Science Friday - “Black Software” Book, Mucus. Oct 25, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

When the World Wide Web was first being developed, African American software engineers, journalists and entrepreneurs were building search engines, directories, and forums to connect and bring on black web users and communities. In his book Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, Charlton McIlwain tells the stories of these individuals. McIlwain also discusses the role these technologies can play in racial justice including how digital data can become segregated and the role social media platforms can play in offline social movements. Plus, mucus gets a bad rap for its “ick” factor. But without it, you couldn’t blink, swallow, smell, or taste. You couldn’t digest your food, either. In fact, you wouldn’t even exist. The slimy material is the miraculous reason for our survival. Mucus is a ubiquitous natural goo. Jellyfish and hagfish have it; corals, which spend 40% of their daily energy intake producing mucus, are coated with it; even vegetables ooze it. The substance is built from tiny thread-like polymers that look like bottle brushes, she says, and that backbone is studded with sugars called glycans. Those sugars appear to be one of the key ingredients that allows mucus to pacify problematic pathogens, according to a new study from Ribbeck’s group. The work is in the journal Nature Microbiology. In this segment, Ribbeck talks with Ira about the molecular complexities of mucus, and the many wondrous qualities of this potent and protective natural goo. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Coming up, the magnificence of mucus. Yes, it really is amazing stuff. You will come away with a new appreciation of it. It's not what you think. But first, in the late 80s and early 90s, when the World Wide Web was first being developed, all sorts of hardware and software were being created for the new network.

And there were groups of African-American engineers and hobbyists working to connect and bring black communities online. The Universal Black Pages was one product, a directory of black content. AfroLink was a software package that was like a Wikipedia database of information about Africa. In his new book, my next guest tells the stories of these black pioneers of the early internet, and he also talks about how this all connects to present-day digital networks, like Black Twitter and Black Lives Matter, hashtag. Charlton McElwain is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University.

He's also author of this book, Black Software, the Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. And you can read an excerpt of the book on our website at Science Friday.com slash black software. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. And I want to ask our listeners, if they listened, if they use the Universal Black Pages or AfroLink in the 90s, Give us a call if you did. Our number is 844-724-8255-8-4-Sight-4-Sight-Talk or tweet us at SciFry. If you ever used the Universal Black Pages or AfroLink in the 90s.

Charles, let me begin with your book looks at black engineers and developers and hobbyists who were active when the World Wide Web was first coming online. What got you interested in these stories? Well, I started with Black Lives Matter, and that's where this journey began. I wanted to understand this new movement. I want to understand its digital underpinnings. And I really want to understand how they accomplished something that no one has managed to do since the late 1960s, which was to catapult racial issues and particularly issues about black people's devastation at the hands of the criminal justice system back onto the public agenda.

So I tried and I started to go looking for the origins of Black Lives Matter. And that led me back to the 90s where this group of pioneers I found. Then that led me back to the 80s, 70s, eventually the 60s, where this book and this story ultimately turned out to be what was in black software. Let's talk about black software. What does that term mean? How did it get started? Black software really came from a chance beating between a guy named William Morel,

who was in Boston and owned a computer store in Cambridge, and Kamal Almansoor, who came from Los Angeles. and had just begun what he had called black software to really intervene in what he saw in the software commercial area at that time, which was not people like him. And these engineers and developers, they weren't building an entirely new internet, right? They were adding pieces onto it. They were adding pieces onto it. And I'd like to say they were building. If we think about what the internet is, I think, in his internet.

And I think in history, so many times we get hung up on the hardware, the software, the folks who invented and built the material infrastructure. But the Internet, as we now know it, and as it has existed for a while, is social and it's powered by human beings and content. And black folks were at the leading edge of that in the 90s and even a little bit before in the 80s. Would it be fair to call them, you know, the hidden figures of black software? They are in many, many ways. They are hidden. Their stories have, if they once were told, it was for a moment in the early 90s, but rarely since. And the narrative that we get and what we know, particularly about black folks, the internet, digital media, particularly in the 1990s, is this term about the digital divide, which really, I think, hamstrung our perceptions of black people and hid away the fact. that there were many, many African-Americans online and really at the leading edge of what came to be known as the World Wide Web. Let me pursue that a little bit.

