Something You Should Know - The Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life & What Does it Mean to Be Alive?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Metro Links and Cross Links are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Today on Something You Should Know, tracking your online shopping orders. It's become a bit of a national pastime. Then the fascinating chemistry of your life, like how soap works, how caffeine keeps you awake, and why you should never have a flaming shot of vodka. Oh my gosh, please don't ever do that. That is so dangerous. Alcohol is so flammable.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Anytime I see a flaming shot, I get as far away from it as possible. It can set any alcohol that's anywhere there, like a little beer skull. If there's a flaming shot, I'm out of there. Also, why you should never drink from your garden hose. And what does it mean to be alive? You'd think we'd know, but we don't. It is really kind of mind-bending that scientists do not agree on a definition of life. They just don't. And it tells us something, I think, really profound about what it means to be alive and how much we have left to understand life.

Starting point is 00:01:22 All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an

Starting point is 00:01:45 owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. And here I thought it was just me. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, one of the interesting things about online shopping, or just sending packages in general, is the ability to track them while they're in transit. Wasn't all that long ago that you really couldn't do that very well.

Starting point is 00:02:30 But now almost everything is trackable. And I find myself tracking packages a lot. I just thought it was something quirky that I did, but apparently not, according to a survey by a printing company called For Over. They wanted to see how people felt about package delivery and tracking, and just people's attitudes in general on the topic. They surveyed more than 2,000 consumers to better understand their delivery tracking habits, and it turns out I'm pretty normal.

Starting point is 00:03:02 96% of consumers track deliveries after ordering online, and 43% say they track deliveries every day after ordering until the package is delivered. 87% of consumers have had a package delivered late, and 73% feel a sense of anxiety when a package is delayed. Most consumers, 45%, feel that two to three days is an acceptable amount of time to wait for shipping, while 24% prefer next day shipping when available. 29% said they would not order an item online if they couldn't track the delivery. Only 3% said the ability to track a package was not important at all. The states with the most delayed deliveries are Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, Alaska, and New Hampshire.

Starting point is 00:03:54 And that is something you should know. If you're the curious type, you are going to love this. Because all around you, everything you do, everywhere you go, there's a lot of science going on, particularly chemistry. You tend not to notice it, but haven't you ever wondered how caffeine works to give you a boost? Or how cleaning products actually clean? Or how moisturizer moisturizes your skin? Or how fireworks work? Well, it's all chemistry, and Kate Bibberdorf understands it very well. Kate is a chemist and author of a book called It's Elemental,

Starting point is 00:04:33 The Hidden Chemistry in Everything. Hey Kate, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. So let's start with what you mean by there's hidden chemistry in everything. Sure. So I am a chemist by trade. So everything I see is chemistry. I can't help it. Basically, the simple definition of chemistry, it's the interaction of matter and energy and just kind of how they play with each other. And so if you look around you, everything you can see has atoms, has molecules, which by definition means it's chemistry. And so for me, everything I see, every reaction that happens, everything we do in the kitchen, it's all chemistry to me.

Starting point is 00:05:17 So let's start in the kitchen. That's always a good place to start. And let's start with caffeine because many of us start our day with a cup of coffee or something with caffeine in it. And so what's the chemistry there? So caffeine, the actual molecule is called trimethylaxanthine, and it's an odorless white powder that no one would ever, ever want to just eat by itself because it's quite bitter. And so what we do is we take this caffeine and we somehow ingest it into our system. So I'm a diet Coke girl. So that's what I do in the morning.

Starting point is 00:05:50 I drink diet Coke. My husband drinks coffee. A lot of people drink coffee, but some way or the other, we get this psychoactive drug into our body. And so it operates a lot like nicotine or morphine, and it kind of messes with the way our brain functions or behaves. So what caffeine does in a simple term, and I'll kind of jump down into it in a second, but it really, it acts like a bouncer for your brain. So a lot of people think that caffeine somehow gives you energy or pumps you up, but it acts like the opposite. So what it does is it gets into your body and it binds with these receptors that are meant to bind with another molecule called adenosine.

Starting point is 00:06:30 And so that molecule, when it binds with these receptors, it makes you feel sleepy and drowsy. So when caffeine gets in there, it blocks adenosine. It can't bind to the receptors. And so it essentially blocks the molecule that makes us feel sleepy or drowsy. So it's a bouncer and it just like said, Nope, not right now. Stay away. Adenosine. We, you know, we need some energy for another hour or two, and then you can come back. Um, and it's like said, nope, not right now. Stay away, adenosine. We need some energy for another hour or two and then you can come back. It's really cool. Really? So caffeine doesn't hype you up

Starting point is 00:06:51 and give you a lot of energy as much as what it's really doing is preventing you from feeling sleepy. But I'm one of those people that caffeine doesn't really bother that much. I can drink a cup of coffee before bed and it doesn't really keep me from sleeping. Well, I'm curious, how much coffee do you drink in a day?

