When 0 = 1000

11:11Michael Stevens:You're good to go. In fact, the rest is science recommends. Just don't finish the last sip from your 20th bottle and you're good. No, that's a joke.

11:19Hannah Fry:Oh, your breast milk and blood alcohol level being 0.5%. To be clear, 0.08 % is the legal driving limit. 0.15 % is severe intoxication, loss of motor control and vomiting. Right. So 0.5 % in your breast milk, you're dead. You're typically at the threshold for death due to respiratory arrest. Yeah. So, you know, you've got bigger problems.

11:44Michael Stevens:Yeah. So again, 19 bottles only. But the way calories are calculated is also something that fascinates me because remember that I said a calorie is the amount of energy required to heat a milliliter of water one degree Celsius. But from where to where are we going from zero Celsius to one Celsius or from 50 to 51? That's different. And it takes a little bit more or less energy. I forget which way it is. So there are when you get into the science of it, it's like, OK, the amount of calories in this or the amount of calories that this contains depends on whether you're measuring this in in like room temperature water or ice cold water.

12:29Michael Stevens:And of course, our bodies aren't perfect converters of mass into energy. We don't have nuclear reactors inside of us. And so the system that we use for dietary food calories is both complicated and also incredibly flimsy. It's based on some work that was done by a scientist named Atwater many, many decades ago who had people eat food. And he measured the energy content of the food in a laboratory by burning the food in a bomb calorimeter. This is like a big glass ball that's in a big vat of water and you burn the food so that you turn it into heat energy and you're left with just all the carbon.

13:10Michael Stevens:And you look at how much you've raised the temperature of the water. And that tells you how many calories of energy are in the thing. But our bodies don't burn the food in combustion style when we eat it. So you have to make some kind of estimates of like how efficient the human body is at getting energy out of its food. But he got really specific. He not only fed people the food, he then collected their urine and feces and burned that to see, okay, I put this much energy into you and you excreted this much energy. So the difference is how much your body used. And he would also put people in big water baths and feed them food and have them not move and see how much their bodies warmed up the water.

13:54Michael Stevens:And from that, we get what we currently use as the tools for estimating the calorie content of food. Okay. He found that fats contain about nine kilocalories per gram.

14:08Hannah Fry:Okay. I mean, that's energy dense.

14:11Michael Stevens:Yes. Proteins and carbohydrates, about four kilocalories per gram. And when I say kilocalories, remember that in America, we just call that a calorie. And he found that alcohol contains about seven kilocalories per gram. So today, when you submit a food for nutrition fact information, the numbers on the nutrition label aren't calculated through an experiment. They're calculated through the manufacturer saying this many carbohydrates, fats and proteins are in each serving. I'm a bit disappointed.

14:41Hannah Fry:I sort of I sort of wanted there to be a laboratory somewhere where they were just setting light to, you know, chocolate eclairs and like, you know, foie gras.

14:49Michael Stevens:No, and you'll notice this if you look at a nutrition package and you look at the fats, carbohydrates and sugars inside of it and you multiply the, you figure out how much per gram that would mean. And then you multiply the fats and protein, sorry, the carbohydrates and proteins by four and the fats by nine, you'll get the calories per serving. That's just how it's done. But it's been found that that's like a little bit too vague.

15:15Hannah Fry:I mean, it's quite a simple method.

15:17Michael Stevens:It's very simple because we don't, our bodies don't get food energy from all fats equally. And not every body works the same way either. I think the most conclusive proof of this is by studying the amount of energy people got from pistachios. And it totally depended on how much they chewed them. If you like barely chew a pistachio and swallow it, you actually mainly get nothing from it. But if you chewed it for a full minute before you swallowed, you got almost all the food energy out of it. So this was, I forget why they were looking into this, but they were trying to figure out how many calories were in pistachios.

15:54Michael Stevens:And it was like, whoa, it really depends on how they chew them.

15:57Hannah Fry:That's interesting. So if it's unchewed, if it's sort of unmastered in your mouth, then once it gets to your stomach, your stomach acid isn't as able to extract the energy from it as possible.

