Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions Volume #1

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Daniel and Kelly answer questons about dark energy, slime molds and Hawking radiation!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, 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 Vibras you've come to expect.

Listen to the new season of Dacius Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast.

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Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How was your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming.

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the universe? All of those begin the same way with a question. In fact, all of science starts with questions. The reason we know things about clouds and beetles and black holes is because someone out there had a question that kept them up at night. So they were willing to stay up late looking at the stars or counting beetles until they figured it out. Science is just people asking questions they couldn't let go. But it's not just professional scientists who ask questions and move us forward. It's everyone. It's you. And we think your questions also deserve answers, or at least replies that make sense and help you grapple with what we do and don't know about the topic. So if you have a question about science or whatever, please write to us to

questions at danielandkelly.org. We'd love to hear from you. And sometimes we'll answer those questions right here on the pod. And so on today's episode, we're going to be answering questions submitted by listeners. And more than that, and I'll admit to being a little bit nervous about this part, we're going to go back to those listeners with our answers and follow up to see if our explanations scratch their itch or not. Today, Daniel and Kelly are getting graded by the listeners. So today on Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe, we'll be answering questions from listeners, Volume 1. Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith, and I am so excited that we're having our first listener

questions episode today. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I love answering questions from the internet about physics, about philosophy, even about dating. really you've answered questions on the show about dating people send me all sorts of questions you know they send me their treatise on the nature of the universe they send me questions about career advice how to get into physics and yes sometimes people ask me questions about their dating life and hey i don't claim any particular expertise there but i'll share my thoughts

sure yeah no i'll share my thoughts on anything well so i was actually going to ask you what is the weirdest or most surprising like no negative connotation needed, but weirdest or most surprising question you've ever been asked related to your career as a physicist. Oh, wow. That is such a good question. Now, I'm mentally cycling through the thousands of questions I've gotten over the years. I think one of the most challenging questions to answer are ones about people's personal

experiences, people writing sometimes about like their UFO experiences or their paranormal experiences and they want my physics knowledge and like what else could have explained it. And that's a delicate line to walk because you don't want to suggest that what they experienced is not what they think they experienced, but you also want to help them disentangle it and think about what else might have explained it. That's maybe like the most oddball and challenging kind of question to answer. I also sometimes get really touching stories like a woman who went through her father's old belongings. He was, of course, a retired engineer. And she found in there a treatise on the nature of the universe. And she sent it to me and she's like, look, I don't know if this is anything.

But if it is something, I feel terrible not sharing it with the world. Can you tell me if this is worthwhile or not? Aw, that's so cute. I know. Was it worthwhile or was it fun to read, but maybe not earth changing? There was nothing really earth-shattering in there. But I think she was happy to know that at least somebody had looked at it. What?

So cool that you were able to provide that. And how about you? Do you get weird questions from the internet about parasites? People send you pictures of bits of their body and be like, Kelly, what is this? Do I need to go to the ER? I do get photos of feces from time to time. And it's worth noting that I cannot identify parasitic infections from a picture of a bell movement. They're microscopic and I can't.

Also, I'm not a medical professional. So everybody out there who was about to email Kelly a picture of their poop, not worth your time. Please don't. I think the hardest question for me to answer, though, was I was doing an interview for our book Soonish. And I think the person doing the interview hadn't really read the book. And so his question was, so tell me about the robots. The robots. And there was like a different robot in every single chapter.

And so I didn't have any idea what he was talking about. This is when I learned the trick that when you do an interview, if someone asks you a question that you don't really know what they're trying to get at, you just decide what is the most interesting thing I feel like talking about right now. And so I just picked like my favorite robot and went off on that tangent. It was a learning experience. Sounds like you're ready to run for higher office now. I'm going to dodge your question and talk about the thing I want to talk about instead.

I don't think I'd make a good politician. All right. Well, you know, I would vote for you to represent Virginia, but not California. I don't think you can really appreciate everything that California has to offer. I lived in California for a while. Is it that you don't like Virginia? And that's why you would vote for me for Virginia? You want to harm Virginia in some way?

No, no, no. Virginia's for lovers. It's fantastic. I just don't feel like you appreciate California. I mean, you did leave. Right? And so clearly you don't understand that it's objectively the best place in the world to live. You know, I have not regretted leaving, sorry to say. So I guess you're right. I shouldn't be representing California. And maybe I'm going to regret that a decade from now when I run for governor of California if I've moved back. But for now, I think we're just going to go with no politics for Kelly. That sounds good because I'm going to have to hold off on endorsing you until I hear you change your opinion on California.

All right. But let's not talk about Kelly's future plans to take over the world slash solar system slash. universe. Let's get to questions from listeners because today on Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe, we are answering questions from you. We think your questions are important. We want you to understand the universe. We want you to get that satisfying moment when everything clicks in your mind. And so we encourage you to write to us with your questions to questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. We will write back to you. You'll hear what we do and don't know about whatever it is you're interested in. We can't wait to hear from you. Our first question today is from a really fun guy named Barima, who lives in Germany. He has a question about gravity. Here is Barima's question. Hello, my name is Burima, living in Germany from England. I'm a big fan of the podcast, and I love what you guys are about. So, gravity becomes so strong that it tears space time, and I was thinking dark energy basically does the same, but in reverse because it's expanding the universe. Both of these phenomena bend or expand the fabric of space time.