Starting point is 00:07:10 Is it possible that you've built up a tolerance? Yeah, I think so. I probably drink way, way too much coffee. That's what that is. And so it has to do with the way the molecule binds in your receptors. And so if you've built up a tolerance, that means essentially you've trained your brain to let go of that receptor a little bit easier. So caffeinism, for example, is a condition that occurs if you regularly ingest like one to one point five grams of caffeine.

Starting point is 00:07:35 But technically, you can actually overdose on caffeine. A lot of people don't know this. You would have to drink a lot, though. It would be about 50 cups of coffee to overdose or about 200 cans of diet Coke. So you'd have to drink a lot to get that far, but most people usually have caffeine, caffeinism. And so those are the people who drink like three or four cups of coffee a day, maybe more. They have several cans of soda or whatever. And you start to build up a tolerance, which means that your receptors aren't as sensitive to the caffeine and they more easily let go of that trimethylxanthine and your brain can go to sleep. When I think about chemistry in the home, I mostly think about cleaning products because cleaning products have a lot of chemicals in them.

Starting point is 00:08:17 People are very concerned about them. And I know that you like the chemistry of cleaning products because it's really, really interesting. And you have some stories of cleaning products because it's really, really interesting. And you have some stories about cleaning products. One of which, which I think is just fascinating in a horrible way is a couple of years ago, there was a woman who was mixing different cleaners because she just wanted to have like a super cleaner. And she took a laundry detergent and mixed it with an unknown chemical. They won't release it. This was in Japan. And she ended up killing herself because the toxic gases that release and 90 people from our apartment complex had to go to the hospital because of it. So all these cleaning supplies

Starting point is 00:08:53 that we have in our house, while they're amazing and they do good things, we absolutely need to be super careful with them because they are chemicals. These are at you're doing chemical reactions. And so you need to be really careful with that. And, and I'm getting a little bit on my soap box because there's a Tik TOK trend going on right now of, of little kids, just throwing as many different cleaners into the toilet as possible and flushing it down to try to get a clean toilet. And that just like stresses me out like nobody's business. Um, and so that's just my little comment of like, make sure you do what it's ever says on the back of the cleaner and never mix things. So let's talk about like some really fun cleaners. So what about a lemon? We probably all have lemon. Maybe we've used lemon

Starting point is 00:09:29 for cleaning before, but lemons contain citric acid, which is a triprotic acid, meaning there's three active components on there that really get to do the active pieces. And so a lot of people like to use something like this triprotic acid or lemons, I should say when they're cleaning a sink, right? Your sink drain. And so that those are often contained with lots of gunk, there's minerals on the inside. And so these minerals have a certain charge. They can be positive. They can be negative. Usually they're positive. And what happens is when your citric acid goes through, it sees every single one of these minerals and essentially bear hugs it because it can wrap its entire body around this mineral. And in three different places, it can coordinate with this mineral. So if you use your body and we're pretending our body is our lemon, that would

Starting point is 00:10:14 be like if our head could reach out and coordinate with a mineral, our arms could reach out and coordinate with a mineral and our feet could. So we have three different places where there are molecules grabbing this one bad thing that's clogging our drain. And so essentially with enough citric acid, you can just roll that down your tube, your pipe, and it's going to wrap around all these minerals, rip them off of your pipe because the mineral, this is the cool part. The mineral is more attracted to the lemon, that citric acid than the side of your pipe. So it lets go of the side of your pipe and it just goes and washes away. And so lemons are a really natural, easy cleaner. So I know there's a lot

Starting point is 00:10:49 of people who want to stay away from lots of chemicals and everything, even though everything's a chemical, but lemons are natural and they're wonderful cleaners and they work, they work really well. Would a lime work? Yes. Any citrus was good. Lemons and limes typically are better just because they have higher concentrations of that citric component. And you can usually notice that by biting in. It's more sour. It's more acidic.

Starting point is 00:11:11 So the more sour, the better it is. Usually, not always. I remember hearing someone talk about toxic household cleaners. And really, if this was correct, really what people mean by toxic household cleaners is cleaners that contain chlorine. That it's the chlorine gas that's the real problem, or the potential for creating chlorine gas is what's the real problem. And that's why people will try natural cleaners, which, you know, sometimes work and maybe sometimes don't work as well because they don't have chlorine in them. What we're trying to do is use things that are not toxic, things that are not going to accidentally make chlorine gas. So often what they're trying to do is avoid the element

Starting point is 00:11:56 chlorine somewhere, somehow. And that's usually the big problem because all-purpose cleaners, our common all-purpose cleaners, typically have a common surfactant. Dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride is one of our most common ones. And there's that chloride component in there. It's very, very common. You see it all the time. So a surfactant has two sides of its molecule.

