00:11
Is it just me or is this like a huge delay just now?
Well, I thought it was fine until you pointed out that there might have been a huge delay, so it might just be you.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, we'll see. Anyway, hello Len.
Hello Asami.
Maybe a few seconds into the future.
Oh boy.
Just regular podcasters having some audio issues, but hopefully my clever editing will circumvent any
awkwardness in the audio at the end.
No, we refuse to fix any audio issues.
Fine, that's fine. It's not like people use this podcast to learn new language,
which is an enormously difficult task.
Yeah, but we just need to up that difficulty level so that it's like,
you know, you not only have to hear all of the words,
you have to correct for any of the inconsistencies.
Yeah, you have to anticipate audio inconsistencies anyway.
That's awful. I'm sorry.
You found an interesting article.
Right, right. Yes.
So go ahead and talk about it.
Yeah, let me talk about this instead of being mean to all of our listeners.
I'm so sorry. It's just that kind of day, I guess.
Let's see here.
The thing that I had found, and I can't quite remember the original trigger,
but the sort of science communication news related things that I have,
led me to a report by, or at least posted on phys.org, physics, you know,
sort of like SciCom website, right?
And it was about clean rooms.
Now, clean rooms, if anybody who's listening doesn't know what that is,
I am also not an expert on what clean rooms are,
but a very simple understanding, they are a room in which you have attempted
to remove any of those, you know, naturally occurring bacterial
and other strands of living organisms in that space, right?
And you also want...
As well as just particulates too, like just dust.
Yep, as well as dust and tiny bits.
You are filtering the air to the degree that the air is just the air, right?
As much as you can have.
Yeah, and you typically have these clean rooms.
Again, different clean rooms have different sort of tiers of cleanliness.
Yeah, right.
But typically, you build a clean room of some kind when you are dealing with
dust sensitive items, like semiconductor materials,
or you're trying to do some lithographs.
And you also might be having a nice clean room for biocontamination.
03:05
Yes.
When you're dealing with bacterias,
or you're dealing with biohazardous things in your lab,
and you want to make sure that they don't contaminate
the entire lab or the floor.
Right.
Or the department.
Right.
And then, you know...
Contamination, bad.
So you are better off using clean rooms.
Yes.
All right.
So what about clean rooms?
So it turns out, clean rooms, not as clean as we thought.
Wait, Len.
I just spent 20 seconds describing how clean the clean rooms are.
I mean, yeah, but that was like the perfect setup for my
pull the rug out from underneath you joke, right?
So that was...
Fun, fun, fun.
Yeah, but no, that seems to be the case.
Now, mind you, right, like you said,
some of these clean rooms in different tiers
and for different purposes are, of course,
also cleaning physical contamination, right?
Like the actual particulates out of the air, for instance.
However, talking about the sort of biological contaminant
or the, you know, biological species
that we are trying to keep out of these rooms in those cases,
it turns out that a study of some NASA clean rooms
has revealed a bunch of, well, new bacteria,
new little bacteria guys coming around
and growing in these highly disinfected rooms
and highly, you know, radiated rooms
to try and kill all of these living species.
Those pesky bacteria, man.
Pesky is a good word.
Like they're, well, you know,
I'm not sure exactly what they're doing in there
other than living,
but they're certainly pesky
when you want the room to be clean, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, I see.
I see.
I'm reading your articles that you shared
and yeah, they found some dozens
of new strains of bacteria previously uncategorized
or unknown to humankind.
Right.
And I guess they are kind of studying
these new strains of bacteria
because they have clearly demonstrated
an extreme resistance to our humanly attempts
to eradicate them by the means of,
you just mentioned radiation.
So typically, you know,
shining some kind of UV light
or some other radiation
typically kills off most earthly bacterias.
But these guys are fine and tough against it.
And it looks like they've done a bunch of other things
and they all survived,
like, you know, specific air flows and other things.
06:00
They've survived all of that
and alive and thriving in the NASA scale clean rooms
of all clean rooms.
Yeah.
It's, well, you know,
there's nothing else for it to compete with.
So.
Well, yeah.
And I guess it's interesting, right?
