Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions #6

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about fundamental particles, radiation-gobbling fungi, and the physics of pinball.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host, Jay, Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the I-HeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's the? the deal with the Higgs and mass? Can I use a rocket to weigh a bass? Could the weak force make

pinball more of a delight? Why is dark chocolate better than white? What are fungi eating in reactor for? Is graphite delicious in a nuclear core? Biology, physics, archaeology, forestry. And yes, even sometimes a little chemistry. Whatever questions keep you up at night. Daniel and Kelly's answer will make it right. Welcome to another listener question. episode on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith, and I'm a biologist, and I'm excited that today I'm going to learn what the Higgs field is. Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist, and I never get bored of explaining the Higgs boson. also excited because we're going to like tangentially talk about Soviet history, which was like one of my weird research hobbies during the pandemic. What's your favorite Soviet history fact? I've been waiting for somebody to ask me that question, actually, Kelly. Of course you have. I actually have a fascinating biology Soviet history fact, which taps into a larger trend. There's a lot of great science done in the Soviet Union and some of it was kind of disregarded by the West for political reasons. So, for example, my wife works on phage therapy, this idea of using viruses that attack

bacteria as a way to attack bacteria that cause disease. So instead of using a fungus like an antibiotic, you cultivate some viruses to kill the specific bugs that are attacking you. She sometimes sent samples by patients who are sort of out of other options and she tries to evolve specific viruses to attack them. And this was something developed in the Soviet Union decades and decades ago and basically ignored until recently by the West. And there's also lots of great examples of physics done in the Soviet Union, which just wasn't followed up on because it was published in Russian or because it was done by Soviets behind the Iron Curtain. So I think this is a treasure trove of Soviet science that we should dig into.

So Katrina is creating phage therapies to try to keep people alive? That's incredible. Yeah, it's boutique medicine, right? She gets samples from individuals and then tries to evolve the phage, which will kill the bacteria in those samples. So real, like, individualized medicine. I think, really, it is the wave of the future. I'm surprised to hear that that technology was developed so long ago

because I had assumed that it required CRISPR. I thought it used to be really hard to take, like, samples from bacterial cells and then show it to a bacteria phage so that they would know what to attack. Does she use CRISPR, or am I just totally not understanding how this phage therapy works? Wow, a biologist asking me research questions about another biologist, I am at the edge of my knowledge here. I don't think she uses CRISPR. I think it's essentially just some kind of evolution in the lab. But maybe we should have her on to talk about phage therapy in more depth.

Yes, that sounds awesome. I look forward to that. We're absolutely doing it. We're going to get her on the schedule for 2025. Sounds good. You gave me like a nice serious Soviet fact. One day maybe we would want to do an episode about Vavlov. He was a plant biologist and he had this amazing seed.

bank in the Soviet Union and even while like Moscow was under siege, the people who worked in the bank, they thought the seed bank was so important for like bringing crops back after there was a problem that they were willing to starve to death to keep their seeds. And this was at a time where a bunch of people were starving to death and they needed the food, but they wouldn't eat the seeds. And it was just some really diligent scientists. And this was at the same time as Lysenko was totally decimating the genetics field in the Soviet Union. But my favorite story is a silly one. Tell me a silly Soviet story. There was a Soviet space program called Intracosmos,

where they got like Soviet bloc countries to send people to be cosmonauts, and it was meant as like a geopolitical, let's bring our friends into space thing. And one of the people that they wanted to bring, his last name was Kakalov. It must have been Kakalov because of the way Russians pronounce the A. Kaka is a Russian word for poop, as you might guess, that has apparently jumped cultures. And so they made him change his last name. name to Ivanov for the purposes of the program because they were like, no, no, no, we can't have

Pupilov flying in space. So needless to say, the Soviets would not fly the Wienersmiths to space. But I love stories about how the Soviet Union was willing to just lie about everything, down to the stupidest details of, like, people's last names. That's just one of my favorite petty examples of all the things the leaders in the Soviet Union lied about. Wow, I love Pupilov. Pupilov and Krapolov. with the sound like a comic duo.

Amazing. Well, let's move on to more serious matters. We have some fantastic questions today from our listeners. Should we listen to the first one from Catherine? Absolutely. And we always love getting questions from listeners because it's not just Kelly who's curious about the universe and Daniel who thinks it's amazing and bonkers. We know that everybody out there has questions about the universe.

And we want to hear yours. Please send us your questions to questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. Some of them we will choose to feature here on. the podcast. And our first question comes from Catherine, who is curious about the fundamental nature of matter and the Higgs field. Here's what she asked. My name is Catherine, and I believe that the fundamental particles we know are likely made up of something smaller. But I've been wondering, since without the Higgs field, these particles are predicted to be massless, how could they be made of smaller components? Surely this would require some amount of stored energy

to keep the pieces together. But then the fundamental particles we know would have mass without the Higgs field. I'm sure that the answer is ultimately that we have no idea, but I would love to hear thoughts of how this could work or any theories that attempt to solve this contradiction. Thank you so much. I love your show, and I can't wait to hear your answer. Wow, that is a deep and awesome question, and this means I'm going to get to learn about the Higgs field. We did a whole episode on what is a particle. Yeah. And you did a great job of explaining it, but I think we should definitely revisit that quickly now. So what is a particle and what is the difference between a particle and a fundamental particle.

