From First Principles - Earth’s 1-ms Day, Baby Solar Systems, Record Black Hole Crash, CRISPR Cancer Hack & AI Indiana Jones (EP. 1)

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Last week the Earth finished a full rotation one millisecond early – but that’s just the opener.In this week’s From First Principles we dive into six mind-bending headlines with our trademark mix of hard science and light-hearted banter:Earth’s fastest spin ever recorded – what shaved a millisecond off the day and why your chakras are still safe.ALMA spots a “baby Earth” forming 1,300 light years away – the first direct look at rocky planets in the making.Biggest black-hole merger on record – 15 ☉ of mass vaporized into pure gravitational waves, detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA.CRISPR reveals a vitamin-D “kill switch” for tumors – how silencing one gene in pancreatic & colon cancers triggers 4,000 downstream changes.A star that died… then died again – the first confirmed “double-detonation” white-dwarf supernova.DeepMind’s Aeneas AI deciphers broken Latin tablets – giving historians new text, provenance and dating in seconds.👋 Hosts • Lester Nare – storyteller & professional curiosity machine • Dr. Krishna Choudhary – Princeton-trained physicist & cosmic tour guide👍 Like what you hear? Hit Subscribe, ring the bell 🔔, and drop your questions for next week’s episode.

Looking to see what's happening around your home? Rings battery doorbell helps you track packages and see who's at your door in real time. The outdoor cam plus protects your yard at night with a wide field of view and clearer retinal 2K video. Or upgrade to 4K cameras and doorbells with retinal vision for ultra-clear zoom in detail. Your door, your yard, your home. With Ring, it's protected. Shop cameras, doorbells, and more at ring.com now. Padiday presents, in the red corner, the undisputed, undefeated weed whacker guys.

Champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the challenger, extra strength, Hannity! Eye drops and work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner, by knockout, is Padaday. Padaday. Bring it on. So we're going to do the rundown. First story of the day, Earth just had one of its shortest days ever.

So the summary on this headline is yesterday, July 22nd, 2025, Earth completed a rotation in less than 24 hours. Yeah. It was shorter by like a millisecond. A millisecond. But, you know, the news people need something to write about in science. So is this the end of the world or what? No, no. It's really not.

Even if you believe in oras and chakras, right, it's a millisecond out of a 24-hour day. That's 86, 400 seconds in a day. So 86 million milliseconds in a day. So it's one part in 86 million. So your chakra has changed by one part in 86 million. So it's really not that bad. So what's interesting about this is there's actually some interesting, fundamental science going on.

Yes. Like, why is that happening? Yeah. So that is actually a really cool fundamental physics question. Because I thought it was just 24 hours. Yeah.

And that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, if the earth was in a void all on its own and there's nothing around it,

then if it spins for 24 hours, it'll spin at exactly that speed because of the conservation of angular momentum and the conservation of energy. Basically, it's got some rotational energy. It's got some angular momentum. It's not going to go anywhere. Right. But we live in the real world where we've got the moon going around the earth. We've got the sun tugging on the planet. We've got Jupiter tugging on the planet. So we have all of these like little forces that are tugging on it. Right. Yep. And so what's going to end up happening is you have something called tidal friction, right? The moon creates tides. What are those tides? Those tides are basically like friction from the ocean as the ocean moves around the earth as it's pulled by the moon. Does that make sense? Okay. And so you're losing energy to that friction.

Because the moon is pulling you. Yeah, the moon is pulling the Earth while we're trying to go this way. Yeah. Okay. And so you have this like this like kind of this this title friction happening and that friction means you're losing energy to heat. Ah. And if you're losing energy to heat, you're the energy has to come from somewhere. And so that slows the the rotation of the earth a little bit, right?

Like way before Earth used to have a day of about 19 hours. Now it's 24. Yeah. Way, way, way back. like millions of years ago. Okay. But now it's like, now it's like 24 hours

and it's going to keep growing. Now this particular one, it's a little like unclear what it is. Okay. This one, it could be the title friction. What do you mean unclear? Well,

it's a millisecond. Okay. And, um, which is, which is really small. Okay. It's not just the moon that's doing that.

For example, like a lot of things on Earth can change its rotational capability. Like, dude, like, like China. Okay, China on its own changed the rotation of the earth. Okay, back when it made, yeah, back when it, okay, I guess that's not a single entity.

It's like a billion people. But like when they made the three gorges dam on the Yangtze River, yep, that was a massive, massive dam. It creates a reservoir. Yep, right? It creates this massive water lake. Yep. And what does that do? Just like, just like when you have a figure skater that's like twirling.

And then when they like put their arms out, they slow down. When they when they put their arms in, they speed up, right? That's because of, again, conservation of angular momentum. What you're doing is you're decreasing what's called a moment of inertia or increasing it. And when you do that, it's kind of like an inertia of rotation. So the bigger you make yourself in terms of the radius, the slower you'll go. Right? And so when China dammed up this river, the earth made itself a little bigger.

Because there's like all this water now at this high elevation. Right. Right. Right. And so all of this water that you used to just keep flowing now becomes a lake that it's kind of like the earth as a figure skater went like this. And then it slowed down the rotation of the earth. But that was only by like a microsecond. That's fascinating.

So this is a millisecond, which is like a thousand times bigger. Which so the idea. But the thing is like things happen. The Sumatra earthquake in 2004 also a microsecond because the earth's plates shifted just in that it changed the moment of inertia of the earth and then, and then, you know, the day changed. This is, this is so crazy because I never in a million years thought about like the 24 hour day being a dynamic variable. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, dude, I was actually doing, I went on a deep dive on this and it was actually like kind of crazy because now you start asking yourself, you know, on first principles. Yes. You start asking yourself, well, how do we measure a day? Right. Okay. How do you measure a day?