In your book, you talk about a developer named Kamal Al-Mansur, who at times was creating something called CP Time and AfroLink. What were these pieces of software? They essentially were software that reflected black people. And in many ways, if we think about old, what we knew as clip art that circulated in the early days, that always looked at figures and what you saw were white folks that were pictured. And Kamal looked out on that landscape and said, hey, I don't see myself. I don't see African people.

I don't see people who are doing and thinking about the things that I do, people from the culture that I know. And he wanted to rectify that. and CP time was his first foray into that journey of what became quite a lucrative business. And CP time stands CPs for a clip art of images of African Americans and Africa, all kinds of images. And in fact, we talked to Kamala Amensura earlier this week. And in this clip, he talks about how and why he developed Afro-Link and CP time, which I say stands for colored people's time. Absolutely. My next step was actually to just start building data. I just started building notebooks. I started

sending letters, if you can imagine, to ministries in Africa, to universities, development orgs, the organization of African community. As the data came in, I would transpose it, try to logically organize it, and then convert it to digital form. And I run across a segment on PBS about an interactive multimedia software program called Culture. And so naturally I'm intrigued because now I'm seeing data move. I'm seeing animation. I'm seeing graphics. I'm seeing an extension of what I'm doing. So I'm intrigued by that. The developer for this program was a professor from Princeton. And so I'm sitting there watching. I'm locked in. and I see some of Michelangelo's sculptures, I think David, I see some Greek mythology. I'm not seeing pyramids. I'm not seeing Dogan sculpture.

I'm not seeing anything black. And so I'm puzzled as to how it could be called culture. I mean, not even the Great Wall, nothing from any place else in the world, but Europe. You know, and it's funny because the name for the bulletin board system and the name from my clipart CP time. About a third of my audience gave me a lot of flack for that because they said I was perpetuating the stereotype of CP time and black people always being late. And so I flipped it around and I said,

it's our time as people of color to be online. It's our time as people of color to be technical. It's our time as people of color to be digital and have access to information. Interesting stuff that he talked about to Kamala Almansur earlier this week. Indeed. That was a story of fascinating story that, of course, is in black software.

And the World Wide Web was around for a while before users knew it existed. How did these developers get the word out about black software? A lot of it have to do with prior systems. And so the bulletin board systems that came before and networks built on the bulletin boards on early networking sites where black folks were. And so you had a tension as the web came online and folks who were used to the ways that we networked and build community online in the 1980s. And now the new very public, very open, even much more accessible worldwide web. And so people decided what platform they wanted to use and which was easier, which allowed them to do more things.

Some said, I'm not going forward and really left things off. But for those that did move forward, word about the web really came from those early networks that already existed. I want to read a quote from your book that you laid down the, you say, the fact that I had myself encountered a whole group of people whom our Internet, computing, and media histories had never known, much less remembered, led me to ask a more fundamental question. What is and has been black people's relationship to the internet and computing technology? Yeah, that was a big question for me. And it was when I found these folks who, I will say, were not hard to find. And so I began to ask, why did no one else find them up to this point?

Why was no one else telling their story or had told their story? And I began to think about there being some more overarching broader reason for that. And that's what got me looking back before the 90s and the 80s and ultimately back to the 60s where the story about civil rights and the story about the development of computing really headed for a head-on clash. What is the legacy of, well, let me ask first about eventually big companies like AOL and CompuServe, if you're old enough to remember. They did catch on to black software. Yeah, they did catch on. And I would say they even pioneered. So one of the stories that I tell was really is about Net Noir and the fact that at a time when companies like AOL were just, you know, small companies not yet to really hit it big and looking for what would bring people users to this new thing called the Internet, called the World Wide Web, what would get people interested in it?