16:06Michael Stevens:Yeah, I mean, chewing is the first step in digestion. And your spit helps break things down so that you can then get all the nutrients, including the fats, the carbohydrates, the proteins, things that give you energy. it requires that that chewing process first so if you just swallowed a bunch of pistachios whole like a pill it's almost like nothing i tell you what though you are coming up with quite a good

16:29Hannah Fry:diet going on here next time i feel you know i've got like a bit peckish and i want to eat something but know that i shouldn't i'm just going to drink ice cold coke zero and swallow pistachios whole

16:40Michael Stevens:wash pistachios down with ice cold water no i don't want to encourage eating disorders you're all beautiful. And again, you should eat what you want to eat and be mindful. But if you want to hurt yourself, yes. The worst diet I've ever heard of was the Sleeping Beauty Diet. Have you heard of this one? No. This is just what you can't eat if you're asleep.

17:00Hannah Fry:Okay. I sort of feel like I've been following that one for my entire life.

17:04Michael Stevens:Yeah, right. Well, I think that if you really are dedicated to the Sleeping Beauty Diet, you take medicine to keep yourself asleep for like days. No. Yeah. Now, I don't know if it's ever actually been done by somebody, but it's been like a joke that's been around for decades. Drop the weight real quick. Drop the weight quick by just letting your body not eat. And it won't bother you because you'll be asleep or unconscious.

17:30Hannah Fry:Yeah. Or going back to your previous advice, just eat what you want.

17:35Michael Stevens:Yeah.

17:36Hannah Fry:Maybe just try that one. Just listen to what your body needs.

17:39Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah. Just do that instead. So anyway, I just wanted to show you this because every time I'm in the UK, I can't stop but like looking to make sure it's still the fact that it says no calories on it and yet it contains a thousand.

17:53Hannah Fry:okay this is what i quite like though the way as you were talking uh okay i thought that the um because the uk we have this like traffic light system right where you break it down you have energy fat saturates sugars and salt i thought for a second there you could just do like a straight up calculation from that of how many calories are in everything but it's a little bit more complicated than that but if you go to the ingredients the nutritional information hey that's a fun little project i mean for my children when i go to the supermarket that's That's one way I can torture them. Calculate how many calories are in this and see if you're correct.

18:26Michael Stevens:Cover that part up and then make them do the arithmetic. Yeah. It's just four times how many grams of carbohydrates and proteins are in a serving. Yeah. And then nine times the fat.

18:37Hannah Fry:And seven times the alcohol.

18:38Michael Stevens:And seven times the alcohol. Now, again, because manufacturers can round to the nearest five for small items, they can round to the nearest 10 if there's a lot of calories in a serving. you'll be within five or ten of the the the answer on the box amazing yeah yeah that was very fun enjoyed that goodness okay well look we've got a question about uh calories coming up after the break from you guys we're gonna get to your questions when we come back

19:11Hannah Fry:this segment is brought to you by cancer research uk we've all become used to technology

19:15Michael Stevens:measuring and improving our lives, right? It's the story of human history. We've now got watches that monitor our heart rates and count our steps. But what happens when that same technology is turned on cancer?

19:27Hannah Fry:Cancer Research UK is backing the research that harnesses new tools and technologies to help find cancer earlier, treat it more precisely, and ultimately save and improve lives.

19:38Michael Stevens:And so today we're asking, what becomes possible when our technology sharpens its senses?

19:44Hannah Fry:right so a big part of all of this is that with cancer timing can change everything if you find cancer really early then treatment has a much better chance of working it's much less invasive but if you find the cancer later it may have already spread or it may have changed it makes it much harder to treat so so you really want to catch it as soon as possible i mean it's a bit like a bank robbery right if you if you imagine that you've got the police that are really slow to come when the alarm rings the robbers are already gone it's really hard to track down really hard to work out what's going on.

20:14Hannah Fry:But if you get an immediate response, as soon as there's any problem, the police kind of surround the building before anyone can get away. And you just have a much better chance of getting the bad guys. And Cancer Research UK, they have played an incredibly important part in the breast screening programme that we have here in the UK. One of the many ways that they've helped to double breast cancer survival in the UK over the last 50 years. One of the difficulties is that in the UK, while mammograms save about 1300 lives a year, For some people, there can be real barriers to accessing them, particularly for people who have disabilities.

20:49Hannah Fry:So what Cancer Research UK scientists have been doing is they've been working to bring cancer detection to people who struggle to access mammograms. So what they've invented, Michael, is a smart bra, right? Finally. Finally. It's a wonder that I got this section rather than you. Okay, so the smart bra, what it does is it uses this electronic textile that is stitched onto the inside. It sends electrical signals through the breast tissue and then reads how they come back. And that data can then be fed to your smartphone. So wearers and clinicians can be alerted if you get any concerning changes.