It used to be that you could just like measure, okay, the sun is going to be here and then like 24 hours later, it's going to be back at the same spot in the sky. Right. Right. Like if there's like, imagine there's a mountain in the distance. Yep. And you're at exactly the spot and then like the sun like grazes the mountain. Yep. Yep. And then the next day it's going to graze the mountain 24 hours later. Right. But that's not quite right because in those 24 hours, if the sun is here, the earth has moved a tiny bit. Right. So it's a little bit shorter because the earth is moved. And so you're looking at the sun from a different. angle. So it's actually like a little bit less than 24 hours by almost six minutes. So then you're like, okay, so how do you wait a minute. First it was a millisecond. Yeah, yeah.

Now it's six minutes. Yeah, because the earth to to point out the sun, the earth doesn't have to do a whole rotation if it's going along this way. Yeah. Right. Because it's rotating around the sun at the same time that itself is rotating, your angle like your like your line of sight. Yeah. Like like like in terms of being directly in line with the sun is constantly shifting as you rotate. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? It is crazy. So like you can't actually reliably

say it. So there's a difference between the solar day, right? And the real day. Oh, okay. Okay. So now, okay, what's the real day? All right. Or is the solar day the real day and we're living in fake news day? Yes, where the earth is flat and the sun is revolving around us. That's certainly not

what is happening. But it's it's certainly cool to think about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could like in terms of, you know, this is just shooting this is actually kind of mind blowing because I just, it's so there's so much detail about because I remember seeing this, this like little animation. Because when we were growing up as kids,

they showed the solar system as a flat plane. Yeah. Sun in the middle and everything just doing. Yeah. Is this an orbital? Yeah. Yeah. You can call it. Yeah, it's an orbit. An orbit around on a flat plane. Yeah. But no, really, we're doing this. As if it was also static in space.

Yeah. We're like flying. Yeah. And we're actually like going around it all like this while we're going that way. Yeah. And it's and that actually causes the next problem, right? Because you could be like, okay, so before we were like, okay, the sun goes to the same spot in the sky. Yes. But now we've just figured out that the earth is moving. But now the sun is moving.

Yeah. So like if we were to say, okay, what if like we pick a star that's far away? Yeah. And then we ask, okay, when is the star going to come back to the same spot? Well, that's better than the sun because the star is like many light years away. Whereas the sun is only like eight minutes, eight light minutes away. So sure, that's better. But still, the sun is moving through these stars.

The stars themselves are moving. So to really like, so dude, as humans, we're incredible. Like we are so incredible with precision and accuracy. See, what we've done is what, so what we do is we point radio telescopes at quasars. Yeah. Okay. Quasars are like these incredibly distant objects, okay? Like, like edges of the universe.

Right. Okay. We're talking edges of the universe. They release these massive radio signals. So you can point a radio telescope at it and reliably be like, oh, the quasars in the same spot. Right. And because it's so, so far away, you can, that's like our best metric of, yep, the

earth has spun a full 360 degrees. Oh, interesting. Because if we, if we use anything local to our galaxy, then the sun's movement and those movements get confounded. Right. So you want something so far away that it's literally infinity. Right. Right.

And then, and then, you know, for all intents and purposes. Right. And then, so that's what we actually do. And that's where we can measure something as small as a microsecond and be like, yeah, the earth literally slowed down by a microsecond when the three gorges of dam went up. Or when the Sumatranian. earthquake happened. And it's going to continue to do so. Yeah. From non-manmade, like impacts, which is kind of why, at least until proven otherwise, July, because to go from the Three Gorge's

damn level of impact, which is a microsecond, a millisecond year. A thousand X, we don't probably don't have, it's probably not us. No, no, this is probably like either like polar ice caps melting or something. Yeah. Or like the interior of the earth is rearranging itself. Like because the interior of the earth is liquid. It's like a very viscous honey like liquid. Great word.

Right. Right. So it could be like rearranging itself in some way that like then makes the rotation change. This is this is really fascinating. It's incredible that we can measure like that. To that level. To that degree of accuracy.

That's also like verifiable by other people. But it's also a reminder that we know. much and so little at the same time. Yeah. It's really incredible. Yeah. So for our next story, so we just talked about, we're going to stick with space. Yeah.

We just talked about the Earth's fastest spin on July 22nd. Yeah. But now a baby shower, no gender reveal, but astronomers apparently have witnessed a baby solar system. That's right. And is that like a first time thing? Yes. Like what is the significance here? This is, so we've seen stars being born before and we've seen like, we've seen stars.

We've seen stars being born before. We've seen solar systems sort of being born before. But this is the first time that we're seeing Earth-like planets form. Okay. That's the big one. Got it. Okay. Earth-like planets are really hard to image because they're small, right?

And, you've got to get like really the right conditions in order to image this thing. Okay? And so what these scientists did was they used the Alma, which is the Atacama large microwave array. It's basically like high on top of the Atacama Desert in Chile, 17,000 feet above sea level. So there's barely any atmosphere. You've got this array of telescopes that measures in the microwave, a little bit shorter than microwave wavelength. And they observed the star called Hops 315. No hops.

Yeah. Astronomers. Not a local brewery. Yes. Yes. Although that's a great name for an IPA that I'm never going to drink. But, you know, for the, there's a lot of scientists who are like, yeah, you try the IPA. It's fucking amazing.

Okay. This star is 1,300 light years away. Okay. And what's... Closer or farther than Andromeda? Farther? No, no. No, no.