So fundamentally we don't understand fundamental particles, right? These are ideas in our heads that we use to make predictions and do calculations. We don't know how much of it aligns with what's actually going on out there in reality, but it's pretty useful, which makes some philosophers think, okay, it probably does align with what's actually happening, but we don't know. And often we run into the limits of our knowledge and we have to wrap something up and say, well, we don't understand this, we're just going to give it a name and move on. And that's essentially what we've done with particles. We have a good theory that describes how these things interact. We

don't really know what they are fundamentally. And we use that word fundamental to mean something very specific about particles. In the theory of particle physics, a fundamental particle is something that's just made of itself. It's not made of something smaller. So, for example, like a chocolate cake is made of ingredients, right? It has cream and it has butter and it has sugar. It's not It's made of other stuff, which come together to make a chocolate cake. But the ingredients in that recipe are fundamental butter is just made of butter. But maybe it's not. If you dove into the butter, you discover, oh, actually butter is made of fat, and there's protein, and there's water in there.

And then you dive into those and you discover, oh, actually water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. And that's made of protons and electrons. And those protons are made of quarks. And so we think the quarks and the electrons are fundamental in that they're just made of themselves. Quarks are not made of something smaller, but we don't know, right? We never really know when something is fundamental. We know when something is not fundamental because we've discovered it's made of smaller bits, but fundamental really means either it's just made of itself, it's actually fundamental to the universe, or we just haven't seen inside of it yet.

Which one of those do you think quarks are? Do you think quirks are the end or you think there's more inside of quarks? I think there's almost certainly more inside of quarks because there are unexplained patterns to the quarks, like zoom out for a moment and think about the periodic table. All sorts of crazy patterns there. And if you didn't know about the structure inside the atom, you'd be like, wow, why are there some things that are metal, some things conduct electricity, and some things are active? There's some crazy patterns here that we don't understand. All of those patterns exist because there are structures inside the atoms.

The way the electrons fill up, the orbitals, et cetera, explains all of that behavior. And so in the same way, we look at the quarks, and there's a lot of the atoms. a table of corks is six corks. There's all sorts of weird patterns. Like there's actually just two kinds of corks that are duplicated three times. And the masses increase as you go from one generation to another. There's all sorts of unexplained patterns in the corks which suggests that probably they're made of smaller stuff that's rearranged in different ways and all those patterns emerge from that internal structure. But we haven't been able to see that structure yet. So we treat them as fundamental in our theory, but we suspect that they're not. So

Catherine, I agree with you. Nice. And you know, I've always thought that the plank length is nonsense. I don't know how to get us there naturally because I don't know what the plonk length is. Wouldn't you agree the plon length is nonsense? And why? Well, there's another question which is like, how do we know it doesn't just go on forever, right? Like, could there just be particles within particles, within particles, within particles?

And the answer is it could just go on forever. It could be an infinite tower of emergent stuff and there is no ground truth, no bottom. But quantum mechanics says maybe not. Quantum mechanics says, you know, the universe is made of discrete stuff and there are minima. Like Planck's constant is a minimum amount of energy, right? And that's very useful. Quantum fields have a minimum amount of energy in them. And so people have tried to use this argument to say, well, if the universe is quantum mechanical, is there a minimum distance, which would mean like a minimum size particle. And you can take a bunch of the constants that we know about, like, gravity and speed of light and planks constant and mash them together

until you get something that has units of distance, right, and say, oh, well, what is that number? And that number is a very small number. It's 10 to the minus 35 meters, which is like 10 to the minus 15 meters smaller than anything we've probed before. So, like, trillions of times smaller than a proton. And it's often said in popular science, like, oh, this is the scale of the universe, or this is the pixel length of the universe, or this is the smallest possible distance. It's 100% not the smallest possible distance.

It's just a number that's very small that has units of distance. That doesn't mean that it's related to the universe in some way, right? It's like saying, oh, I have two numbers. One has units of dollars and the other one has units of donuts. Therefore, if I divide one by the other, I can derive the price of donuts. Like, no, you can't. There's a lot more going on than. just having the right units.

And this is why the plunk length people don't invite you to their parties. Like there's not zero information in the plank length. It's like the only calculation we can do right now to even guess at what the minimum distance might be in the universe to figure out if there is a bottom to this like hierarchy of particles. So it's worth doing, but it's also worth not over interpreting as like a definitive answer. It could be off by like, you know, 10 to the 20 easily. And so sorry, I think I've lost a little bit of the thread.

So the reason we care about the plank length is because if it were the smallest distance possible, then a fundamental particle would have to exist. You couldn't have anything smaller than that size so it can't go forever. Exactly. Exactly. And if there is a most fundamental particle and a shortest distance, and that distance is the plank length, then that suggests that quarks are not fundamental because they're much, much bigger than the plank length.

