Science Vs - Back From the Dead

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

Today we're telling tales that push life to the ultimate limit. We're bringing things back from the dead, diving into the mysteries of immortality and asking just how much can the human body take? We talk to Rohan Schoeman, Dr. Eduard Argudo, Audrey Mash, Prof. Ferdinando Boero, Prof. Shin Kubota, Dr. Moiya McTier, and Prof. David Howard. UPDATE 5/17/21: An earlier version of this episode said that Nesyamun was scanned using MRI. While David has used MRI to scan vocal tracts in his research, Nesyamun’s vocal tract was imaged using a CT scan. Check out the transcript here: https://bit.ly/33NVcF7 Credits: This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, Nick DelRose, and Wendy Zukerman, with help from Taylor White. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Translation by Ben Milam, Kana Hatakeyama, and Bumi Hidaka. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger and So Wylie. And special thanks to all the researchers we talked to for this episode, including Dr. Jordi Riera, Professor Lars J Bjertnæs, Dr. Peter Paal, Dr. Herman Brugger, Prof. Maria Pia Miglietta, and Dr. Jenna Valley. And a big thanks to Sinduja Srinivasan, Katie Cruickshank, Jessica Mack, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Today on the show, we're doing something a little different. The team at Science Versus is telling tales that push life to the ultimate limit. We've got stories of bringing things back from the dead. We're diving into the mysteries of immortality and asking just how much the human body can take. Our first story starts, like many do, with a love story. And I'm going to tell you this one with our producer, Meryl Horne. The guy who fell in love is Rohan Skueman. He's an English teacher and he's from South Africa. And several years ago, he met Audrey Mash. They ran in the same music scene and went to drum and bass nights together. One thing led to another. They got married. And he just loved how adventurous she was.

She brought that out in me. There's all sorts of stuff that I have done now that I wouldn't have liked, like scuba diving and hiking. It was all going great until one trip a few years ago. It was in November and they were living in Barcelona at the time and they decided to do some hiking in the Pyrenees Mountains. It was in this remote spot. It took about a day to hike in, but it ended up being kind of a bust. It was drizzly and windy the whole time. So they were looking forward to getting home. My feeling was like, okay, let's get it done. We can go home, like have a cup of coffee or something, just sit down, you know, and be cozy. But that's not what happens. So they'd been hiking for a few hours.

We were more than halfway. It started snowing gently, lightly, like in a Christmas movie. You know, oh, look, there's like snow softly coming down. The snow was a surprise. They checked the weather that morning, but it was only supposed to rain. So Audrey wasn't dressed for it at all. We stopped and we thought, should we go forward? Should we go back? And we decided, let's just keep going. We've walked most of the way.

And then suddenly it got to a point where everything was just white. Pretty quickly, they were in a complete blizzard. They couldn't see the path and their cell phones had lost reception. where everything was just white. Pretty quickly, they were in a complete blizzard. They couldn't see the path, and their cell phones had lost reception. It was getting really bad. The snow was deep. The sky had sort of whited out, so there was no horizon at this point. We couldn't see anything. There was nowhere to go.

I'd never seen anything like it before in real life. We were getting really, really cold, both of us. I could feel a layer of snow that had gone into my pants. So between my skin and my pants, there was a layer of snow. We were both shivering, like teeth clattering. They crouched down next to this rock for shelter. And the wind was so loud that Audrey and Rohan couldn't hear each other talk. So they stopped even trying to talk to each other and just waited in silence. And it was then that Rohan was like, we might not make it out at all. This is going to be it. We are going to freeze to death and people are going to find our bodies

when the storm has passed. Were you holding each other? Yeah, we were like, that's how I thought they were going to find us. Oh my gosh. After a couple of hours of this, the snow finally stops. And so they start making their way back home.

And that's when I thought, okay, this has been really terrifying, but we've made it. I was quite euphoric at this point. I thought, wow, we've made it. I turned around to tell her, and she seemed weird. She seemed like she was drunk. She had trouble following words. Her eyes were all over the place. So I tried to sit her still, and then she looked really panicked.