Starting point is 00:12:16 So one side is hydrophobic. It does not like water. And the other side is hydrophilic. It does like water. And so the surfactants that are in your cleaning supplies are the exact same ones in your dish soap. They're in your shampoo and they work the same way. So the one side of the surfactant is going to be the hydrophobic side, and that's going to be the part that bonds with the grease. So this is the non-polar side of the molecule. And so it wants to bind with

Starting point is 00:12:42 something that is also non-polar. So the grease, the dirt, the grime in your hair, the grime on your plate, all that. So it grabs that. But the other side of the surfactant is awesome. It is the part that is hydrophilic. It loves water. And so it then attaches to any water molecules that are coming out of your shower drain or in the dishwasher. So it grabs onto the water molecule and then the water itself is being flushed down the drain. And so essentially the water goes, let's just, let's just talk about in the shower. Cause I think it's easiest to think about it gravity wise. So the water comes down onto your head.

Starting point is 00:13:13 It then, uh, the surfactant is then going to bind to the water itself, but it's also attached to the greasy part in your hair. And then as the water is being pulled off of your hair, rolling down due to gravity all the way down to the drain, it's literally ripping that grease of the surfactant out of your hair because the one side of the surfactant is like so attracted to that grease that it's not going to let go. The other side of the surfactant is so attracted to the water that it's not going to let go. So between those two things, you have the grease being ripped off your hair and then it goes all the way down the shower drain. Same thing happens in the dishwasher. The greasy parts, the protein fragments are ripped

Starting point is 00:13:49 off of your plate and then it connects to the water and goes all the way down your dishwasher drain. That's amazing. Who knew this fight was going on on your head? I know, right? It's really fun to think about it. Next time you're in the shower and you're like soaping up, think about what you're doing. You're allowing all of those surfactant molecules to bind to the grease. So when we talk about letting your shampoo kind of sit on your head for a second or two or 30 seconds, you know, whatever your bottle says, there's a reason behind that time component. We're saying it takes about X seconds, 30 seconds, whatever it is for your surfactant to bind to the grease very strongly.

Starting point is 00:14:24 And then it's good to wash it down the drain. But a lot of these surfactants need a little bit of time. My favorite all-purpose cleaner, I believe says let's soak for five minutes on our counter, which I'm terrible about that to be perfectly honest. I never do that. I spray it on, wash it off, and then I bleach once a week and call it good. But you really should listen to what is on the back of the bottle because they know their molecules and they know exactly how long it takes for it to bind to the nasty stuff that we're trying to remove. Well, I've heard, too, that if you use anything to get germs away, and certainly we've been doing that a lot lately, that you can't just spray something on and wipe it off, that it takes time to kill the germs. And if you just wipe it off, you didn't give it enough time to win the battle.

Starting point is 00:15:04 That's why really good custodians, they're always letting the cleaners soak on the toilet seat for a little bit before they go back and clean it. So they clean one, they clean two, they clean three, and then they go back to finish cleaning one and two and three. So you'll see that there is a reason why these places like hospitals, all these places that deep clean, it takes a while because you actually have to give the molecules time to react. We're talking about all the fascinating chemistry in your life. And we're talking with chemist Kate Bibberdorf. She's author of the book Elemental, The Hidden Chemistry in Everything. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic.

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Starting point is 00:16:21 house tomorrow? I want to go to Jack's place today. I'll just take the car. Don't wait up, okay? Kids go from zero to 18 in no time, don't they? At Intact Insurance, we insure your car so you can enjoy the ride. Visit intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply. So, Kate, one thing I've always wondered about cleaning is, you know, like when you have a pan or a pot and there's food in it and it's stuck on.

Starting point is 00:16:46 And so generally you soak it, you put it in the sink, you fill it with water and you let it sit. What's going on during that period while it's soaking that loosens that up and makes it easier to get off? It depends on what you've used, but often what it is, is a lot of our, um, food fragments, a lot of them have water in them. And so what's happening is when you soak a pan full of, of water, you're allowing for your food fragments to form hydrogen bonds with the water. Now we can see this on the macro scale because the food we just made Mac and cheese. So that's what I'm picturing.