Way closer. Way closer. Way closer. 100,000 light years or less is within our galaxy. My fault. Milky Way is like, yeah, 100,000, 200,000. That makes sense. And then you got the end up.

It's in the neighborhood. Yeah. It's not from the other block. No, it's not from the other block. This is our, this is our star. Yeah. It's a star kind of like our sun. Okay.

And this thing was imaged around 200,000 years old. Okay. Okay. This star system is 200,000 years old. For reference. For reference. For reference, how old is the earth? The earth is 4.6 billion years.

The sun, you would say, let's say five billion years, okay? So if we want to compare 200,000 to 5 billion, I did a real quick back of the envelope calculation. So if the sun were a year old, this is us taking a photo at 20 minutes. Oh, our birth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Like this is January 1st, 20 minutes after New Year's. We're still in the hospital.

Yeah. Like we're like, like, we're still like panicking about. Yeah. Is everything okay? Okay, we haven't been discharged. Right, right. Like, why did she leave the room kind of, you know? Yeah.

Like, so, yeah, this is 20 minutes old compared to the sun's one year. Got it. All right. Extremely, extremely new solar system. What they did was, and what's exciting is they observed traces of silica. Okay? Silicon and silicate minerals. Yep.

Like rocks. Yep. Okay. Like rocks are made out of silicon. No, the only thing made it is. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we'll talk about that later. So they found these traces of silicate, which means that, you know, there's a rocky planet forming in this proto-planetary disk. Yep. The region that they found it is like basically somewhere if like the sun is there, then it's like Mars and Jupiter. Some region between Mars and Jupiter, which is like where the asteroid belt is, right? Right. So, you know, getting farther inside that orbit is really hard because the sun, the new. star has a lot of radiation that's being pushed out and there's a lot of like gas that absolutely

obscures you. This thing was like the reason why we could see this is because that star was at exactly the right angle and there was exactly the right hole in the protoplanetary cloud for us to see inside. Again, it's like with astronomy there's this game of like there's so many things to see, but they're like not the right condition for our particular planet. on earth to see. Like we're just not at the right angle to see it. And we can't really move where we are. Right. Right. Right. Right. Because we're stuck on earth. We're bounded by this rock. The farthest we've gone is like Pluto. Right. Which is really not that far compared to like a 300 light years. Right. Right. Pluto is like maybe like some hours. Right. Right. Compared to years. Like so yeah. So we're stuck on this planet. And so every once in a while we get really lucky. Right. And we see a star at exactly the right angle at exactly the right time with exactly the right telescope. to be like, oh shit, like there's an earth forming there.

Right? And like, so that's why this is the first time that we've seen something like a rocky planet form in like an inner part of the solar system. So not only is it close, not only is this newly forming solar system close to us. It is also forming rocky planets. Yeah. And by an act of who knows whoever, we just happen to be pointing in the right direction. Yeah.

And the vastness of space. That's right. At the right time. Yeah. The vastness of time. Mm-hmm. To see through a pinhole. Yeah.

And it's like, oh, look. Yeah. Baby Earth. Yeah. That's, it's insane. I think like the luck that we get. Right. Right.

And like, yeah, we just, we need to, we need to like put out more telescopes to see more of the sky. And there's, there's efforts, right, going into doing exactly that. But, you know, with. But NASA is being defunded. NASA is being defunded. And ASF is being defunded. The new telescopes are being defunded. But golden dome.

But, but, but golden dome. That's, that's, that's, it's golden. Right. Yeah. So. And it's a dome like, like a rocky planet. Yeah. So, so.

So it's the same. You know, it's this. Yeah, let's just point my binoculars at it. And then maybe we'll see some aliens. Fascinating. Right. our next story we're going to stick with space uh this one has a bbh it's the biggest black hole oh got it okay right i was like yo this is not in my notes this is not in the show notes so we have a bbh

biggest black hole collision ever yes uh so this is like when you have a crossover episode you know, with your classic TV show, the most recent one's probably always sunny in Philadelphia and Abbott Elementary. That's a big... Did they do a crossover? They did a crossover because they're both in Philly.

Oh, right. Right. Dude, I got to watch that. I love both of those shows. It's actually pretty funny. Okay, yeah. So this is the deep space version of that crossover.

So the headline reads, two monster, because monsters is a scientific term. Two monster black holes collided. and physics is nervous. Detected by LIGO, Virgo, and Cagra,

I'll let you correct me. This merger involved black holes of 50 to 96 solar masses, much larger than typical stellar remnants, raising questions about how they formed. It sounds like an immigration conversation.

It does. And we are experts at those kinds of conversations. So stay tuned, folks. But it actually is causing a stir in the physics community. Okay. So this is not just headlines. It's not just headlines.

This is actually a really cool story. There's a lot going on. And, you know, we still don't know exactly how this event happened. Okay. So here's what's going on. Okay. There's a solar mass, 140 solar masses. So this is a black hole that's 140 times the mass of the sun.

It combines with something. like 100 solar masses. There's a giant air bar with these things because there is an air bar a chocolate. An error bar is kind of like a chocolate that tells you how off you can possibly be in your number. Like I said 140 solar masses, right? That means it could be like 80. Okay. Or like 90 or it could be like 180. Okay. Right. I'm not sure. But not zero. But it's not zero. Right. It's and those The air bars are quite big because like, you know, the, like, let's be honest here. What, how are we, how are we, how are we, how are we seeing this? Yeah.

Okay. Right. This is a black hole colliding with another black hole. So there's no light. Yep. There's no light coming from these things. So what's happening is they're spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning. They crash into each other and become a bigger black hole.

