From First Principles - Octopus Camouflage, Orcas vs. Sharks, Civet Coffee & Sub-Diffraction Telescope Tech (EP. 16)

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this super-episode spans four wildly different frontiers: bioengineers hijacking bacterial evolution to mass-produce octopus camouflage pigment; orcas developing cultural hunting strategies against great white sharks; the bizarre chemistry behind civet-processed luxury coffee; and a UCLA breakthrough that pushes telescope resolution beyond the classical diffraction limit.SummaryUCSD’s biosynthesis breakthrough — how researchers engineered a growth-coupled, plug-and-play metabolic pathway to mass-produce xanthomatin, the cephalopod pigment behind octopus camouflage.Orca vs. shark culture wars — first-ever documentation of coordinated predation on juvenile great whites in Mexican waters, plus how whales transmit learned behavior socially.The paradox of civet coffee — wild civet gut chemistry, medium-chain esters, and how microbial fermentation creates the world’s most expensive “biologically processed” coffee.UCLA’s telescope hack — a mode-sorting instrument that extracts phase information from starlight, enabling sub-diffraction-limited imaging and revealing asymmetric hydrogen disks around distant stars.Show NotesUCSD — Nature Biotechnology (xanthomatin biosynthesis)Orca Predation Study — Frontiers in Marine ScienceCivet Coffee Chemistry — Nature Scientific ReportsUCLA Sub-Diffraction Telescope Method — ApJ Letters

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Quick breakdown. We're going to start out with we may have figured out how to mass produce the camouflage that Octopi use in their predatory adventures. This is out of UCSD. The second story is about a new beef in the ocean. there's there's a little bit of of beef happening between orcas and sharks yeah um and the paper sort of understands or breaks down this new hunting technique that orkers are participating in that one's out of an institution we'll talk about in a second the third story out of the university of caleta is about some shit yeah they're going to start charging 80 dollars for you to drink

yeah yeah yeah dude i'm not being facetious it's coming to beverly hill Starbucks uh Sivet coffee. Yeah. Sivet shitted coffee. Yeah. Again, not a joke. Not a joke. And we'll wrap it up with a fascinating story at UCLA where we, I'm not saying we're defying physics, but there's some new technology that we're using that makes our telescope see what we didn't think was possible.

That's right. This is going to be a great episode. As always, this is from first principles. My friend. How's it going? How are you? Welcome back. Yep.

Thank you. We have a couple of housekeeping items. So number one, the engagement continues to be unbelievable. If you're watching this on YouTube, which is probably one of the only ways you're hearing me say this part of the show, there's going to be that little bell icon where you can subscribe. It's hugely helpful. We need to get the billionaires to get us in the algorithm. So if you hit that subscribe button, that's going to really help get this science education podcast to more people. We also are going to have our new website up soon, which will have all of the research paper links, all of the episode links.

We may be launching some leaderboards. We'll see, but we're going to get that ready for the holiday season. So keep an eye out for that. But we're going to dive in and start with our first story. Yep. Out of UCSD, which is a biosynthesis story. Yes. About mass producing what octopause.

or octopus used for camouflage, and this was out of nature biotechnology. A lot of people love talking about, like, octopi are super intelligent. Yes. And everyone's like, oh, that's like an alien intelligence in the ocean. Yeah. And this is, I think, been something we've known about, but have just now made this next step of, like, how can we replicate? So let's talk about this story. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The idea is that we want to mass produce something called Xanthometan. Okay, it's nature's master of disguise. It's a pigment that is responsible for cephalopod camouflage. Okay, cephalopods are your octopus, squid, cuttlefish. There you've got a photo. I can't see the octopus. The octopus are incredible at camouflage.

Oh, there's an octopus in that photo. Yeah, in that red circle, there's an octopus in there. That's incredible. Yeah, but it's not only matched the texture, but the exact color characteristics of the coral reef or the, ocean floor that's behind it. Yeah. And it's honestly like defying any reason how good it is. The same, the same pigment is also found in the coloration of butterflies and dragonflies,

in the eyes of flies. So it's a ubiquitous biopigment. It's got a really high value because it's optoelectric, which means it can change its color with a response to electrochemical potential. So that's how the octopus can sometimes become super vibrant. And also at the same time become this, they look like a rock, right? They can be like pulsing with like strobe lights and at the same time do all of these other things. If we can, if we can replicate this biosynthesis, then we can go to next generation electronics, like electrochromic displays. The main thing that's nice about this is it's biocompatible.

So, I mean, one thing that I was thinking was like, what if you had like color changing tattoos? Yeah. Or like if you flex, then like it like just changes. It's, you know, yeah, yeah, like, it's like Avatar, you know? It is like Avatar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great. That's a good reference.

So, so it would be really cool, right, if we could make a bunch of this. So when you say it's biocompatible, it means that it could interact with our, as biological beings are our system directly. Yeah. And it's not like toxic. Right. Got it. Because it's already a sort of organic compound. That makes sense.

The other things, like it could be used in cosmetics if you have like multifunctional ingredients or like health and skin care. It's very UV-productive, these coatings. So if we can mass-produce a lot of it, that would be really helpful for all sorts of industries. The bottleneck is a supply challenge, okay? You can't just go into biology and try to extract it. Like how many butterflies are you going to kill, right? Or like octopus. It's just not, it's low yielding, it's labor intensive, and it's not ethical, right? It's not like mining. Yes. Which you could argue is also not ethical. Yeah, exactly. For different reasons. Exactly. So this breakthrough here reports the first successful industrial gram-scale biosynthesis.

Okay? I understand. Got it. Yep. And the way that they did this scaling and this production is actually what I think the story is about, the real science is about. Because the way that they produce this is kind of a plug-and-play-type pathway that you could use to then manufacture other challenging biochemicals.

The analogy that this makes me think of is kind of like how CRISPR, like was a platform, for lack of a better term, that had multiple use cases or functions that you could use it with. And so there's kind of a similar platform level discovery happening here. Yeah, it's not specific to just this particular. Yeah, this is kind of like a, yeah, exactly. This is kind of like a proof of concept that it can be done. But the way that they did it is what I think is like really, really cool.

Okay. Okay, because here's the core challenge, okay? Whenever you want to install, let's, the Xanthamat, comes from some genomic pathway, right? There's some biochemical pathway in the octopus that creates Xanthometan. Okay. The standard approach is to take that gene or take that bunch of genes that all contribute to this, stick that into a bacteria and then have the bacteria produce it, right?

Yep. You install a foreign gene and that's what you do. Got it. The problem is there's a metabolic burden. Okay? Because if you've got this new pathway that's taking up a lot of energy, it's making up a lot of the ATP, a lot of the carbon atoms even, and it confers no survival advantage, the bacteria doesn't want to do it.

Right? Kind of sounds a little bit like the AI thing happening right now. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And, you can actually, in terms of AI, you can use an analogy where it's like all of the energy budget and the carbon budget of an organism is very strict. Okay, it's had billions of years of evolution to figure out this carbon item has to go there. This carbon atom has to go there.

This amount of ATP needs to be used for this and so on and so forth, right? It's had billions of years of evolution to figure that out. And now all of a sudden you install on this electrical grid like a giant server farm with no advantage. The bacteria is not going to reroute all of its electricity, all of its energy to make this server. farm when it makes no sense, right? Right. In fact, if you have a bacterial population, you've got an evolutionary conflict because let's say a bunch of these bacteria are there, there's some mutation that cuts off supply

to that server farm. That bacteria is going to grow faster because it's not wasting all that energy. Right. And then in a population, it's kind of like antibiotic resistance where you've got a population that sort of, there's some bacteria that use up the resistance. and actually are resistant to the antibiotic and some that aren't, right? And those are the ones that are going to go ahead. But in this case, it's like those that have budgeted well and have cut off this useless server farm are going to grow faster

and then they're going to dominate the entire population. That makes total sense. Right. So that's the problem. It's like we're going against evolution. We're trying to engineer something. Right. But there's all these cheaters around that are just going to do what they want to do.