And then her eyes were rolling around, and then she lost consciousness. I thought that she had died because it was literally her going like... Rohan thought that he had watched his wife just take her last breath. He laid Audrey down and covered her with his jacket. I was hoping that I was wrong, but I thought that she was dead. I couldn't feel a pulse. At some point, Rohan realized that his cell phone had reception again. He made some calls and found out that a helicopter was already searching for them. Audrey was ultimately flown to a hospital in Barcelona.

Her heart had stopped working and she hadn't had a pulse in hours. Which means that in all that time, her body and brain weren't getting enough oxygen. I was a total mess. I was sobbing. I was not in a good mess. I was sobbing. I was not in a good place, as you can imagine. I was thinking funeral arrangements or what she was going to be like if she did wake up. I just started thinking, I was like, how are the cats going to be when I get home? Are they going to be upset that she's not with me? When Audrey got to

the hospital, Dr. Edward Agudo was there to treat her. She was still in cardiac arrest. She was arrested for more than two hours without any sign of life or any kind of electric activity in her heart. But Edouard had read about cases like Audrey's, cases of people who had had hypothermia, whose hearts had stopped, and yet they still survived. So he figured, maybe I can bring her back. I really didn't know at the beginning if we're going to be successful or not. But if there's any chance, we should try. Audrey's body was only 20 degrees

Celsius, that's 68 Fahrenheit. It's really cold. And Edward needed to warm her up to a normal body temperature and get oxygen to her organs fast. So to do that, Edward hooks Audrey up to a machine, an ECMO machine, that takes blood out of her body, warms it up, adds in some oxygen, and then pumps it back through her body. But when Rohan saw Audrey like this, he said it was pretty disturbing. I mean, it was quite horrific because she was in a hospital bed. There were pipes going in and more pipes coming out

and she was like one with the machines around her. Wow, it's like the Borg or something. Yeah, exactly. So, as warm, oxygenated blood starts flowing through her body, Edward can see that she's trying to breathe. She started gasping. That was a good signal,

because that means that the brain is not totally dead. After three hours, the doctors check her pupils and see that they're responsive, which is another good sign. And then using a defibrillator, they give her heart a little jolt. And what was that moment like when you saw that her heart was beating again? Wow, it was incredible. Because it was, we just tried and it was a great moment. A couple of days later, Audrey wakes up and Rohan couldn't believe it. She knew her own name.

She knew who I was. She knew who her parents were. The fact that she was speaking, that she was opening her eyes, was better than I thought it might be. I think I was on a lot of drugs when I woke up. I just remember there being people there and seeing my family. I remember thinking, if everybody's here, this is serious. But I was in a little bit of a blurry bubble.

Yeah. After only around two weeks in the hospital, Audrey went home. And then just a few months after that, she was training for a marathon. I'm 100% fine. To have come out of it without any side effects at all, I do feel incredibly lucky. Okay, so how is any of this possible? Like how can someone be alive after not having a heartbeat for hours? Well, Audrey's body had gone into a kind of hibernation, something special that happens when someone's body gets really cold. Because when you decrease your temperature, your metabolism also decreases, and then your brain needs less oxygen and less blood flow to be alive. So normally, if your heart stops, organs like your brain don't get enough oxygen and you can die. But in this case, because your metabolism slows down, organs don't need as much oxygen and you can survive. Which is why there's actually this saying in medicine.

They will say that you're not dead until you are warm and dead. You're not dead until you're warm and dead. And that's because, just like Audrey, we know that it's possible for people to come back to life once their body temperature goes back to normal. Doctors have known that this is a thing for several decades. Not everyone is as lucky as Audrey to recover completely, but it's actually pretty common to survive this if you get the right treatment. Like one academic told me that out of 96 cases that he's looked at, over 90% of them survived. Audrey says it's sort of odd to be a part of this club, especially because she doesn't actually remember anything from the day of the hike at all. In a strange way, it feels more like it happened to my family than it happened to me,

because I was never conscious at any point when my life was in danger. I got at first after the accident, a lot of messages from people online who wanted answers to the great mysteries of the universe. And some people who were quite upset that I wasn't willing to share them, who thought I was part of some grand conspiracy theory, could answer all the questions about what came next. Like, not that you just didn't remember, but you were holding back. I was holding back, yeah. I'd seen the light, I'd seen the angels, and I could have told everything if I only wanted to.