Mm-hmm. That spinning stretches the fabric of space time, stretches and squishes the fabric of space time. Stretches and squishes the fabric of space time. I've watched. I've watched Interstellar. Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly that. And so, like, literally, when that happens, you get these waves in space time called gravitational waves. Right. And they literally, like, they make a meter or a foot a little bit longer and a little bit shorter and a little bit shorter and a little bit shorter. Yeah, yeah. And they make the clocks go a little bit faster and a little bit shorter.

Like time itself is distorted, right? Like the fabric of space time, meaning like both of these things are interrelated. and they're both like getting kind of wiggled. Yeah, yeah. Right? But how much are they getting wiggled? It's like one part in like 10 to the 22. So one divided by one with 22 zeros.

To tell you how, so in order to observe this, we have these observatories called LIGO. They were funded by the... At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light. And I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice.

Come with me if you want. live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our scene. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. As the Krispy Chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper?

If you want quiet, go eat some soup and refresh. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me and baby I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4?

Very. Only at 711. Valley 36-2326 participating stores only while supplies last the app for full terms. SF back in the 90s, it was our big, like, you know, high risk, high reward. And let me tell you, it was a really good reward. I was going to say back when we used to fund fundamental science. Yes, this was this was. This is such an amazing story of American exceptionalism.

The NSF was like National Science Foundation. Yeah, that's the National Science Foundation, which just got gutted, by the way. I want to note that the National Science Foundation is the number one resource for investment and funding towards basic and fundamental science research. That is not like, it does not need profit in order to be successful. No, yeah. It's the substrate by which the government really does a lot of these basic science and early frontier research things. And then they hand it to the private sector to go make billions of dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's because the frequently fundamental science, like, you can't have a horizon of like 10, 20 years, even 50 years sometimes. Or quarterly for that matter. Yeah, you can't like, you can't expect corporations like way back in the day. Like if you told like any of these pharma corporations like, hey, why don't you go? put in some research to like discover how bacterial immune systems work. Like how does a bacteria defend against viruses? Right. Right.

Any of these pharmaceutical companies, these private sector, would be like, no, because I don't know, why would I do that? Right. The NSF said, yeah, that sounds pretty interesting. Why don't you do it? Out came Chris Barr. Out came all of the gene technologies that we have today. Which are going to literally revolutionize every aspect of human lives. Yes, yes.

Save millions of lives. make millions of lives better, maybe also be kind of bad. But like, that's what science is. Yeah. Right. And you have to like the point is like in order to like in order to actually have the ability to ask these questions and and say like, okay, how are we going to apply this technology? We need to have the technology in the first place.

And the NSF is incredible. And it's like, it's like America's secret weapon for why we've been ahead since post-war. And this is. And this is. Post-war like World War II. Whoever wins physics wins, wins the planet. Yeah. That's a whole other conversation.

That's a whole other conversation we can have. But what's interesting is the only part of the reason we're even able to have the story we're talking about here about the biggest black hole collided collision ever is because we have these tools. Yeah, we have this. That were funded by these programs. Yeah, yeah. We have these two observatories called LIGO, large interferometer gravitational observatory, something like that. Yep. Maybe it's light infrared.

I'm not sure. But it's basically these giant, giant underground facilities in one in Washington State, one in Louisiana, that measure the distortion in length of a three-kilometer long tunnel. Okay? So you've got a tunnel that's three kilometers long. And we want to measure whether that tunnel shrunk by 10 to the minus 18 kilometers. So we got a three kilometer tunnel and we want to see if it got shorter by a little bit bigger than a proton This is so in you know just imagine

It's not even a little bit bigger than an atom right the the thing is the tunnel is made out of atoms Right and we're trying to it's off by one atom It's like we're making like a thing out of Legos yeah We put it in and then we're trying to and then we're trying to measure like way smaller than I don't know how I'm not to say it, way smaller than a Lego? Yeah. Like the thing is made out of atoms and we're measuring less than like like a thousandth thousandth of an atom. And whether it's moved or not. And I guess the idea here is is gravitational waves impact us on Earth at that small of a like that's how we- Yeah, because these things are like at the edges of the universe, right? Right. Like this collision is happening at the edge of the universe. And when these collisions happen, so this particular one, right, 140 solace, masses yes plus a hundred solar masses yes the remnant was 225 solar masses so let's meaning after they collided after they collided they became a 225 solar masses now I can

bench you might be think right solar masses yeah I might need to hit back yeah yeah yeah you might need to well you need to become a black hole yeah I'm halfway there yeah yeah yeah yeah but 140 plus 100 is to need the whole yeah yeah um but 140 plus 100 is to 40. Yep. And then you're left with 225. Where did the 15 go? The 15 became pure energy in these gravitational waves. That just, okay? And to tell you like 15 solar masses just gone in the fraction of a second. Okay. That I actually did the calculation here. That is 250 times the brightness of all the stars in the universe. The power output. Bro, no. Yeah. We're not doing this. Yeah. We're not doing this. No, no, no. In a second, that's what this thing that we captured with LIGO.

Like we're seeing an explosion. Oh, we have the data. Yeah, we have the data to show that like that happened. We measured it. As human beings, we could, we, we could say that that happened. This is so. In the universe. Isn't that like, it's, it's like, it's like, it's like godly power and knowledge to be able to like say, yep, it happened. And it happened over there. And it happened this far away. and we're literally looking back in time and like someone turned the lights on really quick on the whole universe like that and it's like when they said Muhammad Ali

could turn the lights off and get into bed before the lights turned off and it's just this puts that to shame that's an incredible amount of brightness which means like part of the thing to our point earlier when we're talking about how we have tools but we have to kind of get lucky because of the vastness of space

but this is one of those things. This is where, yeah, this is where the gravitational wave just comes and we will see everything along. We will see it. We're not going to miss this one. We're not going to miss this one. We don't need a pinhole

and to be looking at the right place at the right time. No, yeah. This one is like, it's coming from everywhere. This thing's going to stretch. And it hits us. Yeah.