Starting point is 00:17:21 And so I soaked the pan in, um, in water. And then after maybe 30 minutes or so, I saw the, the, like the cheese parts, it looked swollen. If you will, they look plump, they'd absorb the water. You could see that they were not as attached to the surface of the pan. And so what's happening is when they're soaking in the water, they form these hydrogen bonds with the water, but that's actually more favorable for it. It would rather be for rather have these hydrogen bonds of the water than be attached to more favorable for it. It would rather have these hydrogen bonds with the water than be attached to the pan itself. But your food absorbs the water. And then the second part is after it's absorbed the water, it doesn't really want to be attracted to the pan

Starting point is 00:17:55 anymore. So let's go to the pan. And then on top of that, if we then add a soap, if we put it in the dishwasher, if we do anything like that, that allows for that surfactant to come in and do the final piece, which is like really ripping it off the pan because it's more attractive to that. I know a lot of people are concerned about having bleach in their home because, well, you know, of course, if you get a drop of it on your clothes, there goes the color and you've ruined the clothes. But it certainly has the reputation of being very caustic. And also, stories, I can't remember any, but it just seems like you don't want to ever combine bleach with anything else because that can cause problems. What about that? So bleach, sodium hypochlorite, that has chlorine in there. So your bottle of bleach often, probably if it's sitting in your pantry right now or whatever it's at pantry is wrong word, uh, your, your closet probably right now is actually

Starting point is 00:18:49 decomposing just a tiny bit and releasing that chlorine gas. So that's probably happening, but do not panic because our scientists have already looked into this and figured out a way to fix it. And so we also spike our bleach components with a teeny tiny bit of sodium hydroxide, just, so just a little bit of it. And the sodium hydroxide is a really strong base. And if it detects any of that chlorine gas being released, it grabs it immediately and does a little chemical reaction and reproduces the sodium hypochlorite. So in your bleach container, we've already taken care of that for you. If you have any type of

Starting point is 00:19:19 degradation, the problem is if you spray your bleach onto a surface and then you use another cleaning source on it, that could then release the chlorine gas, you breathe that in, it could lead to respiratory problems. And if it's too much in a safe, in a small area, that could be fatal. I want to ask you about moisturizers because I remember hearing a long time ago, someone talk about moisturizers and they said that moisturizers themselves don't necessarily moisturize. They keep moisture in, but what you really need to do for a moisturizer to do its job is wet your skin first, or put your moisturizer on right after a shower when your skin is still wet.

Starting point is 00:20:01 The moisturizer doesn't make your skin moist. It keeps your skin moist, but it has to be moist in the first place. Is that a fair argument, a fair statement? That's very fair. And it depends on what your moisturizer is though, because there's some things that are actually too hydrate. So, and there's different face masks and there's so many different products. So it's hard to say like exactly, but what you just said is so beautiful. And that's exactly what you should do. You should put water on your face first, and then you're going to put your moisturizer on there. And so a really good moisturizer is going to be something that's relatively hydrophobic. So your water that's

Starting point is 00:20:35 underneath the moisturizer is going to come up towards that layer of the moisturizer, and it's going to be repelled back into your face or wherever you're putting it on. So it's back into your skin because it doesn't want to touch the moisturizer. It doesn't want to go through that in order to leave and evaporate off your skin. The problem is with that, I don't want to say too much about that because you don't want the things that lock pieces in. You still want to be able to evaporate. You still want your water to actually to be able to get off your skin because that's how we cool down. Since you are a chemist and since you look at the real makeup of these products, you're the perfect person to ask this because moisturizers can be dirt cheap or can be amazingly expensive.

Starting point is 00:21:17 Is there really much of a difference? Is it worth paying the price or is a moisturizer a moisturizer or is the answer somewhere in the middle? Somewhere in the middle. And there's definitely better products than others. I avoid the really cheap ones because usually that means there's a lot of byproducts in there. They haven't gone through the purification process to remove all the gunk, anything that's left over during the process of actually building that moisturizer together. So I can, I completely agree with that. Personally, I kind of am somewhere in the middle. I really like expensive makeup stuff, makeup products, because they typically are better for your skin. Some are better than others. I'm not going to name drop any, but there are some that are better than others.