I had the date that she woke up. I got the date tattooed on my chest. Maybe I'll cover it up. She thinks it's a bit grim. I was fairly unsure that that was a good idea. I wasn't sure that I wanted to see the date every time I saw my husband shirtless for the rest of our lives. It bothers me less now, though. I think I just don't really see it. He's got quite a lot of chest hair. It hides it quite well.

So something Audrey and Rohan are still grappling with is how to talk about what happened. Did Audrey die? I mean, I don't know how else you could really describe it, because I suppose it's a difference between death and irreversible death. But what is death if it's not that your heart stops and your lungs stop? I don't know how else to describe it. Do you think that Audrey died? The short answer is, I guess, you know, there was

just, I guess, some science that we, that I wasn't aware of that with air quotes could bring someone back from the dead. After the break, more stories of bringing things back from the dead and we'll meet a creature who defies death again and again and again coming up Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome?

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I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean? jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI,

with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Our next story is about one of the most curious creatures on Earth. It's a little creature that refuses to die. And to tell us all about it is producer Rose Rimler. I've always been drawn to animals that don't look or act like animals that are familiar to us. As a kid, I could never get excited about horses,

but I used to love to watch water striders skate on the surface of puddles. And I never really grown out of this attraction to nature's weirdos. So ever since I heard about this death-defying little creature a few years back, I always wanted to find out more about it. So recently I called up Nando Buero.

He's a professor at the University of Naples in Italy. He's a marine biologist. I like to go scuba diving and to look at beautiful animals, not pressing the buttons on machines. Nando and I are kind of two peas in a pod, except that I'm too claustrophobic to scuba dive. But we both love strange little sea creatures like jellyfish. The one we're talking about today is a little shallow water species. Kind of looks like a floating light bulb with wispy tentacles, only it's about the size of a lentil. Whose name is Turritopsis.

And Turritopsis does this amazing thing that was discovered by total accident. It was 1988, and some of Nando's grad students went snorkeling near the marine lab off the coast of Genoa, Italy. They collected some Turritopsis jellies and they thought it might be fun to keep them in an aquarium in the lab. So they brought them back. They put the jellyfish in separate jars, but they forgot about them.

Because, you know, they're young people, they had girlfriends and whatever. So they didn't care much about nursing the tiny jellyfish. Because the students were too busy playing Pac-Man with their girlfriends or whatever the young people were up to back then, the tiny jellyfish went without food for a day or so, which meant they were starving. When the students finally remembered to check on them,

they expected them to be dead. But that's not what happened. They weren't dead. Instead, they had vanished. When they came back, the jellyfish were gone, but there was a tiny polyp on the bottom of the jar. A tiny polyp. Looks a bit like a blob of earwax. And for the purposes of this story, we're going to refer to it as a young jellyfish, which is maybe not technically correct because the pop is really just a different life

stage for this creature. But if you want to anthropomorphize jellyfish, and I do, it's an okay way to think about it. Nando has a helpful analogy. He says, think about it like... Like a butterfly and a caterpillar. If you look at a caterpillar, it's very different from a butterfly. But it's exactly the same animal. So this jelly went from mature adult, butterfly, back to caterpillar. But of course, that's weird, right? That is going the wrong way. So it's like having a butterfly that instead of dying, goes back to a caterpillar

stage. Turritopsis is breaking the laws. Okay, so it is doing something strange. So strange that they could hardly believe their eyes. And they couldn't think of any reasonable explanation. So Nando and the students recreated this. They got more jellies, brought them back to the lab, didn't feed them, and the same thingreated this. They got more jellies, brought them back to the lab, didn't feed them. And the same thing happened again.

These guys went back to polyps. Butterfly to caterpillar. It was a very amazing thing. Scientists who study jellyfish are used to some weird stuff. But nobody had ever seen an animal cheat death by turning itself young again. That was new. And people were like, if it does this over and over, then maybe this means the jellyfish could live forever.

Like maybe it's immortal. And so that's what people started calling it, the immortal jellyfish. And the press became crazy about that. And journalists are still asking questions about the immortal jellyfish. Like me. Exactly like you. But could this animal really keep pulling this trick forever, restarting its life again and again? In other words, is it really immortal or is this just clickbait?