Okay, got it. All right. So what's the next thing we need to know to answer, Catherine's question. All right. So Catherine's wondering about how these particles get mass. She says, look, if electrons and quarks are not fundamental, do they still get mass from the Higgs field? So the next thing we need to unpack is how things get mass, what mass is anyway, and how the Higgs field comes into that. What is mass? Seems like a question that should be easy. But when you ask a physicist something easy, it's never easy. So what is mass, Daniel? Yeah, so again, mass is not something we really understand. It's something we observe and describe. Like, we see that stuff has.

inertia. When you push on a rock, it's hard to speed it up. You want to push on a more massive rock, it's even harder. So things that have more mass have more inertia. You have to provide a larger force to get the same acceleration. That's what F equals MA, right? M being mass. So it's a relationship between the force you have to apply and the acceleration you get. That's inertia, right? And that's something we see in the world. And we don't really understand why there is inertia, right? Why things have it. but it seems to be sort of connected to how much internal stored energy there is in something. So like when I put a fish in a spring scale, let's make this easy so a biologist could understand it. And the spring scale pulls down.

You're saying that's because it has more inertia as it goes down? So that's gravitational mass, right? You're talking about the force of gravity. There's inertial mass, which is how hard is it to accelerate things? And then there's gravitational mass, which is how hard does gravity pull on things, right? And in Newton's conception, those two are actually the same number by some magic coincidence of the universe. Though in Einstein's view, there is no gravitational mass because there is no gravitational force. There's just inertia.

So I think the easiest way to think about it is to avoid gravity, because gravity is a whole other complex thing we don't understand. And just think about like a fish in space. All right, fish is floating in space. you want to speed this fish up what do you have to do you have to put a rocket on it and that rocket needs to push on the fish and the more mass of the fish the stronger the rocket has to be to speed it up to some certain velocity would be really hard to get crants if i had to pay to do that to get their mass okay that makes sense though let's keep going and so the weird thing about mass is where does it come from and one interesting clue is that you can make things more massive by adding energy to them so for example take a box that's filled with mirrors Okay. And it has some mass. Now shoot a bunch of photons into that box. So they bounce around inside the box. They're like trapped inside the box. Right. The weird thing that happens when you do that is that the box gets more massive. Like you have added photons to this box, which have no mass, right? But the box now is more massive. Why is that? The answer is that mass is a measure of how much energy is stored inside of something. And you've captured photons inside this box. You've stored their energy inside the box and so now it has more inertia because inertia really is a measurement of internal stored energy again we don't understand that we don't know why does the

universe require a larger force for things with more internal stored energy we don't know but that's what mass is that just blow your mind yes I am having my like can we take a 15 minute break so I can think about that moment sorry that's what will keep me up tonight is there a fish analogy is it like the more mass the more energy it's like the more fat that they have that gets burned or am I just extrapolating this too far? No, you put that fish out in the sun to absorb energy, it gets more massive. Every time you go sun tanning, you get heavier. You are absorbing energy, and E equals MC squared, you get the energy from those photons and

turn it into mass. And you think of mass as stuff, but it's not. It's internal stored energy. You don't need stuff to have mass. So you absorb those photons, they go into your atoms. Those atoms now vibrate more or wiggle more or move. more, they have more energy there inside you, you have gained mass. And this is actually where Einstein got E equals MC squared from. He thought about rocks and photons and rocks absorbing photons

and how they gain mass. So when I hear about stored energy, I think about fat. And so would it count to say that a fish has more of that energy because like those photons fed a plant, the fish ate the plant and then put that on his mass. Is that still mass? Yeah, absolutely. Fat has stored energy and it has mass. But so do batteries. Batteries get heavier when you charge them because they have more energy in them and they become more massive. It's a tiny amount, but like your Tesla has more mass when it's fully charged. It's difficult to measure because mass is incredibly energy dense. So a huge amount of energy means a small change in your mass. Got it. Okay. So I think I understand that because we've talked about it in terms of fish. And that's what I need. How does

the Higgs field fit in? Right. So how do you get mass? Well, one way is to have internal stored energy, but what if you're a fundamental particle? What if you're an electron, right? You can't like put photons inside the electron. So how does an electron or cork get mass? The way it gets mass is it interacts with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is this quantum field that fills space. And almost every particle interacts with the Higgs field. And so as it's flying through space, it's interacting with the Higgs field. And the picture to have in your mind is an electron is some sort of ripple in a quantum field itself, right? Because it's an electron field that fills the universe. And there's a Higgs field that fills the universe.

And they're on top of each other. And they interact. So they affect each other. You know, like if you are walking across a snowy field, right? You can't walk across that field without leaving footprints in the snow. The electron, when it's flying through the universe, the ripple in the electron field also makes ripples in the Higgs field because the two interact. That's what it means for two particles to interact. It means there are fields like slosh back and forth with energy.

And so what we see when we measure an electron is not actually just a pure electron. This is what Catherine meant when she said that without the Higgs field, particles would be massless. If there was no Higgs field there, we would see just a pure electron ripple and it would have no mass. What we see is this complicated buzzing of the electron of the Higgs field interacting constantly. It's not actually a pure electron we see orbiting atoms. It's this weird electron Higgs field buzz of energy sloshing back and forth between the two. So that's internal stored energy. This weird thing we call an electron, which is actually a composite of electrons and Higgs fields sloshing back and forth,

has internal stored energy. And that's where the electron's mass comes from. Man, every once in a while I have these like, gosh, it's incredible. We figured any of this out moments. That's where I am right now. Okay. And when did we figure out the Higgs field? The Higgs boson was recent.