So my question is, could dark energy be anti-gravity? Thank you for your time, and I hope you guys have a great day. Thank you so much for the question, Burima. Well, you know, Daniel, that sounds like a question for you. Gravity, space time, and dark energy. Ooh, this is my jam for sure. We've recently recorded episodes on what is time and what is space, which might provide some important context, but how do we answer this question more directly?

This is a great question because it gives us a, an opportunity to connect a lot of ideas you hear a lot about space time as a fabric black holes having extreme gravity dark energy pulling space apart how does it all work how do you think about that all together my interpretation of berema's question is that he's thinking about black holes and he's heard that black holes tear space time so he's thinking about that as like pulling space itself apart and he's also heard that the universe is expanding in an accelerating way which feels like it's ripping space apart. And so he's wondering, like, are those the same thing?

Or are they the opposite? Because black holes attract and dark energy is pulling space apart. How does it all work? And is dark energy actually the opposite form of gravity? So we're going to give Burima a way to think about dark energy in terms of gravity and general relativity and link all these ideas together. But we should probably start with black holes and space time

and think about what it means to tear space time apart. And does this have anything to do? We had a conversation about a map and how you can like make the cities closer or farther apart. Is that the right way to start thinking about this problem? Or now that we're talking about black holes, we're in a totally different universe? No, that's exactly the right way to start thinking about this. Let's get a mental picture of what space is or space time is and what it means to tear space time or what happens when gravity gets really, really strong. So let's start with a model of space.

What is space? Space we don't know what it is fundamentally. but we know that we can measure the distance between two points. You have like a ruler, you can measure how many ticks are between two points. And you can do that between L.A. and Virginia, or you can do that between Canada and Mexico, or between Seattle and Miami, or whatever. You can measure distances between points. So we know that we can measure these distances.

We don't understand what is the underlying fabric and what is it doing and how does it work, but we can measure these distances. And we notice that if you put a mass in space, like a star or a planet or whatever, those distances get kind of wonky, like things get closer together, things get further apart. This is what we mean when we say space is curved. It's not like it's curving in some external dimension with the whole crazy rubber sheet analogy. It just means that it's changing the intrinsic distances between stuff.

The curvature of space is not external in some other dimension. It's internal. It's intrinsic. It's just a relative change of distances. And so when we say space is curved, we just mean you're tweaking all of those distances. I think if I were listening to the podcast, this is where I would pause it and just stare at the wall for five minutes and be like, how do I make sense of this? It's all kind of complicated, but yeah, I'm following. Yeah.

And you called up this mental picture of a map. So imagine you had a map the United States and you laid it flat on a table and you measure the distances between these cities. Those distances have to follow some rules because the map is flat. If you measure all those distances like from L.A. to Seattle and Seattle to New York and New York to Miami. and Miami back to L.A., that's kind of a square, right? You measure all those distances, and those distances have to follow some rules because the map is flat on the table. Like from those distances, I can tell you how far it is from L.A. to New York. It's constrained by those other measurements. But what if I told you, I'm just going to go in and make L.A. and New York closer together.

I'm just squeezing them together. Well, then the map can no longer be flat because I have to like bunch up the material between L.A. and New York. And that's what curving space does. It changes the relative distances between these points so they no longer add up in the same way they would if they were on flat space. That's what curved space is. It just changes those relative distances. And the crazy thing is that you can do that. You can develop a model of space that incorporates all these weird changes of distances. And that's what we call curved space. All right. So it's never tearing. There's never a spot where it like breaks and then there's nothing in between. It just kind of gets like curvy like a roller coaster at some point.

Exactly. You can't really tear space time. That's like a dramatic visual people use, but it's not a helpful way to think about it. And remember, we don't know what space is. We have this beautiful mathematical description from Einstein that lets us think about this concept of curvature in terms of these changing relative distances. But that's just our model. It's useful for describing space. Doesn't always tell us what space actually is. But it does predict crazy stuff. Like if you have a huge amount of mass, the curvature gets really, really strong and you get things like black holes. places where space is so curved that light can no longer escape. Because not only does it change the relative distances, it changes like the directions. And inside a black hole, space is now one directional. Every direction inside a black hole is just towards the center. It's not that light can't escape because the force of gravity is so strong. It's because every direction is towards the center now.

There are no other directions inside a black hole. So a black hole is so massive, it like rearranges the relationships between points in space. Okay, so the order of the direction there is that the black hole starts pulling on space. It's not that like space gets bent for some other reason and that causes a black hole. Yeah, that's right. The presence of mass causes the bending of space and that's what the black hole is. Yeah, exactly. So that's the way to think about like gravity and black holes and bending of space time.