Do we know how many times the same animal can go from polyp to jelly to polyp to jelly? There is a crazy guy in Japan, Shin Kubota. If you approach him, he will tell you. I'm trying to figure out, I got a notice that Shin is in the meeting. Good morning. Good morning. Shin Kubota speaking. This is that guy in Japan. He's also a marine biologist. I thought I was obsessed with this little jelly, but Shin takes it to another level. He wrote this whole song about it.

At one point in the song, he sings from the perspective of an old jellyfish. And he says, I'll be able to revert to a polyp soon. I'm going back to the strapping body I had when I was 20. I'll be able to start my life over again. And I think if Shin could rejuvenate, he would spend another lifetime studying jellyfish. Scientists are still working out how these jellies can cheat death. But it looks like their cells can kind of reprogram themselves. They can basically switch from being a muscle cell, for example, to some other kind of cell.

In the process, and this is what's really weird about teratopsis, the whole animal just sort of dissolves. It curls up on itself and becomes a little lump, or what Shin calls a meatball, and then it grows up again. So how many times can they do this? Have we found a cutoff point, or are they really immortal? Well, for years, Shin has been keeping these jellies in a lab,

feeding them teen sea shrimp, sometimes by hand. It's a very quiet, tough world. And over the years, Shin has watched as the jellies got older and then younger, butterflied, caterpillar, and back again. Sometimes Shin would sort of kickstart the cycle by stressing them out. While Nando students did this by starving them, Shin often did this by pricking them with a needle or even crushing them. He says he sometimes feels bad for the little jellies, but whenever he does this, he sends out a wish that it will turn out for the

best. He asks, please rejuvenate. Also, he's pretty sure they don't feel pain. So for years, Shin watched and stabbed and counted and saw the jellies rejuvenate. Once, twice, three times, it kept going. Ten times. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. And then, in 2015, a huge typhoon hit Japan. Typhoon Nanka has reached Japan's Kaguya Shimbun. Authorities have urged 350,000 people to evacuate their homes. The typhoon caused lots of destruction.

But for the jellies, the problem was, Shin was using ocean water in their tanks. But with all the rain from the typhoon, the ocean water was now way less salty than usual. And this kind of stress was too much for the jellies. They couldn, the ocean water was now way less salty than usual. And this kind of stress was too much for the jellies. They couldn't rejuvenate their way out of it. And they died. Because here's the thing about the immortal jellyfish. While it can do this amazing trick, it's not invincible.

They're actually kind of fragile. Which I find really confusing. How can they be fragile and immortal? Why would one catastrophe, like getting stabbed, inspire them to rejuvenate, and another catastrophe, like a typhoon, just straight up kill them? Shin's best explanation is that this rejuvenation thing is a trick they have up their sleeves. Sometimes they can pull it out and live another day, but sometimes it's too much for them and they really do die. But there's still the possibility that with the perfect conditions, maybe they could keep rejuvenating forever.

There's some debate here, but Shin has a lot of faith in these little creatures. Do you think that it's possible for one animal to regenerate even more times? Like 20 times, 50 times, 100 times? Is there a limit? Unlimited. Unlimited. Whatever. Whatever, I think. Yes. It's nice to imagine this little lightbulb creature drifting around off the coast of Japan, cycling back and forth for thousands, thousands of years. Maybe. For our third story today, we're going from the tiniest lightbulbs to massive balls of gas.

We're talking about stars. And we're about to hear the tale of a star that can claw its way back from the brink of death. And to tell us all about it is Michelle Dang, a producer at Science Versus. So some stars can live for billions and billions of years, but they all have to die eventually. And the type of stars that we're talking about today essentially die when they run out of fuel and can't blaze anymore. They start dimming and become what's called a white dwarf. But a white dwarf doesn't always go gentle into

that good night. Sometimes it can hold onto its shine by literally feeding off another star, becoming what astrophysicist Moira McTeer would call vampire stars, which I love because it really is like a vampire just sucking out the life force of another star. Here's how it works. So say you're a white dwarf star that's about to die. You're on your last star legs. But nearby, you've got a star neighbor, a big flaming red giant that's throwing around all this hot gas. You know, we've all got a neighbor like that. Red giants are shedding materials from their outer layers. So they're sending out mass into the space between stars. And if this red giant is at the right distance at the right time, then you, the white dwarf star, can basically start sucking up all the gas that's being thrown at you.

