The Lake At The North Pole That Stops Europe From Freezing

14:26Michael Stevens:Oh, my God.

14:26Hannah Fry:And you're like, OK, well, maybe this isn't that big of a deal. You know, like they can live with it in Moscow. They can live with it in Canada. No big deal. Except that every single bit of infrastructure in Britain is built, as we have learned this summer, right, is built for a very narrow range of temperatures. Really, Brits are happy between plus 5 and plus 25. That's it. That's all we're happy with, you know? If it gets over 25, we break down. If it gets under 5 degrees, it's game over for us.

14:57Michael Stevens:Yeah, things will need to dramatically change infrastructure-wise.

15:00Hannah Fry:And up until now, this big question of this blob of water that protects the ice sheet but threatens the temperature of Europe what is it going to do is it going to stay there is it going to stabilize is it going to grow is it going to shrink which way is it going to go and uh for a really long time people were like no no no there was a group of people who were like no no this is protecting the ice sheet actually we're in a state of stability this is not a problem but in the last couple of years things have started turning for the worse and now the models are saying that it is genuinely possible that by 2070 or so, this conveyor belt of warm water from the Atlantic moving up towards the North Pole will start slowing down enough that it's really going to be bad.

15:49Hannah Fry:Bad. In our lifetimes, basically, Michael.

15:51Michael Stevens:Has anyone named this freshwater lake blob? The lake blob. Yes, they have. It is called Beaufort Guyer. Oh, wow. Beaufort Guyer is a fantastic name.

16:06Hannah Fry:I didn't even know it was there. I had no idea it was there.

16:09Michael Stevens:No, I just assumed it was regular ocean water everywhere. But apparently there's this structure of like floating sea ice. Then you've got this Beaufort Geyer of fresh water. And then below that, you've got the salty, even probably maybe more salty than regular ocean water.

16:26Hannah Fry:Should I open it and have a little sip?

16:29Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, of course. I wasn't going to ask you to because it'd be awkward, but you should.

16:33Hannah Fry:This feels like that moment when you lick the rock, you know?

16:36Michael Stevens:I know. There are risks here. You're doing this under your own free will. It's salty. Oh my God, that is the saltiest thing I've ever tasted. Okay. So it's from what, 4 ,000 feet or meters? How deep?

16:51Hannah Fry:Meters.

16:52Michael Stevens:Wow. Okay. So you did it for the gram. You took the sip and it was really salty. So saltier than regular seawater?

17:01Hannah Fry:I think that's saltier than regular seawater. Yeah, what makes sense? I don't make it a habit of drinking seawater from little vials, but in my experience, that is extremely salty. Wow, and aren't you glad that you've tried it now? Yes, I am. Maybe I'll sprinkle a little bit on my dinner later and say, what do I think is so amazing to imagine, though, is that this little bit of water that was literally at the bottom of the North Pole, nearly four and a half kilometres at the bottom of the North Pole, Think of everything that has swum above it, you know, like think of everything that has been seen in that area.

17:38Hannah Fry:But we just have it's so uncharted. We just we just have so, so much to learn about about our oceans. And, you know, the Arctic in particular, it's like it's wild to me. It's wild to me just what that could have seen. You know what, I bet if I did some DNA analysis of all of the different creatures whose floating little fragments of DNA have wafted through this, I bet there would be so much to learn from this little vial.

18:09Michael Stevens:There'd be so much DNA we didn't even recognize. Species we have not seen yet.

18:14Hannah Fry:And now I've assimilated it into my own body.

18:18Michael Stevens:You've consumed them. Yeah, you're one with the Arctic. next step is to brine some chicken with that i bet it would be too salty too salty listen let's

18:32Hannah Fry:call it my narwhal smoothie okay yeah that's what it is there you go that was my that was my little edition for this week hope you enjoyed they're not always going to be that good i think that

18:42Michael Stevens:was a particularly good job that's really cool yeah it's not it's not always going to be the case that you've just come back from the arctic but you have these adventures and you just show up on the podcast and go, oh, look, I just got back from the moon. Sorry, my floor is a mess. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I know what that's like.

18:58Hannah Fry:You go to the moon of your mind, though, Michael. Also, I haven't been to the moon.

