Radiolab - Elements

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Scientists took about 300 years to lay out the Periodic Table into neat rows and columns. In one hour, we’re going to mess it all up.  This episode, we enlist journalists, poets, musicians, and even a physicist to help us tell stories of matter that matters. You’ll never look at that chart the same way again. Special thanks to Emotive Fruition for organizing poetry performances and to the mighty Sylvan Esso for composing 'Jaime's Song', both inspired by this episode. Thanks also to Sam Kean, Chris Howk, Brian Fields and to Paul Dresher and Ned Rothenberg for the use of their song "Untold Story:The Edge of Sleep".  Check out Jaime Lowe's book Mental: Lithium, Love and Losing My Mind Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.   

Wait, you're listening. Hey Liam! He, Liam, revoked, there is no she, Liam. Yes, he is pronoun and element top right king, the most noble gas. But if there was helium, how fine, wise, life she might be. I'm Jan Abumrod. I'm Robert Kroelwich. This is Radio Lab and today? Elements. Yeah. I carried your oxygen.

And you walked beside me through the lobby, commenting on the decor when you needed to stop for breath. Your hand. Ren light and steady. By the ocean of breath twice, I remember, I carried your oxygen. It was heavy, a bleak alloy,

steel. This hour is a collaboration with poets like the ones you heard and will hear more of. Musicians, reporters, and of course the periodic table of elements. Speaking of which, our producer, Saurorn Wheeler, whose sodium spark brain conceived this entire show, he will lead us off. So this one starts with a story I heard from Jamie Lo. She's our writer and Brooklyn. And at the heart of this story is this particular 24-hour period in Jamie's life that she is uneasy about.

Let's just set it up for one second. So what are we about to watch? I'm not actually exactly sure where it starts, but we're about to watch, I think, the night before Valentine's Day, 2001. I eventually convinced her to sit down with producer, Lotte Thinasser, and sort of just walk us through the tape. Go for it, you're in control there with the space bar. All right.

You got one? You're on. Hi! Hey, you seem very Jamie. Hey, you seem very Jamie, Mike. with the space bar. Alright. You ready? You ready? You ready? Hi! You should marry Jamie. Are you going to marry Jamie Mike? Video starts, it's nighttime, Jamie and her friend Mike. He's the one filming their outside his apartment in Brooklyn and the camera is pointed at a bunch of high school students who were just walking by.

So what's your deal? Tell me, say you want to be an actor, Shwai? Yeah. What's your deal with when you need to tell him? I love acting. You're for you. Six pounds. Tell you. Really? So you want to be an actor, right? Yeah. What's the other way you need to tell them? I love acting. Good for you, Shakespeare. Tell you.

Oh, really? That's so cool. And I'm just by any other name that smells sweet. Yeah, it's by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet.

It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name that smells sweet. It is by any other name belong to a man. Mm. I'm somehow like egging them on to recite it.

Retain that tear perfection which she owes without that title. And Romeo, doff thy name and for thy name, which is no part of the take on myself. This is a part of that. It's a planet Sam's screaming. Um. Baby, so, um, hey. So wait.

Cameron eventually turns to Jamie. She's sitting on the stoop. A huge curly hair, wide eyes, and she starts to sing the kids a song. It goes. You don't come in yesterday. No. Zuck at you. All right.

Even if I was... I was pretty convinced that I was like a great singer and rapper. She liked sound of all voice. Haha, you're good. Wait, do you sing a lot in... No, I never. Never. I think I was convinced that I was a great singer and rapper. She liked Son of Elvus. Wait, do you sing a lot in... No, I never. I am not a singer. I just started singing like that.

I don't know what was it like. Was that the one that... It was fun to watch people react to her. She made people really happy wherever she went. Did I sleep here? We went to flea markets and she would talk to people. And she would pull this spark out of them It it just felt like New York loved her

That's Mike Ryan guy holding the camera. He'd only met Jamie just three weeks earlier not long after he moved to New York And they pretty much instantly became friends. Okay, she was so positive As I recall she's talking to some little kids on a stoop. But then that next four or five hours was pretty defining. Okay, cut to Mike's apartment. I think you're just walking around in a bra and open dress, sparkly red bra and plastic bag.

Plastic bag on the stomach. Belly dancing. You might have to shield your eyes. Okay, here we go. That's forward about four hours. That's my key sleeping. Oh boy. Good morning.

That's Valentine's Day, 2001. Good morning. That's come quats and avocados. The come quats were picked with my grandpa. That's Valentine's Day, 2001. That's Comquats and Avocados. The Comquats were picked with my grandpa and the Comquatchy about three or four days ago. That's true. There's three breakfasts, bows.

What is all that stuff on the cutting board? They're cut up power bars. From the present I gave you, that's hiding in the cup of wine that we're going to drink. And a cup of wine, of're gonna drink and a cup of wine Of course it's 740 in the morning. So do you need a nap or anything new? And are you just keep composing? If I'm tired I'll see you. Oh here's a dollar. Keep poor Mike.

So Jamie what's gonna happen today? Today I'm gonna contact MTV to debate, go out, push, Nader or rock. And Fidel Castro. Yeah. Hey, it's amazing, man. Debate? Fidel, but seriously.

OK. It has to be about anything. Right. And then things goes. So I'm going to taste this one. Yeah. And better and chocolate. Were you meaning that literally that you were going to go on MTV

and debate gore v. Boucher and then that is exactly what I had in mind for the day. I thought it was make believe. It seemed harmless. It just didn't occur to me that what I was seeing was somebody who had deviated substantially from who they wanted to be. It's a change the world. It's a change of the world, Jesus Christ. Eventually Mike got up, had to go to work, Jamie took off for a while, and then later that day, she showed up at his office. And at first everything seemed sort of fine,

but within 20 minutes, she said, hey, tell you what, can we go to the roof really fast? What? And that immediately got me uncomfortable. So okay, over pants, floral wraparound skirt, we are now going to the roof. You can hear he's done like the day has been insane. This is at the end of that day. Snowy, 7th Avenue rooftop.

What is this? Anything here. What is it? It's a piece of yarn. What is it? A piece of yarn. Mr. Mike Patrick Ryan. Will you come tonight to a party?

I can't have to work. I said 520 on top of the world at the World Trade Center where I want to marry you. Yeah, if you want. Tonight? Yeah. It's all set up. Jamie. That's the end.