21:27Hannah Fry:Now, I have to tell you the way that they've tested this technology, it turns out that something that closely mimics the electrical properties of cancerous tissue is carrots. and there are you know they've been using carrots in the bras as part of the testing unconfirmed reports that that people were actually walking around with carrots in their bra but i mean the promise of this is amazing because this technology can spot tumors that are as small as five millimeters and by the way one centimeter tumors is the current benchmark for early detection so this is like much earlier than that the long-term goal here is if you can make detection more accessible, easier to engage with, then one day breast cancer screening could happen in somebody's home and you can get the cancer at the earliest possible opportunity.

22:16Michael Stevens:First of all, I love that technology, but also I love that fact. Next time I eat a carrot at dinner, you know, the electrical conductive properties of this carrot are kind of like cancer, but I want to also talk about surgical micro robots. So when you're a surgeon who's removing a tumor, one of the big difficulties is that tumors are made of cells. Cells are incredibly tiny and you want to remove every one of those cancerous cells and you want to remove as few healthy cells as possible. And so now there are these tiny robots that give live information to the surgeon about what the cells are that are being operated on.

22:56Michael Stevens:What it does is it shoots a laser at a cell and then the cell burns up and the robot essentially sniffs the smoke. from the burned up cell. Looking at the chemical signature of that smoke, the robot can learn all kinds of things about the metabolism properties of the cell, the cell's makeup, and can guide the surgeon in knowing where to stop, where to keep going. And then even after the surgery, all this information about the nature of that tumor can be used to help with, you know, what kind of steps should be taken next. So that's just an incredible little like team of tiny robots and normal sized people doing amazing things.

23:36Michael Stevens:And that level of accuracy can change and save lives. So by investing in this kind of breakthrough research, we're turning high-tech ideas into real-world precision, making cancer medicine smarter, more targeted, and more effective.

23:51Hannah Fry:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science.

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24:31Hannah Fry:Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story.

24:44Michael Stevens:Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

24:56Michael Stevens:Okay, welcome back. Hannah, you're going to be reading the questions because you've got them right there. I've got them right here.

25:01Hannah Fry:And the first one links in perfectly to what you were talking about. This is from Epo. Where do the calories I burn actually go? I assume I get rid of some of them through urine and stool, but does part of it evaporate? And if those calories evaporate, does the earth lose weight too?

25:17Michael Stevens:Yes, I love this because it is weird to think like, okay, wait a second. I turn my food into energy, but then where does it go? And it does, in a way, evaporate away. Ultimately, it turns into wasted heat. Like your body takes that food apart. It takes the molecules it needs and it uses them through primarily the ATP process to produce the energy you need to be warm, to move your muscles, beat your heart, breathe, think, all of that stuff. And ultimately that causes motion, right, of your limbs, of your heart, of your lungs, which is a kind of mechanical energy. It also produces heat energy that is released into the world.

25:57Michael Stevens:And ultimately, this whole mass can be turned into energy thing does not lead to a change in the amount of mass. Well, I mean, it changes the amount of matter, but the mass doesn't change. A compressed spring weighs more than a loose spring. I mean, it's calculatable, but not really measurable. But that energy that I put in really does, the potential energy that that spring has really does affect its mass. It does actually weigh more. A phone weighs more when it contains a lot of photos because we've got a higher energy state in the electrons, I think, or a different energy state.

26:40Hannah Fry:I think it's the other way around, isn't it? It's the same as punch cards. So in a punch card, no hole is a one and a hole is a zero. in hard drives, very simply. It's zero if you've got a charge in it, and it's a one if you make a hole and remove that charge. Oh, interesting. Right.

26:59Michael Stevens:Ones are no charge.

27:01Hannah Fry:Ones are no charge.

27:03Michael Stevens:Yeah. In that case, then, yeah.

27:05Hannah Fry:Yeah. So when you get it, it's all zeros, right? So charges in the hole. Right. Effectively. And then one electron weighs, I think it's 27 zeros, right? 0.027.0 is 1. When you add in a 1, you're taking the electron away, you're making the thing lighter. And so full USB drives weigh less than brand new ones. Interesting.

27:29Michael Stevens:Yeah. Now, your body does not act like a USB drive. No. But we can account for all of the mass that you put into your body through breathing, drinking, and eating by finding that either excreted out of your body through urine, feces, and your exhalated breath. Right.

27:48Hannah Fry:Because the exhalated breath is actually a really big component of this. Because the ATP process that you're describing, where you take glucose and oxygen, the two things that give your body energy, and they break down into water, energy, and CO2. Right. So the question about where does a lot of it go, it's actually that you breathe it out, right? You breathe out most of it.