19:02Michael Stevens:Oh, that's right. The moon, the moon in my mind. And you know what? We're going to visit these cognitive lunar landscapes after the break when we answer some questions from you all.

19:28Hannah Fry:All right, we're back. We have got your questions. The first one is from Reddit. We've been hanging out on the subreddit. We haven't posted it. Have you posted it, Michael?

19:39Michael Stevens:Well, no, I can't post. As I said before, I can't use my Reddit account. I can look at things, but I cannot upvote. I can't comment because I have to change my password. but I can only do that if I have access to my old at google.com email address. So I'm stuck. I'll need to just make a whole brand new account, but it's sad because I like my username, just Michael underscore Stevens. It's a good one. It's the one I've been using. Anyway, I have been lurking on our subreddit, not able to engage, and I loved this one. It starts, this is what it's called. It was written by Fosse. Fosse says, I think this podcast spreads misinformation about science and the moon is flat.

20:20Michael Stevens:Just kidding. My real question is why are people more likely to correct someone online with a detailed explanation when they post something wrong, but are much less likely to give the same kind of thoughtful answer when someone genuinely asks a question? I loved that because, first of all, it proves how significant this phenomenon is. Like I immediately click on this one because I'm like, oh, someone's being mean and wrong on the Internet. Time for me to engage. And I come in and then I see that that's exactly what their question is about. This is a famous part of the Internet. Like the fastest way to get help online is to be wrong.

20:57Michael Stevens:If you want to know what kind of wrench to use on your 2022 Kia, don't ask. Say, hey, here I am. I'm about to use a hammer to undo this fastener. And then everyone's going to go, don't do that. and they'll tell you what to do. Why is that? And as it turns out, one, it hasn't been studied online nearly as much as I expected it to have been studied, but it falls within the purview of the psychological study of the difference between helping and fixing. Those are two very different behaviors that sometimes look the same when you're far away, but are very different things. And I think the first place to start is to recognize that when someone posts online, or even in real life, asks a question, that's a very open-ended challenge.

21:47Michael Stevens:You know, what's the best way to cook ribs? Well, there's a lot of different opinions. There's a lot to cover. There's the tools, there's the time, there's the temperature, there's what kind of ribs, what kind of cut? Is it spare ribs, St. Louis style? It's a lot. It's a lot of cognitive effort. But if someone shows that they're going to be microwaving ribs, boom, you've got one thing to pick on, which is don't do it that way. Or I don't know, maybe maybe you can microwave ribs. I don't know. But the point is just on the surface, they are very different things. If someone's wrong, they're specifically wrong.

22:20Michael Stevens:But if they're just curious, they are open endedly curious.

22:24Hannah Fry:I mean, that brings us back to that episode that we did about curiosity, right? Which is where people are most engaged when it feels like a missing tooth, where you know exactly the size and shape of the piece of information that needs to fit in it. And that's when you sort of get people's attention the most.

22:41Michael Stevens:That's right. So someone wrong on the internet is like a weird gap in your teeth that you just can't stop sticking your tongue through.

22:50Hannah Fry:You need to be like, I know what goes there. I know what goes there.

22:53Michael Stevens:You know what goes there. You know what to say. And the whole phenomenon, or rather, the whole feeling behind someone being wrong on the internet feels more urgent because, again, it's a specific thing and it can spread. Whereas someone not knowing something is not as urgent. Okay? Someone will fill them in. Someone with more time than me. you can sort of do what's called social loafing, where because so many people are looking at this question, you'll let someone else answer it. But if someone's wrong, then that is a thing that has legs. It's more real and it can spread and others can get that information and they can do something wrong, break their microwave, ruin their dinner, hurt themselves.

23:39Michael Stevens:So you've got to act. But then And at an even like more general level, fixing is easier because it's much more egotistical. It is about easing your own discomfort. Someone was wrong online and that makes you annoyed. And so to make yourself feel better, you come in and correct them. It's also like a judgment thing. You're judging the person's action and their theory. And that's fast for us to do. We evolved to make judgments very quickly. Good, bad, retreat, approach, those are fast things. But helping requires listening. It requires reasoning. It requires figuring out what the person already knows and what kind of knowledge base they have.

