Instant Genius - Matt Parker, Helen Arney and Steve Mould: What links coffee, snowflakes and frogs?

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Today‘s podcast episode is a special one, with not one, not two, but three fantastic guests. We’ve teamed up with the three spoken nerds – Matt Parker, Steve Mould and Helen Arney – to bring you an episode of unnecessary details all about… ice. Steve explains how instant coffee is made, Matt gets irate about eight-pointed 'snowfakes' and Helen talks cryonic freezing. To hear more from the three spoken nerds, check out their new Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail. The song was “You And Me And Walt Disney”, produced by Helen Arney and Olly the Octopus and you can download it for free along with all the songs from Unnecessary Detail podcasts at helenarney.bandcamp.com Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription [this will open in a new window] This podcast was supported by brilliant.org, helping people build quantitative skills in maths, science, and computer science with fun and challenging interactive explorations. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Andrew Hunter Murray and Dan Schreiber: Is there really no such thing as a fish? Matt Parker: What happens when maths goes horribly, horribly wrong? Helen Russell: What does it mean to be happy? ? Robin Ince: What's inside the mind of a comedian? Dara Ó Briain: Can you Finding the fun in science? Ryan North: How do you invent everything? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed.

That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets.

They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. Help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank has a line out the door.

Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio,

alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. It's been a question for humans for a long time,

but only recently if we started to crack the maths and the chemistry behind it. Matt, is this only because bees haven't been able to write scientific papers? I maintain the honeycomb conjecture is the record, the earth record for longest time between discovery and proof of a mathematical result. Because bees cracked it, what, millions of years ago? How old are bees? I don't know, that's biology. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast

from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. Today's podcast episode is a special one

with not one, not two, but three fantastic guests. We've teamed up with the three spoken nerds, Matt Parker, Steve Mould and Helen Arnie to bring you an episode of unnecessary details all about ICE. I'll let them introduce themselves as they talk to editorial assistant Amy Barrett. I'm here this morning with Matt Parker. Hello. Steve Mold. Hi. And Helen Arnie.

Hello. They are the three spoken nerds. And they've recently launched a new podcast. Matt, can you tell me about? the podcast of a necessary detail. I mean, it's all there in the title, to be entirely honest, where I mean, all of us, we have a background both in something sufficiently sciencey. The other two are physicists. I tend to, you know, be far more mathematical. But we also have a background in comedy, like sound up comedy and performing. And I think what we realize is both of those,

what they have in common is an obsession with detail and getting down to the finer nuances or just paying attention to the small, you know, the very close-up resolution that a lot of people ignore. And that's what we want to delight in in the podcast, because too often you get told that the details are boring, they don't matter, you want kind of a broad brush approach to something. We're like, no, sometimes things only get really interesting if you get very close and you get almost lost in the tiny details. And so we figured if we just call it a podcast of our necessary detail, it's all there in the title. And people can't complain that there was too much detail because that's what they've signed on

for. So by setting the bar at unnecessary with kind of, it's insurance against heckling, I guess, is the short way to put it. So we'll pick a word or a topic or something that we're interested or obsessed by and we'll take turns looking at something in an undue level of detail. And so your podcast episodes, you've done words like rings. table, stick and fuel. And I'm really excited to be doing a word with you today. But Steve, what would the three of you be doing right now if it weren't for the pandemic?

Oh, we'd be doing live shows. Yeah. So we're all stand-up comedians. That's how we met, actually. We met on the stand-up comedy circuit and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and all that sort of stuff. And we were lamenting, you know, because we've got these science backgrounds sort of complaining about, you know, you can't do this sciencey material at jungleers. or wherever, you know, or the comedy store. Wow, that is a dated reference now. Yeah, it is now, is it. You know when we were last active on the comedy circuit?

Yeah, so, yeah, that's the kind of names we were banding about back then. But so we decided to start our own comedy night. It was all about science. And, you know, that way your audience comes to you. And we were very surprised to find that there was an audience for it. So, yeah, we ended up doing tour shows around the country and all this sort of stuff. our main thing, our main thing now is these regular new material nights that we do every month, or we used to back in the before times. And that was just a lovely way to explore these ideas.

And we can go into a bit more detail on the podcast. So when we confirmed this podcast collaboration, the science focus team took to Twitter, because that's always a great idea, to find suggestions for a word for us to go into unnecessary detail today. We had suggestions of bulls, vaccine, entropy, and even unnecessary itself. But Helen, what word have we chosen to discuss? Well, we've got a name.