Unless even, actually no, no, there's, it's not possible for us to miss this really. Right? It could, like,

if we only had one, then if, if the gravitational wave is coming this way, then like both arms would stretch the same amount. and cancel each other out. But the earth is curved. It's not flat. And we have two.

So we've got two at two different angles. So we'd see it. Yeah. But it's incredible that we get to, we get to like observe these things, right? That are like, it just makes you feel so, so good that like humans were able to do this. One of the things I find so interesting about this is as you're like talking to me about these things, this is kind of feels a little bit left feel. But like these are when people talk in religious context about God or any. derivative, any other version of the naming

convention you want to put on it based on what book your parents read. This is the power. The level of literal power, like literal measurable power. Yeah. That we like ascribe to these concepts of a deity that's higher in the higher community.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is that. This is that. 250 times the brightness of all the stars in the universe. That's the amount of energy that was released. Let there be light. Right? It's insane.

I mean, that's literally, like, that's, that's, I just, in this case, it's like, let there be gravity, like gravitational waves. Right, right. But it's still energy at the end of the day. And like in the language of physics, they're kind of the same. Which, again, you know, like, tune in next week. Yeah. For the deep. Yeah.

It's insane. So this, I think one of the things that's so interesting about all these stories is every single one of these stories is like based on instruments. I think people, like, sometimes, uh, forget. that the tools, because we have the ability to create tools, that is kind of the mechanism by which we are acquiring knowledge over time. And we get better at making tools, we get more precise, we get more clever, and we come up with better experimental design. And then we get these interesting science headlines. I mean, as a perfect example of us building tools, sometimes they're like really big tools and physical and we're measuring. Sometimes they're really small tools.

and we use them to like do stuff. Yeah. And this next story is, uh, we're, we're going to have a, the, the pronunciation brigade decide.

Is it crisper or crisp R? Yeah. I don't actually, I say crisp R. Right, because it's crisp. And then there's a dash with a capital R. Right.

And then I'm like, but then people, because you have an accent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And a brown. It's like,

yeah, you're wrong. Yeah. But what's, what's interesting. So there's, So the next headline is about CRISPR uncovers, CrispR uncovers anti-cancer vitamin D gene. So the title is the gene that supercharges vitamin D and kills tumors found.

Now I know there's a lot of people here in L.A. who are big vitamin D supplement advocates. kits and I've really been pushing for this. But the the story goes, apparently CRISPR screening revealed a gene that boosts vitamin D's ability to suppress tumor growth, especially in pancreatic and chloratical cancers. Column cancer? Yeah. But I don't know what any of that means. Yeah.

Okay, so Chris Barr is this technology that we've built. Another tool. It's another tool. This was built with NSF funding. It started out being like people were like, hey, how does a bacteria defend against viruses? Basically, what's the bacterial immune system? Seems kind of like a random research question. Why would we spend money on that?

A lot of people are asking, why do we spend money on fundamental science? Well, this is why. because out of that bacterial immune system came CRISPR, which is this gene editing mechanism. What it can do is basically snipe DNA at any custom point that you give it. You can program a scissor to search for a specific sequence of DNA, cut it at that point. And then we've got other types of enzymes that will actually stitch it back together. So now you can just play God and take DNA and be like, I don't like this part. Cut it out.

Put something else in. Stitch it back together. I would love some, some, I don't know, maybe like two inches of height, a little bit more intelligence. Yeah, it's too late for us. Oh, that's unfortunate. Yeah. But the kids. But the kids.

Maybe. Yeah. The kids love it. The Chinese are doing it. Yeah, they already have. Yeah. Literally. Yeah.

Literally. Literally. That's another. That's a start for another day. That's a whole. Yeah. So we figured out how to cut the jeans. The gene sequence with Chris Barr.

And so what they did was they targeted this particular gene called SDR-42E-1. Okay, it's a gene that basically lets cells use vitamin D to create these hormones, hormones like calcitrol. Sorry, yeah, calcitriol. That's the hormone. It's a cholesterol-type hormone. This is super important for like bones. It's how they re-uptake calcium, potassium. It's really important for our immune system.

Basically, all the things the vitamin D is important for. This particular gene helps vitamin D do that. Okay. Now, what people have noticed earlier is that this particular gene is really active in cancer cells. Okay. Okay? Like cancer cells like express this gene a lot. Okay.

Okay. So perhaps it's important for cancer cells. So what these guys did was they went and they got a culture of these cancer cells. They went into with Chris Barr and they said, I'm going to cut these this genome. The genome that does the genome. Yeah, I'm just going to silence this gene. It's no longer going to work for these cancers. Censorship regime on the gene.

Yeah. It killed the cancer cells. Oh. But it not only did that. Okay. Okay. When I was reading this, it killed the cancer cells, that's great. Okay.

