How Codes Were Used To Hack The Telegram Business

0:00Hello, welcome to the Vestor Science, I'm Hannah Frye. And I am Michael Stevens, and this is an episode of Field Notes where Hannah or I bring little treats from our lives to show you what we are mulling over what we're playing with, and we also answer questions from you guys. We certainly do. I like how you sort of stumbled on the, and I, there, like Hannah or who else could it be? Someone else brings things to these, oh no, it's me, okay. Well, you know what, we could, we could just pull someone off the street and be like, what's in your pockets? What are you going to be the subject of today's episode? When we run out of stuff, Michael, let's, let's, for that one, the next one. No, no, no, we're never going to run out, but I like the challenge of having to be like, okay, we found this grandmother on the street. She's got like two used tissues in her pocket. We're going to somehow talk about tissues and mucus and investigate this and make it a thrilling hour long episode. That actually would be a really, also, how do you get from trees to paint a tissue? You know what, there's actually loads there.

1:01There's loads there. Okay, speaking of which, here's a little teaser for what's coming up later when we answer your questions. There is a way of measuring tissue and towel softness, like an actual unit of softness, and tools that measure how soft a tissue is. Like you can, you can put some toilet paper into this machine and it'll be like, oh yeah, okay, that's a, that's a three. Ooh, that's a 12. And so there's, look at this. Let's get the grandma now. We're already in. Let's cancel our original plans. There's no grandma's today, but there is something very old that I want to show you. I have had my eyes on this for a very long time. Look at this, Hannah. It is a code book from the 1900s. Okay, Michael is holding it up to the camera. It's about the size of a business card, maybe slightly larger, slightly larger format, but it is leather bound and it's actually a little notebook when you turn it around. It looks very pretty. Oh, hello. Let's diaries. It's got an advert on the back and notice from Mrs. Castle and Company Limited.

2:05The exclusive publishers of the Unrivaled Let's Is Diaries and other time-saving publications. Is that an advert? Oh, is that actually what it is? No. It's an advert. That's completely just an advert that they pressed into the cover. This is a book. Yeah, it's about the size of one of those little tiny detective pads you might see in the movies. It has in quotes on the front just the word unicode. It is unrelated to unicode the standard used on the internet for characters. But it's a code book. It's not a code book for spies. It's not a code book for governments or secret companies. It's a code book for everyday people. It's a code book for telegrams. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. As if they weren't cool enough already. Some astronauts have now added cancer scientists to their CUP. They are making use of microgravity conditions in space to carry out experiments.

3:09That's because the same thing that lets astronauts experience weightlessness also affects how cancer cells grow, behave, and respond to drugs. And back down on Earth, Cancer Research UK is working with astronomers to explore tumors with technologies that are typically used to map the Milky Way, which I think gives you an idea of just how complex this disease is. That's right, there are over 200 different types of cancer. But by pushing boundaries and embracing the latest technologies, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK over the past 50 years. And today it is continuing to save and improve lives around the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, there are search and breakthroughs and how you can support them. Visit cancerresearchuk.org slash rest to science. Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun, an army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana to a lovely SUV and inexplicably queenly offer.

4:14They're even coming to the castle to collect it! Tonight we feast! And offer you can feast on, sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these male fly! This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dies. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dies. It's a UK book and a bookseller on a books was offering it for like 40 bucks. It was first published in 1886. This is the 1900s edition. The Universal Telegraphic Fraze Book.

5:15So, just because I love talking, I'm going to talk about what a telegram is really quickly. There's probably a few people out there who want to know. I want to know. Telegrams are like the first kind of text message you could ever send. They started back in the mid-1800s. And the way it would work is you would have to go to a telegram office and write down on a sheet of paper what message you wanted to send. And then an operator would translate it into an electronic code that was sent through wires at nearly the speed of light, you know, all the way across the country or through a cable under the ocean to another country. And then at a different office, an operator would hear that electronic message come in. They would translate it back into a written note. And then a delivery person would take that letter to the recipient. And that was a telegram. Now, today we all carry around devices with us that transmit messages at light speed. And we don't have to pay anyone. But back then, 200 years ago, you had to pay by the word.

6:15So is that what the book does? It tries to give you short words. The book saves you money. So let's say you work in an industry where you're always having to ask about the length of something. What is the length of the length? You say that all the time. What's the length of your fabric? What's the length of the boards? What's the length of the boat? What's the length of? That's four words you're having to pay for. It's expensive. And so what this book does, this particular one, has an alphabetical list of Latin words. And then a corresponding also alphabetical list of common things people need to say. And so if you go to page 174, which is where measurement codes are provided, it says instead of writing, what is the length of blank? Just write, Melania blank. No. Yeah, Melania. What is the length of? That means just put down Melania. So you could write down Melania tissue paper.