Was the Higgs Field much earlier? The Higgs Field has been an idea for about 50 years, but it wasn't until 2012. We proved that it exists by seeing the Higgs boson, the particle, which is the ripple in the Higgs field, for which the Nobel Prize was given to Higgs and a couple of other folks. So now I think we're set up to actually answer Catherine's question because she's saying, all right, if you're a fundamental particle,

you get massed from the Higgs field. If you're not a fundamental particle, like you're a box of mirrors, you get mass by like having stuff inside you. For example, a proton is filled with quarks, and most of the protons' mass doesn't come from the mass of the quarks. It comes from their energy. It's more like the box of mirrors than like the electron. And so she's saying, well, if quarks and electrons are not fundamental particles,

does that mean they don't get their mass from the Higgs field, but they get their mass from some internal stored energy? And she's absolutely right. If electrons are made of smaller bits, then the story I told you is not the most accurate story. It would mean that those little bits inside the electrons, maybe they get their mass directly from the Higgs field, and some of the mass of the electron comes from the interaction of those little components, the ingredients of the electron, and not directly from the electron and the Higgs field itself. But that's also just kind of how you tell the story, right? Like, science works on many layers, and you can tell the story at the level of the electron, and you can dive deeper and then tell the story at the level of, like, the bits inside the electron.

Science is always an approximate description that's brushing some details under the rug. So even if we discover the electron is actually made of other stuff, it's still a reasonable approximation to think of the electron as a thing and talk about its effective interaction with the Higgs field, even if there are details being hidden inside that. We're always hiding some details when we do science because otherwise we couldn't get anything done. Oh, man. I was reading about molecular biology the other day and I feel you on that.

So we sent this answer to Catherine, but unfortunately did it. hear back from her in time. So instead we found an enthusiastic volunteer on our Discord server. Thank you very much, Damien, who listened and reacted and told us if we answered the question or if we should have spent more time talking about space fish. What I'm hearing is, is that if you put a photon in a box, a massless fundamental particle in a box, it will contribute to the overall mass of the box. And I'm with Kelly on that. I need 15 minutes. But if I just accept that on faith for a minute

and turn my attention to the electron, which I'm hearing could be a box with sub-electron particles in it and photons as well. And the question, I think, the conundrum, the paradox, is if it is such a box, okay, the sub-electron particles in there will be pulling their mess from the Higgs field, but will the gluons be doing that? And I think we've got a Schrodinger's cat kind of situation here, is the way I'm picturing it.

If there's no way to check one way or another, can't we just deem that those gluons are pulling mass from the Higgs field? So Damien is right on the money here. There actually is a way to check to see if the Higgs field. Higgs is giving the electron all of its mass or not. And that's the subject of an upcoming episode dedicated to that specific topic, so stay tuned. Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justices. is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's

It's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that

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podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is

so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt and it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Next up, we have a question about fungal species that are just thriving in the presence of radiation in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And this is a question that we got from our Discord channel from Tamara.

And let's hear the question. Can you tell us about the fungi living in the Chernobyl reactor that seems to be able to eat hazardous radiation? Thank you. So I know this is going to be fun because we're talking about fungi and you're a fun gal. Oh, that's such a unique joke. Nobody's ever made that one before. So tell us what the context is here. What is the stuff that Tamara is talking about?

So in 1986, there was a planned test of reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And the plan test was supposed to be something like, well, when you drop the power really low or turn it off, let's test this system for bringing it back online. And they turned it off and it didn't come back online. And instead, there was an explosion and a fire. And the Soviet Union handled it horribly. they didn't give people the heads up. And so there was this cloud of nuclear waste that was just kind of like moving into other countries

and it was not good. Lots of Ukrainians got cancer. It's a really sad story. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a horrible story and another story about how the Soviet Union didn't want to admit mistakes and stuff like that.

Today, their Chernobyl exclusion zone is an area around that power plant that is still radioactive. And it's less radioactive than it was initially. I found one estimate that the radiation levels are three to five orders of magnitude above normal background level, but that's still lower than it was initially.

And there are still, like, I was watching videos of birds and spiders there. And so there's still animals that live in that area, although, like, there's some evidence maybe that the spider webs are kind of like wonky because the radioactive spiders kind of don't do it right anymore. No doubt that's going to be the setup for a great movie in the future. And what's the microphysics here? Like we had radiation emitted from the explosion. We had radioactive materials that were dispersed sort of in clouds of smoke and debris.

And there's still like radioactive particles that are just like sitting on the ground and in the soil emitting radiation constantly. Yeah. So when the explosion happened, steam sort of came up and it brought the nuclear materials up and a lot of it went airborne. And most of it landed close to the power plant, but some of it ended up quite far distances away. And then the reactor where it happened just kind of got. like covered in cement, but inside of it, there's still all of that radioactive material and that's super radioactive. And I guess one of the tricky things about nuclear power is that this stuff has a very long

half-life and so it's going to be radioactive for a long time. How long until people can live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone? I know that they already let people come in to do experiments. So I, like, watched a New York Times video of a scientist who was in there, like, taking pictures of the spider webs and comparing spiderweb shapes in the exclusion zone versus clean areas. It really depends on where you are and how much nuclear waste fell in that area. But for some areas, it might be hundreds of years, up to thousands of years. And in one area, maybe even as much as 20,000 years.