You get these disks of material around the white dwarf. So it's almost like the white dwarf is eating the material from its larger companion. And once you've got that gas, boom, you can start shining bright like a diamond again. Which is, I think, very exciting. Sometimes these white dwarfs pick up so much gas that they have these crazy looking outbursts that look like this. These big, powerful jets that shoot off. And they look like big columns of light, big columns of energetic material being shot off from these stars. The science-y term for this is symbiotic stars. But it is a lot more fun to think of them as back-from-the-dead stars, or as Moyo puts it, I would call them undead. I think that these white dwarfs are more like vampires or zombies

in that they aren't totally alive, but they're active again. They're moving. Yeah, I love that too. Vampire zombies. Zombie stars, yeah. And for some, this process of sucking the gas from their neighbor Yeah, I love that too. Vampire zombies. Zombie stars, yeah. And for some, this process of sucking the gas from their neighbor can help keep the vampire zombie star stay alive, in a way, for hundreds of thousands of years. And that's what makes them special.

After the break, our final story. A 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy sings from its grave. Welcome back. Our final story for today, the mummy returns. Okay, so several years ago, some boffins from England had a rather bonkers idea to bring back the voice of someone who died 3,000 years ago. And one of those men was Professor David Howard, a musician and engineer at the University of London who studies voice. And he has all these devices to help him. So what I've got here, this is a buzzing device.

During our interview, he whipped one out. Can you just say, Luke, I am your father? Luke, I am your father. I hope that's made your day. Yes. Several years ago, David even created an organ using his own voice. And I suppose I was looking for another outlet. And one day, he sat down for coffee with a friend who's an archaeologist who gave him a rather curious proposal. This was one of those sort of have a cup of coffee and chat about something slightly

off the wall about whether we could do anything with the voices of human remains. David's colleague was asking him, do you reckon we could bring back the voice of someone who was long gone? Like, long gone? And they had the perfect guy for the job. Well, he's 3,000 years old and he has been mummified. Yeah. They ultimately wanted to bring back the voice of an ancient Egyptian mummy. And if they could do this, it would be the first time in history

that someone would recreate the voice of such an ancient human. The mummy's name is Nesumun. Historians think he was a high-ranking priest living in Egypt some 3,000 years ago. And David said he had a very sweet gig at the temple. Every morning, he would place the best cut of beef on the altar. So he would be given a fillet steak and he would go through a door and put this on the altar, then go about his business during the day and any remaining steak that God had not taken,

only Nezha Moon could eat. So my understanding is that he basically lived his life on fillet steak on a daily basis. Well, I guess it depends how hungry God was, you know. I guess it does. Nessie Moon lived into his mid-50s. He was mummified, placed into a wooden coffin painted with hieroglyphics and laid to rest in Egypt. But his resting place was pillaged by tomb raiders and he was brought over to Europe

and ultimately went on display in a British town called Leeds in 1823. And that's where he is today, at the Leeds Museum. And once David and his mate had this idea of recreating this mummy's voice, the two were on a mission. They talked the Leeds Museum into lending them their mummy. The museum heads figured, hey, hearing Nessie Moon's voice might breathe new life into a dusty exhibit about a guy who ate too much beef 3,000 years ago. So now, it's go time. To bring back Nessie Moon's voice, David needs a copy of this mummy's vocal tract.

So the vocal tract is basically a tube that starts at your lips and ends just above your lungs. And in a living person, as the lungs push air out, it vibrates these two muscly flaps. That's our vocal cords. When the vocal cords vibrate faster or slower, that alters their pitch, making a higher or lower noise. And so what David wants to do is to get Nessie Moon's vocal tract.