7:17Right. And then the recipient needs to also be on the unit code system. They would open up their book. They'd look up Melania and they would say, oh, they want to know the length of the tissue. Got it. Got it. Wait, can you look it up both ways? Can you look up the word Melania? Yes, you could look them both up because they're both alphabetical. So the Latin phrases are alphabetical and then the topics are alphabetical. So if it's about like money, you know, you just, you go to the money page in the M's and it's got all the things you might want to say about money. Hold on, I'm desperate to know is the word Trump in there? Because if Melania Trump means what's the length of some other noun, I will be so excited. I don't think Trump is in here because again, these are all like... All schools, though. Well, they seem like Latin phrases. I don't know if Melania is that a, is that a Latin word? Oh, you know what? I don't even think this book goes into the T's. No, it doesn't. The last entry is Sequando, which means, wrote to you by this morning's post, meaning like I sent you a letter through the post

8:21of physical letter that's going to be transported to you at the speed of like a horse at a late to date. Yeah, and you'll get it later, whereas this telegram is coming to you through a wire at light speed. But then after S, all the extra pages are words that are blank, but they start with the V's for some reason. And this is where you can write in your own private code for just you and your recipients. But some of them are really, some of them are pretty dark too. Like, let's say that you knew your friend was pregnant, okay? It was, was, was due very soon. And you got a telegram that said a MIGDLA. Go on. Just, that's one word. So you look up a MIGDLA, which is on page 35. A MIGDLA means, gave birth today baby dead mother week. Oh my God. Imagine getting a telegram, and you still don't really know the news. I would say that that is, that is one situation in which paying for the extra words was probably worth it.

9:24I hadn't even considered that, but you're right. Some messages don't need to be abbreviated. And Nimini means, gave birth today. It was twins, but only one is alive, a girl, and the mother is well. Wow. So that's a lot of information contained in just the one word you had to pay for. So they've got versions of every possible permutation of the mother's health, the baby's health, the, the, the assigned genders of the babies and all this kind of stuff. So for twins, do, do, do, do, do, want to live a boy, that's a Nellis. I mean, look, I'm not, let's be honest here, right? If there's a lot of pressure riding on this telegram operator not to make a spelling mistake. That's true. For sudden, you can completely change, you can completely change the kind of most fundamental news for some, for some person. Oh, imagine that. Like you want to tell someone, help come immediately.

10:24But then they, the, the operator misspells it and it means something like, hey, I ate some nachos today and they were spicy. A couple other fun ones are the word carmino means my husband died today, come at once. Wow. And car effects means my husband died today, do not come. No, I take, yeah, I mean, that's very close. Okay, so a couple other funny things I noticed is that here's a page. I'll show these on screen. These give you a word for when a marriage will take place in the week. And there's of course a different word for each day of the week. Nata, Nolian, Nopolis. But look at, look at a marriage happening on Tuesday. Nausea. Nausea. It's foretelling, it's foretelling. So yeah, you get a telegram that says Nausea, you look it up in the book and you go, oh, they're getting married on Tuesday. If it says nefarious Nausea, you look those two words up, it means, oh, the wedding's in November on a Tuesday.

11:26Wow. You know what, this is reminding me of that commercial. I don't know if it ever aired in the UK, but it was a US commercial for a phone service that allowed you to call and not have to pay for like a long distance call. Okay, I'm trying to remember this all exactly, but you know, there were services where you could call someone and they would pay for the call. Revest, John. Exactly. You call it reverse charge. We did something like calling collect, the money would be collected from the recipient. I did this once when I was a child. Like I had to call my mom, but I didn't have any money in my pocket for the pay phone. So I called collect and I said, yeah, call this number. But then what the operator will do is they'll call the person you want to talk to and the operator speaks first. And they say, hey, you have a call from Michael Stevens. Will you accept the charges? And if the person says no, you don't get to talk to them. Yeah. So the trick in this commercial was that this guy wanted to call and tell his parents that he and his wife had had a baby and that it was a boy.

12:30But he didn't want to have to pay. So he gave the operator his name. He said, my name is Bob. And my last name is we ought to baby eats a boy. So the operator calls up his parents and goes, yeah, you have a call from a Mr. Bob. We ought to baby eats a boy. And the dad goes, I don't accept and hangs up. And the wife is like, who is that? And the dad goes, it was Bob. They had a baby. It was a boy. Amazing. So communication codes to save money have been with us for a very long time. Today we use codes. We use, you know, L-O-L and Raffle and BRB. But it's not to save money anymore. Now it's just because we're also so cool and busy. Lazy. Lazy. I think it was to save money though, because the early days of text messages, you had a limited number of characters. Yeah, yeah. I think that's really, you know, the text speak would arise that way, where you'd start off right out your full message. And then go back through and delete all the vows. And then go back through and delete more and more and more until it finally fit into one single message.