That blows my mind. You know, human civilization is like thousands of years old to imagine that we've created a disaster, which is going to last for 20,000 years. Oh, my gosh. There's the red zone in France where tons of ordinances from World War II, I think, are there. And you're also not allowed to go there either. and that will be off limits for a really long time, maybe forever. But as sad as that is, it also gives us an interesting window into what happens to life

in these crazy high radiation environments, right? Like what's going on? Like life is happening, as you were saying, there are birds and spiders and microbes. Yeah. So one of the observations that have really excited people is that over 200 species of fungi have been found growing. Is it fungi or fungi, I have to ask? I don't know.

I alternate. Okay. You also don't have a strong opinion on GIF or GIF, I'm imagining. Nah, I know what you're saying. Kelly has better things to worry about folks. Yeah, I don't lose too much slip over stuff like that. So there's over 200 species of mushroomy things found near Chernobyl atomic energy station. And there are also a bunch of species that are found inside of the main reactor that had the explosion, which is super radioactive.

And this wasn't a complete surprise because in the like 1960s, which was 25 plus years before this explosion, there had been some fungal species that were found growing in water that had been used to cool nuclear reactors. So we know that some species of fungus can grow in areas where there's radioactivity. But what surprised us in this case was that the fungus appeared to be actually growing towards the most radioactive areas as opposed to just like happening to be there. They seem to be attracted to it. And it looked like they were maybe breaking down and consuming part of the radioactive graphite

that was in there. So graphite is sometimes used in nuclear power plants to moderate reactions. It slows the neutrons down. It also reflects neutrons in some cases. And so it's pretty common to find it in nuclear power plants. So they seem to be breaking some of that down. So then the question was, why? So I've seen some popular science articles that suggest that these things are like eating the radiation, not just that they're surviving, but they're like, ooh, yay, gamma rays have a lot of energy, let's gobble them as some sort of like crazy version of photosynthesis. Well, so I guess the question then is, would you say that plants are eating sunlight? I would as a non-biologist.

I mean, photosynthesis is converting the energy of those photons into local sugars, right? So that seems like eating. Yeah, okay. So there are some scientists who are arguing that they think something like that is happening. And so here's their argument. So the fungus is black. And part of why it's black is because it's producing melanin. And Melanos is Greek for black.

And we have some melanin in our skin. It protects us from UV radiation. And so these fungus make it too. And they make it super thick when they live in high radiation environments. And so the first thing that we think that does is just act as a physical shield to protect them from the radiation. What is it that they need protection from, right? My mental image is essentially like tiny bullets, high energy particles, shooting into them, breaking up their DNA, disrupting all sorts of stuff. Right.

Is that what they need shielding from that these things are super high energy and will just like tear through them? Yeah, right. Those fungi are made out of DNA, just like the rest of us. And so they also have to worry about having their DNA broken into pieces or mutations being induced in their genetic code. And so they need protection from the radiation for that reason. And remember that nuclear waste emits lots of different kinds of radiation. You have gamma rays, which are just very, very high energy photons. And the physics of photons and transparency is really interesting.

Like photons can fly through your body if they have enough energy. You don't think of yourself as transparent because you can't see through yourself. But that's just in the visible light spectrum. In other spectra, like x-ray spectra, that's just photons, ultraviolet. You're mostly transparent. And so those photons can go right through your body. But if they do interact with something in deposit energy, that can be bad. And the other radioactive elements in nuclear waste can also emit things like neutrons, which are bad,

or alpha particles, which are a little helium nuclei. All this kind of stuff can be pretty bad if it hits your cells. Some of it will be deflected just by your skin, but a lot of it is pretty penetrating and pretty dangerous. All right, so it sounds like melanin is like a radiation shield. That's pretty awesome. Does that mean the people who have a stronger tan can go deeper into the exclusion zone? I wouldn't recommend it. Maybe it would take them a little longer to get cancer, but I'd avoid it. There was a group of researchers that looked at melanin, and they found that the melanin was doing something different with like electron transfer than they had expected. And so

they put these fungal species because it's more than one species in an environment where there was like very little food and they gave them access to this radiation and they were still growing fine like i mean sometimes this fungus when it was exposed to radiation was growing better than when it wasn't exposed to radiation and so they were saying like okay if they've got the same amount of food but they grow better when you expose them to radiation is this fungus using radiation the same way plants use the sun for energy. And that's kind of where we are with it right now. Like there's some people who are like,

this could be something like photosynthesis that we need to study and try to explain. But at the moment, I couldn't find any more updates. I think that's all we've got. Like, this is something worth looking into, but we don't know anymore. But there's some hints there, right? There's some evidence that suggests it might be.

It's not just that they're being protected from the radiation. They might actually be taking advantage of it. That's amazing. One of the scientists wanted to emphasize that if you give fungus the choice, it would always prefer to not be growing in the presence of extreme radiation, but if you put it in this horrible environment, it finds a way to thrive. But didn't we hear earlier that it seemed to be growing towards the sources of radiation? If it grows better without the radiation, wouldn't you find it more often further from the radiation?