Because we're trying to use literal biology as the platform by which we generate this organic compound. Yeah. Like we're not using machines no. And a factory. It's we're literally using biology. Yeah.

And there are these inherent properties underlying the evolutionary process of biology. Yeah. That are preventative factors from just being like maximize the output we care about. Yeah. Because it's not purely create, the system is not purely controlled by like human engineering input. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so we need to figure out a way to, to make the bacteria do what we want to do. Right. Okay. And run this server farm that gives us entomatin and like makes us have this octopus superpower, right? And the strategy that they're using is this plug-in-play strategy. It came out in Nature Biotech, growth coupled biosynthesis.

That's what they're calling it. Okay. What they're doing is actually quite a, quite a simple thing. They're creating a fitness advantage. They're creating an evolutionary advantage for, those that are using the server farm. And what they're doing is, they've created what's called an oxotrofe.

It's an organism that has, through some kind of mutation, lost the ability to synthesize some essential ingredient. Okay. And the only way it can get this essential ingredient is if it runs the server farm, it runs this mechanical,

biomechanical pathway that we've installed, that gives it that ingredient to let it grow. That's, that's, It's like if bacteria had ethics, this would be very problematic. Very kind of thing. Yeah. And I'm sure there's people out there that are making that argument.

And I mean, I don't have good arguments about that. Okay. That's not my field. But that's not the scope of this episode, the ethics of oxotrophs. Yeah. But it's pretty insane. Like it's called synthetic oxotrophy. Okay.

So the idea is you have a pathway, right? And on the bottom, you've got your central pathway. that grows the cell that does metabolism and all that other stuff. And usually the input comes in, the input comes in from this side, and then it can fork into two paths. You've got, let's say, a bunch of carbon atoms. The carbon atoms can go to make more bacteria, or it can go to do this Xanthamatin production, this engineered production.

If you've got a choice, the bacteria is going to always pick, grow myself. Right. Evolution dictates that. But if it doesn't have a choice, it has to go through the, server farm in order to get the carbon to grow itself, then it's then then actually those that are better at doing that artificial, um, pathway are going to have an evolutionary advantage. We've actually used evolution to our advantage now by creating a foreign Xanthamatin production pathway that puts out a byproduct that it needs.

This is interesting. We've, we've, we've hijacked our understanding of evolution. Yeah. to know that we need to create basically a need for the system to go down the path we wanted to in order for it to be more evolutionarily advantaged against others. And that it's a little bit, it's interesting. It's interesting, dude. At least it's bacteria, at least.

Let's hope they don't scale it up to larger, you carry out. Yeah, exactly. But anyway. Yeah, so they're using this bacteria called pseudomonas putida. It's a soil bacterium. It's got a robust chassis that has a lot of metabolic versatility, meaning that it can eat a bunch of different things. It's not like, you know, there's not one pathway that it can go through.

It's not vegan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even though it's like mostly glucose, it can like eat glucose in multiple different ways. Okay? And good natural tolerance to substrates and products, like anything that's coming out of that factory that we just installed. it's got a good tolerance for all sorts of stuff. So they're using this soil bacterium.

And what they're doing is they're taking a molecule as hostage. It's the 510 MTHF. It's basically a C1 carrier. It's a carbon carrier for DNA and RNA and for proteins. It can't make methionine without this thing. And it can't make the A and the G that's in our DNA. Okay? So without this pathway,

It can no longer grow because it can't make DNA and it can't make proteins. We're creating almost this like artificial famine at the cell level. Exactly. And requiring it to go through this pathway that will generate an output we care about in order to be able to literally feed itself. Yeah. Yeah. And then comes the production line.

So now how does it actually make the food that it needs, right? Right. What we do is we put a bunch of genes on a plasmid. A plasmid is a circular bit of DNA that we can use to, change what the bacteria is producing. It's just foreign DNA that we can plug in. Now, these bacteria are already stressed out because they can't eat. So they're just trying to take in whatever help they can.

We put in this plasmid that has genes on the plasmid to create this artificial pathway. Where on its way to creating Xanthamatin, what it's going to do is create Formate, which is a precursor for tryptophan and. All of the, all of the other things that the bacteria needs. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Right. Right. Right. And the ultimate goal is you've got like a sole carbon source, which is through the factory. Yeah. You have to go, you have to, you have to pay the cost to be the bus. Yeah. Literally, you have to go kiss the ring.

Yeah. To survive. To survive. Yeah. And even then it wasn't so simple. Okay. Okay. Because you have that single carbon source, but the bacteria is still, the initial bug was it still needed

supplemental glycine and L-tryptophan, which. which is two kind of expensive ingredients that you need to give the bacteria in order to survive. You can't just give it glucose. So then what they did was they had another evolutionary lab in their little lab. What you do is you say, okay, I need you to make glycine, right? I'm going to give you a bunch of glycine at first, and I'm going to slowly wean off your entire population of glycine. And you're hoping that the bacteria just learn through some mutine. because of this pressure, they're going to learn how to make their own glycine.

Either learn how to make their own glycine or live without it. Yep. Okay? And that's exactly what ended up happening. Yep. They, they, the bacteria had a single amino acid change in the Metcay gene. And then all of a sudden, they didn't need glycine. Right.

Supplemental glycine. You were sort of basically through this, uh, providing withdrawal mechanism. Mm-hmm. driving evolutionary progress to basically fulfill the gap of the withdrawal of providing it directly to. Interesting. And it worked. And it worked. And what's cool about this is like this entire pathway, right?

You've got the factory that's going in. Yes. The factory that they're using that they've put in through this plasmid, through this foreign DNA, the stuff that they got from the octopus and whatever, that can't just be the native factory. because it has to have a byproduct that encourages the bacteria to actually work, right? So it has to be leaky in some sense. I understand what I'm saying. Not all of the carbon can go into the xanthamatin production. It's not a hundred percent.

Some of it has to go out. Yeah, some of it has to go out in order to create formate and then become this like sole carbon source. Yep. That makes sense. So the factory has sort of two functions, both creating what we care about and also providing enough for the cell to continue to propagate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then those that ran the factory more actually had an advantage because they're the ones that could actually grow.

Yep. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. That's really crazy. It's really crazy. And one of the ways that they actually showed that this was happening is an old school technique where you take an isotope of an atom. In this case, instead of carbon 12, they used carbon 13. Okay.

And they fed it glucose with carbon 13 in a specific part of the glucose molecule, second from left or whatever. And you can trace, because this carbon is a 13 instead of a 12, it's a little bit heavier. So you can trace how this carbon 13 goes through that entire chemical pathway, right? Because some of those molecules are going to be a little bit heavier than the other ones. Yep. Right? Because it's got one extra neutron. Yes.

And what you can show is atom by atom, the carbon traveled along this Santa Matin pathway. So through the factory, you can see, okay, now it's on the floor. now it's there, now it's getting this, you know? There's an indicator that allows us to see the through line of the entire process, to know that we're actually routing through the factor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can confirm that this is what's happening, right? There's nothing else that's weird.

And then finally, you know, you get this optimized e-puma xanthamatin strain that in 72 hours, you get a bunch of your pigment, a thousand times more than what you were getting earlier for a lot less work. I mean, obviously a lot of worked into doing this, but now that you can do it. Now that you can do it. Yeah, 2.4 grams per liter of xanthamatin powder. So this is, this is, you know, it's not only going to transform, let's say, the camouflage and the cosmetics. Yes.