At that point, he was like, done. We're done. Wow. Yeah, I mean, yeah. That's when it hit me that there is no way that any of this reflects what she would actually want. I don't know if Delusional is a kind word here, and if it's not, I apologize, but if she's delusional enough to think

that we should get married, is she delusional enough to think she can fly? Will she be distraught when I say no, no, and will she jump? And so I lowered the camera and I said, I'm afraid of heights and I wanna go downstairs immediately. And I felt for the first time just fear. And I called her, I believe I called her mother first, Leanne.

And I just said, my name is Mike, I'm a friend of Jamie's. And I think she may be going through something and I don't know what I'm dealing with. I'm in over my head here. When Mike called, I just got on a red eye that night. That's Leon Lantos, Jamie's mom. It was my job to get her to go back to her therapist so that we could get some medication in her. For the end, this episode was not entirely a surprise.

It had happened once before when Jamie was in high school. At that time, she was not sleeping at night, spinning around the room, talking non-stop about how she had to save Central America from disaster. During that first episode, Jamie ended up at a place called the Neuroseciatric Institute at UCLA, and she ended up being treated by this guy, Dr. Mark Deantonio, he's a psychiatrist. She was in a very acute, manic, psychotic state. I remember being sort of tackled by nurses to actually take my meds because I refused to.

We didn't know if we would ever see our Jamie again. You know, that was the scariest part. Everyone around me, I think, was really, really worried that I wouldn't come back. But she did come back, and it's what brought her back. That is actually the reason I got so interested in this story. So shortly after she was admitted,

Dr. Antonio told Jamie's parents, we know what this is, and we know how to treat it. He said, she's a classic case of bipolar. All right, there was no question. And the drug of choice is lithium, which is not even a drug, but just this salt. And he explained to us that she would need to... Take three tablets of lithium,

three tablets of this salt. And it could bring her back when it works. It's just remarkable. Do you have memories of like what it was like to come back like that? What you were thinking or what it felt like? It's really hard to describe. It's a little bit of a slow realization of, of like, oh, that was a weird thing that I did a week ago.

Like, why did I do that? The first time she was actually lucid and coming back to herself again, the first words out of her mouth were, mom, it's not me. And I just, that just killed me. Within a few weeks, it was like the incident never happened. It's so bizarre.

I mean, I felt like here was this thing that's a salt that I get to just take three of a day and and that was it. Totally normal. No side effects, no issues. She went off to college. And just like flourished. It was great. Things were good for a long time.

And then after about six years, she said, you know, I've been on this pill for six years. I've had no problems. I'd like to go off it. Why don't we try to go off gradually? Then about a month after she was totally off to Lithium, she was whack. In Mike's apartment, up all night.

You were so tired just a minute ago. What? That's because you told me I had to leave, but now I'm still here, aren't I? Totally manic episode all over. Because I am whatever you say I am. That's it. One of the things that kind of makes Lithium

that effected Lithium has so spooky and you hear this from a lot of people that have taken Lithium to treat the bipolar is that Lithium itself is so simple. Lithium is an element, right? It's a single atom. This has been Lily. He's a writer, runs the Story Collider podcast. He's had some personal experience with psychiatric drugs, and he's written about lithium. That, to me, was fascinating, that a single atom can change what we think of who we are.

I mean, it's not even, not just an atom, it's atom number three. It's the third element in the table. It's one of the simplest atoms, right? So it's just three protons, four neutrons, three electrons. That's a pretty simple bit of matter. I mean, it doesn't get much. It really is. This had never struck me when I was on Lexipro or Wellbutrin, which is the other one they put me on. You know, if you look at them, they look like what you expect a pharmaceutical drug to look like. There's a ring of carbon atoms and some other things stuck on it and they

look like these big complex molecules. And you're like, oh yeah, I'm complex. My brain's complex. It takes this complicated thing to change it. And then you're confronted with just this atom. It was found by accident that it works. You just, it's not complicated to make us just a salt that you'd still out. And yet it has this profound effect. The other thing I know about lithium that is that is profoundly weird is that you're not just saying my mind, my personality is being changed by an atom. It's being changed by an atom that was created directly in the Big Bang itself. So you have this atom formed in the Big Bang,

goes through whatever it does, winding path to come onto the earth, gets dug up, turned into a pill, given to someone, and that changes shape everything in the universe are the same as the forces that are shaping who we are and what we do and what our identity is. And it's possible that these forces shape not just the people with bipolar disorder, but all of us. I ended up talking to a clinical psychiatrist, Anna Fels, who told me about these studies. Huge epidemiologic studies, the biggest one I think was in Japan, when it was in Austria, when it was in Greece, famous one in Texas, in which they looked at communities that different levels of lithium. Lithium in the water supply, and we're talking about tiny, tiny amounts. Micrograms, those are 1,000th of the amount in a milligram. If you think of like a pill of lithium, well we're talking about amounts like 10,000 of a pill.

Like that's the amount that we're dealing with here. And these studies found by and large in towns that had a tiny bit more lithium in the water, suicide rates were lower. In some cases as much as 30%. Wow. I should say the Texas study, which is astonishing, also shows that the towns that have the highest lithium level have lower

felonies, thefts, rapes, and these are reputable, published studies. Now these studies are only showing us correlations, but there does at least seem to be some kind of connection. I mean, if there is a connection, what the hell is it doing? Do they know why it works in the brain like do they know what it does? Well essentially no it's still kind of a mystery but here's Mark Deantonio's theory. He says we know that bipolar disorder involves a defect in a certain part of the brain. It's an area of the brain that has to do with controlling mood.

So believe it or not, there's neurons in the brain that keep your mood even. These neurons, they do their job by sort of passing electricity back and forth. And that electricity is carried by sodium ions. So the whole system is pretty much based on sodium. Lithium is very similar to sodium. So if you have lithium in the brain, the neurons will use that to communicate. They'll send lithium ions back and forth. And here's what's interesting. Lithium works just like sodium. But not as well. Lithium is similar enough in properties that it can be an

Oposter, but whatever does it just doesn't work as well. That's the key he says. So then this area of the brain, the defective area of the brain that makes these moods flip on and off so intensely, doesn't work as well, and that stops the bipolar episode. That's so interesting that maybe its sluggishness is what makes it good. Yep. Yep. Although he says that same trick where it can be a sort of sodium and posture, but slower, that can also cause the issues.