Do you honest, I was surprised that no one came out with Topic-y-McTopic face. That's what happens when you ask the internet. Wordy-Mexicon, yeah. But we went through all the words and we picked a word that has got something that each of us had been obsessed about at some point recently. And that word is ice. I'm not sure I could say I've had an obsession with ice. But Steve, what does that mean to you?

Yeah, it's funny that you're the odd one out in this scenario, isn't it? This is a bit of unnecessary detail for when you've got an awkward silence around the coffee machine when you eventually get back to the office. It's about freeze drying. It's an amazing process. You've probably heard of freeze-dried coffee. You also get freeze-dried fruit as well. If you buy a fancy cereal, the fruit in there,

maybe you've got a freeze-dried raspberry or something like that. And it's completely counterintuitive to the way you normally dry things. Like how do you dry clothes, for example? What's your process for drying clothes? Hanging it out in one way. Hang it out. Yeah, put it in the tumble dryer. Basically expose it to heat, right?

And then the water evaporates, you end up with dry clothes. but with freeze drying, it's completely the opposite. You take a raspberry, for example, you put it in a box, you seal the box, and you lower the temperature to minus 40 degrees centigrade, which in Fahrenheit, by the way, interesting fact, is minus 40 degrees. It's the only temperature that is the same in Fahrenheit and centigrade. Extra bonus, interesting detail for you there. Can I just add? Yeah.

Can I say, when you say, how would you normally dry clothes, my method is to, for you? forget about it in the washing machine. Yeah, perfect. And overnight, it will eventually dry itself out, which what you're describing is putting stuff in a box and forgetting about it is pretty much my approach to drying clothes. Oh, well done. You're kind of freeze drying your clothes. So anyway, yeah, so you freeze the fruit.

So you've got ice in there now. Because a raspberry is mostly water. Now it's mostly ice. And then crucially, you suck all the air out of the box. So you lower the pressure. And ice does this weird thing at very low pressures. If you bring the temperature back up again to room temperature, instead of melting, it turns directly into a gas. So it skips the liquid phase completely.

The solid ice turns directly into a gas. It's called sublimation instead of melting or boiling or any of that sort of stuff. Sublimation is the word. And what that does is it leaves holes behind where the ice was. So the structure of the raspberry or the strawberry or whatever it is remains. And you'll know this. Like if you pick a bit of the fruit out of your fancy cereal, you can bounce it up and down in your hand. It's really light and fluffy because it's full of tiny pockets of air.

That's actually really useful for instant coffee. So freeze-dried coffee, it's really porous. So it's really instant. When you add the hot water, it just gets into all those pores and it dissolves really, really quickly. There's actually two types of instant coffee. there's the there's the horrible kind and the really horrible kind the the the the the the the difference well this is the thing it doesn't matter like for me it's like drinking coffee in the morning not that I do it anymore but it's like it's just what's the quickest way to get

caffeine molecules attached to the adenosy receptors in my brain and frankly I'm still asleep so I can't even taste it but um yeah so the the the horrible kind is the freeze dry stuff. The really horrible kind is the spray dry stuff. And when you spray dry coffee, that's like the traditional way of drying something. You do it with heat. So you get this coffee. You spray it into a hot box and all the water evaporates. The problem we're doing it that way is with all that heat there, some of those aromatic molecules will escape the coffee as well. It's those aromatic molecules that give coffee its flavor. So when you spray dry coffee, you're removing a lot of the flavor, whereas when you freeze dry coffee, you're only removing the water, those flavor molecules

remain in the coffee. And you can tell if you go into a shop, the expensive coffee, if you look at the actual granules, they're these light brown chips, whereas the spray dry stuff are these horrible dark clumps of powder, and they're also much cheaper. That's how you can tell the difference. So it's an amazing innovation in terms of coffee. It actually wasn't invented by coffee makers. It was invented like a lot of things in a military context. In World War II, it was used as a way to preserve blood serum. Though actually, that's a reinvention. It was used even by the Inca's in the 15th century. They would hike their crops up a mountain. So the pressure is lower up there. It's colder up there, and their crops would freeze dry. So the method's actually been around for ages. In fact,

you can freeze dry stuff even in your freeze age, just it happens much more. slowly. It happens quickly at higher temperatures, but slowly at low temperatures. So in your freezer, that's actually freeze-dried chicken on the surface of your chicken breast. Wow. I actually fed my daughter freeze-dried beef burgers earlier this week. Wow. I was doing science at tea time. I never knew it. Thank you, Steve. You know when there's like a best before date on frozen produce? that's not because it's going to go off and make you sick. Like bacteria and other pathogens aren't going to grow in the freezer. It's just that it becomes unpleasant after a while because of all the freeze drying that happens.