But I think what, to me, what really struck was the way in which they did this, right? This biosynthetic hijacking of the metabolism. Right. we now have sort of this plug-in-play platform. Again, I don't mean to bring up the CRISPR analogy again, but it's similar in the sense that other research teams are going to be able to take the insight from how you can basically facilitate biosynthesis

by this sort of like this pathway that advantages those that go through the factory that produce what you want it to. And you can apply that to any number of other of biosynthetic outputs that you're looking for. And like that's... That's the key insight for me. No, which obviously.

Yeah, I think... And, you know, you can accelerate production of antibiotics, plant alkalides, polyketides, all sorts of... That's fascinating. ...biochemical things. And you can make the factory itself be different, right? Because all you need is something that releases a C1 molecule.

It's a molecule with a single carbon. So it can be the Forme pathway, the formaldehyde pathway, Who knows? Even like CO2, you could hijack respiration itself in the mitochondria, right? It just leads to, I mean, that's probably a lot harder because there's so many more steps. But, you know. Knowing that there's a stage one entry point to utilizing this as a methodology for biosynthesis means that there are any number of other use cases that with some amount of additional research are going to be unlocks.

I mean, this is actually really really really, really fascinating. So we're going to be able to have a makeup that's color changing. We're going to be able to have all your vehicle is going to be laced with this octopi camouflage. So if you're driving at night and you want to go night mode. You have a plant-based display? I don't know. Like all sorts of stuff, dude.

That's actually, okay. So this is, this is out of UCSD. Yeah. They've now sort of created a platform for mass producing. octopus camouflage, but it is a platform that can now be extrapolated into other arenas. This is a paper out of nature biotechnology. That's a great, that's a great story. Yeah, that was cool.

I thought that was really cool. Fascinating story. We're going to move on to our story number two. And our story number two, now I'm going to do my best. Yeah. Our story number two is out of an institution called the Protection and Conservation Pelagacia, Assesson Civil, AC, as well as CSU Monterey Bay. Yes.

And this is about the new hunting techniques of orcas. Like we said, there's a beef in the ocean, right? And so this research study is looking at these new hunting patterns of orcas. And you thought this was interesting, and I'm curious why you put this in the show now. Yeah. I want to know about, because we've seen the story about orcas attacking yachts in the Mediterranean or on the Amafi Coast. forever. But it does seem like, again, we're in the ocean for two of our stories back to back,

which is funny. But the intelligence aspect of this is interesting me. That's exactly right. Okay. Okay. That's exactly right. It's the intelligence aspect that's interesting to me. And more than even the intelligence, it's culture, I think, that we're getting at. Okay. And I'm going to get into that a little bit later. But that's the key word that why I got interested. Because to me, I'm fascinated with human culture. Right. And it seems like, we are, there's a few papers that we're going to go through that talk about animal culture. Okay. And I find that just extremely fascinating.

So the culture wars are not human specific. No, no, no. In this case, they probably have a gentleman in his culture compared to ours. But actually, no, that's not even true. Even the orcas have dialects among their populations, which is fascinating to think about. That's interesting. Right. That like different populations of orcas might not understand each other.

If you're not on the side of the equator. Yeah, like the Pacific ones and the Atlantic ones are going to be like, Why are you talk funny? He looks like me, but he talks really funny. You know? It's a groundbreaking paper, I think, from Higuerra Rivas, published in November this year, Frontiers in Marine Science. The idea is it's the first ever recorded orca predation on young Great White sharks in Mexican waters off the coast of Baja California. Okay.

It's actually the second time that we've seen orcas attacking Great Whites. the first time was off the coast of South Africa. So it's pretty far away. But the technique is remarkably similar. Okay. Okay. Which is kind of weird. Meaning it's transcend.

It might be. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to say that it does. And the paper does not claim that it does. Fair enough. But I just find it kind of funny. Fair right.

But that's a tall order to make. But I will show later on that whales have done this. Okay. Okay. So the first encounter was on August 15, 2020. they found a pot of five female orcas, one adult, and four sub-adults. And what they did was the one orca pushes the shark up to the surface. Then another orca just like punches it, okay, causing bleeding.

And then there's two others that swim around the shark to make it go upside down. And then once the shark is upside down, you get this thing called tonic immobility, where the shark can't really move. And then while that shark can't really move, the other orcas then eat out its liver. And like they bring out its liver and that photo had the liver there. And then they share it with the kids. Oh, yeah. That are kind of in the wading in the wings.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That have sort of been like a part of this, but not really. Right, right, right. And then they had a second encounter two years later at the same exact spot, which suggests that it's predictable. It's seasonal hunting pattern. This time it was an adult male, adult female, two subadult. and a calf. And this time the kid did nothing, just like wait until juvenile white shark again,

much smaller than the orca, gets wrecked. And then shark starts bleeding, liver is exposed, they eat the liver. And only the liver because the liver is super nutrient rich and has a bunch of like, you know, bang for buck. Yeah. And it's in per pound. And it seems like they're trying to give it for the young. Yeah.

And they're saving stuff for the young. I thought that was really cool. That's really interesting. Yeah. It's a pretty cool. toolkit. I mean, they obviously, they're on boats, but a lot of the video and a lot of the analysis comes from the video from DJI Phantom 4 Pro, which is one of the one of those drones. So drone photography has really revolutionized marine ecosystem behavioral science.

Right. And sightings. Because it looks like this is, it was a multi-platform observation system. There's surface, aerial, underwater, and photo identification. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a multimodal. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And the trick that they're using is kind of interesting. They're using, they're weaponizing tonic immobility. If you've seen like the shark, you know, people who like go in the middle of sharks and they're like, nothing's going to happen because I'm going to poke its nose.

I think a lot of times what they're trying to do is like turn it upside down and then it just like freezes. And like there's like tricks, but it's cool that like orcas have like figured this out. Organically. Yeah, they're both apex predators, right? the juvenile sharks and the orcas. But because they're competing, one could argue that, like, they're just trying to take out the other guy who's trying to compete for the same resources. They're paying for the same food supply.

Exactly. If you're eating my food, like, you're now my enemy. Yeah. And these orcas only go after juvenile white sharks. I mean, I was actually going to ask that because, like, clearly they're, like, going after the little ones. Yeah. Yeah. Because the older ones, when they see an orca, they just get the hell out of it.

They're like, I'm out. Yeah. Because I guess they know. They've got some learning capability. and they don't return. We've seen white sharks see an orca, and then they don't return for like two or three years. Oh, wow.

They'll just leave. They're like, I'm good. And they're like, oh, so that's a bad neighborhood. I'm not going to spin the block here. Yeah. I'll find my seals elsewhere. That's actually really interesting. Yeah.

And so now, I mean, there's reports in South Africa where the original report happened. The seal population there has gone a little bit out of control because there's the great white sharks just like avoid that area. Because the orcas have kind of... Yeah, and the orcas, you know, they swim around all over the ocean.

Right. And so there's not a constant supply of predatory pressure. That makes sense. And the seals have kind of... Exploded. Yeah. Which is crazy to think about.

And the reason why I was talking about this being something that reminded me of culture is because it reminded me of a study that came out like a long time ago. There used to be... So culture is something that we know animals do. What does culture mean? Culture means that you've got effectively some type of strategy that is conferred through behavior and through social constructs, like groups of individuals.

It's not something that is innate. Right. It's something that's learned from your peers. So you get the benefit of their experience, right? Like, you don't have to live through an orca attack, for example. If you're a juvenile shark and you can learn through culture, I don't know if sharks can, but I'm just giving you the example here. You don't have to go through that firsthand experience.