Slight trimmers in your hand, you can have nausea. They can affect the kidneys. The balance of sodium in your body is regulated partially through the kidneys and somehow lithium replacing it can be toxic to the kidneys. Which actually brings us back to Jamie. So before I went...

After that episode in New York with Mike in the video, she went back on lithium and again she was fine. In fact, for the last 16 years, she's been completely normal. But then a couple months ago... I went to a new primary physician, mostly because I'm lazy and I didn't want to go to the upper west I had to see my other doctor and this doctor basically took my blood pressure and was like you're gonna die You need to go to the ER turns out her kidneys were failing and so she suddenly had to make this choice that I could sort of just stay on with them and You know go to dialysis and get a transplant or and go to dialysis and get a transplant,

or that I had to switch. And that now would be when I would switch that I had enough function left that I could. You are in the middle of that decision now, you feel like or do you feel like it's decided? I think I'm gonna switch. I think I made that decision. It's just that every psychiatrist in New York leaves for August because I don't know why,

but they all disappear for August, all of August, and mine said, you should probably wait to switch until I come back. But I feel like I have a good group of people around me. I have a solid job. It's terrifying to court mania, but I also feel like there are a lot of effective drugs and that one of them is going to work. It won't be as cool as lithium though. Depacote sounds like, oh god. Like, you're on depacote. As she was in the middle of that decision, Jamie did one last thing. She actually took a trip to Bolivia,

which is where much of the world's lithium comes from. There's this place you can go and literally see these massive salt flats, which are just covered in mounds of lithium. I just wanted to see them. I wanted to experience them. I wanted to be near them. So I went.

I wanted it to be near them. So I went. It just looks like a hallucination. It looks like somebody could not have conceived of this landscape. You know, you have red lakes and you have flocks of flamingos and this like long, salty expanse that goes on forever. Like it's just huge, it's enormous. Do you go up to a pile and put your hand on it? Yeah, you can. You stand on it and you jump off the pile and like I was making kind of

with the umangel's. And it was awesome. And it was awesome. I know I have to go off of it, but I really am. I mean, gratitude is like not even the word. I feel like this thing allows me to be me. It doesn't define me, but it allows for, you know, functionality. And that sounds kind of wonky, but it's like every day I get to work. And it's because of that. Like, everything. You know, I'm just, I'm grateful to it for its service. I feel like it's done,

service. I feel like it's done it's done a lot for for me. It worked so hard to get to me too from the Big Bang to now. Producer, Soren Wheeler. Soren is made of elements, though not of lithium, which we should say only some of which was made in the Big Bang. Some of it was also made in a supernova, and we'll have one of those coming up. Special thanks to Ben Lilley and Harrington, K. Redfield, Jamison, Steve Lowe, and of course Jamie Lowe. Jamie's working on a book about her experience with bipolar. It will be called Grand Delusions.

This is a song from the band Sylvan S.O. We played them the last story in progress and they wrote a song about it. Through the light beam arc, I will stop since stars, I'll space and stars And the brilliant machine, composed of soft abings of soft abing. Compassionate, scale-pins and sues, another novel on the way. Though the constant feels constant, I'm breaking up.

The charges I make belong, fake it those wild memories Shifting up, waking up I remember, I remember, I like that one It's not me who wants to move Slendence around my room Fast to faster till I blow Keep on blue, keep on blue Draggin' me down, who are we moving

Keep on blue, keep on blue Draggin' me down, where I keep moving Keep on moving, keep on moving I'm begging me now, where I keep moving For the constant is constant I'm breaking up As a group I'm so tired that I'm too I'm thinking about the way I'm doing Shifting up, breaking up I'm a man, you're in me, shippin' out Breaking up, I remember, I remember

But I thought I was the most constant, most tonight Breaking up, it's a grow-ups on a tie-up and out-pean Why so tired that I'm here? I mean, just got wild and shittin' out there Waitin' more than I remember I remember that I'm here I remember that I'm here I'm here I'm here I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that I'm a, I can't say that I'm a girl, I can't say that That was Sylvan Essow with Jamie's song. You want to talk bang?

Hydrogen was there at 0100 hours in the coke-colored velodrome of dark matter. Gases, checking gases, and infinitum, chartreuse flair, then a deafening birth. Ions of cosmos, cartwheeling, pink, red, yellow, green, purple, blue, black in the sphere of night. First I was a star, then a stain of water, then a kindergartener.

These poems, by the way, come from two events that we held in New York City. We went to a emotive fruition, which is a wonderful organization, run by Thomas Dooley, who is himself a poet. He summoned poets from all around the metropolitan area and for two nights they came to the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, Botanic Lab in Manhattan. And so far we have heard Hydrogen by Sarah Sala, read by Ramsey Faragala, helium by Christine Kintama, read by Joni's Abbott Pratt.

And I carried your oxygen, a poem by David McLaughlin, read by Sam Brezzlin Wright. So next up, I'm gonna give you three claps. I don't know if you need that, but just... POP! POP! POP! POP! POP! POP! Just in case you know this. If you think there you go.

That's a TV guy. Okay, so a while back, we ended up talking to a guy named Derek Muller, who makes a YouTube channel called Veritasium. Super popular channel by science and engineering. We call them because he's making a documentary about uranium. And we got to talking about what happens

when you take two protons or neutrons and you just whack, put them together. Yeah, it's absolutely nuts. And that led to this really interesting conversation about the beginning of all elements. I mean, I feel like a little bit of backstory is worth saying here. One really important thing to know is that combining nuclei gives you energy. He says when you slam two particles together, they get squished.

And in the squishing, they lose a little mass. That mass gets emitted as energy. This is E equals MC squared. That's what's happening in the sun right now. So the sun is taking protons, individual protons, and smashing them together, combining them. And that gives you energy, the energy of the sun. Their lost mass is the sunlight that we bask in.

