The shocking power of tiny things

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0:43And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today on the show, small but mighty. So I want you to touch your face. Go on, touch it. What do you feel? Soft? Squishy? Maybe chafed? It's you, right? You're feeling you? Well, that's not quite right. You're actually feeling over 100 billion bacterial cells on your face. Those that are creating some of the aromas of body odor and stickiness. You're feeling some of the fungi that have floated down from the rafters or ceiling today. Those that set off allergies.

1:43You're likely coated with some bacterial cells that came from the fecal plumes that arose out of the toilet the last time you flushed it. Oh yeah, and there's at least two species of face mites that are squishing their way across your skin. And they definitely had sex on your face last night. This is Anne Madden. She's a microbiologist and self-described microbe wrangler who does not seem to be bothered by what she just described. We are an ecosystem. And so just as we expect to have lots of different creatures living in a jungle, we expect to have lots of different creatures living in our homes and on our bodies.

2:25And while that's gross, it's also pretty cool. Anne hasn't always been passionate about the microscopic jungle that surrounds us. It certainly wasn't on her mind when she went to college. But I had this opportunity to do an internship in the rainforest of Costa Rica. And so when I arrive in the jungle, I see these trees that are taller than cathedrals. And there are these howling monkeys that sound like dying jaguars. And these beautifully, vibrantly colored poison dart frogs that kind of sound like a baby duck everywhere. and I am in love. And as I get to help all of these different scientists study venomous snakes and poison dart frogs and plants, I realize we know nothing about our beautiful, magnificent world and that the process of research is this puzzle, this adventure, and it never ends.

3:27But it did end, at least for Anne. She had to go home and back to school. And I went back to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and everything was beige and boring, and there were no poison dart frogs, and I was as far away from the jungle as I could imagine. But then I started research in a microbiology lab, and I found out that I'd never left the jungle. There were microscopic species everywhere, just beyond the line of sight. And these species, we barely uncovered what they were. Maybe we know 1 to 10 percent of what these species are. And if you grow them on a petri plate, they erupt in colors and aromas and very strange little behaviors.

4:13And many of them can do remarkable things and have been doing remarkable things. And yet they never get credit for it. And so I think that's when I fell in love with microbiology. I remember the first time I discovered and got to name a new species. Anne Madden continues from the TED stage. It was a fungus that lives in the nest of a paper wasp. It's white and fluffy, and I named it Mucor nidocola, meaning in Latin that it lives in the nest of another. I called up my dad, and I go, Dad, I just discovered a new microorganism species! And he laughed, and he goes, That's great, I hope you also discovered a cure for it.

4:54Now my dad is my biggest fan. So in that crushing moment where he wanted to kill my new little life form, I realized that actually I'd failed him. In my years toiling away in labs and in people's backyards, investigating and cataloging the microscopic life around us, I'd never made clear my true mission to him. My goal is not to find technology to kill the new microscopic life around us. My goal is to find new technology from this life that will help save us. The diversity of life in our homes is more than a list of 100 ,000 new species. is 100 ,000 new sources of solutions to human problems. I know it's hard to believe that anything that's so small or only has one cell can do anything powerful, but they can.

5:43Tiny organisms with extraordinary potential. A single word that can pack a punch. A passing moment that changes everything. In a world of attention-grabbing headlines and seismic global events, we sometimes forget the little guy, the almost imperceptible but powerful forces around us. And so today on the show, small but mighty. Forget big and boisterous. We are talking about things that are minuscule or fleeting, but potent. Like microbes, which can both hurt and help us humans. We live in a time of a horrid pandemic, so I think we're all familiar with how powerful and how devastating one microbe can be, in this case a virus.

6:35But many microbes around us are equally powerful, but they're not devastating. So there are microbes in our dust bunnies that are the source of many of our antibiotics, and they've been saving our loved ones for as long as we've known. One of the first jobs that Ann Madden ever had was working in research at a pharmaceutical company. And our goal was to find new microbes with the idea being that these new microbes could create novel antibiotics. And so that's where I really learned my microbe wrangling skills. We were using new techniques to grow microbes from soil that had never been grown before and no one had ever explored them in the lab.