24:27Michael Stevens:And it requires sharing someone else's perspective. It isn't just about reducing your discomfort. It's about sharing someone else's discomfort and working through it with them. So it's a lot harder in like three ways. Correcting someone, piece of cake. We do it instinctively. But helping someone in an open-ended way, that's a commitment.

24:48Hannah Fry:So, you know, there is this trick. I possibly shouldn't admit to this here, because then maybe I'll weaken the value of the trick in future. But sometimes when I make my TV documentaries, I get to interview scientists a lot of the time. And sometimes scientists who are so amazing in their own field really struggle to understand what the best possible way to describe it to somebody outside of their field essentially i think i think it's just really difficult to find the words that capture the joy or the the gloriousness of the thing that they're studying and so sometimes you sort of have to help the scientist along right in describing their own their own stuff for what you know the audience needs so anyway if if i'm with a scientist and they're being too technical they're sort of they're kind of in their own head a little bit they're just being a bit too nervous whatever have I been.

25:36Hannah Fry:The trick that I do, and it works, I would say 98 % of the time, is I will come up with an explanation and present it to them, something incredibly simple, something that I know the audience would like, but deliberately get one little detail wrong. And then what will happen is that the scientists will be like, no, no, no, no, it's like this. And then they'll repeat my exact same explanation, but change the thing to be right. And then often add a little extra detail on the end. And like nine times out of 10, that is the clip that will actually use when it comes to the edit. But I don't necessarily know that that's what I'm doing.

26:17Hannah Fry:But honestly, it works so well.

26:19Michael Stevens:I bet it does. It's brilliant because you're giving them something much easier to hold, which is a specific incorrect thing rather than an open-ended like, so what are you researching? Oh, brother, they're going to immediately talk as though they were talking to a colleague. But if you say, oh, okay, so like rocks have been here since the Big Bang, they go, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here's how rocks form. And you've given them a thing to push against. Exactly right. Yeah. You're reminding me also of that XKCD comic. So in the comic, these two scientists are talking to one another, and the first one says, silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists.

27:01Michael Stevens:So it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars. And then the other scientist goes, oh, well, and of course, of course. And they go, oh, yes, of course. So that's how it is talking to experts often. They think that you have, at worst, like a graduate level, like entry to graduate program knowledge. And really, you're still thinking.

27:28Hannah Fry:Is quartz a rock or a mineral or like what is it? Is that the thing that they put in watches? What are we talking about here? Right. Totally agree. I also think that sometimes scientists, I do feel a bit bad for them. I think that they are playing in their head to the audience of their peers. everybody is nervous about how they come across every single human on earth and if they're not then I don't trust them and so I think sometimes people are like they want to say the thing that makes them sound smart because because their audience will hear it but actually it's the audience at home who are more important to listen to well yeah and there's a really big difference

28:07Michael Stevens:between explaining to a general audience a field versus talking about the specific thing in the field you've spent 10 years working on, which is like just the way a certain granule size of quartz moves through a riverbed in the northern hemisphere. And so that's where your mind is. And it's hard for you to go back and say, OK, so water flows downhill. Like, let's let's start here. And I think that, yeah, what you just described is a brilliant way to get them to give them handles to hold on to back here so that they can, you know, take us the rest of the way.

28:42Hannah Fry:Isn't there something about how on naval inspections, they would always deliberately leave a rope? I'm sort of half remembering something. You would always deliberately leave a little bit of rope that was like unfurled and not right. And then just because I think when people do inspections, they always want to pick up on something so that you deliberately leave something really obvious that they pick up on that. And then they don't they don't sort of they feel like they've done their job properly.

29:08Michael Stevens:Oh, yeah.

29:09Hannah Fry:I think you can be quite sneaky about using this against people.

29:13Michael Stevens:Yeah. No, this is, I feel like I've heard jokes like this before where, oh yeah, if you want to lie about something, your cover up should be, should include something embarrassing or also kind of illegal, but not as bad. Because then people think, well, why would you, you know, how would that not be true? You know, it took a lot for you to admit that. And it harmed you to admit that. So it's more believable than if you just said, I'm innocent here.

29:44Hannah Fry:Wish you told me that before I went into traitors, Michael. Okay, shall we? Shall we? That's going to only make sense for the British audience. But there we go. Okay, shall we go on to the next question?