Starting point is 00:21:58 But for my moisturizer, I mean, I get my moisturizer at target. It is a really good brand. It's dermatologist recommended, and it is something that is relatively cheap. I think it's like 15 bucks for my face lotion. So it just depends on what's in that bottle. What about the chemistry of exercise? Can we talk about that for a minute? Oh, all day. I love exercising. And so one of my favorite things is actually just the material you wear. So this dry fit material is actually trademarked by Nike. I didn't realize that, but because dry fits kind of like Kleenex, we use that for everything, but the phrase dry fit is actually a Nike thing. And so essentially what they've done is they've created a moisture

Starting point is 00:22:40 wicking fabric and they use a specific blend of polyester. And what happens is this, this way, the, the fabric is threaded together. It essentially pulls the water droplets that you've sweat out of your body because your body's trying to cool ourselves, just like we were talking about there, but the water's being pushed out of the pores. And then the polyester basically touches it and it pulls the water droplet off of your body. And then what happens is the coolest part, honestly, is that the water is able to glide across, across the fabric. So it spreads out. So it's still near your body. So you're still going to get the effect of once it evaporates off the fabric, you're going to feel that piece. It's going to use the heat from your body to evaporate.

Starting point is 00:23:19 So you're still going to cool down, but it's physically pulled the water off of your body. So you don't have that like gunky, sweaty, awful feeling. And so if you've ever worked out in cotton, they have the phrase cotton kills because the fabrics are woven together so tightly that the water molecules can't evaporate out. They're like trapped on your body. They're stuck under, underneath your fabric. And so you don't end up cooling down as quickly. Isn't that interesting? It's very like in the same breath though. So you definitely wear your cotton materials if you're ever going to be playing with fire for the same reason, because the fabrics are woven together, then you have a layer of water underneath it because you've been sweating so much. And so it's actually safer for you because the fire is hopefully less likely to burn your body.

Starting point is 00:24:01 Well, that's good to know. But maybe you shouldn't be playing with fire in the first place. But that's what my parents taught me. But mine too. But I'm definitely a pyromaniac. I breathe fire, I set my hand on fire. I was on Colbert, I taught him how to breathe fire. That was so fun. I read though, that as much as you're a pyromaniac. I read that you are very anti-flaming shots of alcohol that people sometimes drink. You don't like those at all as a chemist, as a pyromaniac. So why is that? Oh my gosh, please don't ever do that. That is so dangerous. Alcohol is so flammable. Anytime I see a flaming shot, I get as far away from it as possible because with just one turn one one little movement it can set any alcohol that's anywhere there like a little beer spill

Starting point is 00:24:50 on the counter anything will immediately ignite and it's so dangerous really oh gosh yes I if there's a flaming shot I'm out of there I don't want to be anywhere near it now that's that's really interesting because nobody thinks about like beer being flammable or wine being flammable because it's, you know, it's only what three, four or 5% alcohol. So how could it catch fire? Well, most of the time it's with shots, right? So most of the time it's with like the ethanol. So a vodka by itself is usually 40% vodka and that's plenty enough to, to have some, um, cause it's the fumes itself that are, that are setting on fire.

Starting point is 00:25:29 It's not the, the ethanol that's in the shot. It's the fact that it's gone up into the vapor. And so a lot of our alcohols are really volatile, meaning that they don't always stay in the liquid form. We can smell them the same thing, the same way you can smell like nail polish remover. That's a volatile chemical. And so you can smell the ethanol because it's going from the liquid to the gas state. And so what's happening with these flaming shots is we're actually lighting those vapors on fire

Starting point is 00:25:52 and those vapors are everywhere. They're all over in the bar and they can jump then to any pour of liquid, any puddle of liquid that's on the bar counter or anything like that. So it's super dangerous. Yeah. I don't like them. I don't like flaming shots at all. One of the things I find interesting, and I know you know something about this, being the pyromaniac that you are, is fireworks and the colors in fireworks and how that all works. Fireworks is one of the biggest examples of chemistry. Every time you see a color in the air, what you're seeing is electrons moving from one energy level to another energy level. And when you see big, bright colors like greens and blues and purples, those are big energy transitions that are happening way up in our

Starting point is 00:26:37 sky. So they're really, really hard to do. But those reds and those yellows and oranges, those are really small transitions that our electrons are moving from. And so it's much easier to set off reds, yellows, and orange fireworks. So if you've ever been curious about why you're getting the reds and the yellows, it's because they're cheaper and they're easier to do. But blues and purples are really, really hard. Well, I have to say you kind of shatter my image of a chemist. I mean, I don't think of a chemist as also being a pyromaniac and into the things that you're into. But it's really fun to go through and hear the science and the stories behind everyday chemistry. Kate Bibberdorf has been my guest. She is a chemist and author of the book, It's Elemental, The Hidden Science of Everything. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Kate. You're a fun guest.

Starting point is 00:27:26 Well, that is quite the compliment coming from the king of podcasts. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and

Starting point is 00:28:56 in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever sat quietly with your thoughts and contemplated, what does it mean to be alive? What's the difference between something that is alive, like you and me and the trees outside, and something that isn't? Seems like we should know this, and yet it's a pretty slippery concept, life, and one that Carl Zimmer has tackled.

