ASM079 Falling Asleep, Micro-biomes, and Alchemist Bacteria

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falling asleep microbiomes and alchemist bacteria all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and this week wow do we have a lot to talk about a new video series a bunch more tour stops of course you know the book is coming so much is going on right now i'm going to travel the country to see you all i can't wait but now i guess we need to do a podcast so let's get it started [Music] so many announcements this week well i guess not many i just say so many because i'm so excited i've been working on something that i'm really excited about and i haven't been allowed to share it or talk about it because we're trying to you know do this book marketing or whatever and timing's important but i get over excited and i just want to share things so i've been working with kevin o'brien at journeybox media and the other great folks over there to create a series of videos that explore the questions and topics that are covered in finding god in the waves my upcoming book it's a relatively difficult book to talk about or market because it's got such a a diversity of topics included all around the central idea of reconciling science and faith and overcoming the kind of destructive doubt that many people experience so today we've launched the first video and i'm really excited about it so if you want to watch the video it's at findinggodonthewaves.com it'll show right up there of course you can also see it on my twitter feed or my facebook page wherever and this first video and there's a lot of these that'll be coming in the coming weeks but this first video is about who i wrote the book for and that was really to me the most important thing about this whole book is the audience i had in mind when i wrote it and i don't mean i had some hypothetical audience in mind i mean that i would take your emails and tweets and questions and when people kind of bear their soul to me over email i'd actually print that out and put it next to my computer while i wrote the manuscript so that i knew exactly who i was talking to so we just made a little a short video it's just a couple of minutes that talks about that so i'd love for you to go check out that video at findinggodinthewaves.com and then of course the other thing i have to talk about is i told you more dates were coming on the finding on the waves book tour and wow have we added a lot more dates so just a couple in particular portland oregon we've got two los angeles stops with an orange county stop coming soon savannah georgia houston texas new york city will probably announce this week a specific date and there's a lot more cities in the work as well uh for example boston uh you're you're in the works and we'll uh we'll announce that date but there's more than that there's several more cities to come but if you go to finding on the waves.com tour you'll see really this is a big tour we're going a lot of places trying to go to as much of the country as i can to see people who listen to this podcast and who hopefully some of you will buy the book so again kick off the video series talking about the topics in the book available at findinggontheways.com and all the uh updated dates and times and cities for the finding god in the waves book tour at finding on the waves dot com slash tour the last thing is kind of i'd like to talk about is the liturgist gathering that's part of the book tour chicago in october is selling out fast i have all really no doubt at this point that one's going to sell out before it happens in october so if you've been thinking about joining us in chicago i would stop thinking and start actually getting your ticket at the liturgist.com gathering denver is uh is a lot safer bet we've got a lot of a lot more room in denver although i believe in our ticket sales actually are picking up in denver as well so i think that's going to be a really well attended event but we'd love to see you at the liturgist gathering that's going to be me and michael and lisa and uh all of you and we've got some really cool stuff planned we're gonna announce more specifics about the structure of the gathering really soon because michael and i have been talking about that and uh but i think you're gonna love it even before you know specifics trust me it's going to be an amazing time so with that let's go ahead and do a podcast today [Music] hey science mike i just wanted to ask you about alchemy i just found an article online talking about a bacteria that's reported to ingest poisons and excrete pure well 24 karat gold i couldn't find anything in the articles that described any sort of chemical process or way that this particular bacteria was getting a hold of gold so i was wondering if you were able to find any deeper insights for me on this thing that i considered fringe science but found all over the science journals thanks bye well it's funny you mentioned this thing you considered fringe science because when i first started listening to this question i assumed it was some kind of pseudoscience just based on the description and then when you said you saw it in reputable journals i didn't believe you so i checked for myself and um yeah you're right this is this is true there is in fact a bacteria a specific species of bacteria now if you think i have trouble with some words watch when i try to do a latin bacteria species name uh cupreavitis metaldurance maybe people who speak latin are uh throwing their headphones off right now anyway one specific species of bacteria does in fact convert toxic chemicals to gold which is really wild that's that is a real thing so does that mean alchemy is real it's totally possible to produce gold well the reason i was skeptical of that idea is gold is an element it's an atomic element it's not a chemical compound it's not a alloy it's not a molecule it's an atom and as far as i understand physics the only way to make gold is in a supernova that's the only time gold gets made right anything any element heavier than iron is produced during a