29:55Michael Stevens:This segment is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Now, in the laboratory, a lot of things can kill cancer. But as it turns out, killing cancer in the body is a much bigger challenge.

30:08Hannah Fry:Yeah, of course. And that is because cancer cells are our own cells that have gone wrong. You know, they're literally part of us, which is going to make killing them much more complicated.

30:18Michael Stevens:Exactly. And also, our bodies are these incredibly complex mazes. They're labyrinths. And so for a drug to launch its attack, it has to navigate all of these twists and turns to reach just the right spot.

30:31Hannah Fry:So today we are asking, could a bath time essential steer us in the right direction? obviously that's where we were going with this obviously the lead-up was there okay the science behind this is absolutely amazing though because if you think about chemotherapy chemotherapy is extremely effective at killing cancer cells but the reason why you get sometimes such such serious side effects is because it can also kill your own cells right it's really difficult to distinguish between what's you and what's the cancer so what you would like to do ideally is to target the chemotherapy right at the point where the tumour exists and bypass all the rest of your tissue.

31:09Hannah Fry:The question is, how do you do that? How do you navigate the complex maze of your body to get it there? So Cancer Research UK scientists, they have developed these tiny little drug laden bubbles that can float through your body and then burst inside tumours. I can hear you thinking, why bubbles and the reason the reason is because they are part gas part liquid but at the same time they're solid enough that you can manipulate them so you can you can sort of create them move them around wobble them as you like the other thing about bubbles is that you can pack the inside of them with the drug that you need you seal the chemotherapy inside those those micro bubbles and we're talking really tiny here right one to ten micrometers in diameter smaller than the width of the human hair over 30 times smaller than a grain of table salt really really really minuscule doses of extremely potent drugs but to get them to the right part of the body you need some sort of guidance system so you inject them in and then these micro bubbles will find their way to the cancer either because they are attached with loads of antibodies to them so it sort of uses the same technique as your immune system does to hunt down an infection but instead it's these bubbles that are hunting down a tumor, you know, at which point it has the chemotherapy inside.

32:31Hannah Fry:Or sometimes what you can do, right, you can attach these tiny magnetic nanoparticles to the bubbles and then physically pull the bubbles through the body with a giant external magnet. How wild is that? And I mean, insane.

32:49Michael Stevens:I want to be the drug driver with the magnet who's just like, and I'm going to put that here. I'm going to put that there.

32:54Hannah Fry:So when you get them to the right part, when you as the drug driver get there, then all you do is you beam ultrasound waves at the tumour so the bubbles end up vibrating so much that they burst. And then the drug gets released at exactly the site of the cancer cells. This is like hyper-targeted drug delivery, keeping your healthy cells safe so that you end up with less side effects. And by the way, we're at the stage now where this successfully treats some cancers in the lab. And they're now preparing to launch this in clinical trials.

33:25Michael Stevens:It's very exciting. But there's one other big challenge. OK, so you can drive these drugs where you want them. That doesn't mean they can get through the gates that have been erected. Because although these bubbles are tiny, I mean, a fraction of a grain of salt. Guess what? Some things in our body are protected against even things that small, like the brain. Okay, brain tumors are a huge challenge for drugs because our brains are surrounded by this. It's basically this tight locked cellular bodyguard chain. It's called the blood brain barrier. And it stops a lot of drugs from getting in. Even if they're in a bubble, they're still too big.

34:04Michael Stevens:So to give you a sense of how tight this blood brain barrier is, you can only fit something that is smaller than seven molecules of salt. Okay. Not a little like piece of a piece of a salt. No, seven molecules of sodium chloride. That's it.

34:22Hannah Fry:And how many are there in a grain of salt?

34:25Michael Stevens:I mean, it's a lot more than seven molecules. A single grain of salt contains about a quintillion molecules. That's not a billion. That's a billion billion. And we can only get seven of them through. So what do you do? Well, Cancer Research UK scientists have a new idea, a solution here bubbling up in their minds and their work. So the drugs are often too big to get in. No problem. Let's use bubbles, not to transport them in, but to open up that blood brain barrier. So you take micro bubbles, just empty micro bubbles, send them up to that blood brain barrier and then blast them with a beam of ultrasound, which is sound that's just too high for us to hear.