Starting point is 00:29:39 Carl is a reporter who writes the Matter column for the New York Times. He's a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. He's the author of 13 books, including Life's Edge, The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. Hey, Carl, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. So why undertake this exploration? Why try to understand what life is? Well, you know, I've been writing about life for, gosh, maybe 30 years now in The New York Times and elsewhere and in books and so on. And, you know, I write about these different manifestations of it, whether it's snakes or jellyfish or redwood trees. And, you know, every now and then you stop and think,

Starting point is 00:30:25 well, what is this? I mean, what is the quality of these things that makes them alive as opposed to things that aren't alive? And, you know, we have this sense that we know, but, you know, if you really kind of scratch under the surface, you kind of don't. You can think of lots of examples that will defy any definition you come up with of what it means to be alive. So what's your definition of what it means to be alive? I don't have one. I don't think anybody has one that really is standing up. Scientists have published hundreds of definitions of life, literally hundreds. And you can look at every one of them and say like, well, yeah, but there's a problem with that or there's a problem with that.

Starting point is 00:31:07 And, you know, in a way, maybe scientists aren't the best people to sort of grapple with the fact that it's so hard to define life. So I ended up talking with philosophers who have really interesting things to say about this. And some of them think that even trying to define life is just a waste. We better off studying it, understanding it, and delving deeper to come up with a theory. Well, it would seem to me, being the great philosopher that I am, that life is really the absence of death that that you know for something to be alive it has to not be dead and or even have the potential of being dead that you know a rock is not alive because it can't be dead well I guess then we just sort of kick the can down the road I mean because what do you mean by dead and this actually is a really important issue when, for example, we're talking about the end of life. And so, you know, people have had different ways to declare a patient dead,

Starting point is 00:32:17 but those shift around as our technology changes. So, you know, when ventilators allowed people's hearts to keep beating and lungs to keep breathing, you know, that really caused a lot of concern among doctors because it was clear for some people that their brains were so damaged that it was just a matter of time before the body completely collapsed. And so they would say, like, we need to declare this person dead now. And so we define death by brain death, but we do that for humans. There are these little animals called tardigrades. They're all over the place in the soil and in the water and so on. They're these adorable little animals, almost visible to the naked eye with lots of little, with eight legs, and they waddle around. And if they get dried out, they don't die the way we would die. They're, basically, their bodies turn to a kind of protein

Starting point is 00:33:12 glass. They lose all their water, and their metabolism stops. There's no chemical activity going on of the sort that we think of that is essential for life. But they're not dead. They can be in that state for decades, maybe centuries, and you can throw them in water and they will start to function again. So, you know, there's really more of a gray zone between life and death, between life and non-life, and it challenges these ideas that we have that there's a simple way to explain life. Yeah, well, maybe based on what you just said, I like what that other guy said,

Starting point is 00:33:53 that it's a waste of time, perhaps, to try to define what life is. I mean, if I see a dead animal on the side of the road, I don't need to go look and define whether it's dead and what the death, it's dead. I mean, it isn't alive anymore and it's not coming back. So that's kind of, that's it. It's dead.

Starting point is 00:34:12 So maybe we don't need to define it. We just need kind of a working knowledge of it. Well, in a way, we do have a working knowledge of life that's really kind of deeply embedded in us. You know, we and other animals actually have a keen sense for biological activity. You know, our brains have separate circuits for detecting biological motion. So that, you know, if you see a rock falling down a hill, or if you see a wolf running around, like your brain responds to those differently, even though they're both moving things. And, you know, that makes some good evolutionary sense, because, you know, you want to figure out how to escape from predators, for example,

Starting point is 00:35:01 or maybe you're trying to catch something. But that doesn't, just because we have these responses doesn't actually mean we have some sort of scientific knowledge, you know. So, you know, you see that animal on the side of the road. Well, it looks dead. And then maybe you get closer to it and you realize, well, it's, you know, maybe it's an opossum playing possum, you know, like it's these appearances can be deceiving. And then there are things where people just can't agree on whether they're alive or not, period. So viruses, for example, are viruses alive? Are they? Depends on who you ask. I once got an email in the morning from a virologist who very emphatically told me that everybody knows that viruses are not alive,

Starting point is 00:35:46 and any expert would tell me that. And then literally that afternoon, another virologist emailed me to inform me that, of course, viruses are alive, and any expert would tell me that. That gives you a sense of how contested viruses are, because they check a lot of the boxes that we think of as being sort of definitive hallmarks of life. You know, they evolve incredibly well. You know, just the pandemic is just an example of evolution in action. This coronavirus is evolving into new variants before our very eyes. But, you know, there's another box that people like to check that says that living things have to have a metabolism. They have to sustain themselves. They need homeostasis, things like that, kind of keeping an inner balance. And, you know, viruses don't do that. I mean, viruses are just protein shells with genes inside, basically, and they deliver those into host cells, which then build new viruses. So they are sort of partly definitely alive and by thinking about life and what we, and really pushing hard