It was mass. I have never thought of light as former mass. Yeah, that's what a star does. He says it smashes little atoms like hydrogen together to make bigger atoms, like helium, and then bigger atoms, like carbon, and then even bigger atoms, like oxygen. And every little collision, it's doing,

generates some energy, which keeps the star going. Stars live by this process of sticking nuclei together, going from smaller nuclei, making bigger nuclei, the heavier the star, the more the smashing and bashing they can do in their core, and the bigger and bigger nuclei they can form. But there are limits. Six million years ago, there was a star, giant star,

way bigger than our son. And it was just doing its thing, taking atoms, and smashing them together, combining. star way bigger than our son and it was just doing its thing taken atoms and Smashing them together combining You know it's taking hydrogen atoms and Making helium taking helium atoms and Making carbon making oxygen and as it's smashing all these nuclei together It's releasing energy and getting bigger and bigger and bigger, but then

energy and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But then, there comes a point where sticking nuclei together no longer gives you energy. And that point is element number 26. Iron. Once you've formed iron, if you're a star, that's the end of life as you know it. Because iron is incredibly stable. One of the most stable nuclei in the universe. Its protons are tightly packed in there, and so you can't force any more energy out of them. Which means you have a core which is no longer going to give you energy.

You can't cook up anything higher than than the iron. That's it. Well what happens to the star does it just become a big punk? What happens is everything starts to collapse. Gravity takes over. That's the thing. A star maintains its size by the fact that there's all this energy going out. So this dead iron core starts pulling everything back in. And at this point all of that stuff which is headed inwards... Aluminum, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, silicon... Starts rubbing against each other, and it starts getting real hot. And real dense.

And all of a sudden, you get... Pfff. The supernova. That was the most pathetic supernova explosion I ever heard. Can you put in a sound effect to make that sound effect? You have to put in a much like that. It is actually our specialty. So even though we know there are no sounds in space for the purposes of your enjoyment, we present to you...

The supernova. So here's the beauty of it. Here's the beauty of the supernova. So, here's the beauty of it. Here's the beauty of the supernova. In the ridiculous excesses of energy that are there in the supernova, right? In that ridiculously huge explosion, the biggest in the universe. There is so much energy there

that actually what happens is you form these nuclei, which would not form under any other conditions. You know, iron hits carbon to form, germanium, silicon hits oxygen to form. Titanium, you start to get all of these bigger elements. Including, like, gold, including the gold in your wedding ring. They need that extreme, ridiculous,

excessive energy to form. And then, it's done. And what are you left with? You're left with a giant field of debris. There's carbon, there's oxygen, there's iron, there's silicon, there's hydrogen, there's helium, and it starts to clump together due to gravity. And the center of that, which clumps together, is our sun, is mostly hydrogen and helium, and it's like 99% of all the mass in our solar system. And then the other chunks, other bits and pieces, start to clump together as well. They have a bit more angular momentum, so they're spinning around the outside,

and those are your planet testimals, your early planets, and that is eventually how you get the Earth. And all of us. This is where we cut you, so you're saying this is the birth of everything past iron. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I feel like an idiot, but I think I get it for the very first time. So post supernova, like in the milliseconds, post supernova, you have lots, you have the whole periodic table hurling through space.

Yeah, you do. You really do. You can find Derek Muller most days on his YouTube channel, the Veritasium. His documentary, Uranium, twisting the dragon's tail will soon appear on PBS. It has already in fact appeared. It has even already appeared on PBS and for some crazy reason it passed me by. Coming up a story that will make you wish the Cold War wasn't over. Not me, not me, I'm happy it's over. This is Hester Fuller calling from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding

of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Next up, producer Molly Webster and Carmen. All right. Okay. Thanks for all the lunch.

So science. And yeah, this is my new thing with my sisters. I just always go hashtag science because they get really sick of me trying to teach the kids science lessons. Hashtag science it. Okay, so one of the biggest mysteries in biology is how old am I? That doesn't seem like a mystery. Well, I mean, like obviously I'm Molly Webster

who's 32 years old, who has lived, you know, through 32 birthdays, I guess. But this is a question of like, we know that some cells in our body regenerate. through 32 birthdays, I guess. But this is a question of like, we know that some cells in our body regenerate. And so it's like, how old are those cells? Like how old is my heart right now? Or like how old my eyeball, or how old is my nose?

That's plain. The northwest corner of my kidney? Mm. Is this like, you know, if I'm three years old and now I'm 33 years old, do the cells in the 33 year old, are they the same, are any of them the same as the one when I was three? Is that the question?

Yeah, that's one of the questions. Are any of them the same, if they're not the same, then how often do they change? Because if you understand that, then you might be able to solve injuries, help people heal faster, or fix diseases where cells are messed up,

like psoriasis or anemia or ALS or something like that. But also, it just seems so cool to be able to be like, oh, that chunk of my heart is from 1997. Yes, that's super cool. Or is that that other chunk of my heart is from 1983. Yes. Oh, I would love to know that. So at the party of Robert,

I would want to meet the original Robert's cell. So if there's anybody who's been here since 1947, I'd love to just say hello. And if you just joined me in 2015, well, that's nice, I mean, nice. Right, it would be super cool. Yeah. So one of the questions they've had for a long time

is is there a way that we can try to date cells? And so they're like, well, we can't really send anything into the body because that can be toxic. So the answer for a long time had been no. And then, 2002-ish, this little idea pops up. And it's something called the Bompulse. B-O-M-B-O-M-B-O-M-B-O-M-B-O-M-B and then pulse P-U-L-S-E. Bomb pulse.

Yeah. To explain. Five, four, three, two, and there it goes. In the 1940s and 50s, we all know this. We... It's color. There is the ground wave. It is all of us.

We tested a lot of atomic bombs. It was a huge bomb. The first test was in 1945, Trinity Test, New Mexico, a few weeks later. The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We shall continue to use it. So then, as World War II comes to an end, the rest of the world just tries to catch up to the US. The Reds are to explode a huge bomb of food. The Reds are to explode a huge bomb of food. Nagasaki. So then is World War II comes to an end, the rest of the world just tries to catch up to the US. The Reds are to explode a huge bomb of 50 megatons. The Russians... ...then after the Russians...

...the British... ...the French, the whole Cold War basically just continues to unspoole, all in all, over 400 atomic tests went off above ground between 1945 and 1963. Just imagine, if only one atom bomb were to be dropped on an American city, thousands of persons would be killed instantly. That was a sucky time. Well, hashtag science. It was one good thing.

Potentially one good thing. Popped out. And that is an answer to the question of how old are we? That somehow came out of the bomb test? Yeah. Well, how? Um, let me explain. Do it.