And it was fascinating to me to know that a company like Net Noir, that black content, black soft. is one of the original things that they invested in, and that brought people in the droves to the online site. Did they have to be talked into this? No. They knew. They knew people like black culture, right? That's been around forever, particularly around entertainment and the things that we really get into. And so we've known that for many, many, many years that black culture sells and it sells not only to black people, but to every.

one. Yeah. I can understand that because we talk about people loving science and they really do. If you just give it to them, and same thing with black culture. Absolutely. You put it out there and people run with it. They love it. And so did it take off from there? It really did. It exploded and exploded in many ways beyond what the founders could do with it. It changed forms in many different ways and ultimately got sold, made the founders a lot of money, and persisted for quite a while. We're going to take a break and come back and talk lots more about the black culture with Charlton McElane, who is author of Black Software, the Internet and Racial Justice from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. I also have some callers and a caller who says he's the designer,

calling in the designer of Net Noir. We'll put him on as a caller. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about the black pioneers who work to develop the World Wide Web in its early days. And my guest is Mark. It's Charles McElwain, Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at New York University, author of the book Black Software, the Internet and Racial Justice from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. Our number 844724-8255. Let's go to Letty in Berkeley, Cal California. Hello. Hi there. Just turn your radio down.

Okay. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Go ahead. Okay, wonderful. So my name is Letty McGuire. I'm one of the founders of Net Noir, and I worked there as the head programmer, programming all, you know, the AOL website using Rain Man software, as well as the worldwide website that we launched when the World Wide Web came into being, and I was also the creative director, so I designed all the graphics and along with, you know, a team. And it's really great to hear this show talking about the work that we did. It's wonderful. And to hear it. Do you consider yourself a, you know,

so-called hidden figure? Definitely, yeah. But I'm also self-prescribed probably hidden because I'm, you know, as most programmers, even though I'm a black woman, I'm a total nerd because of, and so I'm probably more of an introvert than an extrovert. So I think that might be in common with some other programmers and designers as well, you know. What, Charlie, did you know? I knew the name.

And I recall David talking about many of the other folks who were really influential in putting that noir together. And so I'm glad to hear and meet you, so to speak, here across the airwaves. And, you know, I think, you know, you say these hidden figures, I think one of the things that calls attention to are individual people whose stories have been lost. but I think it also just really overshadows a moment that we can never get back in terms of living it and hearing it as it was lived by these folks who were on the ground and doing these really big, great things. Letty, can you give us an idea what a day of yours was like back then and how difficult it was to create what you did? Yeah, so basically, you know, it was a very small community of, you know, in San Francisco, we worked in multi-called multimedia gulch around South Park. It's a little round park.

And at first we all worked for free, and we worked out of our home at first before we got in office. and then we were surprised that our channel became very, very popular, not just with African-American community, but like all races and worldwide. And we became one of the most popular AOL channels online. And I guess, you know, I'd get there early in the morning, and if there was a deadline, we'd sleep under our desks, probably like a lot of small, you know, tech startups today. And, like, yeah, David Ellington was the CEO along with Malcolm Cassell.

David Ellington is the grandson of Duke Ellington. And let's see. I was really inspired by my brother, Hugh McGuire, who's one of the first African-American people who get a Ph.D. in computer science at a very young age. Stanford, and he taught as a professor for a long time in Michigan. He's now at UC Santa Barbara. I would ask you, Charlton, and Ledy, if you stay with us a little bit. In the early days, and even today, is the Internet and how these online platforms operate,

are they just a reflection of the issues, the biases, the problems that we have in brick-and-mortar world today? And the same kinds of issues have been moved online. In many ways they have in terms of our biases, how we live, the communities that we bring ourselves together around. Excuse me. And so what we've done, particularly as social media really dominates and the online world dominates our lives, It is no more just a portal or a virtual community. It is life. And so our biases, racism, the structural elements of racism, as we've known it historically,

really are playing out in the online environment. Ledy, did you expect this kind of reflection online of real life in the brick and mortar world? Yes, definitely. You know, after, you know, I was a self-taught programmer, and later on, I went to call it. I taught myself how to do programming and design, basically. And then years later, I went to Harvard, and I took a class by Professor Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot,

who taught, you know, that schools and online communities echo society and vice versa. And that was definitely the case. I think Net Noir, because it was one of the first online communities, it was extremely diverse. You know, a large part of our membership were, you know, white people. And I think, but we didn't advertise that. We were just really happy that that happened. And we became so popular.