Starting point is 00:37:05 at what we mean by life and trying to draw that, figure out how we draw that line, it actually gives us new ways to think about biology, about viruses, and that can lead to new discoveries. Is it important in this discussion to distinguish between conscious life, things with a brain, and things without a brain, like a tree? Or is life life or not? Well, we think about life with a focus on consciousness produced by our brains. And again, that is sort of like the central aspect of our own lives. So it's understandable that we would view that as being really important. But, you know, in the big scheme of things, I would argue consciousness is not really all that important. The vast majority

Starting point is 00:38:00 of species on Earth are not conscious. They haven't been conscious for billions of years and uh life if we'll call this life uh has done just fine uh without consciousness so we all like our consciousness but i i don't think it's it's a really a vital essential uh ingredient for for understanding life and certainly when nasa talks about looking for signs of life elsewhere in the solar system, elsewhere in the universe, they're not limiting themselves to, you know, aliens with consciousness that are aware of themselves and can communicate in that kind of way as we do. They'll be happy to find some bacteria on Mars. So one of the things I've always wondered about is like, you know, say an orange or, you know, an apple or something, you pick it and, you know, you think, well, it must not be alive because you've picked it off the tree. And yet the seeds inside of it could be

Starting point is 00:38:58 planted to create a new tree. So maybe it is alive. And so what's science say about that? What science tells us is that that apple is no longer part of this bigger organism, but those seeds can indeed, you know, give rise to a new organism. Now, you know, seeds are another one of these fascinating things because, you know, they can be dormant and last for thousands of years. Scientists are thawing seeds out from the Siberian tundra and they're getting plants to grow, sometimes after over 10 or 20,000 years. So it's not alive in the sense of being this sort of full organism. You know, an apple tree has its leaves and its roots and its branches, and it needs all those parts to continue to be a successful tree. But we can sort of we can we can think about life as being sort of broken up into these pieces, which can then kind of lose some of those qualities we think of as being alive. And yet the capacity to produce something new goes on. And

Starting point is 00:40:10 there are lots of, lots of species that, that have turned this into a great strategy. Like, like the tardigrades, for example. I mean, that's, you know, they, they dry out all the time and apparently, and, and they don't die. They just just they just go into this sort of third state of being so you know we don't really have we don't really have the words to describe these fascinating things um these things are all around us um we think and we we think in kind of simple terms of life and death and the reality is much richer. Can life be created? It ought to be. Scientists have not combined some chemicals and produced something that might display the behaviors that we might all agree that means it's alive. So, you know, we could talk about a checklist that we would might all agree that means it's alive so you know we could talk about a checklist that we would want you know we would want something that was maybe a cell that had a

Starting point is 00:41:13 boundary and maybe could you know uh capture energy and could do things with that energy and could reproduce and pass down some sort of genes to descendants. No one's done that yet, but they're making fascinating steps towards that. They are making lifelike combinations of chemicals, like weird little droplets that move around in a dish of water in a strange kind of lifelike way that break apart into new droplets. And so, you know, this kind of research, I do think is going to eventually lead to the creation of life in the lab. And that's going to give us some insights into how life may have begun on Earth and elsewhere in the universe. It would seem that one of the keys or pieces of the puzzle to understanding life would be to understand what death is, because as alive as something can be, once you're gone, you're gone. But there are these situations where it's hard to figure out if

Starting point is 00:42:27 someone is indeed dead or not. It can be difficult to diagnose death in certain situations. You know, and especially when people have suffered accidents and other kinds of trauma that leave them on a ventilator. So there's a standard battery of tests that can be used in order for doctors to declare someone on a ventilator to be dead. And those have to do with how they respond to their environment, what sort of activity is in their brain. And this is established in many states and countries. But the fact is that a person, you know, does continue to breathe, their heart does continue to beat. And, you know, there have been, you know, a few unusual examples where people's bodies continued in this state for years in some cases. There was a girl in California who actually went through puberty

Starting point is 00:43:27 while on a ventilator after having been declared dead by the state of California. Now, eventually she died of other causes a few years later and then received a second death certificate in the state of New Jersey. So I'm not denying that death is real. What I'm saying is that when we try to find that line between life and death, it can be surprisingly challenging, and it actually forces us to think about what we mean when we use those words. Well, you know, what's interesting to me is that if you were to ask random people, you know, do you understand what life is? And do you understand what death is? And do you understand what, you know, inanimate objects are and that they're not alive? People get it. People have a