13:32Just on that point, though, the idea of like sending a really horrible message, what was it? Your wife is dying or whatever it might be. Do you know the story about the sort of inspiration for the telegram in the first place? No. It's so amazing. So Samuel Morse, I mean, see if you can guess what he lent his name to afterwards. Yeah. This is around the 1820s. And Samuel Morse is a painter and he's working away from home. He's doing this commission for a painting in Washington, D.C. And back home in New Haven, his wife is pregnant with her third child. And Morse writes her letter and he says, I just, I long to hear from you. But by the time he wrote the letter, his wife had already died. But the letter telling him he needed to come, taking so many days, that he was sitting there not knowing, not knowing that she had passed away. And as soon as he got the message, he rushed home, you know, by, by horse,

14:33only to find that his wife had already been buried. And he could have been there to be by his side. Had only the message arrived much more promptly. And so he started thinking about surely the has to be away. There has to be some way of sending through a message that doesn't require a physical piece of paper to be transported on horseback. And that's what he came up with. And it changed the world. I really did. I think we, it's been around for so long, because we're talking about, you know, the first, the first telegram was sent in 1844, that we kind of forget that there was a world before you were connected almost instantaneously all around the world in theory at least. A great book to read about how telegraphy, like sending messages across a distance at the speed of light, change the world is amusing ourselves to death. It's a book by Neil Postman about changes in society.

15:34And he was like, it all started with the telegraph. Like that shrunk the world so dramatically, so quickly that suddenly you could be receiving news about things that were not relevant to your life immediately. And for all of human history before 1844, only local news ever happened. You might find out that the Civil War ended a month later. And you're like, oh, there was a war going on. I didn't know. Which happened, right? I mean, there were people who were carrying on fighting, had no idea, or we're not fighting at all, and had no idea. Yeah. And Neil Postman's whole argument is that ever since the telegraph, we've lived in the world that we still live in today with social media, with constant access to news and information from all around the world, from a city that doesn't even concern you. And he was like seriously, think about how much you read in a day that you consider news

16:35that does not change your plans for the day, that doesn't give you information that you need to solve a problem. And I'm like, man, that's pretty much all of it. And I actually doesn't help you in any way. I know, I agree. And I think that Morse himself knew that this was something serious because the very first telegraphically sent message was sent by Samuel Morse in 1844 to his assistant Alfred Veil. And all Morse wrote was, what half-God rot? What a guy. That's incredible. I think he knew that we were almost like a different species now. We were not limited by space. Wow, that really genuinely gave me chills. That was 1844. Telegrams, messages created through the telegraph technology peaked in the 20s, in the mid-20s, where I mean, there were more than 100 million being sent every year.

17:35And they continue to be sent, even though the telephone kind of like made them less necessary for a long time because they were just great keepsakes. If your grandchild was born, three states away, you enjoyed getting a telegram about it because you could save that as the how you got the news. You put an atheris on your wall, or whatever it was, whatever it was. Yeah, if you wanted to be like a framed telegram, maybe don't use the code. Maybe don't use the code. In terms of the way that it changed our world, one story that I've always really loved about the mid-1800s. Was Charles Babbage, who was this kind of crazy inventor, really genuinely, genuinely visionary, but also just complete crackpot. If I first invented the difference engine, which was essentially like this giant mechanical calculator, he was very good friends with Ada Lovelace instantly. And then he invented after that, he sort of got bored with it because his new fancy was the analytical engine.

18:40And the analytical engine was, as far as anybody can tell on the basis of these plans, a fully functioning, legitimate, completely real computer. I mean, it had it worked, right? And no one's ever properly built it. People have created these extraordinary computer simulations of how it would have all fitted together and so on. But it does look like he had invented a Turing complete machine. But yeah, it had it built, it didn't build, had it worked. We could have been in the LOL stage of humanity, maybe 100 years early than we actually were. Gosh, imagine what it would be like today if we had had internet for what, like, 100 more years or something. How much sooner would the web have come along? Like a hyperlinked space that you could enter? Exactly. The other thing I really like about all of this stuff is there's one of my favorite clips, sort of archival clips, is there's a clip of Arthur C. Clark being asked about communications in the 1950s.

19:47And he comes up with this incredible prediction about what he expects the future to hold. And he says, in the future, we will be able to be on any mountain in the world. And we'll have a device that sits in our front pocket that will allow us to communicate with any other human on the planet. It's like it's phenomenal, the foresight of this man. And if you end the clip there, you're like, my goodness me, he was a vision, this is extraordinary. But if you play on the clip, then what is it? It's immediately afterwards is. And then we'll all have genetically engineered monkey buttlers. We're not there yet. Give it another decade, Dave. Give it another decade. We might skip the monkey buttlers and go right to robotic buttlers, but still it's a pretty good prediction. But yeah, we're living in the future that the past predicted in many ways. So imagine if Internet had been invented a hundred years sooner than DARPA put it together in its modern sense.