I would say on behalf of the hipster fancy coffee drinkers of the world. Are you in that group? I am. I'm on the fridge, but I'm definitely in. In fact, while we're recording, I'm drinking coffee that I use my hand grinder to grind up freshly roasted beans, single sauce, etc. However, even though

your hipster coffee drinkers would never go near freeze-dried coffee, if you told them it was hand-carried upper mountain and left to freeze-dry by some traditional tribe, that is the only way you'll sell freeze-dried instant coffee to hipsters. Do you know, I'm quite disappointed

because I was listening to your Rings episode earlier and you all sounded like were eating donuts or bagels or something very enjoyable. I was hoping that for ice we might at least have some ice cream delivered in time for our podcast. Or some cocktails, maybe. But perhaps I didn't want that. Hey, you're just going to have to wait for my section.

Am I going to get a knock on the door and get some ice cream turn up? I know you're going to watch me eating an ice cream on Microsoft Teams. Talk to it. Other video conference software is available. So Steve, one of our episodes of the podcast wasn't necessarily detail talks about decaf coffee, which as Matt will strongly argue, makes coffee so much worse. So we go into how decaffeination works and all the different ways that it does make coffee much worse. So if you took decaf coffee and then sprays,

dried it instead of free dried it, would that make it the worst coffee in the universe? Oh my goodness. Yeah, I think that is the worst coffee. Wow. Wow. I can have to try that. We've reached a new low. But if we know it makes it taste so bad, why do we do it?

Is there not another method of preservation that we could be doing to make good coffee instant? Yeah, if only coffee already came in a small bean-shaped form, that's convenient. to store transport and then turn into a beverage. Wouldn't that be something? Yes, very instant. Okay, it does take me a good 20 minutes, but... Here's an interesting fact as well. Instant coffee only really took off in countries that didn't already have a strong coffee drinking tradition. So, freeze-dried coffee or instant coffee is not really a thing.

In America, it is in the UK because we never really had a strong coffee drinking tradition. We had a tea drinking tradition. So, you know, our coffee is bad, but America's tea is bad. And I would actually argue that America's tea is more bad than our coffee is bad. Wow. So I think we win. We do get a lot of people writing into us at the podcast. And now you will enjoy this too, Amy.

who tell us that we haven't put enough detail in but I feel like what Steve has just mentioned is the kind of detail that is going to cause a lot more letters in your mailbag than normal and I'm going to forward them all onto you Steve to answer moving from coffee over to Snowfakes have I got that right?

Snowfakes, correct so we're not talking about Liberals or Monarch millennials and the insults that we get online, what are we talking about, Matt? Yeah, it's a shame that the word snowflake has now come with more baggage than it used to. So I've been running a campaign for many, many years against inaccurate snowflakes. And we're recording this as we are coming out of summer straight into autumn and winter is not far away. and people get upset when they see the first Christmas decorations going up. I get upset when I see the first snow fake going up,

which is some kind of decorative snowflake which doesn't have six points because all snowflakes have sixfold symmetry. They're hexagonal or they've got pointy bits, but they're always sixfold. Whereas if you go out in the world and you look at shop fronts or BBC two got this wrong a couple years ago with their Christmas decorations magazines. I don't think Focus magazine has ever fallen a foul of this. I can't imagine we would do. In my experience, exactly.

But you'll see eight pointed snowflakes everywhere. And you cannot have an eight pointed snowflake. So I started the hashtag snow fake. Other options are available. I'm not the first person to campaign about this. Foe flake is available. for those of you who prefer that. Because from a mass point of view,

six-fold symmetry is really nice, very neat, and not that hard to fold from a piece of paper. Hang on a second. So six-fold symmetry is when if you turn the thing through a sixth of a turn, it's like it looks how it was before you turned it, sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. So we define something as being symmetric in mathematics

if you can do something to it, and it looks the same. Okay. So you turn it one-sixth of a full-s circle, so pie on three, and it'll look exactly the same. Or you can turn it over and six different ways. And it will look like if I turned a square through a quarter of a turn, it would look the way it was before. Exactly. And I only ever thought about this from a mathematical point of view. Several years ago, we were doing one of our live nerd comedy shows and the science writer

Philip Ball was on the bill. And they were talking about the chemistry background to this. And I'd never really thought that much about the chemistry side. Typical. Apart from, I know, apart from occasionally when I'm tweeting about inaccurate snowflakes, someone will be like, oh, but what about? And then name some obscure form of crystal structure that ice can take on in some weird context. And a tweet is never big enough for me to reply.

well, first of all, I don't know enough chemistry, but secondly, it's not big enough for me to reply with all the details for why that is ridiculous and why I'm not counting that. But in an attempt to kind of respond to that and to kind of crystallize my thoughts, I did look into why water forms. Sorry, I just got that.