I think we were the most visited website in the world at one point. And my design and programming was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine. I believe that was, I can't remember what year that was. but it was really exciting during that time where all groups accepted us, I feel, you know, at the time. And I think now maybe the gap has grown bigger. I think, you know, society, brick and mortar and online. It seems that way, although I think, you know, the Internet is good and bad, right? Yeah.

Well, Lattie, thank you for taking time to – wow, it's great to have you talk about the early days here and for listening to us and joining in a conversation. Thank you for bringing this in, you know, today. It was wonderful, and thank you for writing the book. Thank you. Thank you, Letty. Charlton McElene is with us continuing our conversation about black software. We think of the Internet as this open place where you can freely surf from one place to another.

And you did a study that showed how there is a certain pattern to help people navigate. online. Tell us about that. Yeah, there is, you know, as we go across the web, we do, you know, a few things or one or two ways. We go to where we know we want to go and we have a site and we navigate there. Most of us, however, get there as a result of an intermediary, either links on a web page. So we're at ScienceFriety.com and that sends us to another website and we follow that way. often and most frequently search engines

tell us where to go. Google and often more often social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. So the study I did there basically showed that we navigate in very segregated patterns. That is, when we

look at websites that feature racialized content versus those that do not, that people tend to navigate to one or the other predominantly. And I was interested in how these patterns might tell us something about how inequality shows itself on the web. And we talked about having, you know, offline, brick and mortar world that we live in ported into online environments. I was very curious,

what does inequality look like online? And this was one of those cues to me that when you have racial segregation, that's one clue about something that's very foundational to racial inequality. And one of the major themes of your book is how technologies and racial justice intersect. The most recent example is how Twitter is being used for the Black Lives Matter movement. Can online media translate into offline movements? I think so. I have to want to get people to sort of temper their optimism sometimes and say, you know, we look at a movement like Black Lives Matter, who much of its worse was done through online tools, and then we expect a whole host of outcomes in the, quote,

unquote, offline world. But digital tools, the online movement is about attracting a certain type of thing that's commensurate with the tool, which is attention and attention to a particular story, and that's where Black Lives Matter really succeeded. I have one last question about that. In your book, you had a question about how these technologies can be used for racial justice, and I want to quote from there, will our current or future technology tools ever enable us to outrun white supremacy? That is the question, and I ended the book that way, because I'm still unsure. And the other book that's told within Black Software is that story about what happened in the 70s and the 60s that made me raise

this question. And that is, for all that we are able to do, for all that the courageous folks with Black Lives Matter and other activists, journalists, storytellers online have been able to accomplish, we see very quickly how much the powers that be curtail that kind of movement. And it leaves me wondering exactly how far we will be able to go. That's a good place to leave it because it's a very thought-provoking book. Thank you. Charles McElwain is a professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU, and author of the book, Black Software, the Internet and racial justice from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. And you can read an excerpt of the book on our website at Science Friday.com slash black software.

Thank you for taking it today. Next up, what am I thinking about here? Here are the clues. Without it, you couldn't blink. swallow, smell, or taste. You could not digest your food either. In fact, you wouldn't even exist. The seemingly miraculous reason for your survival is your mucus.

Now, this natural goo, it's ubiquitous. It's found in jellyfish and hagfish. It coats corals and oozes from vegetables. Okra, anybody? And far from a waste product, mucus is an amazing natural substance that ensures our bodies keep working and tames the mighty microbiome. After all, somebody needs to do the job, right?