20:48What kind of skew morphs would we have today? A skew morph? Do you know what that is? No. Tell me. A skew morph is the name for a shape or a symbol that is no longer functional, but is there because it was always there in the past. So think about the save icon. And a lot of software and apps is a floppy disk or a three and a half inch disk, which we don't use anymore. But that was what you saved on to in the past. So we just kept it and people always knew that that meant save. And kids born today are like, oh, that's what that is. Okay, I don't know if this counts as a skew morph because it's a word, but uppercase and lowercase letters are called that because printers who would set the type with little led pieces, they had two cases, an uppercase where all the big letters were the magic skew.

21:50And then they had the minuscule letters in the lowercase because they needed to reach those more easily. So that's what upper and lowercase means. But if the internet had been cold powered back in 1850, I wonder if we would not say things like, oh, you got a log in. We would say things like, oh, you've got to steam up or you got to, ah, here, you have to click shovel and shovel meant like log in. You know, who knows? Yeah, I just got to stoke up my router. Exactly. You wouldn't plug things in. You'd stoke them. It's good, isn't it? What could have been? Definitely one of those sliding doors moments. Should we get some questions? Let's get to some questions. All right, quick, break fast. This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be.

22:51Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dies. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dies. So good, so good, so good. Nordstrom Rack is celebrating 125 years of Nordstrom with 125 of the best deals up to 65% off. In stores and online, we're talking incredible savings on brands you love, like Vince, Sam Edelman, Ragnbonne, all Saints and more. They're only here while supplies last, so shop today. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices, that's why you rack. Okay, Jive, we've ended up with a bit of a theme on this episode, Michael,

23:51because we had a question in from Landpod on Reddit saying, why don't we dream about our smartphones kind of continuing on with the communication ideas that we had in the first time? Why don't we dream about our cell phones? It's a question I've looked into a lot, because people ask it on social media quite often, and I love to try to tackle those. And I haven't found any good answer, especially any evidence-based answer. First of all, whenever someone asks this question, you get kind of two responses. One is a bunch of people who reply and say, oh, not true, I dreamed about my phone last night. So we people do dream about phones. They do dream about screens. But it's to most people quite surprising that we don't dream about them more, considering how much a part of our daily lives they are. We dream about loved ones, we dream about locations from our lives, but we rarely just dream that we're watching a movie, or watching TV, or texting someone.

24:55And there's so little information about this that's not just internet commenter speculating. It's quite frustrating. The one thing, kind of the one educated guess that's out there is in a cut article from 2018, where Alice Rob, who's a dream researcher, said, well, you know, there's this theory called threat simulation hypothesis. It's the idea that maybe our dreams are simulations of threats, and our brains create these so that we can kind of experience them and be more prepared if they ever really happen. And the idea then was that we just haven't evolved long enough for our non-conscious brain to have evolved to see technology as a threat. So we dream more about attacks or bodily illnesses or weird behaviors or falling, but we just haven't gotten to the point where our brains are like, oh yeah, a phone, that's part of the environment.

25:56I don't really buy it, a lot of people don't really buy it. I don't think that Alice Rob herself was trying to say this is the reason it was just like a, here's one thing that she could think of. I mean, tell me about your experience. Have you dreamt about your smartphone? No, I haven't, but then I also think, I mean, I have some sort of thoughts on this, but this is pure speculation, right? I've got no, I've got no, no, there's not falsified any of the things I'm about to say. Okay, it's true that you don't think about your mobile phone. However, I also don't really dream about clothes. I don't really dream about brushing my teeth. I don't really dream about, I mean, many things actually, I don't really dream about possessions very often at all. It's more sort of people, of course, and places, but they're much more sort of visceral than objects. The things that drive emotional reactions, basically, those are the things that I end up dreaming about.

26:59The other thing I would say is that when you are sitting across from somebody who is on their mobile phone, I don't think that they, and you're sort of watching them, they're completely unaware of their surroundings, right? I don't think that you, when you're sitting there on a phone, I don't think that you are existing in the real world, like you would be if you were just holding another arbitrary object. What you're doing is you're sort of, you're kind of swapping your senses of the physical world for like what the feedback that you're getting from this kind of virtual world. And you know, we do call it like the virtual world that you're in. I think that you are, you're sort of your consciousness, I'm going to make this way more woo-woo than I mean it to be, but I think that your conscious mind is sort of operating in a different space, you're no longer fully present in the physical space that you're in. And so I think that, you know, if you were, you would be fully conscious that you were sitting there with a phone

28:03for hours and hours and hours on end and you're not, your mind gets lost, you go down the rabbit hole, sort of blink and many hours have passed. And so I think that when you are, when you're dreaming, that's the space you're inhabiting, right? You're inhabiting the space where you are having those emotions, where you are kind of feeling those feelings, where you're having those experiences, not the one where you're sitting in the room holding a kind of cold black square. You know? Yeah, because you're not really fully conscious there anyway. I think that that's where the answer lies, that the virtual world is certainly full of surprises and fears and emotions, the visceral stuff that our dreams seem to be so made out of, but the phone itself is just the window we're looking through to then feel those things, and we dream about those things, but how they came to us, whether it was through the glass of my phone or the glass of my spectacles, my eyeglasses, it doesn't matter, that's incidental to what the dream is doing, which is saying, you missed a class.