Is it the lag on? Thank you. That's not a lag on the virtual meeting. It's a lag in Helen's brain. It is. There's a lag on the quality of my joke structure. If you do hear any squeaks, it's not me. It might be me, but it's probably the baby. Also, in Helen's defence, my joke structure has a lot of inclusions, so it's fine.

Oh, God. No. Good times. So, everyone says, look, water, when it freezes, gives you a hexagonal structure because of the shape of a water molecule. which people can picture from like classic science diagrams or what they might remember from school, looks like a little boomerang. It's a little kind of little angled,

uh, top half of a triangle, let's say. And that's because, well, we would say mathematically it's the tetrahedral angle, because the oxygen in the middle has four kind of pairs of electrons, two of which have a hydrogen along from the right,

and the other two are just electrons on their own. And we can't see the other two. We only see the two with, hydrogens, and by C, I'm talking about like in diagrams or the structure, the molecule. And so it forms the angles you would in the center of a tetrahedron because it's four equally spaced points. Because the hydrogen behaves a bit differently to just the electrons by themselves in terms of how far away they are from the nucleus, it's actually slightly distorted. But the angle between the two hydrogens is not the tetrahedral, 109 and a half degrees.

It's this water 104 and a half degrees. And everyone says, okay, well, you get a bunch of those, and they form a hexagon. But the internal angle of a hexagon is 120 degrees, whereas the internal angle of a pentagon is 108 degrees, which is much, much closer. And so actually, water, if it's free to crystallize however it fancies, will form pentagonal rings, because that is much, much closer to the angle in a water molecule. What? So why does it happen then? What?

I know. And everyone's like, well, water always forms hexagons. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. If it's just forming rings in a liquid, there'll be pentagons. And I was like, that's amazing. That's crazy. It's only because of the way it then stacks into a lattice. And if you want to have something repeating and nice and neat, then it gets forced into a hexagonal structure.

And so the hexagonal shape you see in a snowflake is not strictly because. of the shape of the water molecule, like we're always told, it's because of the arrangement of lots of water molecules when they get packed into a regular lattice. And I thought, oh, that's incredible. But that arrangement changes depending on the pressure and the temperatures. Like Steve was saying, if you cool ice down and you change the pressure, weird thing starts to happen to it. And several steps later, instant coffee. What I was interested in is what other types of would give you different shaped snowflakes. And a lot of people would mention ice structure number seven.

And chemists have named the different possible ice structures. They're up to something like 18, I think. It's ridiculous. And they're all at different pressures. And so ice structure seven, yes, you can get a cubic kind of square based. I'd be very careful because not face-centered cubic. That gets you back to hexagons. unbelievably. But you can get this much more cubic structure. However, it requires pressures of about

three gigapascals, which is like 30,000 times atmospheric pressure. So if we ever have a winter with a really high pressure system, oh, and actually conveniently humans, we can survive up to about 100. So there you go. We'll be dead. If there was any year that I thought that might be I mean, 2020, the way it's going, could be the year. Exactly. I feel like I'm jinxing it. And I'm like, well, if we have a winter with temperatures below negative 150 degrees Celsius, we might see some square ice flakes.

And everyone's like, well, this was the jerk who made it happen. But then there would be no one to tweet on the hashtag snow fake. So would it really happen? Exactly. Exactly. And so it's not going to happen. All these weird structures everyone throws at me. Unless you're on, well, unless you're at the bottom of the ocean on one of Jupiter's moons, or you're deep in the earth's crust where diamonds are forming.

Like, we don't naturally get these weird eye structures where you'd get snow forming. And so that's why I campaign against snow fakes. Please join in if you see them. Tweet with a hashtag snowfake. I always look forward to the first one of the season. What's interesting is because it's so much easier to fold paper with powers of two, so you get a lot of square, two squared, four, you get like a four-fold symmetry snowflakes that kids make, and you get eight because it's easier.

It's actually super easy to fold six-fold symmetry. Like to get that triangle in a bit of paper, not that difficult. I've got a YouTube video that goes into it. It's pretty straightforward. However, because kids always make eightfold ones and because parents will often make typos, you will see a bunch of parents accidentally using the hashtag snow fake, intending to compliment what their kids are doing. It just comes off really passive, aggressive. Oh, look at this amazing thing my kid made, hashtag snow fake.