I don't think there's a lot of other food for the fungus in reactor for. And so I think it's growing towards the radiation because there's not other, decaying plant material that it could be eating, for example. And does this help us understand something about the origin of life, the history of life on Earth, have we always had the same amount of radiation as we've been evolving? I thought that maybe you'd ask that. And so I learned a lot that I hadn't known before. So, for example, I didn't realize that there have been times in the past where the planet

was exposed to a lot more radiation than it is now. So some of the ideas that these fungus might have picked up this melanization trick at various points in the past, like during the early Cretaceous. When the Earth lost its cosmic radiation shields, do you know why that happened, Daniel? No, to be just like leave it on the counter and forget where we put it? Or, you know, somebody switched it off and forgot to put it back on again when they left for the night. I told you, kids, every time. It's very important.

That's right. It's when the Earth crossed magnetic zero. Oh. Does this have to do with Earth switching its magnetic fields? We need a geologist. We got to bring Callen back. well the earth's magnetic field definitely isn't static like the poles flip and it's kind of chaotic it's not regular like the way it is in the sun and so there definitely also could have been points when the magnetic field is like pointed in a different way and so we get lots more radiation in one particular location because like at the north pole you're not as protected as you are at the equator or it could be that the magnetic field is just like resetting magnetic zero definitely makes it sound like the magnetic field was off for a minute yeah so wait if it goes off for a minute you lose your galactic cosmic radiation shielding, that sounds catastrophic. I don't want that to happen

during my lifetime or my children's. And also, as you mentioned, places like Antarctica have much higher radiation. So, you know, fungi are very melanized down there. So one of the most interesting things that I came across while researching this section was the various proposals for how you could use this observation in ways that are beneficial to people. So one of the suggestions was that you could maybe use melanin and put it in particular places to try to protect patients who are undergoing radiation therapy for things like cancer and that that could maybe protect like the area that's not supposed to get the radiation from it, sort of like a lead blanket. I don't know if this would be a harder way of accomplishing the same thing, but it was sort of an

interesting idea. Fungi or fungi are sometimes suggested as bioremediation tools. There's a couple different ways this could work. But I think the idea in this case would be that the fungus grow in an area where there's radioactivity. They sort of accumulate it into their own tissues. And, you know, especially if it's like in the soil, because they've accumulated into their tissues, you can go and harvest the fungus and it's easier to harvest the fungus than to get the radiation out of the soil. There's other kinds of bioremediation where essentially the like pollutant, in this case would be radioactive waste, gets broken down into something that's no longer dangerous.

I don't necessarily know that that's what the fungus are doing in this case, but I didn't find any evidence that in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, folks are actively using fungus to try to make this area habitable sooner. Wow. Fascinating. And then the final interesting suggestion I saw was that you could use these fungi as a living radiation shield in space while also growing biomass. And here's why I think that might not be a great idea. So, first of all, as someone who has worked with living organisms,

they're always dying when you don't want them to die. And I feel like you really don't want your radiation shield to accidentally die. But also, a bunch of these fungus species that you find growing in reactor for are species that are all over the place, and most of the time they don't cause any problems. But every once in a while, they get inside of our bodies in a way that can be catastrophic. So when they infect us, we're dead ends. They don't get to infect anything else after that.

But they still manage to get inside of us, and our immune systems are not good at fighting them in a lot of cases. And so I found examples where one of the most common fungal species that you would find in that reactor is also associated with meningitis, which is like an inflammation of the layers around your brain. And then cerebral abscesses, which are just like an inflammation that's filled with pus in your brain, and then also lung infections. And so you have to be careful when you use biological.

stuff, both because it's hard to keep alive. And two, you know, it's got like a mind of its own, man. You've got to make sure it doesn't infect the humans. And just maybe one more reason why you need to make sure you have access to medical care when you're in space. This is going to be a long warning label on this stuff. Oh, yeah. All right. So, Tamara, did we answer your question? I hope we did. But if not, let me know what else you'd like to know. You did a great job introducing the topic. This is such a fascinating discovery because it can have so many ramifications. One can only scratch the surface. I hope they are exploring the idea of using fungi to clean up radioactive sites. I have also read a bacteria that will eat chemical spills

and toxic sites. It would be a great direction for young research biologists to explore. Thank you. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulance.

This is just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. According to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets.

With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets

almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets, season 12, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so now we have a fantastic question from David and his daughter, Katie.

I love that this question so much. Let's listen to it now. My name is David Naylor, and I'm here with my daughter, Katie, to ask you a question today about a game we both love to play, namely pinball. So, as you may know, the game started out with just the force of gravity, where a ball would fall. down a hole and it would just randomly move through positions in the board. But it rapidly grew in complexity when the forces of electricity and magnetism were added to introduce things like flippers, sound effects, ball locks, and of course the all-important storage of high scores. So Katie, what's our question today? Our question today is what innovations could theoretically be added to the game using additional forces of nature? Is there something we could add with say

the stronger weak forces. I'd love to hear your ideas. Well, hey, keep up the great work, guys. And if you ever come out with your own pinball machine, Katie and I would definitely love to play it. All right, Daniel, so did you play pinball a ton when you were young? I did, actually. But I actually played simulated pinball more than physical pinball. We had like a pinball game designer on our PC at home in the 90s, and you could like build your own pinball game and then play it. So I had a lot of fun like designing. crazy pinball scenarios, more than playing them, actually. I spent a lot of my childhood in New Jersey, and we used to go to the boardwalk, and the boardwalk

in Atlantic City had a bunch of video game places and pinball machines, and I really loved pinball. I thought it was great at it. It's cool because it uses the laws of physics, right? It's like you're playing a real game with a real ball. It's not just like made up zappers and blasters. That's exactly what I was thinking when I was eight and I was playing it. This is cool because of the laws of physics.