29:03And personally, I dream that one a lot, that I forgot to attend a class for like months, and now I've got a final exam. Yeah. And the thing is I never, ever in the dream experience, or at least remember how I came to know I'd missed the class. Like I read it on an email or on my phone or on a sheet of paper or a letter. It's always just like, I already know, and I'm dealing with that emotion. That's the dream. Right. And what is the emotion? Do you feel sort of, is it like anxiety? Is it sort of... Yeah, it's a panic, and I haven't had that dream for a while, which means maybe my life is going better than it was back when I constantly dreamt that I'd forgotten something, that I... It would either be the dream about missing a class in college, or it would be a dream where I have been cast in a play. And I forgot to ever go to rehearsals. I never went to rehearsal, and now it's opening night, and I don't know my lines.

30:04Oh my gosh. They're very... Yeah. I can see the similarities between those two. Mine, by the way, is that I'm leaving somewhere, like I'm leaving a house or, you know, packing up and leaving. And it doesn't matter how many times I go back, there's always more to do. There's always like, oh my god, how is there still this much stuff to do? There's always like, it's not a refilling well, should we say, stuff to do. And then, and what's the kind of core emotion? I think it's like fatigue, almost. It's sort of overwhelming fatigue. I just can't do it again. It's like that, you know. And then, how do you feel when you wake up from that dream? Honestly, I have it so often, Michael. It sort of feels quite normal. You know what, there's going to be so many people analyzing these in the comments. Isn't that? And like, this means that you are. Fine, I mean, analyze away, guys. This is so much in analysis as it is just, I'm glad I don't have that dream.

31:05Because I feel like waking up from that dream, you still do have a lot to do in your life, you know? It's a day. Whereas in my dream, I wake up and I go, oh, I didn't miss a class. I'm not in a play. I feel relief and I feel so happy to be alive in the real world. But if I was dreaming about all the stuff I have to do, and that it never ends, when I woke up, it would still, I'd still be in that dream. Oh, that's true. So I'm sorry, Hannah. Thank you. I appreciate it. We should definitely do some episodes properly on dreams as well, you know? I think there's so many interesting things to say about dreams. Yeah. And what they mean for consciousness and all of that different kind of thing. Okay. We'll do the next question, Joey. Yeah. This is another one from Reddit. This came in from just some jerk online. I know that's their username. That's actually their username. But they have asked, why does water swirl down drains? Why doesn't it just kind of fall through like sand in an hourglass? What a lovely question. Yeah. Basically, I tell you what it's not. It's not the Coriolis effect.

32:06I think that there's all of these videos online about, actually, some of them are quite good, but some of them aren't. Some of them are quite good about how, you know, when it's was down the drain in the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere are going different directions. It's, I mean, theoretically, you might get some effect, but it's so weak that even the tiniest little bump on the inside of your sink will, will take the direction. The reason why it happens is basically conservation of angular momentum. So if you have a, I mean, the classic example is if you have an ice skater who starts with their, starts spinning with their arms really far out. And then they bring their arms in as they're spinning, they start spinning really, really, really fast, right? Because you have angular momentum is like your mass times your tangential velocity times your radius. So if you tighten up the radius, the total product needs to be the same. Keep the mass the same. So make the radius smaller.

33:06You have to make the velocity quicker. So essentially what's the same thing is happening that when you have got a big bath tub, say, the water is very rarely perfectly still. I mean, you'd have to leave it for a very long time. No footprints, nothing, sort of no stomping around or anything. There's always going to be some tiny little movement in that fluid that gives it an angular momentum. And so then as the fluid starts draining down the plug hole, essentially what's happening is the radius of that fluid is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And so it starts to become faster and faster and faster until you get this vortex as it goes down the drain. I think the interesting thing though, I mean, that's just like, oh, you get a little vortex and it gets faster when you get smaller. But I think what's interesting is why this doesn't happen with sand. Sand on the other hand doesn't, right? Like each particle and act pretty independently. Sand on the other hand has like really high internal friction.

34:06So as one particle rubs against another, it takes a lot of energy for those two to rub against each other. So this is essentially why you don't get it with sand. If sand was at less friction between each sand particle, then you would get it. But because of the exact properties of the fluid. And if sand were like that, it would be more like a liquid. But sand is quite liquidy. Sand can't be quite liquidy. It can be, for sure. Yeah. I think you would be perfectly able to model sand as a liquid. Look, you can take those fluid dynamics equations. You can apply them to all sorts of stuff. But would there ever be a way to get like a big drum of sand, unplug a hole in the bottom and actually get it to spiral out? I think you could if you started off with oil grains, make them all slippery as hell. But then is it going to feel like you just got like a slurry of liquids? Here's a way to do it. You put them in honey. Okay? Okay. So with honey, you could still get a swirl,

35:06but it would be a very slow one. I mean, look, think about this in the limit, right? If you put a teaspoon of sand into a bath of water, then yeah, you'd still get this well. And so... Right. So somewhere in between. Somewhere in between. It's still going to work. It's still going to work. It just depends, I guess, on the fluid properties of the sand that you're dealing with. Yeah. I do like, you know, lava is another thing that you would think is solid, but actually has these really amazing liquid properties. Snow as well, like slurry. I really like all of those sort of taking what are solid objects, but I have these fluid-like properties, and then playing with the equations with them. This segment is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Now, there are a few ways to spot a cancer scientist. Okay? Lab coats, pipettes, microscopes, or you could ask them what their favorite car is.