Those accidental snow fake tweets are my favorite, but my second favorite is everyone documenting the ones out there. So name and shame people who get snowflakes wrong. Especially the kids, those idiots. I know. How are they going to learn? Then I'll get to learn. So if chemists have named the different types of ice, which ice do I have coming from my freezer?

What's the name of it? Oh, yeah. So they've, well, they've numbered the different types of ice, which I think is a superior form of naming. So I'm on board with that. So you'll have ice one, almost all. ice you come across as ice one, which is the classic kind of hexagonal arrangement. If there's another flavor of ice one, which probably tastes exactly the same, now that I say that,

which is under certain pressures or temperatures, because you get these things called phase diagrams, which will show you which combination of pressure and temperature will give you different types of ice. you can get the other one. So our classic ice is ice 1C sorry 1H but if you're not careful it can turn into ice 1C

but that will atmospheric normal conditions will not give you ice 1C except at very very high altitudes and so only in extreme situations it won't survive to the ground any ice you see

and you're not dead. is ice 1.8. And you're not a chemist in an ice lab. If you've got two snowflakes in front of you, one is 1H and the other is 1C, can you tell the difference just by looking? Well, one C, you probably won't get hexagonal symmetry. I'm now really nervous they pronounce it IC and IH

because they use Roman characters. Chemists. write in to BBC Focus with any complaint about my... And I'll forward them to math. So my mathematical guess is yes, but if I've learnt anything about chemistry, it's a mess. So there's probably a bunch of other real-world complications, which always ruin the wonderful mathematics. So I'm going to have to go with I don't know. So if that's six-fold symmetry, what else has got six-fold symmetry that I can see?

Oh, so six-fold symmetry is great in a lot of things where you want to pack things together well. So that's why a bees, their honeycomb, is a hexagonal cross-section. There's actually something called the honeycomb conjecture that hexagons are the best possible shape if you want to pack them together really well, but minimize the amount of edges you need for the space inside. But that wasn't proven to definitely be the best mathematical arrangement until 1999. So it was only a couple decades ago. And humans, we've been working on it for centuries.

It's only cracked very recently. So actually all these things involving arranging things in a nice, potentially regular way, we've been considering it for a long time. So actually the whole snowflake thing, why it's a hexagon, goes back to Kepler who wrote a thing about why snowflakes are hexagons in 1611,

but only very recently have we kind of got a proper understanding of why it forms in that particular arrangement. So it's been a question for humans for a long time, but only recently if we started to crack the maths and the chemistry behind it. Matt, is this only because bees haven't been able to write scientific papers. I maintain the honeycomb conjecture is the record, the Earth record for longest time between

discovery and proof of the mathematical result. Because bees cracked it, what, millions of years ago? How old are bees? I don't know. That's biology. I'm even worse at that than I am at chemistry. But then it took millions of years before a different organism proved that bees had it right all along.

The Star of David. just another example of something with six-fold symmetry. Thanks for joining in, Steve. Good to be here. Matt, can I ask, is there any way that an eight-fold snowflake could possibly exist in nature? So the reason I'm asking is because,

so when we were on lockdown and I was on maternity leave, I bought a lot of fabric, and you are very lucky that the topic of this show is not. But one of them, because it was 3 a.m., and I've no idea what I was doing, and I genuinely ordered some fabric off eBay in my sleep because I didn't realize I'd pressed buy. There's a great sleep.

Great butt purchase. This is true. Congratulations to any new parents who have also managed to buy things off the internet without realizing. Okay, and it arrived, and I thought it was snowflake fabric, and it has eight points.

And I now cannot use it unless you can tell me that there is some kind of eight-pointed, ice formation out there. Well, you've got two options. So you could argue in some extreme pressures and temperatures you'd get eight because even with our regular six, you sometimes, even with our regular six, you sometimes get 12 because two snowflakes love each other very much. And sometimes you can get three.

And that's just if things malform when the snowflake is originally crystallizing. So to get eight, I suspect what you'd need is either you might get it organically if there's something which crystallizes with a very regular cubic kind of square based structure. That might give you four, potentially eight, or if you only get four, one flake at a time, two of them could merge and that would give you eight. But they're pretty extreme situations. the normal way to talk out of it is to say it's not a piece of fabric with snowflakes on it. They're actually stars. And when you get that kind of whatever, the starring effect from a point source coming through the atmosphere, like a flare thing that makes it look pointy,

I'm prepared to accept you get eight pointed traditional stars. So I don't know if you can do a switch to say it's star fabric. I don't think my daughter's going to buy an Elsa costume with stars on, but I'm going to try it. No. Or you could just embroider the hashtag snow faith somewhere. That would fix it. That's a great idea. Sorted.