you really got me there i really thought you were agreeing with me for a minute hold on a second i think this is some sort of joke yeah okay well you didn't realize why it was cool you just thought of school and now that you're older and more mature you're appreciating how physics rules the world that's so true yeah all right i'm gonna pretend that one was sincere but that's sort of the heart of david and katie's question right they're talking about how playing pinball requires you to understand something about the laws of physics, how like when you hit a ball against the paddle, it'll bounce off. And the reason is that there's physics there. And the ball will roll down the slanted slope of the pinball machine because of

gravity. That's right. All right. So let's start by talking about what's happening in a pinball game by describing the electromagnetic forces. So the current laws of physics that are mostly used to control what happens in a pinball game is, of course, gravity because the ball rolls down. But much more subtly and more importantly are electromagnetic forces. And you might be thinking what the pinball isn't charged. It's not like we're shooting photons. It's not laser beams in the pinball game and not the ones I played at least. Wrong game, Daniel. But electromagnetic forces actually do control most of what happens in the pinnball game and most of what happens in the world. Like the whole world is built out of electromagnetic lattices, these like meshes of atoms that are bound

together by electromagnetic forces. You know, the electron is bound to the atom. That's an electromagnetic interaction because the electron is charged and the protons are charged. The bonds between them are electromagnetic. How do you put atoms together to make more complex stuff? Those are ionic and compound bonds and I know I'm talking chemistry here, but chemistry is built on electromagnetism, right? It's the charges of those electrons that allow them to connect the atoms together and zooming out like the whole world is built the same way. The chair that you're sitting in right now is like a mesh of matter and radiation. It's the forces that hold those little bits of matter together that weave it into something that makes it feel solid. The solidity

of our world is an illusion. It's just a zoomed out view of electromagnetic forces woven together to create these volumes. Okay, so one, the more I learn about physics, the more I feel like there's a lot of chemistry going on. And maybe I was tricked when you're like, we're just got to talk about physics, but that's okay. Chemistry is just zoomed out physics, really. All right, all right. So you say your chair is an illusion, but it's holding me up. It's a pretty good illusion.

In the same way that we were talking earlier, like, is an electron just an electron is it made of smaller bits? Well, sometimes it's useful to think of it as an electron. Sometimes it might be useful to talk about the smaller bits. Your chair, it's not useful to think about the tiny atoms that make it up. You think of it as a chair, and that's the way we do science. Sometimes we zoom in and talk about the constituents. Sometimes we ignore those details.

The chair is a great example. You don't really care about the electrons in the chair. But for the purposes of this question, you should know that electrons are doing all the dirty work. Okay. So you've got the ball, the paddles. You know, it's probably got some like 90s era movie theme on the screen. You know, I hope maybe it's Terminator themed or something. And all of that is based on electromagnetic forces.

Exactly. And so their question is like, what can we do to make pinball more interesting by adding other quantum forces to it. So I had fun being a little creative, trying to imagine how you would design a pinball game using the other forces. And the other forces we have in our quiver are the weak force and the strong force, right? Because we're already used gravity and electromagnetism. The only other forces we know about are the weak and the strong force. But both of them could provide some interesting twist on pinball. All right. So I'm guessing it's going to be harder to figure out a way to incorporate the weak force because I bet it's weak. So what did you come up with?

The weak force is unfortunately weak, right? And when we say weak, we mean like very, very, very weak. Particles that only feel the weak force, like neutrinos, they pass right through us without even interacting. Like the whole world is transparent to neutrinos. It's so transparent that you can be on the other side of the earth and still see neutrinos from the sun passing through the entire planet. Like there is no nighttime in neutrinos because neutrinos pass right through.

the earth. So imagine, for example, you made paddles out of neutrinos or pinball out of neutrinos. They would pass right through each other. Like, it just be like ghosts. So it wouldn't be a lot of fun to play. You'd like have to hit that ball like 10 to the 30 times to change its directions. So it'd be like playing with my brother. He'd be like, no, you didn't see it, but I just won the game. And you'd be like, no, you lost, man. But there are other ways we can use the weak force to maybe change the way the game is played because the weak force also is involved in radioactive decay, like we were talking about a moment ago about Chernobyl, what happens inside like a heavy nucleus is sometimes a neutron flips into a proton and also emits an electron

and a neutrino. And he uses the weak force to do that. That whole process only happens because of the weak force. And one of the reasons that these nasty radioactive elements are so long lived is that the weak force is pretty weak. It can't do it all the time. But the cool thing is that these things really are random. Like you have an atom of uranium and you know it's half-life.