35:07Michael Stevens:And that causes the bubbles to wiggle around. It causes them to expand and contract. and that expansion and contraction can actually open up a larger opening in the blood-brain barrier for the chemotherapy drugs to get into the brain where they're needed. You know what it's like? It's like a heist movie, okay? But like too small to see. It's breaking into the vault. Yeah, but it's breaking into the vault. You're too big, not if you dance. No. Okay, not if you have scientists with ultrasound exactly formulated to wiggle you.

35:40Hannah Fry:stretching you and squeezing you exactly the right way.

35:43Michael Stevens:Cancer Research UK is launching clinical trials to test micro bubble delivery of chemotherapy to brain tumors in children and young people right now. And this could offer a vital treatment for young patients who lack options. And this gives children and young people more moments with their loved ones. So the point is, though, that by backing bold ideas from the laboratory to the clinic, Cancer Research UK is helping develop better, more tailored treatments. Right.

36:10Hannah Fry:And that means that they work for more people, for people with more types of cancer, with fewer side effects, crucially. In fact, Cancer Research UK's work has played a role in more than half of the world's essential cancer drugs.

36:23Michael Stevens:That's right. Cancer research that's happening today will change the future of cancer medicine, including for hard to treat cancers. And by tackling the biggest challenges, more people can live longer, better lives.

36:36Hannah Fry:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rested science.

36:46Michael Stevens:Trevor emailed us asking, how often do coincidences occur? What is the weirdest coincidence in history? How often do we mistake coincidence for fact? And are they always mathematically explainable?

36:59Hannah Fry:Trevor, that's like seven questions in one. And I like it a lot. I'm here for the layering of questions. Okay, I've got what I think is a really good submission for the weirdest coincidence. So a friend of mine, David Spiegelhauser, who is a Cambridge mathematician, one of my colleagues, he did this whole entire project on coincidences where he got people to submit their coincidences. because I think that when you um you know if you talk to the mathematicians or statisticians they will say that actually there's a few simple laws behind this one is the law of truly large numbers that if you if you try something enough times even if it has a very small chance of coming true that actually it becomes a statistical inevitability so um a different cambridge mathematician uh littlewood that he was around about 100 years ago really amazing mathematician littlewood was but he was like okay well suppose a miracle event is is happens one in a million it's a one in a million event which sounds impossibly rare but if you're awake for eight hours a day like looking for you're out and about for eight hours a day and you experience you know one distinct event every second littlewood's life was apparently more interesting and exciting than than nine um but you'll rack up a million events every 35 days you know and even if you sort of halve that or quarter it you're talking about one in a million events that will happen a couple of times a year you know and i think that in a lot of ways that you that is the way to think of things is that you you are essentially rolling the dice every moment of your life you are allowing the possibility for a coincidence to happen every moment of your life all the same some of them are incredible so so david spiegel how to end this project asked loads of people to submit their their greatest coincidences and my favorite one by a long stretch is about ron biederman's trousers he tells this much better than i do by the way but essentially somebody wrote in with this coincidence and they verified it and fact checked it and it's absolutely true uh there was a backpacker called Doug he was the one who wrote in and uh he was working in Miami when all of his possessions were stolen during this this greyhound bus trip and he literally had nothing apart from what he was wearing and so when he went back to his hostel there was this New Yorker called Ron Biederman he was very kind took pity on him had some spare clothes and then gave him this pair uh this this shirt sorry this this shirt that had like these very these kind of very broad red dull stripes this is ron beaderman's shirt anyway doug he eventually returned to the uk he stores the shirt in this box in his attic he doesn't think of it at all two years later doug is heading to london and he needed some temporary clothes to to wear so he gets this shirt out of his attic he puts the shirt on and he's he's at this backpacker's hostel in earl's court and he goes down for dinner he starts talking to this girl who was sitting opposite him and she says that she just got back from from a hostel in israel and then doug who was making conversation was like oh i knew this guy from new york who spent a lot of times in hostels and had been in israel as well and you know i think he like he'd been around the area and she was like oh my gosh i know him do you mean ron beaderman she was like and he's like yeah i do i do mean ron beaderman so they had this like strange connection and the girl was really stunned and then um doug says oh i i i always remembered Ron Biedemann because he gave me the shirt that I'm wearing right now.