Starting point is 00:44:14 sense that what they believe, what they know to be true and, you know, are pretty comfortable with those assumptions. But, you know, clearly from what you're saying, our assumptions, it's just not that black and white. We go through our lives with a lot of assumptions about how things are. And it's, I think it can be really fascinating to stop and think about them. I mean, certainly scientists themselves are contemplating all these paradoxes and so on on um and you know i i feel like well the rest of us should be let in on the fun as well you know it's really it's really it is really kind of mind bending to to think about the fact that that scientists do not agree on a definition of life they just don't um and i i find that fascinating and and it tells us something, I think, really profound about what it means to be alive and

Starting point is 00:45:08 how much we have left to understand life. Well, I wonder, I mean, science doesn't agree on a lot of things, and things keep changing. So maybe science isn't the place to find the answer. Well, I find it interesting that, you know, chemists, for example, do not have a bunch of different definitions for a molecule. I mean, they agree on what a molecule is. So you might imagine that biologists who all study life would have an agreed on definition for it. And they don't. And that actually then, you know, tells us that there's something interesting going on there. And, you know, I think that one of the reasons it's so hard for scientists to agree on a definition of life is that unlike chemists, they don't actually have a theory of life yet.

Starting point is 00:46:01 So chemists have an atomic theory that explains lots of different things. And so, you know, if they want to define water, they define it in terms of H2O and so on. Whereas before then, you know, alchemists would define water just in terms of its properties. They'd say, well, water is something that's transparent, that's wet, that's a liquid that dissolves certain things. They were defining it by just listing things off. And that's what we do now. People will say, well, well, life is this and this and that and that. You know, they come up with lists and lists aren't good enough.

Starting point is 00:46:39 And so, you know, I think we will have a theory of life, just like we have lots of developed lots of other theories in the history of science. And it will be scientists who develop it. It's just they're not they're just not there yet. When do you think we'll be there? I think pretty soon. The history of asking what is life, which goes back for centuries, has been rid you know, riddled with failures. People have tried to come up with definitions, those definitions have failed. People have claimed that they have discovered, you know, the link between life and non-life, and it turns out to be just nothing. People have even claimed to have created life from scratch, and it turns out that they were

Starting point is 00:47:23 just fooled by bad chemistry. So there's a lot of failure in the history of this kind of work. And yet, you know, scientists are really making some remarkable progress in terms of, first of all, understanding living things down at the level of atoms and molecules, and they're tying biology to physics, to some of the fundamental insights that physics has to offer about how matter works, even how information can shape matter, because, you know, we can appreciate that information is really important to life too. So these things are coming together. You know, just as scientists, I think, are pretty close to creating life in the lab. I think they're pretty close to creating a theory that will be a good theory of life. So, you know, I forgive the pun, but I hope I'm alive to see it.

Starting point is 00:48:17 Well, what do you mean by alive? But this is such an interesting thing to ponder. You would think we would have pretty much a fundamental understanding of what life is, and clearly we don't. And to think about it, you start to understand why. Carl Zimmer has been my guest. He is a writer and reporter. He writes the Matter column for the New York Times. And his book is called Life's Edge, the Search for What It Means to Be Alive.

Starting point is 00:48:46 And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Carl. Great. Well, thanks for your interest. I really appreciate it. On a hot summer day, when you're out working in the yard or whatever, you might be tempted to take a refreshing sip

Starting point is 00:49:03 of cool water from the garden hose. Well, don't. Consumer Reports says you might be tempted to take a refreshing sip of cool water from the garden hose. Well, don't. Consumer Reports says you could be getting a mouthful of lead. The PVC that most hoses are made from can contain a dangerous amount of lead, and that goes for the brass fitting on the end of the hose as well. Some hoses have warning labels on them that they're not to be used for drinking, and others might be labeled drinking water safe, but even those hoses should be flushed out first.

Starting point is 00:49:32 And a lot of hoses, they're not labeled at all, so you're just better off skipping the drink from the hose and going in the house and getting a glass of water. It's also, by the way, a good idea to wash your hands

Starting point is 00:49:44 after you've been out in the yard handling the hose, since the lead from the hose can be transferred to your hands and then into your mouth. And that is something you should know. I used to ask you to subscribe to this podcast, but the industry has changed the term now, so now we're supposed to ask you to follow this podcast. So please, follow Something You Should Know on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Starting point is 00:50:09 I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening. And tell your friends to listen to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks,

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Something You Should Know - The Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life & What Does it Mean to Be Alive?

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