Because, you know,
clean room in some way,
just kind of for these bacterias,
they've kind of functioned
as a giant petri dish for them
because, you know,
they have adopted to survive in this,
you know, what is, I guess,
considered extreme environment for these bacterias.
Right.
And they've survived all of it.
They seem to, you know,
have enough of them to be, you know,
to be picked up by these scientists.
Right.
Because if there's like one colony of bacteria,
it's likely that it's really, really hard to find them.
Right.
But there are enough of these guys to, you know,
be like, oh, that's a flag.
Yeah.
They were able to at least, you know,
not being the people who investigated this,
but they were able to collect enough
of a sample of, say, all of these.
Right.
And then attempt to multiply them.
Right.
So that they could get enough
that they could visibly like observe and or not.
Of course.
Yeah.
I guess they also kind of purposely incubated them.
Right.
Right.
These colonies are not just like coding
the rooms of clean rooms, I think.
Right.
We're not walking in
and like grabbing handfuls of,
you know, resistant bacteria.
But there are like colonies
and or at least small little,
you know, units of these bacteria
enough that throughout the clean rooms,
they're there.
You can find them.
So when they went looking, they found them.
And I think it's interesting because,
you know, that's typically a bad news
for facility managers, right?
Like, damn it, my clean room is not clean.
Right.
Yes.
They, you know, turned this opportunity
into a paper and, you know,
suggested that there might be
some interesting stress resistance genes,
as they call it, I'm coding.
Right.
And these can be, you know,
applicable for medicine,
food preservation and other industries, right?
Like where you want, you know,
maybe you want to devise a way to suppress
even the stress resistant bacterias.
Or you might just take advantage
of that particular type
of stress resistant gene and,
you know, turn it into something
that you actually want to use.
Maybe when you, I don't know,
when humans thousands of years from now
decide to colonize Mars or something.
Yeah.
09:00
I am not the right person to talk about
the ethics of, you know,
human colonizing some outer space or anything.
But hey, enough people dream about it.
Yeah. I mean, I'll take a crack at it,
but we won't do it in this episode.
That's for sure.
So it took me a second
to actually register.
You'd said colonizing Mars
before I registered.
That's what you said.
I'd like to jump off of that sort of,
you know, feeling or not feeling
your thinking about how
these observed resistances
can be transferred, right,
to knowledge that we can use
in other fields, right?
Whether it be in, you know,
human health, whether it be in food.
I mean, that's not my idea.
That's Julia Schultz's idea
from the article I'm quoting.
Yep. No, great.
Right. So that's, I mean,
everybody cite your sources.
Give credit to where credit's due, right?
Asami has just pulled that off.
I would also like to point out
one of the terms that I think is given
both in the science communication
article by I think also
Schultz in this case,
and in the article near their conclusion.
They frame these in a couple of ways,
but I want to just quote this one here
because it gets at
kind of what we had started
to talk about earlier outside
when I had first introduced this to you.
Where I started questioning,
did they expect this to happen, right?
Did they know that these
would somehow appear?
Because we know,
we know that if you don't
get rid of everything
and especially bacteria,
which can go through essentially
a rate of evolution
that is observable, right?
Which is what we're seeing here.
You can have ones that survive.
And if they have resistance
within their gene,
not just survival by accident,
then if those ones multiply,
they are likely to be more resistant, right?
So did they expect this to happen?
And then it will connect back to
those potential things you were saying.
So in the conclusion,
this is also in their introduction
about this part,
but the first sentence quote,
the controlled conditions
and stringent decontamination processes
in clean rooms create unique,
selective pressures
that foster the survival of rare,
stress-resistant microorganisms,
leading to the isolation of novel species
with significant biotechnological potential.
End quote.
Biotechnological was mentioned in,
by Schultz in the
science communication piece as well.
Yeah.
It sounds a little wild to me,
not in like a negative way,
but it definitely starts leaning
into the marketed terms
that I hear for things,
you know,
like the cyber technological acceleration
12:02
of the human race.
Yeah, it does trigger my,
you know,
bullshit alert a little bit.
Yeah.
Not comfortable.
It's an amber alert.
Yes.