What was really surprising to me is that it then modified four thousand other cancer-related genes that were downstream. So this particular gene acts like a switch that like controls a bunch of other genes downstream. So it's not just like it's not just doing like one thing, right? It's like this this kind of like overseer. It's an air traffic controller. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you cut that off, the cancer cells are nowhere to be found. Right. And then they like all of these other genes are gone. The cancer cells are basically. dead. Yeah. And now you can have these like targeted immune therapies. Yeah, yeah. Right. These targeted like cancer therapies where you can like target a specific tumor. Yeah. Make the CRISPR go into just those cells, cut those out. And then, you know, you can get rid of the cancer that way. This, okay. Um, wow. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. That. And again, uh, quick shout out to NSF. We wouldn't be having this as an option for people who are cancer patients and or or who

have family and friends who are cancer patients. This is why fundamental science research investment matters because this, I didn't realize that this was what that was about because effectively, like, and correct me if I'm wrong, we're not, you're not saying we're cancer experts here, but one of the biggest challenges is how to solve for this. Yeah. Both from like a therapeutics, like an after the fact and also from a preventative context. And this seems to be the case in the most high.

impact way that for people who already have tumors there is now another among many research avenues another option to explore that has a level of precision that's right that might have been missing from previous iterations of cancer. Exactly yeah like it's not like radiology we're just blasting the whole thing with with radiation right or even chemo chemo like right the whole body right this you can like target it into a specific area um The other cool thing is like, so here, you know, you want to cut off vitamin D from cancer cells. And then basically starve cancer cells from vitamin D also make all of these other genes go haywire and then you kill it, right? What you could also do is with gene therapy, now that we've identified this gene that's so important for vitamin D, you can like up it for people who are vitamin D deficient or have like other kinds of disorders that aren't necessarily cancer related.

Right. It opens up whole new avenues of medical research. And I imagine that there are learnings from this that then can be extrapolated to a variety of other We're talking about vitamin D in this context Yeah, but you can, I mean, you know, genes are in incredibly powerful tools. Right, right? Like the genetic code is incredibly powerful. Right.

This is one of the ways that Chris Barr is being used. But there's like so many other different ways that Chris Barr can be used. Not just to like make designer babies, but also like actual like health things, you know, right, that are much less, I think, ethically concerning. Concerning to me. Right. Right. Like this is not ethically concerning to me. Right. Right. We don't need burkin babies. Yeah. But this would be nice. But maybe solving cancer at scale without hair loss, chemo, destroying the body in these other ways and much more efficient. Yeah. potentially if you scale it up also much more cost effective. That's right. Which corporations might not like, but that's a whole other story.

But that's a whole other story, of course. This is fascinating. Again, the power of our ability to build and create tools and come from first principles to understand the fundamentals. And I think, again, this is what, like, we should never underestimate, right, like, the power of, like, fundamental knowledge when you can then extract. I mean, this is why the U.S. government has understood. when you think about warfare, that physics is the starting point.

Yeah, physics is, physics is a starting point. And then, like, getting everywhere, like, funding all levels. Levels. Is huge, right? It's huge. Like, it's like a national security issue. Issue. Issue that we're not funding science.

Right. Yeah. Right. I don't understand it, dude. So, so that's, okay. So, again, that's our fourth story today with, and a perfect example of how some of our existing like really deep scientific tools and research are providing like real world value. It might not be making groceries cheaper, but it's going to help you not get killed by

them. So we're going to pivot back to space for our second to last story before we end on our wonderful AI is here, story of the day. And the title on this article is a star that died. and then died again, but not three days later. So this isn't the second coming of Jesus. It's like a John Snow. Oh, John Snow star.

Okay. Shout out to the Game of Thrones fans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the star, the Prince who was promised. The Prince was promised. They totally shot the bed with the last season. Look, you know, I don't want to be a TV or movie producer, and I don't envy that job. But basically the story's saying that we have the first vision.

visual confirmation of a, quote, double detonation. Yeah. Type of, it's a supernova where a helium shell explosion triggered a core blast in a white dwarf. Now, this sounds like some adult contemporary, right, right, right. You know, literature. Yes. Double detonation. Double detonation.

And the white dwarfs. No, we're not talking about snow white. We're talking about deep space. No, we're talking about deep space. We're talking about a star that's about the size of the Earth. Okay. It has the mass of the sun. Imagine that.

Oh, super dense? Super dense. Yeah. So this is what, this is what would happen to our sun when it dies in about five billion years, when it runs out of fuel and the gravity just collapses it. The sun is not big enough to become a supernova, which is like when the gravity is so fast that it just goes everywhere.

It just explodes. This is kind of like the, it's going to like shed its outer layers. and the core is going to remain and become a white dwarf. It's going to be about the size of the earth, but about the same mass as the sun. These white dwarfs are the stellar remnants of these stars, right? They're like the corpses, you can say. But sometimes they can come alive again,

especially in binary star systems. So if you've got a white dwarf from a star that died and it's got a companion, get your head out of the gutter, Lester. Binary, white dwarfs. I know the white dwarf has a companion and it's stealing from its companion because that's what it's doing. Okay, the white dwarf is stealing gas from its companion. I'm not making this up. This is what's happening.

Okay. This is not, we're not here to push the agenda of the alphabet. No, no, no, no. This is science. For the moments that matter, choose Kyrad naturals. Infused with aloeuvreira and vitamin E. Kiraad natural's bandages protect your unexpected scrapes, cuts. and burns while also

moisturizing your skin. Find deeper relief with natural ingredients you can trust to start the healing. When life surprises call for the best, choose Kyrad, a deeper level of care. Shop the full collection on Amazon or visit

curad.com to learn more. I wrote a little song to remind you Choice Hotels, get you more of the experiences. You value. The can be a hotel's got it all. A rooftop ball, have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right Is Cambria your homebe?

Bring a date, your team, or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. See you on the roof. The star revolving around another star. Okay, it's just physics, guys. Right? Like, there's no... Okay.