But Burima is asking us to connect that to the expansion of the universe and how the universe we've noticed in the last 20 years or so is not just getting bigger. it's getting bigger faster and faster as time goes on. And this is the mystery we call dark energy because we don't understand the source of that expansion or why it's accelerating. Okay, so we know that it's accelerating and we're using dark energy as the explanation and is that the extent of what we know about dark energy

is that it is the magical way that this all works out? Essentially, dark energy is shorthand for saying we see the universe is accelerating its expansion. We don't understand why. please somebody figure it out and we don't have a working explanation we have sort of like a sketch on the back of a napkin idea that might work out but currently the calculations are not connecting and they're off by like 10 with 100 zeros but the sketch of the explanation actually comes from general relativity general relativity of course is Einstein's generalization of Newton's gravity

Newton says masses attract each other because there's a force Einstein says no actually it's more complicated space time curves and it gives mostly the same behavior. But there's a little bit more to Einstein's general relativity than just mass bend space time. Einstein's relativity also lets other things happen. So for example, Einstein says, yes, if you have mass in space time, then space curves and things get closer together. But also, if you fill the universe with potential energy, not mass energy, but some weird kind of potential energy, then it causes the opposite effect. It causes things to move apart.

It's like a negative pressure. This is the fascinating thing is that Newton's gravity is just attractive. You can only pull stuff together. Einstein's gravity is a generalization of that and allows in some weird situations for things to get pushed apart by general relativity. Okay, so we've got gravity and dark energy. Gravity pulls in. Dark energy pushes out.

How do we determine who wins where? Yes. All right. Great question. But first, I want to be technical about what we mean by gravity. because when some people hear gravity, they think the pulling together part. Other people hear gravity,

they think general relativity, which can include dark energy. So in some sense, gravity could be the attractive part and the dark energy part. Or some people could just think about gravity is the attractive part. So let's just call gravity the attractive part.

And when we're talking about the whole shebang, we'll call it that general relativity. So you're asking about like, when is the attractive part of gravity, things tugging on each other when, and when does dark energy, the universe pulling itself apart when, and that depends on distance. So the attractive part, the parts that's like Newton,

that gets strong when things are closer together. Like the closer you are to a star, the more its gravity is going to pull on you. The more space time is bent in a way that's going to move you closer. And as you get further away, that fades. So like we don't feel much gravity from Jupiter because it's kind of far away. We don't feel much gravity from other stars because they're even further away, et cetera, et cetera. So gravity gets weaker with distance. Dark energy has the opposite really dark energy is like every chunk of space is getting bigger so if you just have one little chunk of space it's getting bigger by a tiny amount but if you have lots of chunks of space huge distances then that adds up and so over big distances dark energy becomes very very powerful so like between our galaxy and other galaxies there's a lot of space if all that space is expanding by a little bit all those little bits add up to a huge expansion so dark energy gets more powerful at greater distances. So for example, between our cluster of galaxies

and the neighboring cluster of galaxies, dark energy is winning. There's not enough gravity to hold those together, and they're getting pulled apart by dark energy. All that space is expanding faster than gravity can hold stuff together. But in our solar system, though there is dark energy here, and it is expanding the space between our planet and the sun,

gravity is more powerful because it's a fairly small distance, so gravity wins. So shorter distances like, smaller than a galactic supercluster, gravity wins. Big distances, bigger than a galactic supercluster, dark energy wins. Okay, so that makes sense to me. And so you said that dark energy is a form of kinetic energy. Potential energy, actually.

Wow, they're the same thing. They're so 100% not the same thing. I'm sorry, okay. It's a form of potential energy. And so does that make dark energy, like negative potential energy, or gravity? and dark energy just opposites of one another? Yeah, great question. So number one, we don't know where the potential energy comes from.

That's the big mystery. Like to have enough potential energy to explain the accelerating expansion we see, you'd need a lot more energy than we can account for. If you add up all the potential energy we know about in the universe from the Higgs field and all the other fields and all that stuff, you get a number. That number we calculate doesn't match the accelerating expansion we see in the universe. And it's not even close.

The two numbers are off by 10 to the 120. So general relativity has a mechanism to create this negative pressure requires positive potential energy. We can't explain the source of that potential energy. We don't know. So that's the remaining mystery. Like there is no potential energy we know about that is capable of doing this, which might mean there's some other field out there we don't understand.

It requires positive potential energy to create this negative pressure, this pulling things apart. So to bring it sort of back to Borema's question, he's asking, like, could dark energy be anti-gravity? And the answer is kind of yes. Like dark energy is a component of general relativity that allows for pulling things apart, sort of opposite to the attractive part of gravity. So if you consider gravity to just be the attractive part of general relativity, then yeah, dark energy is sort of the opposite of that. It's still a component of general relativity, but it has the opposite effect that creates negative pressure. Okay. Well, thank you for that great question, Borema.