Yes. Right? Of like, oh, that was bad. Yes. No, your parents tell you that was bad. Don't do that. Sometimes we're just like, eh, I'll try it. But there's other things where like, okay, clearly that's like that, right?

So there's examples of this. for example, shark bay bottle-nosed dolphins, they use a sponging techniques where they carry around a sponge, like one of those like SpongeBob, like the natural sponges, right? And they use that to probe the seafloor and that protects their

bottle nose. Oh, right? When they're like foraging the sea floor. Yeah, because it's almost like a cushion. Yeah, and it's passed from mother to calf. So it's a vertical cultural transmission. Okay. Right.

Yep. And then we've got Japanese macaques. Yep. They wash their sweet potatoes. A little macaque. Yeah, they wash their sweet potatoes before eating it. And that's something that's culturally passed down because, like, the youngsters, see the elders doing it? They're like, okay, that's the way to eat this thing, right?

Very, yep, yep. So orcopods, they've shown to have cultural things. For example, complex, stable vocal dialects that I was talking about, almost like languages where different geographic populations will have different dialects. And those are obviously learned socially. There was one paper that is honestly one of my favorite papers in animal. behavior. It was in 2021 out of the Royal Society. What it did was analyze 19th century

American whaler log books in the North Pacific Ocean. Okay. And these whalers kept meticulous lab notes when they went out in the field to try to kill sperm whales. You love to see it. And back then, I think sperm whales were used for all sorts of stuff. Not only their meat, but

this was before electricity. Right. So all of the oil was being used to light up our streets. And that actually caused one of the big epidemics of near extinction for these whales all across the ocean. And the process was whaling was as follows. In the 18,

19th century, you'd go with your ship, which was powered by a sail, you'd spot some whales, and then you'd go out down in these duffies and try to harpoon them the whales. Yes. And then if you harpooned one, you'd bring it back to the ship

for extraction. Yes. Okay. What they noticed was, whenever they went to a certain spot, the success rate plummeted from when they first got there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they go to a certain spot. On the top, you've got a map of all of the spots that they've been in the North Pacific. This is between Japan and America.

And there you've got the rate at which you're able to kill whales. Yes. Okay? Yes. And the rate was diminishing. Now there's four hypotheses Okay, there's four ways We can think about it

One is just the first guys who went to that particular spot We're just good at it They were LeBron and you're not LeBron Yeah, yeah And so everyone, that doesn't make sense Because we have the logbooks from the same whalers That go to other spots like the North Atlantic And they get the baseline rate

Okay, the fact that this is new, right? This is the North Pacific So this has this is a harvesting ground for whales That it hasn't been extracted before Right? Whaling has been around for centuries in the North Atlantic, right? Europeans have been at it forever. Yes.

So that's the first hypothesis. The first whalers were good. It's not the case. Yep. Second one is the first whales that were taken out were these juvenile sort of slower, let's say, or they weren't very good at getting away. That also is something that we can model, right? We can model, we can have some type of population model that says, okay, like the slower whales

in a population die out. how would the rate decrease then if it's some sort of random strategy right okay okay the third one is the whales learned from personal experience meaning i'm part of a pod that had this crazy thing happen to me where a bunch of our pod got shot yes in the ocean and then and then got extracted and so now i'm never going to have that happen to my pod again this is literally i think the plot of the second or third avatar movie yeah yeah yeah yeah one of those like it's one of them where the ocean thingies And then they were getting hunted. And then they didn't go back to the spot.

Exactly. Because that's where we lost all our people. Exactly. And then the fourth one is the best one. Okay. Okay. That I want to be true. I'll just be honest.

Okay. And it's that the whales learned between unit learning. Meaning there was a pod that I ran into yesterday that had that experience. They told me about it and they told me how to get away. The idea is you're on the block. Your block is block two. But the cats from block one pull up and they're like, like, yo, yesterday on block one, this happened.

So y'all watch out. Yeah. And so there's a transferring socially of learning without having to physically or literally experience. And that's the culture part. That's the culture part. Right. So the question is, do the whales have culture?

Is the fourth hypothesis true or any of these? And what they did was modeling, they did mathematical modeling to see how that rate would decrease based on these three hypotheses. And the one that had the best fit was the one where the whales adapted, learned, and shared defensive knowledge too rapidly for genetic evolution. The point is the rate of decrease of efficacy of the hunting was so steep that it couldn't have just been from personal experience because there wasn't enough volume for personal experience to be the trigger.

There's not enough juveniles in the population spread of whales for it to just be the juveniles. And it can't be that they're just that good because in other areas they were doing just fine. Yeah. And so like these other three things don't account for the rate of decrease. Yeah. And it's, and so the entire population in the Pacific learn that, okay, when you got these whales, and here's what they would do. Usually they do defensive huddling, okay?

So if orcas come up, what you do is like kind of what elephants do, where you huddle around you're young and you try to bite the people around. That slows you down and that is super ineffective, ineffective against boats. Right, right, right. You come up on a boat, they're already slowed down. Great. just, you know, go at it. So pretty soon they realized that's not going to work.

And in their whaler journals, they showed that the whales abandoned that traditional defensive huddling, and they went for new tactics. For example, if they know which way the wind is, just swim opposite direction of the wind. Oh, because they know we can't. They figured out that these guys can only go in the direction of the wind with their big ship, right?

And so they just like swim in the other direction. Evasive deep diving. resurface like many miles away, yep, away from the ship. Yep. Right? And some people just started doing aggressive defencing. If they were cornered, they would just like start attacking.

You know, the best defense is the attack. You know what's funny is the social learning from this era might still be persisting, which is why the yachts are getting attack. Yes, I was going to say, and that's the final, that's the final photo that we have. That's right. It's like now we've got, we've got this thing coming back where the orcas are now all around Spain and Portugal. just like attacking yachts, right? And it's become like kind of an epidemic of Orca on yacht violence.

Yep. Right? Yep. And we don't have harpoons on those yachts. Yeah. And that also looks like it's a cultural thing. Because it started one day. And then everyone started doing it all across the North Sea, all across the Portugal,

through the Straits of Gibraltar. I wouldn't be surprised about all of the Mediterranean is starting it. You know? And what's interesting is at the time of when whaling was happening, you have sort of a reason for the behavior change that's identifiable. It's not necessarily obvious clear in this recent. Yeah, it's not necessarily obvious. There was one hypothesis that was saying that like, oh, because we have like so much tuna in the ocean now, because we've curbed fishing, that the orcas are just getting bored.

And so with their time, they're doing this. I don't buy that. I think that's a fisherman lobby, like paying some special interest group to be like, hey, we have too much. fish. And so we can just like start fishing again. Another one that I thought was pretty likely was that like they've recognized that boats are fishermen boats. And the same reason why you go after the shark is why you go after the boat. It's a competing predator. That's like depleting my resources. That makes more sense. Like I was going up against a school of tuna and now half of them are gone. Yeah. And there was a boat right there. Yeah. So like screw that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

No, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot more sense to me. But I, I just think like these kinds of stories are so interesting and so capable of sort of putting humans in their place when it comes to uniqueness. Yeah. Like we always think that like, oh, culture is very unique to us, right? Cognition. Cognition is not unique. Yep.

More and more, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that consciousness is not unique to humans. I think a lot of people out there agree. And now culture is not unique. Right. Feelings are not unique. We can see animals in pain. It's, yeah, it's quite humbling that like, and we've got now scientific backing. Yeah, right, right.