supernova so i didn't see how a bacteria could create gold out of chemicals that didn't contain gold that just didn't seem possible and that's for good reason it is not so how do we have a bacteria that produces gold out of toxic chemicals well that's the trick this species of bacteria can't turn any just just any old toxic waste any toxic chemical into gold it can only do it with one specific chemical gold chloride which there are several versions of gold chloride depending on how many gold atoms are bonded with the chlorine atom but all of them are nasty they really are toxic but this particular species of bacteria can kind of sit in a pool of the stuff and in about a week it can digest gold chloride into just regular old gold so basically this is the digestion process and this bacteria is stripping the chlorine atom away from the gold at which point gold is bonding with whatever it can find which is another gold atom making pure gold and what you've got is bacteria poop golden bacteria poop right because a poop or excrement or waste is leftover byproducts of digestion things our biological systems can't use to produce energy so this bacteria is using the chlorine now i'm not a biochemist and i couldn't see any specific documentation on what it's doing i don't know if it's using that chlorine as a catalyst or if it's a final product and some chemical it's producing to create energy or harness energy but that gold that pure gold does qualify the technical definition of poop so it's uh sounds magical and like alchemy at first and the end result is uh it's really expensive bacteria poop so this is not like some way to end the scarcity of gold because you're taking a chemical that has gold in it in the first place which for that reason is expensive to produce in laboratories and is used in industrial applications and here's pulling the gold back out of it now this is interesting for toxic waste cleanup in that you could potentially use the species of bacteria to clean up gold chloride in environments it doesn't belong in so that's interesting but not true alchemy really interesting fun question though our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike when you were a guest on the relevant podcast you mentioned that you had taught yourself to fall asleep within five minutes of laying down each evening what is your technique for falling asleep and what is the science behind it do you have any other tips for falling asleep at night and although this is the question i read on the air i've probably seen this question a hundred times in the last month because of the relevant podcast and because my friend donald miller wrote a blurb for my book and in that blurb he talked about actually seeing me kind of do this process like we were hanging out at a lodge together and we were all outside and uh i put myself to sleep really fast i think five minutes might be long i think i usually do it in less than a minute often less than 20 seconds which probably sounds incredible to a lot of people but it's it's actually true uh there is a technique to it and obviously a lot of people are curious because i get asked this so much uh here's the bad news this is not a quick or easy trick it's not like i can show you a youtube video that's going to magically help you fall asleep tonight or give you some weird trick as marketers like to say right now this is something that you have to train yourself to do over time so he but i'll tell you how i do it i'll tell you exactly how i do it and you can see if it works for you or not the first step is really good sleep hygiene i think one of the reasons people have difficulty falling asleep is because we have poor sleep hygiene so here's some things that will help you set yourself up for success to train yourself to fall asleep faster stick to a schedule go to bed about the same time every night and wake up about the same time every morning it's incredibly incredibly helpful control your lighting so as you get later in the evening and closer in bed turn off more lights in your home and make it darker avoid screens turn the tv off put your phone away don't use the computer 30 minutes before you lay down is great 60 minutes is better 90 minutes is fantastic because your sleep wake cycle is controlled by a sodium and potassium current in the brain and this cycle of currents is influenced uh primarily by light and when you eat right so you also don't want to eat right before you go to bed so don't eat or drink right before bed try to avoid caffeine after 4 p.m if you're on a normal working day schedule now if you if you work on the night shift obviously that won't work but but several hours five six hours before you're gonna lay down stop ingesting caffeine you wanna get at least seven hours of sleep at night and eight is better and that's also believe they're not going to help you fall asleep by faster some people say if i get six hours a night i'm great um for most people studies would say that's not true seven is the bare minimum for most people and eight is closer to ideal and then this is really big don't use your bed for anything but sleep or sex don't watch tv in bed don't read your phone in bed don't tweet don't check emails because you're training yourself to do the wrong things in that environment so what you're wanting to do is condition yourself so that your bed means it's time to sleep and that's it studies and and myself agree that uh especially for a guy sex can certainly aid going to sleep process although that's not the trick i use so when you do all those things and you set yourself up for success by giving your brain its best chance to be in the right current phase as you're going to sleep and this is this is a big thing you know we we love there's a dopamine cycle involved with smartphones so we like to look at email and facebook and twitter with the phone on the nightstand right before we go to bed and right when we wake up and that is an incredibly destructive habit for your personal well-being and your ability to sleep stay away from that seriously if you want to sleep so if you do all