Well, mucus gets it done. Let us know what you want to talk about, about mucus. What do you need to know? What do you want to know about mucus? Our number is 844724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI. 844724-8255. And our trusty guide through the magical world of slimy stuff

is Cateri Rebeck, is biochemist. Caterina, I'm sorry, Rebeck. and a professor at MIT in Cambridge. She runs the Biogels Lab in the Department of Biological Engineering. Welcome to Science Friday, Katerina. Thanks. Hello, Ira. Thanks for having me.

Why do we have mucus? Why do we have mucus? Well, you just gave us this really great introduction. It is a material that really most animals have animals and also sponges, all sorts of creatures. It helps

protect your surfaces. So we have two types of surfaces. The skin we typically see and think about our skin a lot more than our internal surfaces. Those are the moist surfaces. And that's a much bigger surface, 2,000 square feet in the intestine alone. And, you know, those surfaces are very tender. They are fragile. They contain our sensory organs. They need to absorb food. And they need at all times to be coated with mucus with, they need to be moisturized. And that is what mucus the gel does. It helps preserve, moisture, and all these epithelia. You were just talking about our intestines

were one of our favorite topics. The microbiome lives. Is it mucus that puts the barrier between those trillions of microbes and our intestines and sort of protects them from the bacteria there? Well, here's the thing. Trillions of microbes are inside the mucus. Yes, it provides a barrier from infection,

but the way it works is really that it maintains a broad variety of microbes are both beneficial and pathogenic. And it is really fascinating to think about how it can manage to accommodate them without the problematic pathogens causing really damage to the body. That is amazing. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Katarina Rebeck is a biochemist and professor at MIT in Cambridge.

I mentioned at the top of the segment that you couldn't blink, without mucus. You know, and I'm thinking that there's tears in our eyes. Is it mucus that's in our eyes? Yeah, exactly. So tears are some form of mucus, very thin, mucus, the polymer, those are thread-like molecules that entangle with each other, reappear in different surfaces of the body, and the eye's surface is as one of the places, yeah, and they form this very ever-so-thin, sheet of a lubricious layer with which you can blink

effortlessly. And when it is missing, that can cause a lot of damage and discomfort and infections. So those little crusty things at the corner of your eye when you wake up is crusty mucus.

That is collected mucus. Indeed, dry it out mucus, yeah. Is there any way to measure how much mucus we make each day? Yeah, you can, you can estimate it. It's probably a couple of liters a day. So the body invests a significant amount of energy into building that material.

So is what is music? Is it as solid or a liquid or something in between? Yeah, exactly. It's something in between. It has liquid-like properties, but it also has solid-like properties, and that is because it forms a very, very thin gel. These gel-forming properties can change depending on where the material is in the body. In the eyes, it's very thin. In the mouth, it's very thin, and the lungs it's thin, but then in a stomach, the place where mucus protects your stomach really from digesting itself, it forms a thick, almost rubber-like material. And, yeah, in the reproductive tract, the properties of mucus can change depending on pH, for example, and that allows passage of sperm during ovulation, for example.

Do we change how much mucus we make as we age? Does it change? Yeah, yeah, so it can change. And also the properties, the characteristics of mucus can change and that can lead to suboptimal mucus in moisture, for example, a dry eye, a lot of 20% of the elderly population suffer from dry eye symptoms, dry mouth.

Yeah, and we had at the top of the show when we asked on our SciFrii Vox Pop app about mucus and somebody mentioned that it was just snot. Is that true? The dry the tear, the dry

comes in When it comes out of your nose, it's snot. That's not exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's really the waste part. That's mucus when it's done. It's like an air filter that you exchange. And when it's full and dirty, you've got to take it out.

And that's what you do when you blow your nose. That's a good time to take a break here. We're talking about mucus with Katerina Rebeck, a biolchemist and professor at MIT. Our number 844-724-8255 is our number. it's not what you think today on Science Friday, and we'll prove it when we get back. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iraf Plato.