36:07But if you do, don't expect the usual debate between convertibles or SUVs. They are way more likely to name a lab-made protein that is central to one of the most exciting breakthroughs in cancer treatment. Ca-T cell therapy. Which is much cooler, because this particular car chase doesn't involve high speeds and sharp turns. It's about hunting down and killing cancer cells. So today, we are asking, can cause help us drive cancer out of the body? I mean, that's a good pun. Come on. It's really good. That whole bit was good. Okay, so what kind of car are we talking about? Car, C-A-R, which stands for chimeric antigen receptors. There are special molecules that can recognize and target specific features only found on the surface of cancer cells. So in car-T cell therapy, T cells are removed from a patient's blood. These are T cells are a kind of white blood cell that act like the elite special force of the immune system.

37:11And then genes are added to those T cells that make them grow car proteins on their surface. Those T cells are then put back into the patient's body. And the car receptors effectively hunt down the cancer cells, bind to them, and trigger an immune attack eliminating the cancer. Now, the benefits of car-T cell therapies over other cancer therapies are that one car-T cells live inside the body. So they're more able to check for and chase returning cancer cells. Also, they should only target cancer cells, not healthy ones. That means fewer long-term side effects, which is particularly important for children and young people, who's developing bodies, face-lasting harm from harsh treatments originally made for adult cancers. The point is the journey has started. How do we make sure, though, that it doesn't run out of gas? Okay, so the thing is, is that cancer cells, I mean, they're mosses of disguise. They can change their appearance so that car-T cells can't then recognize them.

38:11And that will switch off the immune system's alarm so that tumors can grow undetected. Now, scientists, they're creating car-T cells that recognize two features on the surface of cancer cells, and rather than just one. But a drawback to the prototype is that chasing cancer can end up exhausting your car-T cells. When you're looking for these multiple features, exhaustion ends up hitting sooner. The car-T cells are like running out of fuel, essentially, if we really want to push this analogy. And that means, then, if you exhaust your car-T cells that you can allow, cancer cells to start dividing again, and the cancer end up returning, which is actually something that's quite common when treating children and young people. So cancer research UK, they are studying the car-T cells that ended up lasting the longest in children and young people's clinical trials to find out what it was about them that gave them that extra mileage. And in doing so, they've identified this unique group of 20 genes

39:12that might be responsible for this stamina. They nickname them the Persist SIG. The name scientists come up with, honestly. But here's the thing, taking Persist SIG apart to understand what's going on there, and make sure that it is turned on for all car-T cells. It's a bit like giving a bigger battery pack, a better end in something that will end up working for much longer. Yeah, that's right. So what are the challenges? One of the challenges in production of car-T cell therapies is that they must be tailor-made for each person from their own T cells, from their immune cells. Well, cancer research UK are developing off the shelf therapies, using a specialist type of T cell. They can be mass-produced and they can be stored and then ready for immediate delivery. So cancer research UK scientists have tested this in the lab against a type of childhood leukemia, and it worked better than traditional car-T cells.

40:14Now, while car-T cell therapy is newer and it's currently limited to very specific blood cancers, these kind of innovations, they're opening up incredible new possibilities by targeting more types of cancer in both adults and children and young people. And that's what this research is all about. Over the last 50 years, more than 35,000 children and young people with cancer in the UK have survived into adulthood, thanks in part to cancer research UK's work. Their ambition is to revolutionise how better treatments are discovered, developed and made available to more people, including children and young people, so they can live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer. For more information about cancer research UK, their research, their breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org slash rest is science. You get very far, that's how you predict where lava flow is going to go instantly.

41:14Okay, so you do another question? Yeah, let's do another question. This one came from our subreddit. F. Mother 22 asks, how soft a material would someone have to land on for them to survive if they jumped off the world's tallest building? Now, what I love about this one is the word soft put in quotation marks. It's not just like how could you survive a fall off the tallest building? It's how soft. And that got me obsessed with what is softness? And as it turns out, there are ways to measure softness. But softness is a lot of different things for a mattress. We can measure something like how much force does it take to push a four inch by four inch square down a quarter of an inch? That's literally what mattress companies do when they measure how soft a mattress is. Or in metric if they're in Europe and more sensible, but carry on.