those things then this training technique may work for you it's important what i'm about to tell you probably won't be effective if you don't have good sleep hygiene and you aren't disciplined and regimented about your sleep routine but going through a routine is important so with that said here's how it works to actually train yourself to fall asleep faster you start with something that's called progressive muscle relaxation i like to start at the very top of my head and move down towards my feet one body part at a time and intentionally relax my muscles some people like to think of like a melting visual just imagine yourself kind of melting into the mattress getting heavier and you know you can say with every exhale every exhalation you get more relaxed so as you kind of feel your head and neck relax then you can move to your shoulders then you can move to your chest your abdominals maybe down your arms and into your hands your hips your thighs your lower legs the bottoms of your feet it's going to get this really relaxed state most people find that feels pretty good just to do anyway and then as you get into this relaxed state and you kind of just regularly scan your body for any signs of tension and relax and melt then you switch to a very simple breathing meditation where you breathe in and out and you pay attention to that breathing you just listen to your own breathing and as is typical with any meditation you will have thoughts and you kind of say oh hi thought i had a thought isn't that interesting and then you just gently return your attention right back to your breathing that's it progressive muscle relaxation and a breath meditation these are these are kind of fundamental concepts in something called biofeedback which is where you become aware of your body's states and and intentionally manipulate them and over time that technique will build a discipline where your brain like any other kind of mutation produces less thoughts and so what you'll find is if you do this consistently you'll kind of internalize these meditative practices so when i lie down in bed i just immediately my whole body melts my all my muscles relax and i listen to my breath and it takes like two three maybe five breaths and i'm gone but that's something that took me literally years of practice to get to so the payoff is amazing it's it's like a parlor trick i can fall asleep anywhere but uh it's not something i just figured out one day it's something i i honestly it probably took me a solid decade of consistent practice to work that out maybe you could beat me maybe you could do it in three or four years but like i say it's not some uh thing that's going to work overnight now what's the science of it it's it's really normal it's the science of sleep cycles and meditation and it has all kind of benefits i sleep deeper i have fewer nightmares i have less stress i usually wake up with a pretty clear mind i don't wake up with all the days anxieties rushing on me with that kind of a focused meditative approach to falling asleep i actually usually wake up with a lot of ideas and feeling very creative so i've got links that kind of talk about some of the stuff on asksciencemike.com this week you can check it out and hopefully maybe in 10 years you'll fall asleep in 20 seconds too [Music] hi mike this is becky from oklahoma city in a previous episode you had mentioned how you had been sick and how the treatment for that sickness had wiped out your microbiome and how that had caused physical and emotional effects i was wondering um what is the science behind our microbiome what does it do for us and um also what did you do to rebuild that after your illness thanks so much okay that's a really great question i think it's going to interest a lot of people unfortunately some of the specific science isn't entirely understood today and we'll unpack that in the answer so here we go your body especially your intestines is a really vital ecosystem if you would imagine for a second a jungle or a savannah where you have herds of of prey animals and herbivores and then you have predators kind of stalking them that's that's what your body is like especially your intestines only you're the savannah or the field not the animals so you have these bacteria the vast bulk of which belong to just a couple of uh of genuses of bacteria or two families of bacteria and then there's bacteria that feed on those bacteria and then there's specialized uh types of viruses that feed on the bacteria some of which only feed on the bacteria that feed on the bacteria and you find that it's this incredibly diverse ecosystem that happens in your body and as part of how you live and here's the interesting thing we've mapped the human genome but we're just starting to kind of scratch the surface and study the human microbiome now here's what we understand today we know that bacteria help us to digest food and we've actually done tests that specifically show that when we wipe out the microbiome of laboratory mice they have to ingest a third more calories just to survive so their efficiency and turning food into usable calories drops without the bacteria that live in their guts and we would surmise that very similar effects are at play in humans we also know that bacteria can help boost immunity and influence for good or bad our immune system although most research i read would say that the mechanisms aren't completely understood today or maybe maybe not completely they're almost mysterious right now we know that bacterial populations in our gut influence the kinds of allergies we have we know that our microbiome can affect our propensity toward obesity now some studies have even found that bacteria can pass chemical messages to our gut neurons and influence our moods if you didn't know that other than your brain the part of your body that has the most neurons is your gi tract some scientists call it the second brain or the gut brain and that brain or that collection of neurons is in much closer communication with the bacteria in your intestine than the brain in your skull and we understand that