So with every one of those detonations, when a atomic bomb goes off, it would shoot a whole bunch of stuff up into the atmosphere. All of these radioactive elements, like CCM and plutonium and all these things. But also that explosion shoots up a bunch of neutrons, and the neutron will crash into nitrogen that's floating in our atmosphere and create C-14. It's a very special type of carbon. It has two extra particles in it. Now, is all that bad radioactive stuff start to falling out of the atmosphere back to the ground? C-14 doesn't fall out of the sky. It just sort of floats there. And what happened is over time, the wind currents

carried C-14 from these test sites and just spread it all over the planet. And this C-14, which is just totally like normal carbon, not harmful, it just bonds with oxygen and it gets sucked up into plants and then animals eat the plants and then we eat the animals or we eat the plants and then suddenly the C C14 is in us. So we all have like a little bit of the atomic age in us.

Wait, but I wasn't even born in 1963, so why would it be in me? That is the cool thing because it hangs out in the air for a long time, so it's actually still up there. But why does this have anything to do with dating anything? Yeah, so I'm about to tell you that. Hey, are you there?

Hey, yes I am. Yeah, perfect. I'm Bruce Bucult. I'm a senior scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Jonas Frisiem, professor of STEM subresearch at the Carlin's Institute in Stockholm. So in the early 2000s, Jonas is staring down this question of like, how do I date cells? And at a certain point, he gets together with Bruce because he comes up with this idea,

which is just, oh, maybe we just look up. So there are some groups in Europe, there's one in particular, that's been measuring the atmosphere every two weeks since the late 1950s. Oh my god. It's an incredible data record. Bruce says what the scientists have done is they've taken all of these measurements and they put them into one chart so you can see the amount of C14 in the atmosphere over time. So we have this basically a calendar and I could send you a picture so you can see what the graph looks like. Yeah, I'd love to see a picture. What you see on that graph is this, according to Jonas.

Up to 1955 it's a pretty flat line with very little variation, but then suddenly in 1955. With all the bomb tests, there's a very sharp increase. A lot of carbon-14, very dramatic increase. That's why they call it a pulse. And that increase goes all the way up to 1963 when... The Cremlin, Fortress of Communist Doctrine, is a setting of an historic event. When the U.S. the UK and the Soviet Union agreed to stop exploding atomic bombs above ground. To signing of an atom test then. After that, there's a gradual decline. And you know, they're just measuring it all the way down so they can just say,

oh, like, here's where it was in 1980, here's where it was in 1990, 2000, 2010. This right here is the coolest part because the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere at any given moment is directly reflected in ourselves, right? So if there's There's like that much C14 in the atmosphere in September 1972. Then that is going to be mirrored in cells that were born in September 1972. So it is like this totally perfect birthday calendar. We can see approximately how long have they been there for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years. So like once this idea got out, like scientists all over the world were like...

Oh yeah! It didn't take long to see that this might be something cool to do. So just to give you a quick sense of some of the work that came out of this, I spoke to one scientist. I'm Kirsty Spolding and I work at the Carolinsk Institute in Stockholm. She was working with Jonas and they figured out how to use C14 in brains. I mean, first of all, the basic question was, can adult humans make new neurons? She says that for like a hundred years, the dogma had always been that the neurons were born with other ones we die with.

The problem was she had no way to investigate this. She couldn't use it in humans, even if they were dead humans, until she figured out a technique where she could extract brain cells and see how much C-14 was in there. Yeah, exactly. And it turns out the next best thing to human is a horse. Because horses can live for quite some years. Decades. So every second Tuesday, I would go out to the local abattoir.

The local slaughterhouse. Now away. And I mean, I was a vegetarian, surrounded by carcasses, and they would bring the horse's head out to me. And I had to figure out how to get the brain out of its head. Wait, what? So you actually had to like,

cut open the skull and get to the brain yourself. I mean, the second time I went went I took my boyfriend with me. Because I was like I can't do this. Physically they actually had a circular saw. And I actually discovered that the skull, the bone across the top, the nose of the horse is quite thin. So that was a much easier access point. This is really gross discussion. Did you ever see your research going that way?

No, absolutely not at all. But what she saw when she finally moved her research from horse heads to humans was turnover. We found quite robust levels of new neurons in adulthood. Once Jonas' team showed that this worked, the scientists got excited, and people started to date things, and not just cells. When I feel like...

So... When I feel like... Can I tell you the ages? Sure. Okay. The baseline ages we knew before C14 was that skin was like 14 days old. 14? Oh, that's only 14 days old?

14 days old? Yeah, oh that's only 14 days old? Yeah, so it's like two weeks. The surface level of your gut, like the skin on your gut, I guess, was five days. Five days. So that's even shorter than skin. Does that's like the surface of the intestine? Wow, oh, the surface of the intestine.

Yeah, the lining. The lining, that's like- Well that's because that's everything's scraping all that food going down so though. That doesn't surprise me. And then with C14, the deeper muscley part of the intestine, the average is 15.1 years. 15.1 years.

Oh, big difference between... Wait, 15.9. 15.9 years old. Okay, 15.9 years. Fat cells was another one that they did 10 years old. 10 years old. Okay, 15.9 years. Fat cells was another one that they did 10 years old. 10 years old. Yeah. Interesting.

Why would a fat cell need to last that long? 10 years. Because it's perverse. It's torture years. Yes, what fat cells are mean cells? But honestly, do they have any idea? They don't know. Did I know that what would be one of the oldest part of us?

Your cortex, which is like the part of your brain that does like abstract thinking or your voluntary movements, that's as old as you are. Really? Huh. So if you want to know one of the oldest parts of you, the oldest cell is probably in your... Super thinking part of your brain. It'll be like your cortical neuron. The oldest cell is probably in your... Super think you part of your brain. It'll be like your cortical neuron.

Well that fits if I think of myself as the stories I tell myself. When you get Alzheimer's and you lose your stories and you lose your mind, like people say. But the interesting thing though is the hippocampus is where you keep all your memories and they saw that your hippocampus does make a bunch of new neurons. Yeah, so in the hippocampus. That's Jonas Freason again. And adult gets approximately 1400 new hippocampal neurons per day.

Really? Yeah, and then each of those neurons will live like 20, maybe 30 years. So does that mean that the part of Robert's brain where he keeps the stories he tells himself that part is being made new every 20 or 30 years? Yeah. It's a strange thing that like your oldest stories could be stored in baby little neurons. It is weird. Yeah.