7:18And indeed, these bizarre, slow-growing, tenacious little critters were creating novel antibiotics. And though they haven't been commercialized yet, we were successful in finding them. You knew what you were looking for then. I mean, it's not like you're like, here's a new microbe, let's see what it does. Like, what are some of the clues that you look for when you are hunting down microbes that you think might have medicinal uses? Yeah. So part of it is the idea of guilty by association. So other microbes that live in our soil are the source of many of our antibiotics that we use today. You'll actually know if they're in the soil because they produce the smell of fresh-turned earth.

7:59And so these microbes, you grow them in the lab and they actually look like tiny little sheep. They're adorable and fluffy. And one strategy is to then look for species of microbes that are related The idea being, if your cousins can do it, maybe you can too. Do you give them bits of disease and see how they respond? Or how do you test it? Yeah. So there are different ways of assessing whether a microbe can produce novel antibiotics. And one of them is a gladiator test. So you actually put them in a Petri plate next to a microbe that causes disease. So say you've got a microbe that's MRSA, right?

8:34So it's a horrible staph infection. And you can slather it on a Petri plate and have it grow. and then you come back the next day and you look to see who grew and who died. Oh, wow. Okay. Battle to the finish. Yeah. And so that gives you one hint. That's not the end of the story by any means, but it gives you a clue that, all right, this fluffy microbe has something that's killing off a microbe that causes disease. So maybe we can isolate that something, extract it, and maybe it can do what no other antibiotics could do before. Okay, Anne, you have also been working on projects that are more about the simple pleasures in life, like a good beer, which brings us to another microbe story that involves wasps.

9:21Yeah, so as soon as you start talking about wasp research, people my entire life always said, oh, what's good about a wasp? Nobody likes wasps. These are stinging creatures that often create nests in our eaves. But it turns out that yeasts, microbes that we love because they make bread and beer and all sorts of lovely flavors, use wasps as airplanes. We started with a pest. Inside that wasp, we plucked out a little-known microorganism species with a unique ability. It could make beer. This is a trait that only a few species on this planet have. In fact, all commercially produced beer you've ever had likely came from one of only three microorganism species.

10:06Yet our species? It could make a beer that tasted like honey. And it could also make a delightfully tart beer. In fact, this microorganism species that lives in the belly of a wasp, it could make a valuable sour beer better than any other species on this planet. This yeast could do what no other yeast species could do before it, which is make a sour beer in record time, just a few weeks. And so brewers could make sour beer more economically and people could enjoy new flavors and understand the benefits of biodiversity. And with that weird little moment in time, we gave a yeast the ability to make beer for the first time in 150 million years of its existence.

10:55And so now, just a few years later, brewing with these lactic acid yeasts is now commonplace. And there's something magical about that. I'm here to tell you that the next 100 years will feature these microscopic creatures solving more of our problems. And we have a lot of problems to choose from. We've got the mundane, bad-smelling clothes or bland food. And we've got the monumental, disease, pollution, war. And so this is my mission, to not just catalog the microscopic life around us, but to find out what it's uniquely well-suited to help us with. These creatures are microscopic alchemists with the ability to transform their environment with an arsenal of chemical tools.

11:38This means that they can live anywhere on this planet, and they can eat whatever food's around them. This means they can eat everything from toxic waste to plastic. I keep thinking about what you've mentioned a couple times now, which is plastic eating microbes. I mean, that is, we always hear about, you know, the plastic that goes into a landfill and is going to be around for thousands and thousands of years. Is there a possibility that actually maybe that might not be true? That if we could add microbes, it would in some fashion break down? Absolutely. So scientists have already found microbes that are incredibly adept at breaking down plastics, even the plastics that seem to last forever.

12:24That's really what they were designed to do. And as we think about our future, we need to think about not just the microbes that are going to break down plastic, but those that are going to help us build materials that are more sustainable. And so right now there are also microbes that generate PLA or polylactic acid, which is the plastic-like filaments that a lot of people are using in 3D printers. And those are made by microbes. Are they more biodegradable? They are. And there are groups that are now using AI and machine learning to enhance the activity of those microbe-made enzymes that tear apart plastic.