that second brain has the ability to significantly impact your mood and motivation so it's really fascinating if you consider that you know there's 10 trillion human cells in an average human and there's somewhere between you know eight and 20 trillion bacterial cells in a given person so in most people bacteria actually outnumber human cells although that number is deceiving because all of the bacteria in you would fit like a plastic bag but what's weird is if you consider that incredibly high number of um and i actually think i just missed quotes i think it's 27 trillion human cells ah look at me it's either 10 20 or 27 trillion both are huge numbers i think it's 27 trillion in an average person regardless most of the human cells in your body are blood cells now they're not most of your mass but they're most of your cells your muscle cells are a huge part of your mass but relatively few a number why one muscle cell is much larger than a red blood cell so i'm just trying to map something out sometimes when i say that bacteria outnumber human cells in the human body some people then think that more than half of your weight is bacteria and that's not the case but it's still an interesting image it still shows the way that we are less separate from nature and ecosystems than we sometimes style ourselves to be now when it came to my own situation i had a really bad bacterial infection in the flesh of my scalp and my ear and i had to take some really serious painkillers they actually gave me several iv bags of antibiotics and then put me on a really really powerful antibiotic regimen and it absolutely just wiped out all the the ecosystem in my body and they told me it would and they told me to take certain types of probiotics and eat certain yogurts and i did and just as soon as you know i would take that an hour after i took the pills the next time i took pills i'd wipe it all out again and it left me feeling with a very low energy level a little bit of a mild depression no appetite is really kind of debilitating and over time once i was able to stop taking the antibiotics i continued to take the probiotics i continued to eat the active culture yogurts and i ate high fiber foods to try to stabilize the environment of my gut enough to repopulate it and you know my energy levels back up uh my mood is back up but i will admit i still really don't have a lot of an appetite i eat because the clock says it's probably time to eat the sizes of my meals are a lot less consistent i don't have the food aversion i had i really had for a while food just looked disgusting even my favorite foods i didn't want it the food aversion is gone but i don't really crave food like i did i'm half hoping that's permanent because i've managed to shed some pretty significant weight because uh i haven't been stuffing my face so much but it's really interesting now you know here's the thing about probiotics some of the research on certain types of probiotics are interesting but there's also just a lot of like junk out there just kind of pseudoscience um not based on on research stuff so i would say i would say approach probiotics with caution i think most of them are probably harmless or placebo and some seem to be beneficial just look for studies on the particular formulation you're thinking about before you try it but the the fact of the matter is i've learned firsthand how essential this ecosystem that lives in our bodies is to our own well-being physically and even emotionally [Music] our last question comes in via email and it reads hey science mike first i'd like to say you've helped me so much in the past year and i just wanted to say thanks my question is about spiritual abuse i have an anxiety disorder and throughout my life a lot of spiritual things worship and the bible have all become triggers for anxiety attacks i really want to and feel that i'm ready to try to have a relationship with god again but it seems i can't what should i do thanks well first of all i'm so sorry that you have had such traumatic experiences involving spirituality and christianity and something that was intended to be a path of peace and greater love and something jesus even calls a more abundant life someone or some people have turned into a source of pain for you and i'd first just like to say it's not your fault and there's nothing wrong with you and you're not bad and i don't believe that god judges you because you have anxiety related to spiritual imagery like that so i would start by just saying you know you can have a relationship with god without corporate worship or reading the bible or whatever spiritual things trouble you these triggers are memories and stimulus patterns that have become associated with trauma in your limbic system whatever happened hurt you enough that your brain thinks it's to your survival advantage to avoid anything like it so i would start by thinking are there spiritual things or things you associate with god that don't cause anxiety attacks and could you focus on those first for example if you were to pray on your own or do meditation on your own is that something that triggers you if not i would focus on that especially because science shows that very few things are as good for your brain or make you feel as close to god as a regular prayer practice if you're able to pray on your own and you want to move into more of a corporate worship environment why not have a couple of very close very trusted friends pray with you or meditate with you or even sit in silence and centering prayer and you may find that these are things that bring you more calm and more peace more of a feeling of connection with others and even a feeling of connection with god i think the most important thing is that you don't place any pressure on yourself our spiritual discipline our spiritual walk is not a performance it's not something that we try to succeed at but in my opinion is instead a gift we receive it's a way that helps us feel more alive helps us feel more connected and more in love with other people now in terms of starting to recover from the anxiety