I remember going to Kyoto and it's like the oldest most beautiful temple in Kyoto. It has exactly the form that it had hundreds of years ago. But when you walk in, the walls and the floors and the roofing, and they've been restored, they've been restored actually over and over again. Because in Japan, what they call old is the form. It's the shape of the building. You go to Athens, though, and you go up

to the Eccroplocene stand in the Parthenon. There you're standing in the very temple that Paracles stood in. It's the same place exactly, same materials. So like in Greece, they believe that the original stuff is what you preserve. And in Japan, they don't,, think it's just the form. And I was thinking of this thing you're doing

is sort of a little bit like that. Like I was thinking, I'm much more Greek than I am Japanese. Because I want to know what my original cells are if they're where they are in me. Yeah, but my question is, maximum more basic, it's like, why does part of me get to reborn

and the other parts of me don't? Like why does part of me get to reborn and the other parts of me don't? Like, why not all of me get to be reborn? Because if all of you were being reborn, you were just crumpled into dust. No, but why not? Why does only certain parts get to regenerate? It's interesting because they don't know. They said the next, they said basically this question

of how old is a cell? They said no one was asking everyone wondered this, but no one was asking this question because they never had the tools to ask it So now they're just starting to ask those questions, but there's a problem This bomb pulse that we've been dependent on in the last decade to start answering all these questions is going away Really every day a little more that C14 gets sucked out of the air So how much time do we have left before?

15 years. It's gone by 2030. Give or take. Yeah. So we need to get questions answered now because we really are working against the clock for many things we want to look at. I talked to this Alzheimer's researcher who was trying to figure out like the chronology of the disease, like when certain, like pathologies form in the brain and he was kind of just

like, I just wish I had a little more time. And when I think about this, like I was thinking about this on the subway this morning, like I was looking around and I was thinking, you know, I'm on the L train, it's a bunch of like 30-year-old kids or something. And I was like, these, they're all reading or something and drinking their expensive lattes. Like these people are so far away from thinking about the Cold War or atomic bombs or anything like that and they're all walking around with like the secret signal from the atomic period inside of them and then that little signal is like banging out like knowledge about their shoulder and their elbow and their liver

and the west side of the liver and the east side of the liver and like, different parts of their heart. And the fact that it's now going away and how like, someone born in 2042 is just going to be really boring and like, we know they're not going to have any insights into who they are. It sort of makes me inclined to very peacefully want to explode another atomic bomb. What? No, no, no, no.

Why? You forget all the poisons that, that is not a benign event that's sort of an experimental picker-up or that is extra stuff in the air. Don't kill my dream. I have to kill your jinkers. What about dumb, dumb dreams? Mm-hmm.

God have given us a brand new power. Mm-hmm. What you use for the good of all mankind. Mm-hmm. Some people want to use this thought, everything. Oh, God didn't mean it like that. He wants to use it for the good of all things. On the your tummy telephone,

Well, then no man knows his power. Oh, only God alone, Well, then it can knows his power. Oh, only God alone. Well, then it can't cure the sick. Our destroyer evil. With once we've all power, And known by God alone. Producer Molly Webster And special thanks to Henry Druid and Mark Lovell. Happy Valentine's Day, Magnesium!

I'd go blind watching you burn, Magnesium. Iodine is cute the way it sublimates, yes, I'll put lithium in water to watch it scoot about, but my heart belongs to you, magnesium. The hot, white flame, the abandon, the slowness of you becoming your own fuse. Mercury is beautiful, yes way you leave nothing of yourself behind. We are flying over Greenland. Your elbow is too close to mine on the airplane armrest. Down there they are excavating uranium from beneath the Arctic ice and selling indiscriminately. Though from here I can only see the white of ice sheets in glacier-topped mountains. This is an island of fishing rigs and colorful houses, caught and catfished stew and tomato cream. Once I thought every isotope in me is radioactive,

I make the people who love me sick. This is a teenage way of thinking, but you have uncovered a glowing spark in the pristine frozen places within me. That was Uranium from poet Emily Hockadeh, read by a Jonas Abbott Pratt. And before that, happy Valentine's Day, Macnesian by Jason Schneiderman,

performed by Sam Brezlin Wright. Everybody has a middle name in this thing, so Brezlin right, yeah. Coming up. We're gonna get into an elevator, push the button, and go down, and I mean, all the way down. I'm Robert Lewis-Covid. Chad Dickless, I'm Boomerod. Yeah. We'll continue in a moment.

Hi, this is Bill Arkastro from Bovo Tacolombia. Radio Lavie supported in part by the Alfred P's Long Foundation and hence in public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. that's long tarot. Muchas gracias, Radio Lab. Hey, I'm Chad Abumarad. I am Robert Grovichwitch. It's just radio lab and today

Okay Elements we're doing it We're doing it. There's an ammonia arsenic aluminum salineium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and radium and nickel Eodium and Eptoneium germanium and iron amorecium Ruthenium uranium Eurobium zaconium Luticium and ADM and lanthanaminosamine asitine and Uranium, Eurobium Zaconium, Ruticium Vanadium, and Lantzaminosium, Aminastatinium, Rhenium, and Old Protectinium, and Indium, and Gallium.

And Iodine and Thorium, and Thuleium and Thalium. Satteris Townler. There's Etriam, Eturbium, Eturbium, Rubidium, Abort, and Gattel, and Iodium, Iodium, Iodium, and Straniam, and Silicum, and Silver, and Samarium, and Business Romine Lithium, but Iodium and Barium. Okay, so we have this periodic table of elements,

which is a list of the simplest bits of matter that we know of. And so theoretically, everything that we see, everything that we are is made of the stuff that is in that table. That's sort of the beauty of the periodic table is that it describes everything, right? Yeah. About 45 years ago, a scientist named Vera Rubin

was studying the motion of the galaxies. You know how the galaxies just spin in a beautiful way around like an spiral? And her calculations did not explain why the galaxies were holding together. And she figured, no, there's got to be some stuff that I can't see around the galaxies that explain why they move

the way they do. What is that stuff? Whatever it is, it's not interacting with the matter of our world, hardly at all. Otherwise, we'd see it. It's indeed while we call it dark. Dark matter is the dominant matter component in the universe.

That's experimental physicist Rick Gatesko. The stuff you and I made of, these conventional protons, it's the flotsim and jetsim of the matter world. It's cast on a sea of dog matter. We're talking about in terms of the total composition of the universe, you and I, the stuff we're made of, is 4.5%. The other 95.5% is this stuff that dark matter, that dark energy, which theoretically is all around us. If you cut your hands, you have a dog matter particle in your hand.