But David wasn't about to unwrap the mummy and rip out its throat. So instead, David needs to make a 3D model by first scanning the vocal tract in this very non-invasive way, using a CT scanner at a local hospital. The mummy handlers did it in the middle of the night so they wouldn't freak out actual patients at the hospital. They were very conscious that they didn't want people wondering what on earth was going on here because it would have looked very strange. And it just looked as if we were ordinary people waiting. And then suddenly the door opened and this trolley came in.

And there he was. Nessie Moon was carefully hoisted out of his blue and gold coffin and slid into the machine. David could see his toes poking out. The scan starts with its whirring and buzzing. And then it works. David gets this beautiful, clear scan of Nessie Moon's vocal tract. I mean, this is going to sound morbid, but it's true. The difficulty of putting live people in is they have to breathe. And if they breathe, their flesh moves. So if you've got somebody who does not move, the pictures are really clear. The edges are really clear. And that was fantastic.

With the scan in hand, David goes to step two. He prints out a 3D model of Nessie Moon's vocal tract. It's printed out of a thin white resin. He showed it to me. It was a little bit hard to describe, but I gave it a go. Oh, you know what? It looks a bit like, it looks as if a mouth has, like, sort of come out of a genie's lamp and gone. Oh, I see. Oh, yeah, well, it's, yeah. All right, well, maybe just imagine a small, lumpy, upside-down saxophone.

From here, David attaches a loudspeaker to the bottom of the model, and when he turns it on, it sends vibrations through the freshly printed vocal tract. And now, we can finally hear what Nessie Moon's voice might have sounded like 3,000 years ago. Here it is. So it's somewhere around about an eh vowel. I think it's eh and an ah. Perhaps imagine he's just waking up 3,000 years ago and just, ugh. Why not?

Why not indeed? So then what? So he makes this, eh. That's very good. That's very good. Are you auditioning to take his role? All right. So talking involves your tongue and face muscles moving about,

which they couldn't get Nessie Moon to do. That's why he's not reciting a soliloquy. Still, though, Jake, did you bring his voice back from the dead? Well, our argument is that we did, yes, in some sense. This is his afterlife and we have created a sound from his remains. And there was that sense of awe and wonder the fact that this voice can be recreated. It was a very special moment. And here's what's eerie about all this. It's almost as if Nessie Moon knew that this might happen because of something scribed in the hieroglyphics on his coffin.

What's written in his coffin is the phrase, true of voice. And it is understood from, I believe, writing around the time. But he reckoned that his voice would be heard in the afterlife. And David is now taking this prophecy to a whole new level. He's been working out a way to get Nessie Moon to sing in a choir. Kind of. David changed the way that the air was vibrating through the mummy's vocal tract,

changing the pitch of Nessie Moon's voice so that he sang all these different notes. And here he is, singing Handel. Let's see if this works. Okay, so I can add vibrato. That's Science Versus. Hello. Hello, producer Rose Ribbler. Hello, host Wendy Zuckerman.

How many citations in this week's episode? There are 121 citations in this week's episode? There are 121 citations this week. 121. And if people want to see these citations, where should they go? They can see them in the transcript. And to find our transcript, they can look in the show notes. There's a link there.

Instagram this week. I think we've got photos from basically all the stories that people just heard, there's a lot of cute ones, but maybe my favorite is the jellyfish. Well, we've got pictures of the jellyfish stage and the polyp stage of Turritopsis, and I think it's cuter than a blob of earwax, personally. It really is. It's like kind of furry-ish. I think those are tentacles, but yeah.

We may have undersold it in our description, but you can check it out and see for yourself. Yes, you should definitely do that. Our Instagram is science underscore VS. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. And just quickly, astrophysicist Moya McTeer, who told us all about vampire stars, has this wonderful podcast called ExoLore, where she uses science to imagine life on other worlds.

She asks questions like, if intelligent life evolved in the clouds of Venus, what would they be like? You got to check it out. It's called ExoLaw. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, Nick Del Rose, me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Taylor White. We're edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenny. Fact-checking by Eva Dasher. Translation by Ben Millam, Kana Hatakeyama,

and Bumi Hidaka. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Marcus Begala, Emma Munger, and So Wiley.

A special thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Jordi Riera, Professor Lars Björdnes, Dr. Peter Pahl, Dr. Herman Brugger, Professor Maria Pia Miglietta, Thank you.