disorder that's associated with these triggers i would say it's important to have really safe conversations about the pain you're experiencing and the events that cause that pain to form i would certainly recommend that you consider seeing a therapist or mental health professional in context those feelings but absent that simply safe conversations with friends will help to relieve some of the psychological and neurological pressure behind those triggers and conventional anxiety treatments work for spiritually centered anxiety just as well as they do for more generalized anxiety disorders i've actually recently done an ask science mike episode on that if you check out episode 75 which is titled anxiety demon possession and righteous anger i talk a lot about specific treatment options for anxiety disorders just remember there's no one way a relationship with god looks like something as simple as singing with friends or reading from the bible at home or some other neutral ground can form a foundation for a relationship with god if you physically or psychologically can't tolerate a church environment whatever happens just know that you are loved that you're loved by god and there are christians who would be happy to walk with you through this without pressuring you to act in any specific way in order to feel close to god well there's another episode of ask science mike before we wrap up this show i'd like to revisit a topic we covered on last week's show i don't think this is something i've ever done before but we talked about sunscreen last week and i talked about you know some of the ideas out there and the science of sunscreen sunscreen causing cancer i still feel really good about that answer but i mentioned that i didn't see any valid science that undermined the idea that sun exposure was dangerous and uh one of my readers brian jones came up with a really thorough well-sided response to that idea wherein he says that the situation is more subtle and complex and that some of the positions i attributed exclusively to pseudoscience are held by respected scientists to which he cited seven specific studies and he does in fact paint a more nuanced picture than i did in the original answer i would still stand behind the fact that sunburns are dangerous that sunscreen is not and that sun exposure in general should be approached with caution but he does point to some research that seems to indicate that a lack of sun exposure increases a risk for other types of cancers and that a regular moderate exposure to the sun is the most healthy so i haven't had a chance to review all that research i don't have an opinion on it yet but i thought it may be useful for you to read for yourself so if you go to ask sciencemike.com and click on episode 78 and then scroll down to the comments i've set brian's comment as a featured comment so it will always show up at the top of that comment thread and if you have questions your curiosity about what what amount of sun exposure is the right amount of sun exposure i think that might be an important counterpoint to what i said last week uh and always always i love corrections uh it happens a lot you know the episode on chiropractors i got a lot of pushback from people who practice chiropraction i love it what i really like about this feedback in particular is it cited the specific studies in question because when i had googled those positions what i got were like essential oil sites and like food bloggers and people who typically don't present very credible scientific information and none of them actually cited studies so when i'll always read your feedback and i'll always read pushback on my answers but when you provide specific citations like brian did it's much easier for me to correct my own thinking and and see where your claims are coming from as you know on sciencemic.com i always try to share my notes on where i got the information i use to support my opinion on a given question so brian thanks so much for the really thoughtful pushback and i'd encourage everybody to go check that out as always to make s science mic happen we need more questions we always need more questions and so you can submit questions to the show by going to asksciencemike.com where you can record a voice question or you can type out a email question you can use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter or youtube or soundcloud i'll just go ahead and tell you the easiest way to get a question on the show is a voice question we just get a lot more text questions than email questions believe it or not most of the email questions don't even make it for consideration because there's just so many and a lot most a lot of the questions are duplicates i only let new questions kind of end to the queue so voice questions are are the easiest way although as we do answer two text questions every single week so it's not like you'll never have a chance to get your question answered just statistically speaking voice questions a little better shot of course you can guarantee that you get a question on the show just by becoming a patron on patreon and uh at certain reward levels you get an automatic question on the show so that's kind of a neat thing that not a lot of people have taken advantage of which kind of surprises me our patrons also pick out the show's questions each week so they're the ones who have final say on what comes on the program not me so if you'd like to be a part of the patron team just go to asksciencemike.com find the patreon button and click it and then you can help make at science mike financially possible which i really appreciate now if money's tight i get it you can rate the show on itunes you can share one of your favorite episodes on social media and that helps a whole lot and i appreciate it of course i'd also like to thank andrew gallucki who handles pre-production for ask science mike greg nordin who is our producer and sound designer and jeb bonafer who composed and performed and recorded the ask science my theme song thanks for listening everyone and i can't wait to talk to you next week [Music]