. So the question is like why do we have internal fertilization and why in particular do we have devices that are used to insert sperm into the female? One of the hypotheses is this idea of, like a lock-in key. So if you're trying to figure out if you have picked a member of your own species to mate with, then seeing if a penis fits in a vagina

is one way to do that, to make sure that you're mating with the right species. I should say the evidence for this hypothesis is kind of mixed. You see plenty of closely related species mating with one another anyway. It doesn't seem like

this lock-in key is very specific. But there's some idea that this is a first pass at trying to make sure that you're mating with a member of the right species. Another benefit of internal fertilization, which we've talked about, is that now you've got it in an environment that is sort of moist so the sperm and the eggs aren't going to dry out. But in particular, if you have a penis, then you can increase the probability that you actually get the sperm into the female at the right spot relative to something like a cloacal kiss, which, you know, does work a lot of the time. But it might be nice to have a little bit of extra confidence that it's getting to where it needs to go.

another nice thing about internal fertilization is that the eggs tend to be bigger, and especially if the females are holding on to the offspring inside of them, until the offspring are bigger than when you finally release them into the environment, they have a better chance of survival. So there's lots of benefits to internal fertilization. Some of them are even more beneficial when you have a device that can insert right up into the vagina. But plenty of organisms make do without it. They just kind of come up with some clever ways of doing it.

So do you feel like that answered the question? Do you understand why penises exist to some extent? Yeah, I do. I think it gives me an idea for why there are penises. And also, though, I don't think you talked about this, helps me understand why there's like a plethora of kinds. You know, like we're exploring evolutionarily, like, what things might work. And I know they're like long ones and spiral ones and, you know,

multi-tipped ones or whatever. Ones with horns, lizards and snakes have hemipede. It means they have two penises that they can alternate between which one they use. Amazing. Yes, exactly. Evolution is the greatest experimenter. That's right. Yeah, so intermittent organs have popped up, if you will, multiple times throughout evolution. And yeah, they've got lots of different shapes, lots of different forms. And again, because this is ecology, the answer is it depends. So we were talking about how if you're in an aquatic environment, it's fine to release sperm and eggs out into the environment because it's wet there.

But there's plenty of fish species that have organs that else. allow males to play sperm inside of a female. And we think that that increases the probability of fertilization, increases certainty that you're the only one, at least in that moment, who was attempting to fertilize the eggs. And so, you know, even in aquatic environments, you find organisms that have intermittent organs because nature is complicated. Nature is complicated.

All right, let's send this answer back to Josh and see if your answers have gotten up in there to the place where his questions were we to. Josh, let us know if you're okay with that. Hello again. Thank you so much for sharing the ins and outs of this fascinating topic. The world of reproductive organs is even more varied than I realized, and I'll definitely be checking that book out. All right, thank you, everybody, for your amazing questions.

I know I had a ton of fun today, probably more fun than should be legal. Yeah, thanks for sharing your time and your curiosity with us. And if you have a question about how the universe works, it's Sprint Too Late. to send it to us. Oh, no. And I'm sorry, remember, it's sprate too late to send it to Daniel. Kelly's on hiatus for a little while. But looking forward to catching up so I can get new questions from you all soon. Stay tuned, everyone. 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,

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I'm Cameron Dicker, the kicker from the Los Angeles Chargers, and I'm here with Timmy Tillman, current L-AFC star player. So, we know a little something about kicking balls. Each week we'll tackle things like, who's winning the Premier League this year? What do you think is harder? Scoring a penalty kick or scoring a field goal? Join us each week for a quick chat with your soccer-loving bro. about the best sport in the world.

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Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. This week on the show, it's Star Trek. So we're going to be talking about the Borg all week long. Are you ready to get some probes put in your flesh? That's right. Tune in.

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They say no news is good news. But weird news? That's bananas. Every Tuesday on our podcast bananas, we find the strangest true stories from a around the world and try to understand what the hell is going on. Man rescued by firefighters after getting stuck in a phone booth trying to order a kebab. Man, you did it. You wowed me.

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I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. 100% of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Help with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.