And so now I'm curious whether we answered Borema's question, whether we scratched his itch or whether we totally misunderstood or whether we just confused him further with our crazy description of L.A. and Miami. So I reached out to Borema and I sent him our conversation to hear what he had to say. Here's Borema's reaction. Okay. Thank you very much, Borema, for joining us here on the podcast and for sending in such a wonderful and fun question. So tell me what did you think of our answer? Did we answer your question? Did we create more questions in your mind? I'm dying to hear your thoughts Yeah, so thank you for answering the question. It's great to be here I think you guys pretty much answered the question bang on. It did blow my mind if I'm being a hundred percent honest because At first I was like okay, where is this going and then at the end sort of just landed it very nicely

It did raise another question that I have you mentioned the dark energy sort of being caused by potential energy. And my sort of follow-up question was, does that have anything to do with then zero point energy? Yeah, so the two things are definitely connected. Zero point energy is a description of basically the minimum energy that a quantum field can have. You know, quantum fields are like oscillating in space.

They're zigging, zagging, they're whizzing back and forth. There's energy there of their motion, the changing of their values. That's kinetic energy. And they can also have potential energy if they're in some weird configuration. Zero point energy just says that the total energy, the combination of kinetic and potential and any other kind of energy, can never go to zero, because quantum fields can never be totally flat. Like a classical field, an electrical field,

can be just zero. You can have like no electric field because you have no electric charges. You can be totally zero. But if it's a quantum field, it's always buzzing and frothing a tiny little bit. There's a minimum energy there. But the potential energy we think is causing dark energy comes from a field we don't know. We don't know what field is out there doing it. There's only one field we know about that has a lot of potential energy. That's the Higgs field. We know that it fills space with this weird potential energy that gives all particles mass. But when we sit down and try to calculate, is the potential energy from the Higgs field enough to explain dark energy and the acceleration? We find that it's not. Like they're different by 10 with 100 zeros. So yeah, we're not even close

to understanding the source of dark energy. Yeah. We're not even close to understanding the source of dark energy. Yeah, we're not even close to being close. Yeah. Yeah, okay, fair. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. Well, thanks very much for sending your question and for doing this follow-up. Lots of fun to chat with you. Yeah. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure and I learned something. And that's our entire goal. All right. Thanks, everyone. And if you have a question about the nature of the universe or if you'd heard something you haven't quite understood, please send it to us. We'd love to answer your question. All right. Well, that was our first question. Now we're going to move on to a question in Kelly's wheelhouse, which we'll get to after the break.

Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations 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've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, 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 for. 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, You know, so it's 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. 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 when 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. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brandford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Othewton Fia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal.

Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection

can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all.

Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back, showing up to the locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd.

I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, we're back from the break, and we're going to tackle our first biology-oriented listener question. So Charlie Davidson had this question for us. Hi, Daniel and Kelly.

I've got a question for your new podcast about slime mold computation. How is it possible for a bunch of single. celled organisms to perform programmable computational tasks for people. It just seems wild to me. So I'd love to hear more about it and find out how on earth that works. Thanks very much. Bye-bye. Oh, man, Charlie.

In my family, we call this the $10,000 question because that's how much money we lost thinking about this problem. So here is the story. All right, so slime molds are single-celled organisms. that are thought to be really great at solving mazes. This has become like a fact that's entered the, you know, general consciousness. You say something about slime molds and they'll be like,

oh, they're really great at solving mazes. And they've become famous for like solving straight up mazes. They've also become famous for being able to recreate transportation systems. So if you put a bunch of different cities on a map and you put a piece of oat on the different cities, the slime mold will start growing on that oat. I believe it's actually eating the bacteria. and the fungus on that oat.

And then it will spread out and it will find the other oats. And if it's working the way we want it to work, it will then contract and only have the shortest paths between those things. And so perhaps you've seen videos that like where the slime molds have created this map that is almost exactly the same as like the map of the transportation system matches up almost perfectly with what the slime mold did. It's really impressive. This is really appealing.

I understand why people are into this because this is. suggest like there's another way to do calculations or this is like a biological computer or maybe even some like awareness, right? I feel like we're so hungry to discover we're not alone in the universe that we're looking for like aliens here on Earth, even in slime molds. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, if slime molds can be that smart, what else have we missed, right? That's incredible.

And did you see the dark matter example? Mm-hmm. I did. Yeah, they used slime molds to understand the filaments of dark matter between galaxies, which was pretty cool. I think that they used a computational model based on the behavior of slime molds. Yeah. Since it's like a 3D thing, so it would be a little bit harder to do.

No, I don't think they had like cosmic slime molds between actual galaxies. That would be awesome. Wow. That would be maybe scary, but interesting. So my husband and I got really excited about these slime molds. We're like, you know, this seems like such an easy thing that you should be able to recreate at home. And so many science experiments are, you know, that we remembered that we did at school when we were kids. We're like not super exciting.