28:11Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah. And if you compare everything put in and everything that comes out, you will still find a deficit because some of it was turned into the energy of motion, of heat. And some of it still exists in your body as chemical energy. Like in many ways, fat contains chemical energy. There's the potential for it to be turned back into energy for motion and for heat if your body needs to do that. Burning fat is turning that back into energy. So that's where it all goes. But it's all accounted for. None of it just magically evaporates. If we had enough time, we could extract all the energy that was in that Snickers bar that you ate.

28:48Hannah Fry:And in terms of the Earth getting lighter over time?

28:51Michael Stevens:Oh, yeah. Well, the Earth's mass, if it was in a completely sealed system, would not change. Even the fact that you've heated up the air by being warm-blooded and by moving in it, that does make up for the matter that is now missing because you digested it.

29:10Hannah Fry:Yeah. Sorry, Earth.

29:11Michael Stevens:The Coke Zero diet won't work for you. The Coke Zero diet might make a person lighter, but it will not make the Earth lighter. This really depends on the Earth being in a sealed system, Because if you are turning Coke Zero or full sugar Coke into heat energy, some of it is radiating into space. True. So technically Earth will lose some of it. But I'm assuming that the Earth is like a closed system and everything that's on Earth or leaves it is still part of the system. But technically, yes, the Earth does become lighter just because of the heat that we radiate away that leaves space. It's gone from Earth now.

29:50Hannah Fry:Yeah, because actually, if you think about it, if you were sitting on a, I don't know, like a spaceship some miles out in space, like, you know, if you let's say half a light year or whatever, and you had an infrared camera, an extremely sensitive infrared camera, you would be able to see your body on the surface of the Earth. And the only way that that's possible is because there is, as you described, some of it's left. Yeah, exactly. In fact, there is an entire cone of your energy floating out in space right now.

30:18Michael Stevens:Yeah, you're welcome, aliens.

30:20Hannah Fry:You're welcome. You're welcome. Okay. All right. Next question. This one came from Luke FTF. I've heard NASA turned Velcro into a household name after it was widely used in the Apollo 11 mission. Are there any technologies that have come from space science that we are now using in our daily lives without realizing it? It's a myth.

30:40Michael Stevens:It's not. That hook and loop fastener wasn't popularized by the space program?

30:44Hannah Fry:I mean, it was popularized by it, but it wasn't invented by them. Sure. Yeah. It was actually invented in the 40s, a Swiss engineer called George de Mestral. Okay, so I did a program. I actually can't remember which program this was in. But anyway, there was a bit about the invention of Velcro. And his story was that he noticed these burdock burrs that were sticking to his dog's fur. So for this story, for this TV program, we were like, okay, here's what we'll do. We'll get a dog. We'll go for a walk with the dog. And then there'll be burrs sticking to the dog. And then it'll be great. And we'll take them off and it'll be fine.

31:15Hannah Fry:Anyway, it was... hilarious because this dog was very happy right the dog was having a great old time but the exec producer was so worried that we would get complaints about there being birds on the dog um that we had this entire like i mean days of conversations days of conversations about whether this counted as animal cruelty on tv anyway it turns out it obviously isn't uh but that is where velcro came from but it was popularized by nasa that one's that's okay um but there are nonetheless some really amazing technology that has come directly as a result of the space program. Pixel sensors being one.

31:53Hannah Fry:I mean, the only reason why we have smartphone cameras is a direct result. This is from the 1990s. They had these giant spacecraft cameras, but they wanted to shrink them down. So they essentially came up with this digital version, a way that you can, I mean, they needed something lightweight, needed something low power. so they came up with these active pixel sensors that are now in smartphones everywhere another example braces so you know Invisalign I'm sure other brands are available

32:23Michael Stevens:I know they are you can 3D print your own plastic your own tooth fixer braces I was just reading about this I forget where it came from but this guy was like yeah I just printed he had to print like a new one every week or so to get it smaller and smaller and tighter but it fixed his teeth

32:40Hannah Fry:But then, hold on, is it not quite a sophisticated process to work out the sort of trajectory you want your teeth to travel through? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

32:46Michael Stevens:I would still say go to a doctor.

32:48Hannah Fry:I would say.

32:49Michael Stevens:But you don't have to.

32:53Hannah Fry:I think the key one about this is the fact that the material is completely see-through. So you can't always tell that people are wearing them. Oh, no, this guy's thing, you could tell he was wearing a 3D printed mouth guard.