13:01And so it's going to be microbial skill sets and human ingenuity linked together to create that better future. When we return, the most famous microbe of all? I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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15:09And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and cuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up that Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or the daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to rinse. Rinse. It's time to be great. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today on the show, small but mighty. And we were just talking to microbiologist Anne Madden, who spends her days exploring the vast, colossal, positively cosmic universe of teeny tiny microbes. If you were to take a sugar packet's worth of soil and you were to explore the microbe species in there, you would find more microbial species in that sugar packet's worth of soil than you would find in all of the zoos on this planet.

16:09And if you were to take just another sugar packet worth of soil, you'd find a whole other planet's worth of species. This is the immense world that we live in at the microbial scale. I do feel like the pandemic changed my relationship to microbes. Maybe it made me a little bit paranoid in many ways. And not just the idea that there is a virus circulating among us, but potentially many scary microbes around us. How do you feel like people's relationship with microbes has been changed by COVID? Yeah. Yeah. So I think during the pandemic, particularly at the beginning, watched as the word microbe brought chills to everyone.

16:55And I saw it in young children, too, where it was a lesson that was hard learned. You know, microbes kill, they destroy, they bring with them sadness and isolation. And I think as we navigate our microbial world, it's important to also teach children and students that, again, not all microbes are evil. And so while it's important that we use hand sanitizer and things like that to limit the spread of certain microbes, we need to remember the plurality of these species and that there are microbes that we can play with in the soil and that that brings with it health, not just kind of griminess or germiness of what we think of.

17:42so when it comes to good microbes do you worry that you know just as certain species are going extinct are certain microbes also in trouble have we humans caused them harm oh so what keeps me up at night sometimes is thinking about all the microbes that have gone extinct because we have no idea what they are we have no idea who they were or what they did and i don't just think about that in terms of those that are in our house that we might have accidentally killed off with some kind of bleaching agent. But I think about that in the world in terms of habitats. And as we navigate worlds where we're clear-cutting forests, we don't really know all the microbes that we've lost.

18:29And there very well might be microbes out there that are going to create the solutions to our future problems. And so one of the reasons that I know a lot of microbiologists such as myself love uncovering new species to science is that part of that discovery involves conservation. We are asked when we name a species or rather required to put some of those cells into a deep freeze in multiple countries. So they are sitting in biobanks where they can be revived in the future. And we don't necessarily know what any of those microbes are going to be doing right A lot of them sit just as specimens with Latin names that no one can pronounce.

19:12But that doesn't mean that they'll always be that way. There might be a future where they are revived and those cells will help people combat a future pandemic. Or maybe they'll help them grow furniture in space stations or something far more mundane. But the key is that they still exist. That's microbiologist Anne Madden. She's the founder and chief scientist at the Microbe Institute. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, how the little things in life can make a big difference, like the words we use to express ourselves every day. Our next guest studies how small variations in language may mean big distinctions in how we experience the world.

20:06And to demonstrate, let's play a little game. Close your eyes. Yes. Well, so if you're driving, don't close your eyes. But if you're not driving or operating another kind of motor vehicle, close your eyes and point southeast. Southeast. Okay. Yeah. I'm pointing. Okay. So if you do this in any kind of normal room full of Westerners. I want you all to close your eyes and point southeast. Keep your eyes closed. Point. And then you have people open their eyes. They will immediately see that they have pointed in every possible direction. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there. I don't know which way it is myself.

20:53You have not been a lot of help. And I do this to point out that there can be really big cognitive differences between groups of people. And I've had a chance to work in an aboriginal community in Australia where they could do this task very easily. I could ask a five-year-old girl, hey, can you point southeast? And she would point immediately and without hesitation. And, you know, that's a big difference compared to, say, a room full of distinguished scientists. So I'll point in different directions. This is cognitive scientist Lara Boroditsky. And I study how humans get so smart, how languages and cultures that we have help us think the way that we do.

21:42So, Lara, it may not seem obvious to some of us, but what do you think this exercise of pointing southeast says about how language influences the brain? Well, our languages and cultures teach us to pay attention to certain things and not to other things. There's basically an infinite set of things that we could possibly take in, process, but our brains can't process all the information, can't take in all the information, so we have to make some choices. And one of the ways that we make those choices are by the things that our languages and cultures require of us. So in this aboriginal community in Australia that I mentioned, they, instead of using words like left and right to give directions or to talk about the body, they use cardinal directions, more or less north, south, east, and west.