We're talking with MIT biochemist, Katerina Rebac, about mucus, how it evolved, how it helps us, how it subdues problematic pathogens. And we're taking your calls, too. Let us know what you want to know about mucus. A number is 844724-8255. Also, you can tweet us at SciFRI. And we had a lot of listeners submitting questions about mucus on our Science Friday Voxpop app. And I'd like to address a few of those questions.

Here's a question from Mark in Montana. I live in the West and run in the mornings around 5 to 5.30. And anytime the temperature is below 55 degrees, my eyes and my nose start to run. Why is that? Dr. Rebeck, you must know that. Well, that's a really good question. The water, vapor, the air in your nose is warm, and when it hits a cold air as you breathe in,

the vapor reaches its dew point, and it comes to some sort of condensation where the cold air forms liquid drops of water, which then, you know, come out of your nose. Now, David in California had a very popular question. Is it healthy or unhealthy? healthy to eat snot. I've heard both. Do you have any comments about this? Yeah, interesting. This is a question I get a lot. You know, snot I wouldn't recommend maybe eating, though kids do it a lot,

of course. But, you know, in the 30s, a related form of mucus was tested out to treat ulcer patients. So a clinician purified mucus from the stomachs of hogs, and he gave it. that to patients who had ulcers and these patients, the symptoms went away and they didn't reoccur. So there is, I think, reason to believe that eating mucus or supplying mucus supplement to fortify the natural mucus bear can help indeed when it is this functional. Here's a tweet from R.C. who asks, when mucus changes color, does it mean it is dead? So mucus itself is a material is like rubber

What gives it the color Is what lives inside it And what is deposited So for example Dirt that you breathe in or toxins That bacteria secrete that live inside They can have colors Green is one that

For example one Well character as bacterium Sudumunas erginosa can secrete And that can show up as green As this snot-like color that we know. Let's go to Mark on the phone in Des Moines, Iowa. Hi, Mark. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Specifically, I was interested in the mucus of the intestinal lining, and I was wondering, are there any specific activities that you can do to either damage that lining or to improve it?

Good question. That's a great question. Unfortunately, we don't have tools yet to regulate mucous production at will. So the best I think you can do is eat healthy and yeah, take care, take care of your nutrition. Our options to really modify

mucus and influence it right now are really limited, but it's a big piece of research in the future that we want to address. Let's go back to our Science Friday Voxpop. Here is Beckett from Virginia. you asking this question.

This is Beckett, and I was wondering why spicy foods make your nose run. That's a really good question. That's a really good question. Also, yeah, the spicy, the molecules that make your food spicy, they have the ability to bind to pain receptors. So that's an erroneous binding, even where the pain receptors then signal to the body that there's some inflammation or damage to the issue, which in turn stimulates mucus production, which has a production. which has a protective barrier function. Here's a tweet from Ann. She wants to know via Twitter,

does constant spitting of mucus or saliva by men cause health issues? I'm not sure the study has been done. Yeah, I'm not sure. Do we know why that happened? Why people spit like that? Is there an accumulation of mucus? Yeah, sometimes when the mucus is too thick or if you have allergic reactions,

it can feel uncomfortable in the mouth if it's too thick. Your mouth is sensitive to the gel properties. If they're not right, then you want to get rid of it. Your team had a recent study out in the journal Nature Microbiology about how mucus tames microbes. You mentioned it just a bit. Can you give us some more details? Yeah, so the question we addressed here was the following.

You have trillions of microbes growing on and inside of your body. And, you know, the vast majority of these microbes live inside the mucus of your digestive tract. And many of these microbes are beneficial. They help you digest food. They help you build vitamins. And some also protect you from potential other pathogens. But in this mix are also problematic pathogens. And in fact, it is a wonder that we are alive.

So over millions of years, mucus has evolved the ability to keep those problematic pathogens in check. And we wanted to get to the bottom of how exactly the material does that. And what we found is that mucus does that with so-called muicein polymers. Mutecine polymers are thread-like molecules. They look like tiny bottle brushes. And they bind also components from the immune system, which protects your health. And on these bottle brush molecules are lots and lots of sugar molecules. Glycans, we call them.