That doesn't mean it's going to take exactly that half-life and then decay. It means it's a distribution and that's like a typical time. And so you could imagine turning this into a game like you have a blob of decaying elements. And every time one of them decays, you get like a shower bonus pinballs or maybe opens traps or just changes something about the game in a random way that's affected by the weak force. Okay. So one, I think adding radioactive material to pinball. ball games probably doesn't make it any less safe to be in New Jersey.

Only the strong survive. That's what they say. That's right. That's right. But when you play every time you get it into one of the holes in the pinball game, there's usually like some random, like how many points are you going to get? So this seems like a good way to make those decisions. Yeah, because those things are not really random.

They're deterministic, right? Gravity and electromagnetism at the scale we use it is all completely predictable. Even when the computer generates random numbers, that's not truly random. It's pseudo random. It's just like a long sequence that's difficult to predict. So this could be like a way to add true randomness to your pinball game. So do random number generators online make physicists really angry because they're not truly random or physicists like it's close enough like the way fungi fungi, whatever.

Do you feel the same? If you're really serious about your random numbers, you can actually get true random numbers from cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are another example of the weak force and you build a cosmic rate. detector, it can provide truly random numbers. So if you're really serious about it, you can find sources of cosmic ray random numbers online. Thank goodness. All right. So we established that it would probably be easier to figure out a role for the strong force, but let's do it. How are you going to incorporate the strong force? Strong force is very, very strong. In fact, it's so strong that it's

hard to use because anytime something has a strong force charge, which we call a color, which is like an analogy to the electromagnetic charge of plus and minus. Anytime something has a strong force charge, it overwhelms everything else and it neutralizes itself. The way that, for example, if a cloud is positively charged and the ground is negatively charged, you'll get a bolt of lightning because it wants to neutralize that imbalance. And the strong force is even more powerful. So basically everything we experience in the world is neutral in the strong force for that reason. So the strong force holds the nucleus together.

Protons and neutrons are built from, corks using the strong force, but they themselves are neutral in the strong force. But it's the strongest force we know about. It's the reason we have fusion in the sun, for example. It's very powerful. Okay. So now it's hard for me to imagine that you're going to be able to turn that into an improvement in the pinball game, a game which I'll say is already perfected.

That and see ball. Those are two really fantastic games. But all right, what is your idea? I have two ideas here. One is if you could manage to strong charge the ball to give them a quarter, quantum colors. And then imagine playing with two balls. Sometimes you have like a bonus ball. And if they're strongly charged, then when they get further apart, you would pop new balls out of the vacuum to balance that strong charge to neutralize it, basically like a lightning strike

with a strong charge. But in this case, that energy gets converted to mass. This is what happens if you have two corks, for example, that have a strong charge. We produce them with a large adjunct collider and they're flying apart. There's so much energy in the bond between them that it gets converted to new corks, new mass. So now imagine you have two pinballs on the board that have strong charge, and then you get a shower of new pinballs just like filling the game momentarily. I think that would be pretty cool. That sounds super fun. Also, it's Hadron. I've been saying Hadron. Fun guy, fun gal. Jif, Gif, Hadron, Hadron. Who knows? Let's call the whole thing off. I think you have one more idea. Another idea is, hey, the strong force is very powerful.

But what if we could use the energy, like imagine mastering fusion, right? Somehow figure that out. That's energy from the strong force. And then use that to turn pinball into a three-dimensional game, like levitate the balls somehow. So you have like 3D pinball instead of just 2D pinball. Fusion-powered levitating pinballs. And is the fusion just because you need extra power to levitate the pinballs? Or why would fusion in particular be levitating the pinballs?

Why can't we do that with fossil fuels? Oh my gosh. Yeah, coal-powered 3D pinball. we should get on that. How come nobody's invented that? I don't know. Billion dollar idea. Totally worth the consequences of global climate change to be able to play pinball in 3D. All right. Well, these ideas sound like a ton of fun. And I wish that I was back in Atlantic City, although I'm not sure what it's like 20, 30 years hence. But all right, let's see if David and Katie are interested in playing the games you came up with. And if they want to invest in our coal-powered

3D pinball idea. Oh, yeah. Hey, that was really awesome. I didn't even think of those ideas and I absolutely love it. Thank you so much for that. I know myself I was very encouraged to get into my field of work, which is IT related, because of interest in gaming. And I think it's a really fun way to connect young people like my daughter, for example, getting them into STEM and science-related work by getting them to think about how all this stuff works under the hood and all the cool new things that you could do with that kind of understanding to make the things we enjoy in life, that much more engaging. So with that said, Katie, did you have anything else you'd like to say? Thank you for taking my question. If you come out with a pinball machine,

I would really love to play it. Okay, thanks very much for those questions. And thank you for listening. And thanks everybody out there for powering science with their personal curiosity. And I absolutely love that I got to read about black fungi in Chernobyl. So please consider sending us questions at questions at Daniel and Kelly.org or join us on our Discord. Is that how you say

in New Jersey? That's right. Discoid. Discoid. Discoid. Yeah. I had to take speech classes after I moved out, but join us on our Discord channel. See you next week.

Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is produced by iHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms you can find us at D and K Universe. Don't be shy. Right to us.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of ed. Enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real at advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA.

Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe saved my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

This is an IHeart podcast.