33:04Michael Stevens:Like a grill. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

33:08Hannah Fry:sure i mean you know go to go to the dentist i think that's fair but that came from nasa it did yeah so um it's called translucent polycrystalline alumina and uh yeah they have these uh infrared antenna heat seeking tracker trackers essentially um and they needed this material that was really strong but transparent to be able to coat them um you know transparent to specific wavelengths of light in particular. And yeah, they came up with this material and it can withstand supersonic flight, right? And it turns out, you know, also can withstand being chewed on. The last one that I really like, well, I mean, there's loads, but this is one that I like is memory foam mattresses.

33:50Hannah Fry:So when you are, you know, sending astronauts off into space, their seats are really uncomfortable. I mean, they get like thrown around really properly in their seats. And so they created this foam that molds to a warm body but then returns to its original shape when you remove the pressure.

34:10Michael Stevens:So memory foam is also a space technology originally. Wow, I didn't know that. And it was not like to protect the ship. It was for comfort.

34:19Hannah Fry:It was to protect their butts. Yeah.

34:21Michael Stevens:I wanted to show another space technology, which I do have in my bag. It's for a future Field Notes episode, though. Not today. Is this, the Fisher Space Pen.

34:31Hannah Fry:okay so here's my guess there's that thing that people always say which is oh uh nasa spent 40 squillion trillion dollars on making a biro that will write in space and meanwhile the soviets just used pencils and it was often used on the internet as a really hilarious way to like slag off the research that goes into uh you know high-end products but actually the reality is using a pencil room space is a very very very bad idea because bits of graphite will flake off and get into the circuitry short circuit stuff it's just don't use them like okay all right next question hold on this one is from oscar sedlak recently i was listening to the episode about borden and isolation and it got me wondering there were multiple experiments regarding isolation which put individuals into some kind of chamber with no stimuli but what happens if you put not one but two people in such a room together.

35:23Hannah Fry:What are the effects of that?

35:26Michael Stevens:Dualitary confinement. We have no idea. It's never been done. Yeah, there are no psychological studies of two people stored in sensory deprivation isolation together.

35:41Hannah Fry:I mean, it must have happened at some time. I'm thinking about prisons here, right?

35:45Michael Stevens:I know. But in prison, there just isn't a lot of history of like, oh, yeah, we locked these two people together in solitary, which wouldn't be solitary, it would be dualitary. Dualitary confinement, by the way, is a word that you can search on Google and you get no results. A Google whack. Is that what they call it too? I think so.

36:06Hannah Fry:Yeah.

36:06Michael Stevens:Yeah. Something that has absolutely no results on Google. I just love that. So the thing is, we don't know. I would predict that you would be likely to wind up with a folly ado sort of situation where two people kind of lose their minds together and they mutually reinforce each other's delusional beliefs. Spiraling downwards together. Yeah. And so because of that, I think they're probably going to wind up getting along more than not. But what they get along in and what they both believe together and feel together and think together might be destructive. But I don't know if they would just wind up fighting and battling it out.

36:49Hannah Fry:I saw an episode of Mr. Beast where he did something quite similar to this, where he dug a bunker and locked two people in there for 100 days. It wasn't sensory deprivation. And also once a week, he would go in with a big bag of cash as he has a habit of doing.

37:04Michael Stevens:So I think in those situations, it's not sensory deprivation. I think there have been a lot like, yeah, Mr. Beast put two people down in a bunker together. But he also like visited and whatever, you know. But as far as two people locked into like a purely empty white room or a dark room or locked in a cave with nothing to do but be together, that's an experiment we've got to do soon. I'm not volunteering, to be absolutely clear.

37:34Hannah Fry:Okay.

37:34Michael Stevens:Oh, okay. So it won't be an episode of The Rest is Science.

37:38Hannah Fry:It won't be an episode of The Rest is Science. Well, I mean,

37:40Michael Stevens:or at least it'll, maybe if you guys want to volunteer for it, but it won't be Hannah and I.

37:45Hannah Fry:No. But if you do, I mean, you can write into us with your volunteering. The email address is therestofscience at goalhanger.com. As always, I mean, all your thoughts and questions and things you'd like us to answer, that's, I mean, you can do that instead, but really we want you volunteering to be put in a sense. That's right. We love questions.

38:03Michael Stevens:We love comments, but we also love the third C, consent. Give it to us.

38:10Hannah Fry:Okay, I think that's about it for this week. We will see you next week with our usual episode on Tuesday. Thanks for watching.

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