The problem or the challenge is that it is so weakly interacting that it will pass straight through you and in fact will pass straight through the earth, and will have very little probability of interacting. But what if you could get one of these little bastards to interact? Then, I mean, forget the beer like table, then you would meet the most fundamental element of them all. City of lead, historic hometown. We're going to tell you about an experiment now, this is our experiment, and we sent

our producers Andy Mills and Tommy Onomat Ketty to check it out. It is happening in South Dakota, in the Black Hills, in this little town called Lead. And I have not seen this many trees in so long. Incredibly beautiful picturesque little town, but right near the town, as you crest over this hill, that's it. Oh, that's a deep cut. You'll see this mountain that looks like it's just been torn open. No.

We pulled over and we walked over to the edge of this thing. And it was like peering down into an ancient volcano. That's not what I thought it would look like. Carved out that hill. In this town, there is one of the deepest man-made holes on the planet. That's where the experiment is. And it's there because way down deep in that hole, it's demonstrably the quietest place in the universe.

That is Kent Myers, he's a writer. The quietest thing will make sense in a second. He wrote an article in Harper's Magazine recently that is all about this experiment and this hole. I was interested in the idea of these fron tears. You know, the fron tear. Where are you from? Frontier. I'm from Minnesota.

Oh, there you go. People tell me I sound like I'm from the movie Fargo. Let me join them. Anyway, Ken says that this story, it starts off way back in the Old West. A hearty fron frontier, wild rugged. 1874, General Custer and crew. Custer comes out looking for this gold and finds it.

Gold on the mountains, in the rivers, and in the dark depths far below the surface of the earth. And just like that, 10,000 people within two years are just invading illegally invading the Black Hills, which were the great Sue reservation. And by 1901 the miners blasted 1,500 feet down by 1927, 3,500 feet down. By 1975, it's 8,000 feet deep to put that into perspective. That's a sort of mile and a half, but you say a mile and a half is if they literally move mountains. Oh, it's immense. Imagine six Empire State buildings going straight down.

And gold is that valuable that you could put that kind of effort and energy in the state? You isn't out of astonishing. But what happened is that eventually the price of gold dropped to the point where the size of the mine was just unsustainable. When you're mining 8,000 feet down, for every foot you go down, your price increases, your cost increase. You've got to haul it further,

you've got to air condition the mine. You've got to pump out the groundwater. You have to run electric lines down there. And so in 2001, after 126 years of being in operation, the mine shut down. Did it create a ghost town? I mean, did it... Well, this was the fear.

This was the fear that we were just gonna have a whole economy of this part of the country was gonna fall apart. But as this was happening, we saw an opportunity there. These physicists realized that this was a goal than opportunity. Well, I mean, before I, I don't know, like, how do physicists do

experimental physicists do they love holes? I mean, is it just old tradition? Yeah, they're just in love with holes. They're just like dwarves. No, no, no. This is where we get to that idea of quiet. This experiment, it needs a kind of quiet that you cannot find on the surface of the earth.

When you and I are sitting on the surface of the earth, we're not acutely aware of it, but we are being hit by cosmic rays at a rate that I think really rather amazes people. If you simply hold your hand out three or four times a second, a cosmic ray is going through your hand and it's going right through it and that's every second. So your body is literally bathed in thousands of these every second. We are just being bombarded with a dent. Rick Gates' skill talks about it like being in the middle of a stadium during the Super Bowl. And this is as though everybody in this arena is clapping. Now just imagine that in the middle of all this chaos,

there is one person leaning over to their friend and whispering a secret into their ear. Dark matter is like... the whisper. It'll be lost in the noise. We have to cut out all this noise in order to even come close to hearing it. And it turns out putting a mile of rock between you and the Glappest is taking you a lot of the way that. Yeah, that's a great sound.

So Rick took us into this mine through these massive iron doors down these long underground tunnels. No! Into a room where we met this guy. What's your name and who are you? Mike Suni grew up in lead in South Dakota. I'm the fourth generation that's been hanging around the home steak mine. Mike worked at the mine, so did his dad. Both my grandfather's were home steak veterans.

Most kids that Mike went to school with and his dad went to school with, they worked at the mines. And my grandmother's father on my dad's side was also a minor. But now, now he works in a room where he basically equips scientists with all their safety gear and stuff. You gotta have your belt on. He gave us these boots and a respirator. You touched on the fire and you want to be able to breathe. Just what you want to hear in the morning. Yeah. And eventually, We're going more fast.

The climbing, this old steel service elevator. Little further. South Cage is the 41. Southbound, where are you? Lower South Cage. And then, we just start rocketing downward. We're just going to go We're going so fast.

The speed at which we're moving is sort of equivalent to the speed at which an error plane often, you know, when it's descending. At a thousand feet, our ears pop. At a two thousand feet, this sort of wet, muddy smell sort of wafes up. And as we're dropping, all that noise is getting slowly filtered out. We're able to literally use the rock to absorb these cosmic ray particles after about 10 minutes.

The elevator stops. Whoa. Hey, guys. Stop here. Thank you, guys. Thank you. And we step out. 4,850 feet down. This is a f***ing cave, man.

It looks like a cave. It's got a dome-like ceiling in walls that are just carved rocks. What does that sound? It's water. That's the sound of rain coming through a whole lot of rock. Because it's not raining outside. It's not raining up in the world. It's just groundwater. According to Kent, it's not raining up in the world, it's just groundwater.

According to Camp, it's costing over a million dollars a year. Just to run the pumps to drain that water, so that gives you some a million dollars a year? Yeah. But Rick says down here, like this is the least amount of radiation that we will ever experience in our lives. It is quite dramatic. It's about 3 million less cosmic rays. So when you hold your hand out, less than one every few months.

January, coming through your hand now. March. But that isn't the end of the story. So we're going to step inside here. The very first step, we actually even have a nice, the other. It turns out that even if you cut out all the rays coming from the outside, there are still rays coming off of us. You and I, we carry a certain amount of uranium and thorium, these radioactive elements in us. So, okay, so what we're gonna do is you're gonna take

your cover-all saw. Oh, my name's Robin Barlin made a strange close. So can you take that machine out? Oman named Robin Barlin made a strange close. So can you take that machine out? Yeah. Scrub their stuff. Oh, the microphone. I'm going to wipe this, are you OK? Yeah. And then, Rick takes us into the lab where the experiment happens.