Those are body-produced sugars that, you know, can regulate microbial physiology. They tame the microbes. They take away their ability to build certain weapons, certain molecules, or strategies that they need to mount infections effectively. Interesting. Let's go to Jenny. Jenny in Norman, Oklahoma.

Hi, Jenny. We'd like to know what makes mucus smell. What makes it smell? What makes it smell? Jenny, does your mucus, well, do you think mucus? smells? Fine. Okay.

What kind of mucus are you thinking about? You know, when you're sick and maybe you're coughing up, coughing up gunk. Okay, so that usually is byproducts from bacteria. That's not the mucus itself. Again, mucus is not, mucus is just a scaffold. It's like a sponge and whatever grows inside of it can sometimes release factors and the microbes can release factors. You know, underarm odor is similar as it.

where you have the release of molecules that can cause odor in mouth, odor in the mouth. Also, these are usually products secreted by the microbes that live inside your mucus. Now, that's an interesting point you made because we have a tweet from Jonathan who asks, is my mucus the same as your mucus? And how is mucus cater to our bodies? Or is it, you know, specific to everybody's body, their mucus? Yeah, that's a great question. We think this is a really active areas of research now. We think there are there, on one hand, many differences, personal differences

between individuals, but also even within an individual adapting to the exact environmental conditions, to the incoming microbes or nutrients, so there's a constant, we think, dynamic adjustment of the mucus properties. And

you know, sometimes they can go wrong these adjustments and cause disease. But yes, there is a lot of flexibility and dynamics, and we want to understand exactly how they come about and how we can regulate them if we don't want them. That's interesting. Let's go to a vox pop, science variety vox pop, from Ingrid in L.A. Why aren't we using mucus as an adhesive when it has such excellent bonding and polymerization

properties? So that's an interesting question. Mucous is, on one hand, adhesive because it, indeed, it associates with the surface of the body. That's how it keeps the surface moist. But at the same time, it has a very special property, and it is lubricious. That means it is actually anti-adhesive. That's why it's also called an anti-fowling surface

because it prevents things, microbes, particles, from sticking to it. So it actually, as opposed to, you know, similar materials made by muscles underwater that attach them to stones and those are really adhesives. And mucus is a lubricious layer, a very soft gel that prevents adhesion more. Let's talk about some other what happens when mucus goes wrong.

Here's a tweet. Jackie wants to know, she says, I work as a nurse and have seen people actually die from overproduction of mucus. Why is the body unable to regulate mucus production at certain times? So in the lung, for example, the way the lung surfaces are kept clean is the cilia, you have tiny protrusions on the surface of your body which continuously sweep out the mucus that absorbs, again, like an air filter, particles that shouldn't go into your body toxins and microbes also. So that's how it's kept clean, those cilia continuously shuffle out, sweep out, that used mucus. And sometimes when mucus gets too thick, and you have this, for example, cystic fibrosis, the cilia, the material becomes too heavy for those cilia, and they fail. That is one example. Interesting.

To the phones, to Sarah in Madison, Connecticut. Hi, Sarah. Hi. I'm fighting a cold right now, and I'm wondering why the body overproduces mucus when you have a cold. Good question. Yeah, great question. And so we think that has to do with its protective properties, that it, when it senses an inflammatory state, when it senses an acute exposure to pathogens that could be damaging viruses or microbes, bacteria, then it increases secretion of molecules that specifically can attend to those microbes and hopefully neutralize them. Hi, John, in Cincinnati, welcome to Science Friday.

Yeah, hi. Yeah, so I'm not sure if saliva is considered a type of mucus or not, but, you know, when a, let's say a dog, either looks itself or a human being, what's the impact? Is that a good thing, bad thing? Yeah, you know, we hear the animals, licking animals, they have some antibiotic effect. Is that true?

Yes, that is absolutely true. That is also something we want to leverage. the, in part this comes from the polymers themselves, but then the polymers are also loaded, charged with molecules from the immune system, which can additionally assist in fighting off microbes. You see this very prominently, for example, in the skin of frogs, which, you know, they live in dirt, basically, and when they hurt themselves, they don't get infections.