Solved the problem. Christmas is saved. Daffodils. Do they also have six-fold symmetry, Steve? They do. Well done. I thought my brain was working slowly and Steve is like, hmm. Hmm, random thing.

So bees aren't the only animal we're going to be talking about today. Have I got that right, Helen? Ah, yes. So my take on ice comes from the song that I have put at the end of this podcast. So in a podcast of Anastroa detail, we often finish with one of my scientifically accurate songs. And this song that I'm kind of donating to the science-focused podcast is one about, an obsession I had a while ago with cryonic freezing. And this is, I guess you couldn't call it a science topic particularly because it's more of a

philosophical topic. And the reason I wrote this song about cryonic freezing is because I met a professor at Oxford Literary Festival when we were doing a show together. He was a professor of philosophy though, right? And he had a tag around his neck saying the usual thing, if you're a cryonic sign-up, It says, you know, if I am dead, please call this number. And they come and they freeze his body. And I'm like, this is amazing that I finally met someone who has taken the philosophical bet

on whether science is going to be completely different in the future and will be able to revive a body filled with anti-freeze. So I've got this song about chronic freezing and you're going to hear it at the end and you'll find it all about that. But there's loads of details that never made it into the song. And that is all of the creatures and living things that already contain antifreeze. Oh. Oh. So you can freeze other creatures. Yeah. So in this, this song was about chronic freezing where, you know, your body gets filled with antifreeze and they get stored for a future time that at some point someone might be able to revive you. And if you're a philosopher and you ignore all the science, that's quite a good bet,

right? You pay some money every month into your kind of insurance policy that in the future, you'll be revived to a philosopher that seems like a pretty good bet, right? But on the other hand, there are already animals and creatures and plants that have antifreeze in some of the them, which is what helps them survive in cold temperatures. And I've got, I've got three that I've wanted to talk about. And they're ones that I couldn't manage to get into the song somehow. And I found out all about them at the time. And I've always wanted to be able to talk about them. The first one is grass, right? There are types of grass that are frost resistant because you can't move grass in the winter. And if it goes below freezing temperature, then it needs to survive, right? I've found it

I've only found this up because I was reading about some scientists who were trying to extract the antifreeze from inside the wheatgrass. And they basically spent the day mowing the lawn outside their research facility in order to harvest enough of this stuff. And it's an anti-freeze protein that's produced by the grass that inhibits the crystal growth. So the thing that causes the damage inside animal or plant cells is that when the water freezes into ice, it expands. And it's one of the only compounds that actually does that. Is that right, Steve?

It's not very common. I don't know if it's the only one. It's the only one I know of. It's certainly very, very rare anyway. And this is why your raspberries, when you freeze dry them, right? the water in the cells expands into ice, but then when your freeze-dried raspberries get freeze-dried, the structure is still there, but as soon as you add water again, they just turn into mush, don't they? Yeah, because the ice has broken down the cell, and it can't

survive that process. But Greek grass is able to produce antifreeze so that it doesn't die on a cold day. So that's number one. It might be outside your house or your office, if you're in an office, seems unlikely. But there's another one, Canadian tree frogs. Now, when I found out about these, this is amazing. When Canadian tree frogs in the winter reach temperatures of minus 10 or minus 15 degrees out in the wild, their skin freezes. If you drop a Canadian wood frog in the winter, it clunks. It doesn't bounce. It clunks. because it has an antifreeze that it produces inside its bloodstream. So the antifreeze proteins cause the blood to freeze. This is different from the grass stuff where the anti-freeze proteins there,

they stop the ice crystals forming, right? This is different. It actually encourages the blood to freeze. So it actually sucks the water out of the cells. And then the frog's liver produces all of this sugar and glucose, which then packs into the cells. So the result is a frog where the blood is frozen, but the cells are full of sugar and dehydrated. And that's how it survives. So you can freeze, like this frog can be freeze-dried. And then, and then when it thaws out, it's alive. And if I know, well, if there's anything like coffee, it's also going to taste terrible. But it would taste better than if it was spray dried.