22:34And they use these directions at all scales. So, for example, in some languages like this, like in Gugu Yimitir, you would even say, there's an ant on your southwest leg. You would say, move your cup to the north, northeast a little bit. So in Kuktair, this language that I had a chance to work on, the way you even say hello is, which way are you going? And the answer should be something like north-northwest in the far distance. How about you? So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction. Here's Lara Boroditsky on the TED stage.

23:12That would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? because you literally couldn't get past hello if you didn't know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really, really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because some biological excuse, oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales. No, if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually you can do it. so for me whenever I come across an example like this the biggest lesson for me is to not underestimate the potential of the human mind not just to say that the things that I can do or the things that I can imagine that those are the limits language allows us to recombine elements in infinite new ways and create new ideas on the spot.

24:09So right now I could say, imagine a giraffe river dancing on a pancake while solving differential equations, right? You've never had that thought before? No, no, I'm glad, happy to say. Maybe it's not the most useful thought, but there are so many other thoughts like that that people throughout history have had, And all of a sudden we have interesting ideas about time travel that make us engage with the future in different ways. So this ability to think beyond what is physically present and imagine and work in the realm of the abstract is one of the things that language opens the door to. You are really the latest in a long, centuries-long line of people who have been asking this question, does language shape the way we think?

25:08Like, why has this been such a debated topic? Because when I, you know, I remember the first time thinking about it, I just assumed it did. But actually, this is not something that anyone agrees on how it works. Well, I think often we disagree with ourselves about it, right? I think all of us have both intuitions. and so the idea that language shapes thought is very similar to the idea that physical exercises changes the way that your body looks and acts right when you speak a language you're practicing paying attention you're practicing categorizing something every day constantly and so it would be in fact the most surprising thing that the thing that you do all day every day this practice of speaking language would have no influence on your brain.

26:01And for me as a scientist, what's interesting is to figure out what are the times that language shapes thought meaningfully, and what are the times that it doesn't. And so I think one of the reasons that this idea has gotten new life in the last 20 or 30 years is because we started using experimental methods, like real scientific experimental methods rather than just arguing back and forth about our intuitions. One of your critics, John McWhorter, the linguist, he said, well, the gradual consensus is becoming that language can shape thought, but it tends to be in rather darling obscure psychological flutters.

26:44It's not a matter of giving you a different pair of glasses on the world. is this a small discovery that you're making or would you beg to differ? Obviously I would beg to differ because, you know, there are many different ways you could ask how deep, big, important differences are. And there are studies that reveal really big, interesting differences of different kinds. So for example, if we look at color perception, Different languages have different words for colors, put color boundaries in different places. We can find that language influences even these tiny perceptual decisions that are so early on and so kind of stupid, you know, like a pigeon could make these decisions.

27:34And yet, somehow, even in these smart human brains, language is making a difference in how you tell the difference between two patches of blue, for example. Now, that tells us that language can have an extremely early influence in cognition. And if it can influence something very early, that means it's influencing all of the other things downstream. Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? So you take an event like this, an accident. In English, it's fine to say, he broke the vase. In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, the vase broke or the vase broke itself.

28:14If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. Now, this has consequences. So, we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers. English speakers will remember who did it. Because English requires you to say, he did it, he broke the vase. where Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident. They're more likely to remember the intention. So two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony.

28:54The language guides our reasoning about events.

29:01So another example that's coming to mind for me, and tell me if this fits, it's the use of gendered pronouns in the U.S. So one of my daughter's friends uses non-binary pronouns, they, them. And my daughter and I were talking to my mother about this friend, and my mother was getting so confused every time we referred to them because she thought we were referring to multiple people. And it made me think, like, does this come down to a generational thing, the way we change the way that we use language, the way we think about the gendered sex of someone? That is changing. Does this example fit into what you're talking about?

29:41Absolutely. Yeah, it's a wonderful example. And it's another wonderful example of how whatever it is that we're used to seems to be the way that things naturally should be. So for example, in English, we mark gender on third person singular pronouns. So he, she, his, her. We don't mark gender on first-person pronouns. We only have I. We don't mark gender on second-person pronouns. We only have you. So, in fact, most of English pronouns are gender-neutral. It's just in a third-person singular that we mark gender. But proposing that there could be a new pronoun or proposing that we could not mark gender on those pronouns causes some people incredible pain.