They didn't necessarily stay with you. So we got really excited about making slime mold mazes that you could sell pretty cheaply to classrooms so that they could recreate these experiments. I'm getting an ironic foreshadowing vibe here that you're setting us up for a big disappointment. Is this going to be another Kelly throws cold water on things? I mean, that's what I do, right? How else could this have gone? You got to lean into your skills, Kelly.

You know, yeah, I didn't think this was going to be my niche, but it is. So here we go. All right. So Zach was excited about this first. I was busy with something else at the time. So we were living in Alabama, and he was like in our humid garage, trying to use Legos to build mazes, and then he was pouring auger in there. And auger is this thing that like when it's hot, it's sort of like viscous and fluidy.

But when it cools, it cools to like kind of smushy surface that something can grow on. So he was trying to like make mazes in our garage out of this stuff. And then he went to Carolina Biological website and he bought slime mold. Specifically, he bought fizzarmine. and polycephalus, which is the main, like, yellow species that people usually see when they're thinking of these mazes. But tell us briefly, what is a slime mold exactly? Is it a mold?

Is it a slime? Is it totally padly named? It's not really a slime. It's not really a mold. It's its own thing. It has a complicated life cycle. But when it's at the part of its life cycle where it is solving these mazes, it's a single cell with a bunch of nuclei in it.

Wow. Which is kind of amazing. I think we should actually have a whole episode on why. organisms would ever have multiple nuclei in the same cell? Like, what problems does that solve? Because my brain, like, more than one nucleus, that just doesn't make sense. So he was trying to do it. That wasn't working.

And so then we moved to Virginia, and he was like, okay, you know what? I'm going to, like, outsource to experts. So he hired an engineer. And he was like, all right, engineer, I want you to make me a really nice maze because the auger kept, like, seeping through my Legos. It just wasn't working the way I wanted it to make me a really nice maze with a really nice cover. And the engineer is like, okay, great.

I'll do that. But it's going to cost $10,000 to make an injection molded makes. And Zach was like, oh, that's a little steep, but I really think kids would enjoy this and we're going to do it. And so he pays and he does it. Oh, yeah, I know. And so he ran it by me and I was like, I don't know that that's a great decision, but okay, let's try it. This is what happens when you have one family with two nuclei, right? You had different nuclei making different decisions like, you know, this slime mold is spending 10K over here and that nuclei is objecting to it.

You know, it's like a model of a family. That's totally true. I should have known this problem was coming. So he gets this maze. And, you know, we'd had a lot of conversations about like, oh, it's so funny that Carolina biological cells slime mold, but they don't sell these mazes. I wonder why they don't sell these mazes. And so we get the mazes and then Zach's like, okay, so now I'm taking this project to the

biologist. So I got a bunch of auger. I got a bunch of slime molds. I'm like using my sterile technique and I'm trying to run these mazes. And it's my job to write the protocol and the directions. So the classrooms can do this. And so I start doing it, and it's not working. The slime pewter is not solving the maze the way it's supposed to.

So what is it supposed to do exactly? Like you put it in the beginning and you put an Ode at the end and it's supposed to find the shortest path through the maze. Exactly. And how could it possibly do that? Like it's supposed to explore every direction and then eventually figure out which of the paths it's found is the shortest and then slowly coalesce onto that? Is that the best case scenario? So that's what we thought was supposed to be happening. And so I contacted an expert who works in this field, and I was like, it's not working for me.

Why is it not working for me? Meaning what were you seeing? Like, it just didn't find the end or found the wrong path or you just didn't go anywhere? It was not finding the shortest path. I see. Something like 20 to 30% of the time, it would end up at the right path, which was essentially like random chance. And I contacted a person who was doing even simpler experiments in their class. But it was like a petri dish and then an oat in the middle as a starting point.

and an oat on one side. And so it should have been very simple to just, like, it expands, and then it was supposed to just sort of contract to just be this short, straight line distance. And they were like, oh, yeah, that experiment never worked. But apparently it always, well, maybe your students are doing something wrong. So I reach out to this expert, and he's like, well, first of all, the way that it solves it is it's following a chemical trail.

And so the chemical trail needs to be incredibly easy to detect. So instead of oatmeal, you could try something that's like, creates more chemicals and makes a more clear path. And I was like, well, that's not how I had been taught that this works. And I was like, okay, well, what percent of the time, if I'm doing it right, should I expect it to solve the maze? Because, like, I'm thinking the answer should be close to 100 percent based on what people are saying on Twitter.