That's because they have this very potent lus layer. Even underwater, right? Underwater, I remember I used to, raised corals, and I remember they were prolific mucous producers. Yes, yes, yes. And why? So they have, they have, just like us, they need mucas to engage with their environment in a way that enhances their function. For example, they attract food particles, they enrich food particles with this gel, they move the food particles around, but then what they also do is they select for themselves a range of microbes that can benefit

their health. And it is fascinating because these microbes are really distinct from the environment. It's a very specific set, just like we have in our mouth or intestine, distinct from not just other species, but then also from the environment. And some other, like squids, they use mucus to, you know, build light by selectively recruiting microbes that can develop bioluminescence, and that's a survival strategy. So I have to make note of that. for a cephalopod week coming up. Exactly, yeah. Am I reflato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about mucus with Katerina Rebeck and all kinds of things.

What about vegetables? Do vegetables need mucus? Yeah, we all, I think, have experienced the goo in Okra. But isn't it the same mucus that we're making? No, I don't know enough about the composition. But it could have a related function, you know, to fend off predators. I'm sorry, go ahead. No, that eat plants. So plants do also sometimes shed mucus that can protect them from.

Is there any connection between mucus and being used diagnostically to tell if you have a disease or not, besides just the cold that you get? Yeah, so that is, I think, a really exciting. and promising area of research, however really understudied, where one can imagine that changes in mucus properties can, if sensitively enough measured, can be used as a diagnostic tool to preempt, to identify susceptibility, for example,

or already existing disease dysfunction. Interesting tweet from Kelly, who says, isn't mucus production very dependent upon hydration if you're drinking enough water or something? I would think so. I'm reluctant to, you know... It makes sense, doesn't it? It does.

You're not going to make mucus if you're not drinking enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think there's a connection. But what do you want to know about mucus, that you don't know? What I want to know? Yeah. I want to know... So here's what I know.

I want to know how it selects for microbes, because that is really, really powerful. That can equip us with potentially new functions. So the microbiome that we have in our mouth or in the intestine is specific. It's diverse, but also really specific when infants are born there. Initially, they don't have a microbiome. And then go through a phase where they have many more microbes growing, types of microbes growing, then eventually become permanent residence. And that specification is exciting because if we understand,

understand that not only can we maybe prevent outgrowth of unwanted microbes, but perhaps, perhaps we can also invite new microbes that have special skills, such as, you know, giving us salt tolerance or helping us build food in our digestive tract. Well, if you're a listener at the Science Friday, you know that the microbiome is right in our wheelhouse. So we'll have you back when you figure that out. Okay. Okay, Dr. Rebeck. Katerina Rebeck is a biochemist and professor at MIT in Cambridge, and she runs the biojells lab. in the Department of Biological Engineering. Fascinating work, Dr. Rebeck, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome.

And if you want to keep exploring the wide world of mucus this weekend, and why not, you can experiment. You can make your own mucus. Here's how you do it. You go to science friday.com slash mucus. It's is really cool stuff. I've already experimented with it. It's something like flubber,

if you know what I'm talking about. ScienceFriety.com slash mucus to find out how you can make your own. And to our San Francisco fans, we're coming to town in just a few weeks to talk about building ethical artificial intelligence. We're going to zoom in on the arachnids on your face. Yes, they're living on your face and on my face in particular with KQED's Deep Look Team. You're not going to want to miss this. And the date, Saturday, November 16th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater tickets and info at Science Friday.com slash San Francisco. That's Saturday, November 16th, Sydney Goldstein, Lerston.

live show we're going to be putting on. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, we want you to go out and observe the moths living around you. A little nighttime activity for the weekend? Download the Vox Pop app. Tell us what you see on Science Friday Vox Pop app, and then

maybe you'll become famous like the other listeners are on there and sent in their questions. And of course, we're on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You know how to find us all week long. Have a great week. Happy trick-or-treating next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.