For that. I mean, this is the whole, there's a whole sort of culture of no longer eating, like, Kalamari. Because it's like, the idea is like, you have this highly intelligent, conscious creature. Yeah. And there's now this, like, ethical sort of piece to this. Like, well, like, you know, we don't eat other humans. Yeah. Yeah.

generally speaking. Generally speaking, yeah. I mean, dude, it's interesting to me. I mean, I'm a selfish person, so I will eat the calamari because it tastes so good. But at the same time, I will acknowledge that, like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I think what's interesting is, like, we're now getting more research studies, particularly because we also, like, again, have, like, this multimodal systems that are able to sort of track in ways where we get a more robust data. where we can now draw more deeper conclusions because of that. And it's not surprising to anyone who watched Free Willy that orcas are incredibly intelligent and potentially have culture.

Or if you've seen that documentary about the SeaWorld Orca, that's just like grueling. I haven't visited a single aquatic theme park after watching that. You know how they're solving. You know how they're solving there because they're clearly structurally. struggling for business. But the SeaWorld, the SeaWorld or whatever the brand is in San Diego, this summer, they had a summer series of concerts with like bow wow and little can't, like all these OG.

Okay. So you have like these rappers like on the stage that's on the water like at SeaWorld. Oh God. Sold out. Yeah. On walk a flock of flame. Like it was, it did look quite fun. And so look, if you want to change the venue from holding animals in captivity to a concert venue.

Oh, yeah. Then, okay, I thought they were doing it with the. No, no, no, no. I was like, cheese. Waka flukkah. I know you got Arka flipping over. Because they have no, they're not getting people to come for other stuff. I'll come to those.

I think that's a great off ramp. Yeah. We would love to see more summer series and converting these places into concert venues. Fantastic. Story number two, that was a great one. Yeah, that was cool. Frontiers in Marine Science. we're moving on to our third story,

which is about sivet, shitted coffee. Yeah, no, literally. Literally. They shit out coffee. If you go to Starbucks and you think inflation has made your coffee expensive now, there's $80 cups of coffee. Yeah. It's shit coffee.

No, literally. I don't know about the taste, but it's literally shit coffee that's coming from the shit of something called a civet. This is out of the University of Kerala. And it was in, nature scientific reports. When you put this in the show notes, the title was,

you know, Copee Luwak, the paradoxical luxury of biological processing. Yeah. And I had not yet. Yeah, no. And then I had a foot together.

Sivit shitted coffee. And they're like, is that shitted? Like shit? And I was like, no, no, like the biological term.

So tell me about, I mean, so I think I've literally seen this on some billionaire podcast about how they've moved to civet coffee because it's, Yeah, apparently it's, apparently it's exceptional. It's a bizarre luxury drink cost $30 to $75 a cup. $1,300 per pound.

You see the coffee and it's all agglomerated, you know, in a little clump. That's because it came out of the anus of a civet. Okay. I'm sorry to our listeners, but I really, I saw this and I was like, how do we try our best to be a PG-13 rated on the show? show. This is biological. It's literal. It's literal. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not feces. Peecees. Poop to shit. It's literal. Yeah. It's literal feces. Okay. All right. All right. Let's get serious.

Yes. So, so, so, so. So the market value is $7 billion for this. Civic Coffee, the real chemistry behind this bizarre luxury drink. And that's what this paper is about. Right. It's about describing the chemistry behind why when coffee beans go through the gastrointestinal tract of this animal, they taste better when they come out of the other side. Okay, it's a, it's a coffee called Kopiluak. It began in the 18th century because classic colonialism, okay, the Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia, they had coffee plantation workers. The plantation workers were forbidden from drinking the coffee that they were collecting.

Okay. Okay. Because, you know, white people. Yeah. So, so, so instead they collected the undigested beans from the droppings of Asian Pomsivets to, to drink those. And then when the, when the white plantation owners found out. Yeah.

And they tried some. They're like, oh, this actually tastes really good. And it became a new expensive export for the Dutch because the Dutch back then were always after getting rich. This is so funny because there's so many, like, so many things in like, like, like, ox tail. being 30 bucks a pound or whatever now. Cale salads being $20. Yeah.

Like, Oxtail and kale were eaten like when we were gross because it was cheap. Yeah. And it was the stuff no one else wanted. Yeah. And now it's been repress. Yeah, dude, I think it's the same with like IPAs. Yeah. Honestly, there's no one who actually enjoys IPAs, all right?

No one can convince me in a blind tasting that they like IPAs, okay? But they need everyone else to know. Right. That they drink IP. Anyways. So I first actually heard about it in the bucket list movie. with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. This is one of the things that he wanted to drink

before he died of cancer. So the civet is this Asian common palm civet. It looks kind of like a raccoon to me. It looks like a hyena mix of a raccoon. Yeah, it's, yeah. And it consumes the ripest berries and the beans pass through in about 12 hours and they become 10 times the value somehow.

And the digestive. process, it's thought that the digestive process modifies the beans chemical composition, refining flavor precursors, and giving a genesee qua. And there are another awesome civet dropping. This is funny that this episode we did our first story on biosynthesis. Yeah. This is another kind of biosynthesis. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, it's actually led, jokes aside, it's led to a lot of unethical cage farming of these civets because obviously if you have something that is a commodity that is highly valuable. And it comes from an animal.

Humans don't care about the animal's welfare. And so it's led to like cage farming driven by the demand. So there's demand in Japan, South Korea and USA. And the cage farming has happened in places like Vietnam and those Southeast Asian countries. So it has become a real problem. I mean, this is literally what we just talked about, about the ethical issue of doing biosynthesis with bacteria. Yeah.

But like this is now like you're scaling it up and it's the same problem set. Yeah, yeah, it's the same problem set, right? And this particular paper focused on wild civets, wild civets, not in captivity. In the Western Ghats, which are these mountain ranges on the western side of the Indian Peninsula. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. One day we will go. We'll go. With our wives and who.

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You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

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it's wild, meaning that there's coffee plantations there, but then there's wild civets that go and eat some of the berries, and you can collect the droppings. Yep. And what they wanted to figure out was what actually is going on here, chemically. Right. Okay. Is there anything going on, or is it just placebo?

Okay. So first thing what they did was they actually, you know, what you can do with coffee is you can roast it. And when you roast it, you get this thing called a myelard reaction, which generates that final, aroma and taste profile. They wanted to look at the coffee bean before the roast, right? Because you don't

want anything that is volatile or anything that requires some kind of heat. You want to look at the raw naked chemical composition, right, before you treat it to that heat. And so that's exactly what they did. They figured out that there's, in the civic gut,

there's a bioreactor. There's just like we have gut bacteria. The civvits have gut bacteria. Yes. And we're pretty sure that Gluconobacter, which is highly abundant in the civet gut, that's linked to some kind of fermentation. It metabolizes like sulfur-containing amino acids. It metabolizes hydrogen sulfide. So that could be some kind of chemistry that's leading to this unique taste that happens in the civet, right?

One thing that they did notice was that the beans that came out of the gut of the civet were significantly larger than the manually harvested beans. And that might be because the civet has some natural way of like picking which ones to eat. Oh, you know what I mean? It's not necessarily about what's happening inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're selective. They're selective about it. The other thing they realized was caprylic acid methyl ester and capric acid methyl ester.

These are two types of medium chain fatty acids. Their name is derived, the capric and the caprylic. They're named as derived from the Latin term for goat. or capra. And they're basically these chains of carbon compounds that impart a desirable dairy or milk-like aroma

in flavor. And the compounds that came out of the civet gut had a higher concentration of this. So we're saying civet shit coffee is the goat. Yes. Very nice. Very nice. Apparently it is. Yeah. So

there's two things that can happen with the study. One, you can you can target fraud. You can test for these compounds and be like, this is not. This did not come out of a civet sales. So anyone who's branding $80 cup of coffee in New York and L.A. and San Francisco, that's really just selling off-the-shelf Colombian coffee beef.