Oh, he's a reliable resource. Twitter is basically one big documentary, right? You can rely on it. Yeah, right. We spent 10K based on Twitter advice. It was a great choice. I cite Twitter in my science papers all the time. Oh wow

No I don't of course It's a good thing you've got tenure Anyway so you're told that these things don't actually solve the problem They just follow a trail which is very different from like Considering all the past to figure out which is shortest and then coalescing on that one That's like they're just walked through to the solution Sometimes I'll smell a hot dog and I'll just walk towards the source of the hot dog And it's like not that different that's not impressive that I can do that

Can you actually resist hot dogs like if you walk past a hot dog everybody knows your kryptonite now wow just like i actually can't i worked at the zoo once and we switched from all beef hot dogs to all meat hot dogs and wondering what that downgrade meant put me off hot dogs because i started thinking about it too hard uh but anyway let's not dwell on hot dogs so i ask okay if i find the perfect very smelly thing that the slime mold can like cue in on that's gonna work better than my oats. What percent of the time should I expect this to work? And they said 30 or 40 percent. That's not great. No. And that's when I realized. I went back through all the papers. And I was like, oh my gosh, it says for the slime molds that solved the maze, but they don't include the number of

times the maze wasn't solved. And so I think a lot of times what's happening is like these scenarios are set up. And the one time out of 100th, the slime mold gets it close. They're like, Whoa, that's incredible and that's what makes the news. And maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that like maybe under absolutely perfect conditions when you replicate things a bunch of times, slime mold's come up with the right answer. But as far as I can tell, mostly they're following a chemical gradient. Probably chemical gradients aren't that strong in nature, like as strong as you're able

to make it in these enclosed mazes. So I am personally not super impressed with slime mold computational abilities. And maybe that's just me being bitter that we weren't able to make these kids. to give to classrooms, and we, like, tanked all this time and money on the project. But that is my take on slime-old computational ability. It sounds to me like somebody's got a room full of monkeys, and one of them typed of Shakespeare, and they're like, look, monkeys can type Shakespeare. Let's make a meme about it.

I mean, is it better than that? Is it actually a little bit better than random? Or is it completely exaggerated? I think it is probably a little better than random. Some of the problems that they're being asked to solve are really complicated. But I do think it's mostly following a chemical gradient, which is, less interesting than doing computations about the shortest way to get to a thing or whatever. But I just feel like the whole answer has been kind of oversold. And if somebody thinks

that I'm wrong and I have missed something, I would love to hear that because actually we just found out that we have to make a decision about whether or not we're going to throw out that injection mold thing. You still have it? It's in a warehouse somewhere. And they're like, you can either pay $200 to get rid of it or we can ship it to you on a pallet. And I'm like, on a pallet, where am I going to keep this thing? Let us know if you know the answer. But like, Slime molds are still awesome. Those paths that they're creating that is a single cell with multiple nuclei. There's also slime molds called dog vomit slime mold,

which you often find in your mulch on moist, warm summer days. And it does kind of look like dog vomit. And it's one of my favorite, full of goceptica. And so slime molds are fascinating. And we had them miscategorized for a while. We kind of couldn't figure out what they were. But I'm not totally convinced that they are amazing. problem solvers. Sorry.

And are they always single cells? I mean, we're talking about an extended thing, right? It's like this single cell can be like a meter across. That kind of blows in my mind. They have different stages in their life cycle. I think at other stages, they might not be single celled. I'm not an expert on these. But at the stage that everybody is seeing for the maze solving stage, they are a single cell with a bunch of nuclei. And are there other examples of things out there in nature that can do something similar and that are also oversold? Or is there anything out there that actually can solve this kind of problem in an impressive way? Or is biology all just a dank meme?

I'm reaching real far back here. I watched this really interesting lecture from a woman who studied crows. So this isn't like maze solving, but they're super clever. Like if there was another crow in the room, they would bury their treat. And then when the crow turned around, they would take the treat out. bury it somewhere else so they knew like that bird was watching me and I want to trick it and that's not watching now. So now it's time for me to move where I hid my cash. Clever.

There are very smart organisms. I think this is just an exciting thing that escaped that has maybe since been oversold. It sounds like the puzzle you really solved was why Carolina Biological doesn't carry maces in their catalog. Exactly. That is the puzzle we solved. And so now we need to find out, does Charlie Davis? Davidson, like answers that are kind of a bummer?

And did I mistakenly assume that he wanted to talk about slime molds, but he had another single-celled organism in mind? Let's hear from Charlie and find out. Thank you for answering the question, guys. That's exactly what I wanted to have answered. The computational abilities of slime molds are no longer impressive to me either. But never mind. Can't win them all.

I was hoping it would be something far more amazing. But it's the way it is, I guess. Thank you so much, though. I do believe we have dog vomit, slime mold in the UK. We call it Witches Brew, if it's the same thing. Not sure which name I prefer, but either or ice goes. Thanks very much. Look forward to future podcasts.

Bye-bye. All right, enough about single-cell organisms, hot dogs and slime molds. When we come back, we're going to tackle another question about space and time and black holes. 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. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.

That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect.

And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know what I'm me? Yeah.

But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 when 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session

421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're

someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebration.

co-hosting a podcast with her fiancée Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room.

I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candice Parker and college superstar A.Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all.