Okay, but, okay, so the white dwarf starts stealing mass. Okay. From his companion. And when it does that, it starts like getting fatter and fatter. And at some point, it's going to, the traditional thinking is it's going to reach this thing

called the Chandrashaker limit. It's named after my boy Subramaniam Chandrshaker, Nobel Prize winner from India. It's basically the maximum mass a white dwarf star can have before weird physics starts happening, before the electron degeneracy pressure goes away and like it starts collapsing on itself and all this other stuff.

So usually the mass go, grows to that length and then it like explodes. Okay. But this one had like a sub detonation. Okay. Where it was like, it was like amassing a bunch of gas and then the helium shell that, that from all the gas that it was getting detonated. And then that triggered another detonation inside because the shockwave went inside and

outside and then the shockwave detonated the star and self. What's cool about this story to me was how they discovered it. Okay. How do we know that there was a double detonation, right? What would you expect to see? What you'd expect to see, because this thing would happen like many years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what you'd expect to see is one shell, like imagine a double detonation, right, out in empty space.

There'd be like a shell of expanding gas. And then there'd be another shell inside. Right. Right, there'd be a double shell, so to speak. So you want to, what you need to do is you need to image this double shell. It's incredibly hard to do, okay? Because this is a pretty recent eruption, I think, within the last thousand years. So the shell is not that big.

Right? So you're trying to image something really small. They use the very large telescope, the VLT, which is kind of like the VLA that you visited in New Mexico. Except in New Mexico, those are a bunch of radio telescopes. These are four optical telescopes. So it's much harder to synchronize the versus. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And in the radio telescopes, like the frequency of light is pretty slow. Right.

So in order to get this giant picture with high resolution, you need to synchronize all of the signals from the radio telescopes. But because the frequency of the light is slow, the clocks are like, you know, you can synchronize them as long as you're shorter, like much shorter than the time it takes for a single, right? Right. But in optical, the clocks need to be extremely, extremely fast. So building this VLT is like a feat of engineering in its own right. And they actually don't even use, like, digital synchronization. They have, like, underground mirrors that, like, manually synchronize all the light. Using light.

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. So they literally have underground mirrors that are, like, on, like, trains. Yeah, it's an insane engineering project.

But what they did was they used this VLT in Chile. They pointed it at this system. And over two years, they imaged it for 39. And whoever tells you that like science isn't romantic. Like this is this is like astronomy is probably the most romantic of sciences because you've got to synchronize this so that there's no full moon. There's no moon in the sky. It's got to be extremely dark to see this thing. It's extremely faint, right?

Like what you're trying to see. You got to synchronize over 39 nights over two years. Point this telescope at the same spot to image the same thing over two years. You're like borderline stalking it. You're right, right, right. point, right? Hoping that there's no clouds that are in the between and all this other stuff. And finally, you get this amazing picture. And hopefully we can put it out. Yeah, it's an amazing picture of these like calcium shells moving out at near the speed of light away from this

explosion. Right. And so yeah, it's a very clear sign of this like two like two shells moving out and you can see the double detonation. And it's being captured over time. So, you can see that it's movement through space. Yeah. Such that you can sort of then back calculate. Yeah, like in 10 years, you can go back and like actually see them. And like maybe one of the one of the things is moving faster than the other. And like there's all sorts of possibilities for how we can like better understand these kinds of explosions.

Because understanding this explosion is very important for us from a fundamental science perspective. Because these explosions help us chart out the distances to galaxies. and help us chart out the expansion of the universe. It's we're Christopher Columbus. We're building the map of the new world. And this is like our meter stick. Right. This is our Maria Pinto, Santa Maria.

What were the ships called? Oh, I forget. The Pinto. They made me learn this in American school. Someone's going to put it in the comments and they're going to be like, you. Yeah. America's education system. That's what's important apparently, knowing the fucking ship name of Christopher Columbus's.

You know, the genocide. Vital Madiac who killed all the Native Americans, but that's fine. So this is the first time we've seen a double kill in space. Double kill. Shout out to all my Halo people. And like, again, is I just, one of the things I keep wanting to come back to is how extremely clever the humans who build these instruments are that enable us to gather data that then we can make conclusions about the beautiful world around. us and we can't do that without enabling these brilliant people to have creative freedom to like build yeah and like again you're like imagine someone coming up to hey I want to build a giant

telescope and I want to build a series of underground mirror systems yeah and I'm going to build four of them I'm I tuned out like 15 minutes ago yeah it's just but it's so I the wonder I've always love space. We're so infinitesimally small in a sea of everything. And there's so much interesting stuff going on around. And the wonder, I think this is kind of what you were saying.

The romance in astronomy is uniquely interesting in the sciences. You know, in a way where it's like the wonder is constantly there. Because you kind of never know what you're going to find.

What you're going to find. Sometimes you might be looking at the right place at the right time like several our stories. I think our last story of the day and this is one I have no, this is, this is, so we always do an AI story. AI is going to be something that's going to impact all of our lives on a daily basis, whether we like it or not, forever, for the rest of our lives, until the planet ends or we all die or something. And so as long as we don't give them the access to nuclear and solar power and they can self-replicate, but that's a whole another story. But you have an interesting AI story. Yes, it's an optimistic one. We love an

optimistic AI story for our listeners today. So we're going to have Dr. Krishna Chowary walk us through the optimistic story of the day on AI. Yeah. It's a new AI from Google's deep mind. Yep. Called Aeneas. Aeneas. Aeneas. Yeah. Do you know who that is? I need another Aeneas because my current one is struggling a little bit. Yeah. I'm not familiar though. This is, Aeneas is basically like the Roman version of Odysseus. Got it. Like he apparently like it was, he fled Troy with the sort of Troy and then he did a journey very much like Odysseus and ended up in Rome, founded Rome. So Virgil wrote a poem called the Aeneid and it's one of the great classical works of literature.