You can actually have a... You can actually have a test. The other thing that I'm more excited about is, you know, you do have this ethical crisis with the caging and mistreatment of these animals. Yes. Well, if you could, like... identify the key microbial players and the chemical output, you could make fake ones of this,

just how we make fake diamonds now, so we don't need blood diamonds. And you could then sell these for a lot less, and without the ethical dilemma. Without K-Jing civics. Knowing humans, they'll still pay the premium for the real shit. For the real stuff. As they say.

The real stuff. The literal real shit. The literal real shit, that's what I mean. Yeah. But I think it's still pretty cool. No, that that is, so I, again, I think I'd only ever heard of this one time. And I was like, I think coffee is terrible. I mean, I was from a colonial country.

So tea is my, yeah, same, same. Chai. It is my thing. Yeah, chai tea. I'll take a little Earl Grey, a little u-long. However, I understand coffee is what most people like to drink as their hot drink. That's right. Or their cold drink.

Yeah. A nice iced chai tea latte is. is quite nice. But this, this is, it's good to know because I will never be buying a cup of civet coffee.

Yeah, I don't think it's needed. But we now have like the path to move from this. Maybe if they make the fake one, I'll get it. I'll get it. Right.

Right. And, and also being able to call out frauds. Funny. Great, great heartwarming story. I thought that was funny. Just make sure.

Because out of nature, uh, scientific reports. Look. And they were like, yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.

Pretty good coffee. Yeah. We're going to wrap. wrap up with a nice physics-defying story out of our local favorite UCLA. We literally can almost not go through one week without the UC system being one of our stories. This week it was two of our stories. That's right. We started with UCSD.

This story is about new tech that's making our telescopes see things that really shouldn't be possible. Yeah. And this is out of the astrophysical journey. letters. I'm super excited about this story. Yeah, this is a pretty, pretty crazy story. It's out of the UCLA astrophysics department, along with a bunch of other institutions. What they've done is hack the telescope and have sharper views into the universe. Okay. And they hacked it to the point where even I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay? They have, they have a line that I'll get to in their paper that I was like, What are you talking about?

Okay, so the goal is always higher angular resolution. You want to be able to resolve smaller and smaller things. The epitome of that is the Event Horizon Telescope, which gave us that beautiful view of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the black hole in M86, which is a far, far away galaxy. You're looking at a thing that's about the size of a solar system, maybe several solar systems, but it's millions of light years away. Right. It's insane.

It's not close. Yeah, it's not close. It's something like, I mean, I think somebody was saying something like the head of a pin or they're resolving a quarter on the Empire State Building if you're looking from Los Angeles. Right. Resolution is what that means. How fine detail can you resolve something in the night sky? And we want to always push this as far as possible. This is new work that came out of the UCLA Astrophysics Department. what they've done is demonstrate sub-diffraction-limited

astronomical measurement. Okay? And that key thing is what got me, sub-difraction-limited. So what does that mean? Okay. There is a limit when it comes to the resolution that you can have with light. Okay.

It's dependent on the wavelength, and it's dependent on the size of your aperture. It's called a Raleigh limit. If you've got two points of light that are really close together, as they are on the right-hand side, then they're going to look like one point of light, and I won't be able to resolve them differently. On the other hand, if I have two points that are a little bit farther apart,

then I can resolve them because their Gaussian peaks, this sort of like envelope of stuff, it's not technically Gaussian. It's like this other function called the airy function. But in any case, they don't overlap enough. I can resolve the two as separate things, right? Yes. How far apart they need to be an angle.

It's not actually distance, right? Because if something's closer, then they need to be closer away. If they're farther away, then they could be really far. It's the angle that matters. It's like the angle between them, right? And how far away they can be in terms of angle is determined by something called the Raleigh criterion, which is what we just saw. It's a ratio between the wavelength and the diameter, okay? Wavent, divided by diameter times some constant, which has to do with the shape of your aperture.

Usually it's 1.22 because your apertures are usually round. So the bigger the wavelength, the larger this angle has. has to be. Right. And that makes sense, right? Because if the wavelength is really large, then, you know, we've looked at large waves that try to go across a rock, they get unbothered. Yes.

Because the large waves will just go through. The smaller waves are the ones that'll bend. Yes. And that bending is what actually gives us any type of information. Yes. Also, the larger, the diameter of your lens, the smaller you can resolve. Yes. Right.

That makes sense. That's why we have big telescopes. That's why have these giant, massive telescope. massive telescope. Big, big mirrors and lens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the reasons is light gathering, but the other reason is so that we can have a giant sort of diffraction thingy.

Yeah. That, like, lets us resolve. Yes. Okay. And the one that they're doing here, they're using the 8.2 meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii. That thing, you know, if we take the wavelength of light to be around 656 nanometers, the diffraction limit there with the 8.2 meter.

2.2 meter Subaru telescope is 20 milli arc seconds. Okay. Okay. And to think about arc seconds, it's like you got degrees, from degrees, then you get minutes. From minutes, you get seconds, and then from seconds is divided into a thousand arc seconds. So it goes 60, 60, then 1,000. Okay.

It's extremely small. It means if we were to look at Pluto right now from Earth. Yes. Pluto would be a fifth the size of that angle. So Subaru telescope could actually tell Pluto and Karen apart. part. Oh, yeah. The two,

Pluto and it's moon. Moon. That's, because, because its resolution is, is smaller than Pluto's. That's, that's great nice.

Pluto's about 100 arc seconds. And this thing's resolution is 20 milli arc seconds, 0.2 times 100, right? Yep. It's a fifth of that. Yep. Okay.

Okay. There's a bunch of problems, right? The other problem that gets to us is not just rally, rally thing, which is just physics. Yeah.

Right? Like even the Hubble has this problem. James Webb has this problem. The other thing is we're under the earth atmosphere and the earth's atmosphere causes the twinkling of stars it also causes the twinkling of distant lights if you're on top of a mountain right because all the earth's atmosphere has this turbulent packets of warm air and then cold air and highly dense and then lower dense so the light is going to is going to start moving around before it gets to your detector interacting with the atmosphere

on its way to the exactly capturing it with yeah exactly and so and so the resulting disk of your point source, let's say if you're trying to look at a star, it's going to go up by 500 to 1,000 milliarck seconds. It's going to be 25 to 50 times worse than that theoretical limit. And so what we can do is we can do something called adaptive optics. We can correct by making a fake star. Here what you're seeing is the Keck Telescope. And there's two lasers pointing out at where the telescope is looking.

and it's creating a fake star there. The trick is the following. You've got a fake star that looks like any other star, but we know that it came from our laser, so it should be stationary. The star and the stuff that I'm looking at could be moving and it could have dynamics, but I know that the laser that I'm pointing

is definitely straight. And the laser is going through the same bit of atmosphere that the starlight is coming in. So if I can change, if I have some kind of deformable, mirror, right, that is taking that starlight and right in the middle, I have like little ways in which I can change the shape of that mirror. In order to keep that laser stationary, that's going to cancel out the effects of that

column of the atmosphere. Makes total sense. I have to say this because I would be remiss if we didn't. We're in between photos six and seven on the show notes. Yeah. And you literally, and I literally didn't say, oh, God. But still don't understand that. But the point you're saying is because we have a fixed point from the lasers in the sky that we can then measure and basically remove the impacts of the atmosphere on how we're detecting the other stretch, because we have a fixed point that we control.

Yes. That then can remove the noise that comes from the atmosphere. Exactly. And then we can finally get to that diffraction limit. Got it. Okay? We can finally get to what the telescope is truly capable of given Raleigh criterion. And here what we're seeing is the center of our Milky Way in infrared.