42:14Yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's the best unit to use. I'm just saying that that's an industry standard that I found in my research, which is most certainly the American standard. But then a mattress being soft is different than like pajamas being soft or a tissue being soft. Now, you could have the world's softest tissue. And I would not want to land on that if I jumped off the tallest building. In fact, I would much rather land on a big old messy pile of corrugated aluminum sheets than a soft tissue. Because if you want to survive a fall off the tallest building, you don't want it to be like gentle, gentle, soft on your skin. What you want is something that can absorb an enormous amount of kinetic energy. Because the problem with a fall is the blunt force trauma of hitting the ground,

43:15where you accelerate really quickly. Your momentum changes really quickly. And that's what a force is. Force is the rate of change of momentum. The faster your velocity changes, the greater that force and the more harm can be done to your body. But if you can lose your velocity, lose your downward speed slowly, then the force is much smaller. So to survive a fall off the tallest building, you're going to want to minimize the G-Force you experience when you stop. How much of a G-Force is going to kill you really depends on you. It depends on how you fall. If you fall, like the best way to fall, from my research, initially I thought you want to fall on your legs, because they might get shattered and broken, but at least your head and your heart. You're too excited.

44:15But again, it kind of depends. I think that the shock wave still goes through your entire body. If you fall on your back, you want to increase the surface area that comes into contact with the ground to minimize the pressure. On each individual part of the body. So I still don't know exactly how to fall. Because stunt people, they tend to try and fall on their back, isn't they? Yes. Yes, exactly. They rarely say, oh, just fall on your legs, because then they'll shatter and break and break your fall. No, they don't want to break anything. You've got to fall on a material that is going to, at most, subject you to 10 or 15 Gs, I would say. You might even be able to land head first at 10 Gs and be okay. But your legs, your butt could take like 100 if they had to.

45:16What this question reminded me of is a really cool question in Lewis Carroll Epstein's thinking physics. He points out what makes a hard hat work. And hard hats protect you from stuff hitting your head, not because they're so hard, but because they have so much give. And in the book, he says we should really call them give hats. Because all they do is they say, look, a hammer's going to hit your head. If a hammer hits your skull, the hammer goes from really fast to zero in like a fraction of a second. And that's an enormous force. So that's why hard hats sit up above your head. If you've ever worn one, you know that a hard hat is actually this like plastic crown that supports a little dome that just hovers over your head. And that distance means that there's time for the hammer to slow down. Right. Of course, that's the thing that is essentially changing is the amount of time.

46:16Yes, it's a give hat. And so you want things that have give and a single tissue on the ground might be soft in your hands, but it's going to get compressed and you're going to hit the concrete underneath immediately. But a giant pile of corrugated sheets of metal, they're going to crumple and dent and absorb all this energy over time, making it a less painful experience, even though each individual piece is harder. So, okay, a couple of things that this question reminds me of. One is that I once went to a factory that makes the corrugated iron, I think, that you get on motorways between the two lanes of a motorway. Oh, and I've always looked at stuff and been like, that stuff looks flimsy, you know. I could felt a bit nervous about it. I don't want to run into that. That looks really super flimsy. But actually, the design of it is complete genius because,

47:16so in part, it's been sort of that W shape, for exactly that reason, that that will take the impact, that will crumple, that will take some of the energy of the collision. But the other thing is that what happens is the posts that it stuck into, as your car, if you kind of come off, if you veer off, and you hit it at sort of high speed, basically, the posts are designed to fail, to a certain degree, a particular speed. And then the whole thing sort of becomes like an elastic band, the sort of stretches inwards, and then slowly returns. And crucially, they are not designed to make you come to a complete stop, because if you come to a complete stop, if you crashed into it and it slowed you down, for one thing, the force that you would be under would be absolute gigantic. It would be like, you know, hitting a concrete wall. But secondly, the cars that are immediately behind you, you would then give them much less time to be able to veer away from you.

48:18Right. So actually, what they are trying to do, if you imagine you've got sort of a helicopter view of a motorway, if you imagine that there is this spot that you are in, that your car is occupying, that is moving forward at a particular speed, what those crash barriers are designed to do is to slow you down slightly and return you back into your same spot in the traffic. Right. So that then you slow down while going straight, and other cars have more time to move around. It's absolute genius, right. It looks like it doesn't work at all, but it's genius. And it's great for teaching physics. Even when there are concrete barricades on the side of the road, they tend to have sloped sides, like little ramps sides. So when you hit them, your wheel gets pushed back into the road. But yeah, ultimately, surviving these falls or crashes is about stopping distance being quite large. That way you're not subjected to a big, immediate impulse.

49:18And so, like cars built today are built to crumble. If you're in an old car that's like really solid and it's so well constructed and you hit something like a brick wall, you go from 100 kilometers an hour to zero within like a centimeter and you die. But if we can slow you down to zero over the course of 30 or 60 centimeters and just have the front of the car totally crumple up and take all that energy, then you never necessarily, I mean, 100 kilometers an hour is pretty fast. You don't hit anything at that speed. But the point is that we want you to slow down more slowly. Cover more distance while you're decelerating and you will have a smaller force at any one time. Point is you want to fall into something that can absorb all your kinetic energy and do it over a long period of time. So ideally, it's something that's like full of a bunch of air. An airbag is great. A net is pretty good because what are nets made out of? Basically, just the air in between the ropes or the wires.