The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, we're back, and we are answering. questions from the audience, questions from people like you. If there's something about the

universe that's never clicked in your mind or if you heard us talk about something that didn't quite make sense to you, please write to us. We want to follow up. We want those ideas to connect in your head so that you feel like you understand as well. We will answer any questions you send to us to questions at danielandkelly.org. Even dating questions, though we don't claim any expertise. Oh, I'm an expert. I did a lot of dating, but I don't know if anyone wants my advice. Well, if they know, Zach, then they can evaluate whether they think that went well for you or not.

Yeah, it's up in the air. TBD. All right. In the meantime, here's a question we got from Derek in New Hampshire, who's thinking about black holes and Hawking radiation. I was wondering, can a black hole be so massive that not even Hawkins radiation can escape from its gravitational pull? Look forward to you.

in your answer. Thanks. All right. So this is a great question. We did a little bit of an intro into black holes as part of the very first question. Maybe the right place to start is what is hawking radiation? Yeah, great. So Derek's basically asking about the glow that we think black holes might make. We talked in the earlier question about what black holes are. There are regions of space time that are so bent, so deformed that space is now only pointing

inward. So you shine a flashlight inside a black hole, it's only going to go towards the center. There's no path out from behind the event horizon. And that's a description of a black hole that comes from general relativity. It's Einstein's theory that says space gets bent and the space tells matter how to move and all this kind of stuff. But we know that general relativity can't be the final story of the universe because it's not compatible with the other story we have about the universe, which is quantum mechanics. And in particular, Einstein's theory of black holes predicts that they're totally black, that if you look at a black hole, there's no glow, it's not emitting anything, no light comes off of the black hole. But if you do try to account a little bit

for quantum mechanical effects, and this is what Hawking did, it predicts something different. It predicts that black holes are not actually totally black, that they glow very faintly with this radiation. He called, of course, Hawking radiation. He named it after himself. Isn't someone supposed to do that for you? He actually worked it out with a student of his. But yeah, it's called Hawking Radiation and not Hawking Beckenstein radiation. The next wasp I discover is going to be Wienersmith's Wast. Do it, of course. Okay.

And this is really a very impressive bit of physics. It's like an end run around a bigger problem. The biggest problem in modern physics right now is like, how do we reconcile quantum mechanics, which tells us that like stuff doesn't have a specific location. It can be here or it can be there. And general relativity, which tells us like space gets bent based on where stuff is. And general relativity can't handle if stuff doesn't have a specific location. Like if the particles may be here and maybe there, a space may be bent here and maybe bent there or partially bent here or partially bent there.

Nobody knows how to bring these two things together, which is what you have to do if you want a theory of general relativity that's consistent with quantum mechanics. Nobody knows how to do that. Big question. Lots of Nobel Prize is waiting. But what Hawking did was like an end run around that. He's like, can't figure out the big problem. But maybe I can sort of chip away out. it a little bit. So he found a little trick that let him think about what happened to quantum

fields near an event horizon. And his trick let him make this prediction that black holes should glow a little bit. Can you remind me what an event horizon is? Right. Thank you. An event horizon is what we think of as like the edge of the black hole. Inside the event horizon, everything is trapped forever. Outside the event horizon, you're still free. So you can approach a black hole, be near the event horizon, and then escape and go back to your planet and live a happy life. If you cross, the event horizon, you're in the black hole forever. I think there's also a lot of confusion out there about hawking radiation and what it means and how to think about it. Because I've said that we don't understand how particles are affected by really strong gravity. And the typical

story you hear is that hawking radiation comes from particles being created near the event horizon like particle antiparticle pairs popping out of the vacuum and one falls into the event horizon and the other doesn't. And so to do that calculation, it feels like you'd need to understand how gravity works for particles. Well, the thing is, that's not how Hawking radiation works. That's the, like, well-worn pop-s-eye cartoon version of it,

but it doesn't actually make any sense. I mean, virtual particles can't be treated like real particles. They're not real particles. You shouldn't think of the vacuum that's filled with actual particles that can fall into black holes. And we don't know how to do those calculations for gravity.

of particles. Instead, what Hawking did was take a very different approach. He just said, what happens to quantum fields if there's a discontinuity in space, if there's an event horizon? How do I solve the mathematics of a quantum field near an event horizon? And what he found was the only way to make the math work for a quantum field near an event horizon was to have an outgoing wave of radiation. And that's what he interpreted as Hawking radiation. He doesn't have a microscopic particle picture of Hawking radiation. What's happening to individual particles?

We don't know how to do that. But we do know that quantum mechanics says, if there's an event horizon in space, then your quantum fields have to radiate. And the really cool thing about this is that you don't need a complete solution to quantum gravity to attack it in this way. This is really Hawking's brilliance

of finding a sort of an end run around having to have the whole picture and still getting this one result from this mathematical trick. And there's another. a beautiful angle to this to make it a little bit more satisfying. Even though you can't think about the individual particles and how they're affected by gravity, you can think about Hawking radiation like thermodynamics. The way Hawking thought about it and his student Beckenstein was that black holes eat information, black holes eat entropy, right? All the disorder

in the universe, if it falls into a black hole, is it decreasing? Is it violating the second law of thermodynamics? They showed that on one hand, you can think about it mathematically, quantum fields radiating energy near an event horizon, but you can also think about it thermodynamically, meaning that black holes, if they have information, if they have entropy, they should have temperature. And if they have temperature, then they glow, like everything else in the universe that has temperature. I glow, you glow, the sun glows. Things glow based on their temperatures. Hotter things glow with higher frequency. Colder things glow with lower frequency, more infrared. Hot things glow in like the X-ray in the ultraviolet.