On the left is without adaptive optics, and on the right is with adaptive optics. My goodness. You can see the huge change. This is how Andrea Gaz won the Nobel Prize. This is crazy. For listeners who are not watching the video, and I encourage you to go to YouTube because we always have graphics for this. On the left, it basically looks like a gradient, a red-orange gradient. With blobs.

It's just a massive blob. And maybe 20 blobs. There's no discrete shape of any kind. It's just like a sauce. On the right, you can see very, very. discrete points of light multiple. There's maybe... Even in the zoomed in version, right?

There's an inset. And you can see in the inset, there's like... It's incredibly high fidelity comparatively. And here, when you're looking at something called Sagittarius A-star, and the stars around that compact object. And if we were to make a movie out of this, you'd see all of the stars going around around an invisible point. Right?

And that invisible point is our super... massive black hole. Yep. And that's, this is why Andrew Giz at UCLA won the Nobel Prize. UCLA has had an incredible

history of, um, imaging techniques. Okay. They've, they've, they've, they've got like two floors

dedicated in the, um, Knitzen Hall, I think, to just getting imaging to, the next level. And this is the next sort of, I mean,

LA is, the home of Hollywood. It is, right? Yeah. So that is, that's pretty funny. So,

so you can see now, right? Adoptive optics is insane. Yes. That's a big deal. The other thing that we can do is not just adaptive optics. We can make the telescope size bigger without actually making the telescope bigger. The effective size.

You've seen this. The VLA, you've been to the VLA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A very large array. Yeah, very large array in New Mexico. A giant 27-mile-long radio telescope made of smaller telescopes that are all coordinated and they can sense the time in which the light came. They can have them interfere. And so the light gathering power is not as much.

You're not gathering as much light, but your resolution is limited by how far away your telescopes are. Right? Yeah, yeah. Now, with the radio, it's easier to do because the radio waves are slower. Yes. With visible light, it's harder. But actually, the gold standard right now is in Mount Wilson.

It's called a Kara array. It's six one meter telescopes all along the mountain that you can see over there. The baseline is 330 meters, so about three football fields wide. Yes. It's effectively a visible optical light telescope that is three football fields wide. And with that, you can achieve an angular resolution of 0.2 micro arc seconds, which is insane because you can now image other stars like this. Jesus. This is a star called Altair.

It revolves really fast on its axis, which is why it's got this like really, really, big grapefruit bulge on the equator because it's revolving so fast. And because in the equator, you can also see that it's dimmer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, like, that gas is farther away from the equator compared to the pole. Yep. So it's a little bit dimmer, right? This is a single star that we're imaging like this.

Yeah, that's incredible. It's incredible. We've also, with the Kara array, we've been able to see sunspots on other stars. So star spots on other stars. with the Kara Ray. And it was really cool because the last time I went up there was for one of these, they have classical music concerts at Mount Wilson in the telescope dome. And I, for the longest time, thought that nighttime astronomy was dead at Mount Wilson

because of the light pollution from Los Angeles. Nighttime astronomy had been retired and all they did was solar astronomy. But no, Kara was up there. six small one meter telescopes all along the mountain. They route their light through vacuum tubes. Which is crazy. And then they have a central array where they make them interfere and actually get that resolution. It was cool.

Yeah. That's really cool. Astronomy, cutting edge astronomy is still alive and well in Mount Wilson. And beautiful, sunny Los Angeles. Los Angeles, where it all started. So this paper's profound claim. So we've gone through, you know, rally limit, which is just the physics of light waves.

Yes. And we've gone through the atmosphere and so on and so forth. Yes. The core claim that got me thinking about what this paper was, they said the rally criterion is not fundamental. So it's like Jack Sparrow being like, it's more like guidelines. Right. Like not like, like I was like, what are you talking about? I thought the rally criterion, I learned this in undergrad and I thought that was it.

Yeah, right. Right. Insane. So here's the thing. The idea is like there, previously this was viewed as a fundamental limitation. Yeah. At a physics level.

Right. Then I started reading. So the Raleigh Criterion assumes the following. The only thing that you're sensitive to is the intensity of the light. Okay. Okay. You've got a telescope. You've got a CCD in the back.

The telescope creates an image. The CCD then tells how much intensity of light is coming from this direction, this direction. and it creates an image. But light is an electromagnetic wave, and there is phase information. Okay. Right?

Because the electromagnetic wave is coming at you. At some point, it's going to be up. At some point, it's going to be down this way. Right. There's a phase. There's a timing that the light is coming through. And if you can extract the timing, then you have both parts of the wave.

You have the amplitude, which is the intensity, which you already had. And you also have the timing in which that wave packet came in. Yes. Right? Yes. And so now it's kind of like, with a complex number, right?

A complex number, as I said the other day, it's a clock that has a length and it has a phase. Yes. We were only sensitive to the length of this thing with the CCD. What these guys are doing now is they're getting sensitive to the phase of that light,

creating much more information out of that single resolution. I have the existing system that's already there. Yes. Which is like a key idea here. They're adding another little piece of equipment. Right.

Instead of the CCD, they have this. thing that we're going to talk about. But that thing is now going to capture all of this additional information. And what's happening is they're dividing up the light into its notes, into its musical notes. Like when you listen to a musical note, let's say a chord that has a C and a G, that's three different piano keys that are put down, right? Yes. How does your ear hear it?

Your ear actually hears the three different notes. The way it's doing it is there's hardware inside of our ear that's in the cochlea, The cochleas is this curled up little thing. That's a hardware part of our ear. And what it does is it's made out of cells of different thickness. The lower frequency, the base notes, are going to vibrate the cells with the big thickness. And the higher frequency are going to vibrate the thinner, smaller cells. So where in this spiral the cells are getting excited tells you which piano notes are being played.

Okay? Our ear has hardware that is breaking down the. the sound that is coming in into its respective modes, as you would say, into its respective like components. Okay? We're going to do the same thing with the light that's coming through a telescope. Okay. What we have is we've got a wave guide that takes in the light that's coming in from the telescope.

Yes. Okay. And then what it's going to do is make it go through this fiber optic sort of chassis. Okay. And all of that multimodal, the sound that's coming from an instrument, It's going to be broken down into these modes. Yes. Into each individual fiber optic cable.

Yes. Okay. And so you're decomposing the light field into a basis of what are the notes that make up that light field. Which also changes over time. Yes. And each of those notes has a certain phase to it, right? Because some of the notes are going to be arriving a little bit later. Some of them earlier.

Some of them are going to be louder than the others. And so if you go to the next one, we'll have, this is what the light notes look like. On the left-hand side over here, we've got the actual image. Let's say it's a dot with a ring around it or something like that. That can be broken up into a dot in the center. Then there's maybe two lobes this way.

There's two lobes this way. And what we can do is we can say, what are the modes, which are these individual notes, how do they add up to make the image that I'm seeing? That's what that's what that deconstruction is doing. You know what this looks like? For any video or film editors that are listening,

it looks like the color panel on DaVinci Resolve when you're color correcting your video footage. It gives you the color wheels of all these different permutations. It literally looks just like it. It's actually hilarious. It's kind of similar in that sense, right? It's like it's extracting this like low information, right? All the stuff that makes it up.

This is only really possible if you look at very simple objects, for example, a single star, or like stuff around a single star. If you wanted to image the Eagle Nebula or something, this wouldn't really work. That's fair. But the mathematics is simple because the source is simple. And because the source is simple, I only need to worry about the first like 20 notes. I got you. I don't need to worry about, because you can, I mean, in theory, you can recreate any image

using like just a bunch of notes like this. But in practice, it's going to get difficult. That makes sense. With a simple objective, which is just we're looking at a star, we want to resolve the stuff in the star and around the star very, very nicely. That's what we can do. And the key principle is the phase information of that input is now converted into a measurable intensity difference between all of these different notes, right?