40:37Hannah Fry:And then she is like, you are kidding me because he gave me a pair of trousers that I am currently wearing. And she stands up and they are wearing the matching set, the matching shirt and trousers combo that Ron Biedemann gave both of them in completely different countries, one in Miami, one in Israel, they met in London. That's good, that one. That's good.

41:00Michael Stevens:I'm kind of not that amazed by it, Hannah. I guess maybe I'm thinking about it too much. And I'm like, these people are clearly backpacking around and staying at hostels all the time. They're running into a lot of people. And the kind of person who's going to lend you their shirt or give you their shirt is a very social person who's going to be remembered and give a lot of gifts around. Like you're talking about two years later. There's a lot of time for you to run into someone else who knows the same backpacker you did and was also a recipient of their largesse. largesse.

41:32Hannah Fry:Well, there's also how many backpackers are there in the world? How many opportunities are there in the world? There's sort of a survivorship bias to these stories because the ones that are really extraordinary end up being the ones that are told over and over and over again.

41:47Michael Stevens:Oh, for sure. Yeah. Here's a coincidence. Just if you don't mind me telling you a little quick one, please. Our neighbors, one of our neighbors, we hadn't really met for like a year. We just never saw them. And just like last week, my wife saw a woman outside the house and was like, oh, hey, how's it going? What's your name? And the neighbor said that her name was Marty. And my wife is like, oh, that's so similar to my name. My wife's name is Marnie, like the Hitchcock film, M-A-R-N-I-E, Marnie. So Marnie and Marty. Turns out they both have husbands named Michael. So we've got Marnie and Michael and Marty and Michael.

42:26Hannah Fry:That's amazing. That's amazing. That's one type of coincidence that you could have discovered with your neighbor, but maybe it could be that you both went outside and you were both wearing the same pair of shoes. Or it could be that your daughters have the same name or that your daughters were born on the same day. You know, the number of different possibilities that you would accept as a strange coincidence is gigantic, super gigantic. The thing I like to think about is of all of the times that I've met my, you know, my neighbour when I was in Kenya, right? And I saw them in Kenya and was like, wow, this is weird.

43:03Hannah Fry:For all of those times, I like to think about the much greater number of times that I must have just missed somebody. I'm just like a near miss coincidence. And if you could only calculate those,

43:16Michael Stevens:Those I think would really blow you away. Yeah, I've had this idea for a while. Ever since I saw Signs, you know, that alien movie? Right. But coincidences can be scary. And I think that movie must involve some coincidences or something. Because I thought there should be a horror film where what's scary is that a bunch of coincidences start happening. No one gets hurt. It's just like, wait, why is everything working out? Why is everything related? What is going on? That could be really unsettling.

43:46Hannah Fry:Hmm.

43:47Michael Stevens:I need to watch it. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it in so long, but I remember being inspired to do like a whole horror film about coincidences. Because in Signs, coincidences are part of the story. Let us know in the comments. Leave us a lot of comments. Please do. Tell us your coincidences. I would like to.

44:05Hannah Fry:I genuinely would like to see them. I would love to hear those. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. That would be great. All however many hundreds of thousands of you that watch this, please tell us your coincidences. There'll be coincidences between them. You know what I mean? Like, if there was... Anyway.

44:21Michael Stevens:So, yeah, leave them in the comments below and continue emailing us questions. We love these. And one of these days, I will be able to interact with you on Reddit. So join us there at r slash the rest is science.

44:34Hannah Fry:What I'm going to do to all of the people who've written coincidences in the bottom is I'm just going to go through and everyone and comment, yeah, law of large numbers. Yeah, law of large numbers. Yeah, law of large numbers over and over and over again.

44:44Michael Stevens:We will explain every single one of them, Well, Hannah will. I don't promise to.

44:49Hannah Fry:I'll see. If there's any that I can't explain, then we'll definitely include them. I'm happy to be proved wrong. I'm happy to be proved wrong, as ever. As always, please do send us in your questions. Your coincidence is, hey, why not, to therestofscience at goalhanger.com and we will see you next week.

45:03Michael Stevens:See you later.

45:17Thank you.