Good point. That's how it survives. It kind of uses its blood to make sure that the blood gets frozen and that sucks the water out of the cells. So the cells don't burst because they're not full of ice. They're full of sugar rather than water ice. So they have this weird system. And it's kind of the opposite of a way that wheatgrass does it because that stops the cells. forming at all, the frog kind of redirects where the frozen ice happens in its body, so it manages

to survive. I want to take back my previous statement, because if the cells are now full of sugars, it might taste better. It could taste delicious. That is not to encourage anyone to try that. Anyone knows what a Canadian frozen tree frog tastes like. Please write in to BBC Science. I'm going to get so many emails.

So there's a third one which is probably the one that people have heard about before, which is the Antarctic fish. So in 1969, Arthur DeVries found when he was researching Arctic fish that they produce antifreeze in their bodies that can help them survive up to minus two degrees Celsius. So these are, I've had a go out pronouncing this word and people can tell me I forgot this right. Nototheniodes. Does everyone want to try that? Yeah, nototheniodes.

They're a type of Antarctic fish, like I think the pout fish is one of them, and they produce antifreeze glycoproteins, which stop them freezing in the sub-zero Antarctic waters. And the reason you might have heard about this is because that antifreeze glycoprotein was extracted and reproduced and used in ice cream. What? Yeah. I told you ice cream was going to happen at some point. Not in the way you think, right?

I've had a look. I actually went around Tesco this morning and I looked at every single packet of ice cream. And none of them have the ice structuring protein that is the name for this thing. Right. So it's fish antifreeze. And the way they get enough of it to put into ice cream is not. by like milking a fish. They don't just like squeeze a fish until enough comes out. They've found the part of the genetic code that creates the antifreeze. And they've done the same thing that they do with

insulin and food flavorings and stuff. They've inserted it into yeast. And then the yeast has gone and multiplied loads and loads and loads and also produce this antifreeze. And then they go ahead and harvest the antifreeze from the genetically modified yeast. It's in IEAWRILLI. It's in I cream in, at various points in time, it has been in ice cream in the USA and I think Australia and Brazil and places like that, you can't find it in European ice cream. And I don't know why. Regulations, probably. No, I do remember in Australia, fish ice cream. Why would you want antifreeze in ice cream? How does it help?

It seems completely counterintuitive. But it is the thing that the wheatgrass anti-freeze does, which is it makes smaller ice crystals. And the thing with ice cream is it's a combination of like milk proteins and fats and all of that stuff is a nice structure. And inside that you get ice crystals and air pockets. And those ice crystals and air pockets, it's that combination of those and the size and the structure that makes ice cream taste good. And weirdly, smaller ice crystals means better tasting ice cream. Ice cream starts to degrade as soon as it leaves the factory. So as it comes out of the factory, it's this lovely combination of tiny ice crystals,

tiny air pockets and all of that lovely fatty sugary stuff around it. But as it goes through time, the air pockets start to bleed together and the ice crystals get bigger, quite a lot like Steve and his freezer burn thing, right? The ice crystals get bigger as you leave stuff in the freezer for too long. and that means that the ice cream that uses this anti-freeze in it never gets those big ice crystals. The ice crystals in the first place are much smaller, which means it tastes much more creamy.

You know what goes well with fish ice cream? No. Chips ice cream. Frozen sugar frogs. That's disgusting. So this ice structuring protein will encourage different shaped ice structures as well as different sizes of ice structure, depending on which one you use of these different ice structuring proteins. And they can be used to do exactly what you were talking about with your different types of ice structure. So yeah, this is what can make snowfall.

fakes real. That's amazing. I looked up, I couldn't find one that made eight points, but you can force the ice to form in diamond shapes, in like long needle shapes, in spheres. And there's just loads of them out there. And I started looking into what other applications there are. And when I first researched all of this stuff to write the song about chronics, there were loads of future applications that could possibly be part of the future

of anti-freeze glycoproteins. And I've got to say that a few years on, I looked again, and almost none of them have happened. It's really sad. It's truly sad. So there is one product that has been, there is one product that has been created and marketed successfully. I looked at their website this morning.

It is called Snowmax. Right. And the opposite of pretty much all the other applications, it doesn't inhibit freezing, it actually helps freezing. Snowmax is a product that makes better quality fake snow. Ooh. Yeah. You add it to your...