If the star's position, for example, it shifts, then one of those fiber optic inputs is going to be brighter than the other. If it ships the other way, then another fiber optic input is going to be brighter, right? Yes. And the raw data has gone from being a CCD to now it's not a picture of the, the star, but it's 38 different spectra in each of these different modes. Okay?

So it's like how how loud was this note at this frequency? Yes. So to speak. So to speak, right? Right. This is, but that's the best way that I can describe it. We're trying to distill it into an analogy that doesn't require us to go through more. Yeah, go through all of the, all of the data. But it's like, it's like they're basically got 19 different notes and two polarizations,

because polarization is also important, right? The electric field oscillating this way or this way tells us something about what the thing is that is producing that light. So it's 19 different nodes all in two different polarizations to get 38 different spectra. The idea is before we were looking at just like one box and now we have like 19 boxes with two flavors

to analyze the same object we were looking at before that was just one box. Yes, exactly. And the one box, sure, had the direct information of how bright this thing was. But now we're just sophisticating it, right? We're no longer taking, let's say, just how loud the sound is. But what are the thingies on top?

Another analogy this makes me think of is like, for DJs, when you get a track, right, the track is like one audio waveform. And it has the drums, it has the vocals, it has everything as one waveform. Exactly. Now there's all these AI tools that allow you to separate out the drums from the vocals, from the sense, and now you have it as these individuals, and like there is information when you're looking at just the individual instrument that is hard to decipher when you're looking at the single way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is very similar to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think that's a good analogy, right? It's taking that aggregate light and it's decomposing it into these individual modes. Yeah, yep, you know? Yep. And what you can do now, the second thing that you can do is this star,

it's got two different. So this star specifically, what they're looking at is a star in Canis Minoris, Beta CMI. It's 162 light years away. It's surrounded by gas of hydrogen. Canis Minoris is one of the two dogs that are the hunting companions of Orion,

the hunter. And so this star specifically, it's got a gas of hydrogen around it, and that gas is spinning so fast that we can see a Doppler shift. We're on one side, it's blue shifted because it's coming at us. And on the other side, it's red shifted because it's going away. Right.

So what we want to do is resolve this gas cloud. Okay? There's two ways to do this. There's two steps. The first is to say, okay, all of the light, most of the light is coming from the star, right? There's going to be some jitter because of the adaptive optics. Yes. Remember when we talked about the episode about AI being used for LIGO?

for the gravitational observatory. And I told you that when you have these control systems, you can eliminate low-frequency noise. Yes. But you're going to inject high-frequency noise. Yes. Right? This thing is injecting high-frequency noise, right?

So that there's going to be some jitter of the star there, right? What you can do is you can capture that response map of a single star that's basically telling you how the instrument and this modal system that we have is responding to that jitter at every single point that the star is at. Okay? So you've got a response map effectively being like, this is what the astronomical jitter from the star is. Yes.

Yes. That's from all of the light. Yes. Then what you do is you look at something called the H-Alpha emission line. Okay. The H-alpha emission line is because of quantum mechanics. Hydrogen has discrete levels. Yes.

Right? And whenever the hydrogen atom trans- whenever the hydrogen atom goes from the n equals 3 to n equals 2 energy, it releases this red light that's right at 650 nanometers about, I think 656 nanometers, okay? So if we look only at that frequency of light, we're going to see the gas cloud, the accretion, the disk of hydrogen around the star.

So what we can do is we can take an image in the H-Alpha line. We can take an image with all the light, subtract the two, and we'll get a nice hydrogen gas cloud. That is surrounding the star. And so it's like not just that, okay, we're now able to basically make the stars'

structure and the gas cloud structure discrete using this methodology. Yes, exactly. And we can do it because this is sub-diffraction, right? Right, right. This is where we're going way inside what Rale even thought was possible. Right?

Yes. That, okay, that tracks. It's pretty cool. And what they found is with this technique, they found that the disc was lopsided. It's not completely like a plate. It's not symmetric. There's like a little bulge to it that they actually saw.

And there's a non-zero shift in that accretion disk, and that means that now the modelers can go and be like, okay, how do we get something like this, right? What is causing that non-zero shift? Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's really cool. It proves that you know, you've got this compact. It's cost effective.

You just like stick it in the back of the telescope. Right. Right. Where the light was coming in. Now it goes through this other thing. It's a bolt on. It's like a bolt on. Yeah.

Like you don't have to rebuild any of these systems from scratch. You can add this as a as an add-on. And it just receives the existing feed and then processes. Yeah. And then process it in its own way. And there's, I mean, there's so much more that we can do with this. You can put this on a space telescope, for example. Because those guys are also limited by Rally, but maybe not anymore.

And the last photo that we had, Photo 19, I just wanted to dwell on a little bit. There you can see the gas cloud and you can see the clear Doppler. Yes, red blue shift. Red blue shift, right? Between the part that's coming away from us and the part that's coming towards us. The blue is where it's coming towards us and the red is where it's going away. And that scale bar is one micro arc second, right? And I told you before that it used to be 20.

Now you've resolved stuff to that. To one. And you can even see the lobsidedness that you were talking about earlier in this, too. This is unbelievable. I think it's a new dawn of like, you know, higher than rally resolution. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I mean, I think it's going to be really, really cool.

Again, this is where we talk about this all the time. There's a compounding happening right now of these fundamental either techniques, methodologies, tools, combination of these things that are now not only allowing us to take our existing tooling and make it better, take our existing data sets and analyze it differently. But giving us a totally new way

in which we see the world around us. This was a good story. I think it's really cool. This is really cool. We covered, this was a super episode. We hit four stories. I don't think we're going to hit two hours this episode. We went through it quick.

We started with UCS. We're mass-producing camouflage from octopus, octopi. Yeah. This was out of UCSD. By hijacking bacteria. By hijacking the factory, the biosynthesis. We're now telling these organisms, you've got to go through the factory to make what we want before you can make what you want. Yeah.

Just crazy. This is not an ethics podcast. That was a nature biotechnology. Our second story was about these new hunting techniques in Orcas, both out of CSU. Monterey Bay and the protection, conservation, pelagacia, association, civil, AC. That was in frontiers of marine science.

That was a cool story because a lot of news, there's been a lot of news about the yachts being crushed by all of the orcas, but understanding culture might not be specific to human beings. There's this non, you know, this cross pod communication process happening. Yeah. Our third story was about civet, shitted coffee

and nature scientific reports out of the University of Kerala. That was hilarious. That was fun. I'm never buying $80 coffee. No. I barely buy $9 coffee, which is what it is now in L.A. And we ended with our second UC story of the day out of UCLA.

We are now able to take our telescopes and see more and deeper into the universe in a way we have not before. The imagery difference that we showed was crazy. Because it's like obviously, you don't have to be someone who knows. You can look at one and look at the other. be like, oh wow, that's crazy. That's better.

Yeah, that's really far away and okay, we can see it that well. Yeah. I know when I'm trying to zoom in on my iPhone and I see all the

Samsung Galaxy commercials about how you can go zoom into a skyscraper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic episode. As always, we appreciate you guys joining us.

Please, if you've made it this far, there's very few of you, but if you have made it this far, I want you to comment either Sivit, Waguan, Krishna in the comments. So we know you've made it this far.

Please subscribe, share it with a friend. We're trying to really push science again. The shutdown is over. Yes. Which might mean we'll get some scientific funding back in the mix. Yes. We still need to do more. We cannot fall behind.

Always. I'm joined, as always, by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Chowdery. My name is Lesterneri. This is from First Principles. We'll see you guys next week. Relax and let Ralph's delivery. handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items,

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