50:20In fact, back in 2016, a guy named Luke Atkins, Skydove from 25,000 feet without a parachute. All he had to save him was a 100 foot by 100 foot net on the ground. Whoa. Which from 25,000 feet is like the period on a sentence, okay? It was nothing. And he's Skydove with two friends that did have parachutes and they were there to make sure that he was on the right trajectory. And then at the last minute, they parachuted. And then they just let him use his own body as basically a sail to guide himself towards that net. And this net was like 100 feet off the ground. It had air pressure cannons in it that pulled the net to keep it from him from sinking too deep too fast. But he hit the net going about 120 miles an hour and he was fine. Oh my gosh. No, thank you. Why? What did he get? No.

51:20Well, what he got was a mention on the rest of his science. That's true. That's true. It was worth it. But I can barely watch the video because he was wearing like a camera as he did it. So you can see it. And you're just the whole time you're thinking, oh, you're too far to the left. Move, move, move, move, move. And he does hit like the kind of the left edge of the net. And you're like, oh my gosh. But again, the net was just so easy for his body to move. And it had so much give that he was fine, hitting water as we know at a high speed. Can't move it out of the way fast enough. You may as well hit concrete. Okay. But a net is really good. It's soft when it comes to impacts. I think I said that there was two things that this question reminded me of. One was the one was the sort of crumpling in the car. Sorry. The other thing is this really amazing essay by a whole day in the 1920s, which was called on being the right size. And essentially it was asking the question of if you did fall from a great height from a from a from a very tall building or an airplane or whatever it might be.

52:23Is there a point at which you could act as your own parachute? And so what a whole day writes in this essay, he's imagining it, a sort of disused mind shaft. Right. And what would happen if you threw certain animals down? No animals were harmed in the making of this essay. Well, what happened if you threw certain animals down this mind shaft? And a mouse would be absolutely fine. It would be it's it's small enough that it could act as its own parachute. It's terminal velocity. It's is not high enough. It's completely fine. A rat would be a bit like a dazed dog. Maybe would have a few broken bones. And then in this essay, the way I remember it, right? I am doing this off the cuff. So again, give me a minute. I'm getting this wrong. But he said that a pit pony, if it weren't sent down a disused mind shaft, could only be described as a splash at the bottom. So the other way to survive this is just be smaller, just be smaller. Yeah.

53:23It's so funny that you bring that up Hannah because I literally quoted that last weekend at my daughter's birthday party. I was mentioning we went to a place where there's a lot of climbing. And I mentioned like, oh yeah, I mean, a kid can climb because they just hit the ground and they're fine. But if I fell, I would splash. And this is an actual just property of physics. Like when you, in geometry, if you increase the volume of an object, its surface area doesn't grow as fast. So yeah, a horse is really heavy and it doesn't have as much surface area. Now, I don't know if I've told you this story, but I extended actual experiment on this in a unreleased, unared pilot for CNN called Michael Stevens Unlimited. And it was the whole idea. This was back in like, I don't know, 2013, 2014. It was like, what if Michael Stevens had unlimited money? And I was like, I want to test out like throwing animals off of buildings. And we found out that there's no way to kill an ant by throwing it off a building.

54:26Because their surface area is so large compared to their volume, their terminal velocity is just never very fast at all. I mean, they are a parachute that is alive. And so we threw ants off of this building, like a 20 story building in Los Angeles. But we thought, how are we going to know that they survived? Like we can't just run down there and find an ant and say, oh, it's okay. So what we had to do is we had to buy this radioactive paint from United Nuclear. And we painted the ants with a radioactive paint through them off the building. And it went down onto the sidewalk with a Geiger counter and found the ants we had painted and showed that they were just fine. And they were local ants by the way. So they were just like, hey, I'm at home, but I'm in a different room now. That's amazing. That's amazing. I love that story and I love doing that experiment. I got to get the footage one of these days. It's going to be weird to like release some at some point because I look so much younger. But it was a really fun show.

55:26Yeah. I really enjoyed that. Thank you very much for that question. Mother 22. Let us know if you have me. F mother 21. Doesn't feel like it would be a... The first 21 were taken. Or maybe that person was born in 1922. Hey, maybe they were. And they're 104. And they're listening to the rest of the science every day. Maybe indeed. Yes. As ever, if you would like to send us in your questions, you can send them to us at the rest of science at GoHunger.com. And we'll see you next time. Sally Roe. Bye-bye. Imagine a left brain and a right brain got together and came up with an incredible banking solution. The innovative minds at Silicon Valley Bank and the pragmatic ones at first citizens bank have put their heads together so they can deliver solutions tailored to your unique financial needs.

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