And the Google Deep Mind AI is called Aeneas because it is basically a generative AI model that, helps epigraphers and like like is like an AI Indiana Jones it's like basically trying to decipher Latin and date it and tell you where the Latin is from it's got three jobs it's going to it's going to decipher Latin and frequently a big problem with antiquity right right is like the incompleteness of what we find you've seen like the statues there's an arm missing there's a head missing and they're still like um nose missing and like they're still like in these museums and they're priceless right because they're these incredible works of art um same thing happens with inscriptions right you go to like the parthenon or like any of these other ancient greek or

ancient roman temples the half the marble is gone so the the latin is going to be like this and then it's going to be cut off right and so we don't know what the rest of the latin says well this is something where generative i i can do something right this sounds perfect for all the because they're basically next token generation. So it's almost literally the core function. The core function of these models is kind of purpose. To like fill in. Fill in the gaps.

Yeah. With limited information. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. So and that's exactly what this thing does. It's so it does three things. It fills in missing text.

It provides provenance, which is like where did this thing come from? And it uses basically like context clues. Yeah. Or like did they abbreviate certain Latin terms to figure out like what the dialect is and then figure out where in the classical, you know, world it came from. And then also it tells you, gives you an estimate of the date based on, again, like context and like vernacular, grammar, things like that. So it's trained on 176,000 Latin inscriptions. Only

some of them have images, okay? But most of them are like, like, actually translated like stuff. Anywhere from 7th century BC all the way to 8th century AD. So giant thousand years span of stuff. And it's an incredible tool now because, so what they did was they tested it on this temple, on some inscriptions from the Temple of Augustus, which is in Ankara Turkey. It's also called the queen of inscriptions

because there's so many inscriptions that are on this temple. But again, a lot of these inscriptions are cut off and like they don't have it, right? So they tested it between that. The thing completed it. A bunch of historians actually said, okay, that's actually a pretty good inscription. The inscription itself is from the emperor Augustus.

It's like an autobiography. Like, I did this. I did this. You know, that's what the emperors. I was both the biggest. Yeah. And the bestest. Basically.

Like, yeah. Yeah. Right after killing Caesar. No, wait. I don't think he did. He, no, that's a different Augustus. I'm confusing by Shakespeare with the real world. but and the other thing is it gave um it gave like two date ranges so it was like 10 to 20 CE or 10 to 1 BC

it said that this is the date range that this inscription is on and that corresponds exactly to what current historians are debating over whether it's this or that in the sort of independent because I think part of with AI people always talk about well when you do these AI models and they do these benchmark tests, people are saying, well, if you feed them to test while you're training. No, this is not in the training data. It's not in the training data set because it was just those inscriptions without the interpretations of modern day historians as X, Y, or Z. It just had structured data around it.

It's like, we know this description is we, like that's as a fundamental entry point. But I think that's an important distinction because the natural reaction will be, well, okay, but it also took all the feedback and interpretation of these historians. And that's why it lined up with what they already said. But the point is that it didn't have that. It didn't have that. This was a completely test case, right? And so it becomes this incredible tool that now epigraphers and historians can use.

Obviously, it's going to make some stuff up. But having this tool is much better than not having this tool, right? Because then you can, like, reduce the amount of effort that you're doing. You can, you can cross-check. You can verify. There's a lot of new inscriptions that are coming out as archaeological data. are happening, right? I was just in Pompeii the other day. There's an active dig happening in Pompeii. They're going to find new inscriptions, right? And then they'll be able to feed it into

the Salah Lama if obviously there's going to be stuff that's cut off because the volcano came and buried in everything. Right? So like it's it's it's I think I think it gives a lot of hope for what AI can do for human beings like in this case you know a lot of people talk about like AI is a is a way we're like losing humanity. Yeah. And into certain respect, I think that is true. Like if we're not careful, we might lose our ability to be human or like our sense of what it means to be human. But in this case, like, it's giving us more connection to our human past. Right. It's telling us like what the same humans were like 2,000 years ago. You know, and so like it's helping us connect in in ways that I think are very good. And so like if, if, AI can be used for more things like this and less for like, you know, surveillance or like trying to like addict me to video games or apps. Like I think that'd be nice. I think what's so fascinating is AI is both a lens into our past that allows it to interpret it with greater clarity

and like the specter like hanging over the future because it's like or the guillotine that hangs over our future where we actually have the ability to pull it. Yeah, yeah. We don't understand that we have that. That we're constantly like, yeah, like if we go after like what is easy, right. And what is profitable. Right. Then all we're doing is just like loosening our grip on this. Correct. You know, right? And, and that's not good. This is why it's so important, I think, these conversations where we try to talk about these topics from first principles. Yeah. Because the way we can retain our humanity is by always having that frame of reference and mindset, whether it's from a media literacy perspective,

whether it's from a science literary perspective, social interpersonal interaction. When you're flooded with information everywhere all the time, being able to have a framework to build up what the worldview that you have, that is not simply just intaking information and outputting it without processing is like increasingly and so, so important. And it's why I love being able to talk to you about these stories. It's a good time.

It's a good time. I also like, thanks for sending me these stories because like the more I, the deeper I don't. It's like every single like science story just has like so many layers to it. And you, you get such a kick out of like, knowing how we did things. At least I do.

No, I do, I do too. And that's why we are very excited for next week's installment of Firm First Principles.