Okay, I'm interested. So it's not the anti-freeze protein that is using ice cream or wheatgrass or anything like that. It comes from a bacteria called pseudomonas syringaase. Someone can correct my pronunciation on that one. And it is a snow inducer. So rather than stopping ice crystal forming, it actually helps ice crystal forms. Like the proteins in the tree frog blood, it actually nucleates snow. It nucleates ice. So it actually makes snow happen. And it makes better snow. It freezes faster at a higher temperature and it lasts longer, which means your fake snow machine will use less energy and you'll get better snow. So this is a product that genuinely has been taken from nature and turned into something that is affecting all our lives if we are people who visit alpine resorts where they add fake snow. I don't know. This could be the future. It almost certainly will be the future if you count climate change. Is this the

bacteria that spends some of its life in clouds? Yes, it is the same bacteria as that cloud stuff. but this is how it works. It's the proteins that that bacteria creates that are the nucleation of the snow. So you can now get them in a bag at vast expense and help you make snow. Wow. But do I have to be careful of going somewhere

that has fake snow that I don't get any on my tongue like you see in those adverts of people running around with their mouth open to catch it. By the time it gets into the snow-making additive packet, it's not active anymore. I don't know, maybe they freeze dry it, Steve. I'm not, I'm not in what they do to it. Their website claims they freeze-dry it. Does it really? Yeah.

There you go. So it also tastes as good as a tree frog at the same time. So there's one final thing I wanted to mention, which is that there is still potentially one use for these anti-freeze proteins that one of those applications is organ preservation. So with a donated organ, you have to get it to the recipient within a few hours and keep it around zero degree centigrade. Otherwise, it starts to break down. But there's a possibility that these anti-freeze proteins could be used to not only extend the life of, extend the life of donator organs, but also

could be used for storing tissue. Because at the moment, if you're storing like frozen tissue for a future use, not like a whole organ, but just some tissue, you need to use like ethylene glycol, which is a kind of antifreeze, glycerol, you need to stuff it full of stuff that isn't brilliant and is quite toxic.

And potentially antifreeze proteins could be used because they're less toxic, they have lower concentrations to get the same effect and stuff like that. So potentially, can you see where I'm coming back to you now? Cryonic freezing may be possible. Wow. We got there, guys. I mean, yeah. So this is where if in the future at some point, if you choose chronic freezing as your future, I don't necessarily recommend it.

you may be stuffed with fish proteins instead of antifreeze. It's a possibility. And that's something I didn't know about when I wrote this song. So enjoy the song as a time capsule of where cryonic freezing was a few years ago. anniversary next week My gift for you is carefully chosen It's perfect for the couple who have everything I'm getting us both cryogenically frozen

So it's you and me and Walt Disney And we're dancing and singing in the 25th century We're living the future held together by sutures Ice cubes forming in our brains Industrial antifree is running through our veins So I've looked into this square carefully, it turns out there's a lot of contradiction. Disney on ice isn't literal,

and that episode of Doctor Who was fiction. So it's you and me, but know Walt Disney, just some baseball players and 70s, hippies don't shake their hands because you've got more than you planned, and please stop flirting with you. great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great and daughter's friend just want to please you just want to freeze you you don't seem to overjoyed my love but it's too late to get a refund and the truth is that I never liked you your body much so I have only paid to get your head done don't have a

so it's you and me in the 35th century I'll keep your brain in a mechanical jar on wheels first cryonic then bionic we will be together though together us liquid some people say I've got more money than sense truth is that I have neither I bought a package from some Coppriced cowboys in Russia who didn't build a door for your freezer You are so hard But your brain is It's just me A minus 200 degrees

I'm waiting for The 35th century I have no regrets Except not wearing a vest Maybe I should just have bought you that discount home cremation kit instead That was Matt Parker, Steve Mould and Helen Arnie, revealing their favourite unnecessary details about ice. For more from the three spoken nerds, search for a podcast of unnecessary detail wherever you get your podcasts, or head to Festivalof thespokennerd.com forward slash podcast.

The song was You and Me and Walt Disney, produced by Helen Arnie and Olly the Octopus, and you can download it for free, along with all the songs from Unnecessary Detail Podcasts at helenarney. bandcamp.com. In the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we discover how to keep our minds healthy in a world of uncertainty. Michael Mosley writes on when doctors have to unleash their inner Sherlock Holmes, and we meet the brainless organisms that can think, solve problems and reveal the secrets of the universe. Of course, there are loads more science stories inside and available on sciencefocus.com. If you like what you've just listened to, then please leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with. Analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

Discover more at NameAudio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. There's a new way to Sweet Green. Meat, wraps, handheld, hearty, and made for life on the moon. With bold, chef-crafted flavors, fresh ingredients, and over 40 grams of protein, they're built to satisfy without slowing you down. Try wraps today in the app or at order.com,

available at all participating locations.