It's not quite red flax,
but I'm like,
yeah, there's this person
throwing buzzwords now.
Right.
This is, I'm like, that is,
that is, if it wasn't before,
it is now a buzzword, right?
And that is a bit of a hmm.
But the first bit, right?
And in the introduction
and sort of throughout, right?
At least presents this as an awareness,
like these clean rooms are a place
that to some people, at least,
were aware that this could happen.
And it makes sense, right?
Like the existence of this makes sense.
I mean, for all we know,
this might've started
with like a routine cleanup protocol
where people were just like swabbing,
you know,
desks and chairs in a clean room
just to make sure that they don't find
their usual equalize and stuff.
And then found out instead,
like 12 different,
you know, new strains of bacteria, right?
Like it could be just that.
Yeah, exactly.
We don't know.
Exactly.
There is something here as well,
which we don't have to talk about now
because I'm not prepared to,
but this idea of sort of resistances
to intense, you know,
decontamination procedures,
you know, such as radiation.
It's a form of extreme environment.
Yes.
Much like high pressure,
high temperature,
low temperature, what have you.
Yeah.
And these are discussed, right?
As being insightful
for other applications.
And the other thing that I know of
off the top of my head
in which people explore for this purpose
is the tardigrade.
Yes.
Which is the water bear
or whatever it's also called, right?
So, yeah.
You know what they're called in Japanese?
No, but I want to.
What is it?
They're called kumamushi.
Isn't it so cute?
Like, is it a bear or is it a bug?
We don't really know.
It's a bug bear, which is hilarious
because I'm pretty sure that in English,
a bug bear is a different thing.
And it's funny.
Oh, no.
Now I need to Google what it is.
I've got it.
I've got it for you here.
So, let me do this in a certain order.
So first, right?
You said, so kumamushi, right?
So this bear, bug.
And so my brain immediately flipped it around
because in English,
there is a word bug bear.
Not many people use it.
At least nobody that I know.
But a bug bear, for instance,
from the Cambridge Dictionary,
is a particular thing that annoys or upsets you.
That's a quote.
Okay.
So it could be anything.
15:02
They have some examples here.
Let me...
So like something that bugs you.
Something that bugs you, right?
It is causing you a great amount of annoyance, right?
This particular thing.
I didn't know that that thing has a name called bug bear.
Right.
Now you know.
Now it's bug bear, right?
Now, instead of saying, oh, that bugs me so much,
I can say, oh, damn, my bug bears.
Yeah, yeah.
You can say like, that is a bug bear of mine, right?
That's my bug bear or something.
Now, mind you, it will sound weird
because I don't think enough people use it,
at least in most contexts that I'm aware of.
Honestly, tardigrades slash kumamushi
don't deserve that kind of bad rep
because they are truly fascinating creatures.
Yes.
So they themselves are also fascinating creatures.
Now, do you want a second connection to bug bear
before we end this episode?
Okay, please go ahead.
Okay.
I'm going to make a callback,
back to when we talked about character alignments
in tabletop RPGs.
Oh, yeah.
So this, a bug bear, is a monster.
It's a character, not a character,
it is a monster type in some of the rule sets,
especially from things like Dungeons and Dragons.
In particular, it looks like a much more humanoid bear
that has the face of some sort of troll
with extended pointy ears
and sort of a unibrow of some kind.
Wow, this is some ugly shit.
Okay, so for anybody interested,
you can just look up bug bear
and you could put D&D at the end if you want,
but that will probably bring you the picture there.
Okay, but tardigrades are way cuter than this.
Yeah, I wouldn't also call a tardigrade chaotic evil
going back to our alignment stuff,
whereas these things are chaotic evil
based on the old rule set there.
But yeah.
I see.
I see.
Well, now we know.
You know, we went from talking about NASA clean room
to a D&D character.
You know, that's the range that we have.
We have such range.
And if I want to close it off,
we could say, well, NASA's bug bear must be those bacteria.
So, yeah.
Da-dunce.
Da-dunce.
End of story.
I'm going home now.
Thanks for listening.
Goodbye.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening
and find us on X at Eigo de Science,
that is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