So it turns out you can model black holes as if they are black body radiators, things that glow just based on their temperature. Of course, they're extraordinarily cold, tiny, tiny temperatures. And the weird thing is that as a black hole gets bigger, it gets more massive, it actually gets colder and it glows more dimly. So smaller black holes glow more brightly and evaporate more quickly, and larger black holes glow more dimly, because it's more dimly. more dimly because they're colder. So that's another fun way that you can think about hawking radiation that helps you sort of get a mental picture of it. Okay.

And then one more follow-up question. So when we've talked in the past, we've said that quantum mechanics and general relativity, they don't make the same predictions, but usually that doesn't matter because any question that you have usually just requires you to think in one of those terms. That's right. Why with black holes is it important to understand both of them? Yeah, great question. Usually you can ignore general relativity when you're doing quantum mechanics because particles have almost no mass. And so they hardly bend space. Their gravity is basically

irrelevant. Usually you could ignore quantum mechanics when you're doing general relativity because you're dealing with big masses like planets. And for planets, the quantum mechanical effects all average out to zero. So usually you can ignore one or the other. When you're dealing with black holes, you're dealing with very short distances or very, very strong gravity. So now you want to know the answer to like, what happens to a part of the other? particle near the edge of an event horizon. You have like very, very strong gravity enough to pull on a particle. And you want to know, like, what's going to happen to my electron is going to go this way or is going to go that way? Or if it splits into other particles, what happens to it? Now you want

to answer questions about the gravity of particles. You need to be able to include the effects of gravity and to be able to describe that particle as a quantum mechanical object. So you need both. Usually you don't care about the gravity on individual electron. But if you want to understand things like hawking radiation, what happens to a particle near the event horizon, you need the answers to those. Okay, so that's suggest black holes. If we could understand them, that might be the way that we merge our understanding of those two things.

Oh, absolutely. If we could see inside an event horizon, we would know the answer to how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, because we would see, is there a singularity like general relativity predicts and quantum mechanics says it's impossible, or is there something else weird and fuzzy? But of course, we can't. So we know the answer is there, but it's frustratingly hiding behind. the veil of the black hole. But Derek's question was basically,

could you make a black hole so massive that even its hawking radiation can't escape, right? So here you have a black hole and it's emitting radiation, could it suck it that back in? Could the hawking radiation get trapped by the black hole? The answer is we don't really know because what you're asking requires us to be able to think about the gravity on particles

near a black hole. And we just don't know how to do that, right? Because we don't know how to think about gravity for things where we don't have a way to describe their location exactly where they are through space and time. General relativity is basically a classical theory. It assumes that everything has a location and momentum and that can be well defined and you can do those calculations.

So short answer is Derek, we don't know. The best answer, though, is probably not. Hawking's calculations suggest that black holes glow outside of the event horizon. Basically what he did in his calculation is figure out what happens to a quantum field near an event horizon. And his solutions suggest there has to be outgoing radiation. And that radiation is past the event horizon. So even if the gravity is very, very strong, it's past the event horizon, which means technically

it can still escape. That's the definition of the event horizon. So if it couldn't escape, it would be within the event horizon. But Hawking radiation is always emitted past the event horizon. So probably it's free. All right. So Derek, we want to know if that explanation was satisfying. So we've reached out to Derek and here's what he said.

You did an excellent job at answering the question as best as you could. I, for one, have a big fear of missing out, and I can only hope that technology will allow us to have the answers for these types of questions. Thank you. Okay, so that's it for today. Thank you so much to Berema and Charlie and Derek for sending in their questions. We hope to get more questions. Actually, we already have a stack ready for listener questions number two. So if you send your questions, be patient.

we are going to get to all of them, and we really appreciate your questions. Can't wait to hear from you. Send us emails at Questions at Danielankelly.org. Because it's not just our curiosity that drive science forward. It's yours. It's the reason we're doing it. It's a collective curiosity of humanity is why we have science. So thanks, everyone, for pushing knowledge forward. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeartRadio. 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. Daniel and Kelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky,

and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D&K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you.

When you think about emotion regulation, we're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful. to use unless you think there's a good outcome avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denials easier complex problem solving takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hi it's honey german and i'm back with season two of my podcast gratis 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 IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in the backlog will be identical. in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcome one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were like riding the lime bikes the other day, and we're like, we're like, people ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it?

Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on She Pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jodie Sweetie. Monica Patton. Elaine Welteroth. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots. Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.