It's this all-white room with this huge tank in the middle. So, yeah, tank contains 70,000 gallons of high purity Water and was you know directly inside it and we can without fear of disrupting experiment one can the experiment actually happens inside this day Bang the outside of the Steel container the whole idea is that this water will actually filter out even more radiation That makes it very quiet, But still, it's not quiet enough. And so inside that tank of water, they put an even smaller tank of the element xenon. About a third of a ton of liquid xenon. Where do we find xenon on the periodic table?

Where is it? Xenon is number 54. It's over on the right hand side so that we have this empirically named set of elements we call the noble elements. I mean, they're just too good for everybody else. They interact hardly at all. That's right. You really struggle to make Xenon interact with any other atoms.

Which is just another way of saying that inside of this tank of Xenon, which is inside of this tank of water, which is down in one of the biggest holes ever dug by man, it is really, really, really, really, really quiet. It's demonstrably the quietest place in the universe. You can't, you don't know that it is because there could be somewhere, some quieter place, but as far as we know, the center of the slux detector is the quietest place that we human beings know of. And what's supposed to happen inside this super quiet xenon space? So the idea that you have here is that this cloud of xenon,

it's just waiting. And the thought is that when a dark matter particle that's like zooming around all the time, when that zooms through this xenon, because it is so quiet in there because there is nothing else happening in there. That dark matter particle even though it's not supposed to interact with anything from our world, that particle if it disturbs, if it nudges in any way any of the atoms of the xenon, will notice it. And that tiny little disturbance whenever it happens, Ken says,

you can think of that moment as the universe whispering to us. The whisper in human nature, the whisper is a point where we really, when we really want to speak intently to a single person, we whisper. When, you know person we whisper. When we whisper it to funerals, we whisper in the presence of awesome things in nature. We, you know, it's that reduced use of the voice, that drops down and drops down until it only goes into the ear, it's intended for it. It's Isaiah's call, you know, he's lying on his mat and he hears the whisper because he knows that's for me alone. That call is for me alone. And that's that sense that this experiment

gives to me. Is it here the universe has been shouting and shouting and shouting and shouting at us. And we've gathered all this scientific knowledge out of the shout, out of the clapping, out of the cheers. And now where we're at, in the 21st century is we're going down to what's it saying in the whisper. And those whispers go clear back to conception. They go clear back to conception. They will clear back to birth. If we understand these whispers, we're very close to understanding gestation. And I got carried away there, but you really,

yeah. Okay. And did you get to hear the whispers, see the disturbance, whatever it is? Did you get to hear the whisper, see the disturbance, whatever it is? Did you meet the dark matter? Well, how can I give this to you lightly? Okay, so this is confession time. I've been looking for dark matter for 27 years. And so far, we have yet to see a convincing set of interactions that are associated with this dark matter. Didn't it? it nothing at all?

Yeah, nothing but Rick hasn't given up hope. I mean he sort of never gives up hope. I mean he says maybe we just need to build a bigger more sensitive detector. That's of course exactly what we're doing instead of their current one which has a third of a ton of xenon. We are now designing and building a detector that's going to be a ten tons. You see so it says even there? Who knows? The uncertainty we have to deal with is at least a factor of 10 million. 10,000. And, Sony, the other pretty disappointing thing is that when you're in this room,

like in the room with the Lux detector, that's supposed to be the quietest place in the universe, it's loud! It's crazy loud! There are sounds that I can only describe as robots dying. And listen to this. //Squeaking sound// Was there any moment that was quiet? Like, quiety quiet, like deep quiet, feeling quiet? Well, sort of.

After we went to the Lux, we had some time to kill, and they took us into the raw part of the mine where they used to mine for gold and they just sort of walked just through these old tunnels. He's scared. A little bit. Yeah. And you're walking through the black and all you hear is like the sound of our feet

crunching The wind is being sucked down. It's kind of rushing through the tunnel. So yes And it's the silence it's it's not like it's not like the science of like oh the street is really quiet outside of my bedroom It's got like an energy to it. It's like I gotta it's not like the science of like, oh the street is really quiet outside of my bedroom. It's got like an energy to it. It's like, I gotta, it's got like this. Grrrr. Grrrr. Grrrr.

Grrrr. Grrrr. Grrrr. It's kind of like when you're running and when you stop running and the absence of your exertion sort of fills you. Yeah. It's like that moment where the absence of the noise sort of becomes palpable And that's for me the moment not standing in the laboratory for me that moment was the moment where I'm like Now I am standing at the center of the xenon

I don't think I ever ever have felt that before Now I am standing at the center of the Xenon. I don't think I ever, ever have felt that before. We have had Domeano with us for almost a year and it's been a total pleasure. He is moving on but we wish him. What do you like to wish him? I wish him quiet. But the good kind of quiet, you know, the kind that has energy. That's nice. You know, the won't, won't, won't, God, that kind. Yeah.

Thank you, Damiano. Huge thanks to Thomas Dooley. We had original music this hour from one Thrix Pointe Never, Sylvan Esso, Kevin Drum, Ken Camden, and Vijay Iyer. Thanks also to Matt Capest and to Connie Walter and to the folks at Sanford Underground Research Facility for letting us visit them and stay and stay and ask so many questions and finally leave. Yeah, which was what we're about to do. I'm Chad Eppengrod.

I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening. This is Jamie Laugh. This is Count Myers. Hey, this is Derek Muller calling to read the credits. And I just wanted to do this because I think all these people's names are awesome. I mean, tell me you've done a great radio live is produced by Chad Obamrock. Our staff includes Brenna Ferrell, Ellen Horne, David Gable, Dylan Keith, Matt Kielte, Andy Mell, The Tiff now sir. Kelsey Paget. Aryan Wack. Molly Webster. Thorne Wheeler. Jamie York. Who are these people? It sounds like a crime fighting team. You know when you got the Calvary Paget and the Thorne Wheeler. With help from Simon Adler. Kathy Tew. Molly McBride. Jacob

Finn. And Alexandra Lee Young. Our fact checkers are Eva Dineshers, Michelle here. I mean tell me those aren't cool names. Eva Dineshers, I just love these names. Anyway, thank you so much for having me on the show and I don't know if you guys have time for a plug. But if you haven't checked out very fast, you might just want to go check that out. The element of truth.

All right, bye. And this message. end of message.