ASM109 Exoplanets, Itches, and Bovine Polarity

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exoplanets itches and bovine polarity all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Applause] [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly once again podcast where i answer questions about science faith in life i apologize for a few weeks of uh dead air and down time had a little bit of a medical incident that i've been recovering from we'll talk about that more after the break but i'm excited to be back hosting the show we've got some great questions this week so uh let's get it started so my email inbox has been mobbed because some of you uh listen to the show but you don't follow me on twitter or on facebook which is fine that's not a social media plug but that means you didn't know why the show has been off the air whereas folks that follow me on social media got the lowdown i have been on tour as you know and as i got towards the end of a small string of dates i had an incident i had some stroke-like symptoms had difficulty seeing difficulty speaking really really intense headache and ended up going to the hospital and uh staying overnight there and they thought i i had a stroke from the early uh testing with the with the cat scan and as they did a lot more uh intense testing including a an mri uh looks like that was not a stroke so yay not a stroke uh but it seems like all the traveling i've been doing with a existing brain injury essentially got me into kind of a chronic migraine situation and basically uh i was in a migraine i never got out of for months and the episodes were daily and getting more severe so they ended up putting me on medical rest so i wasn't allowed to work at all which was difficult for me you know just rest no traveling and i ended up missing the biologos event which was one of the events i was the most excited about doing this year honestly so that was really tough to miss that event now i'm back i'm on some medication that is helping the headaches but what i've been encouraged to do by my neurologist and my doctor is slow down my travel schedule and when i travel not try to turn around and do a show as soon as i get back so what we'll do from now on is sometimes when i have these more regular travel events we'll take those weeks off of the show or maybe we'll do like a highlight reel i'm not sure what that's going to look like yet honestly today is is kind of my first day back doing ask science mike stuff but show's back i'm okay i've just got to take it easier i've i have found in general i just don't have the mental stamina that i did before i fell off of a motorcycle so like in the morning i'm i'm fully alert i'm fully me and as the day goes on i get foggier and fuzzier especially when i work so i've got to i guess take more frequent breaks i don't know it doesn't come naturally to me i'm kind of a intense working kind of person intense studying and frustratingly i haven't found my meditative practice to be particularly restorative it doesn't like refill the you know the hourglass in my skull in terms of having good focus or the ability to work so i'll just be pacing things differently i guess but for now shows back shows weekly i don't have a ton of travel over the summer so that's going to be helpful speaking of travel here's my upcoming dates may 13th i will be at christ church in greenwich connecticut really excited about that one that's going to be a great event and then we have a three gatherings the liturgist gathering coming up uh september 15th and 16th in los angeles uh tickets go on sale april 18th for the public for that they're on sale now for the litter just patrons on patreon uh october 6th and 7th will be boston for the liturgist gathering october 27th and 28th will be the liturgist gathering in seattle okay so if you'd like to come to the liturgist gathering uh those are the dates you can learn more at the liturgistgathering.com october 21st i'll be at the rubicon conference in dublin ireland really really excited about that i've followed what they've been doing for a while so i'm excited to go get to be a part of that this has been long in the works and really excited that it's finally happening while i'm over there i'm going to do a small uk tour of ask science mike to support finding god in the waves in its uk release there is one i don't know if you know that there is a uk release of the book and we're already confirmed in london for an ask science mike so more details coming about that but we'd like to do a couple more stops so if you'd like to get an ass science mic in your city in uh anywhere in the uk uh this is it's never been easier especially if you're in glasgow edinburgh birmingham or manchester it's going to be so easy to get me there uh in that little time frame but you want to go ahead and act now so go to uh ask sciencemike.com and there's a book mic button in the menu bar or in the little menu if you're on mobile and click that and it'll take you to chafee management who handles my speaking just get in touch with them fill out the form and uh and they'll talk to you about hosting an ask science mike event in the uk so we'll be doing the republic of ireland and the uk both in one trip really really exciting uh and so that's all the the events coming up uh that's on the calendar i've got a couple more that aren't publicly advertised uh but those will be the ones that you can come see me at so let's answer some questions about science and faith hi mike this is hannah i have a question about itching why do i get a random itch sometimes and it seems for no reason i'd love to know the science behind that thanks so much hannah as i uh researched an answer to this question itches are far more complex than i was previously aware i thought i had a good handle on the biological components of an itch uh but i i was totally wrong itches are incredibly complex and sophisticated phenomenon uh we typically understand that an itch occurs when you have an irritating but not painful stimulus at the dermis like think about you know a small bug crawling on your skin that's going to be an itch inducing phenomenon it can also be caused by brushing against something it can be caused by certain chemical irritants like some plants have an oil that will irritate your skin and cause it to itch and we've known for a while that both pain and itches are transmitted via a particular type of neuron that are trpv1 expressing so trpv1 expressing neurons let you feel pain and make you itch and we've learned that even though itches and pain travel along the same neuron they're still different they're not just like different intensities of the same signal because itches or most itches come from neuropeptide naturiolic polypeptide b or nppbb which is released in response to an itch stimulus that's why you feel itchy in way you don't feel pain and learning that allowed us to engineer mice who can feel pain but don't ever itch isn't that interesting we don't understand why scratching an itch is so gratifying i haven't seen any literature that explains what chemical action what neurotransmitter what phenomena may be responsible for why it feels good to scratch an itch of course itching makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary sense right bug bites uh often follow a bug crawling on the skin and so this itch says pay attention maybe scratch if you scratch you might push the bug away or crush them and avoid a bite but that doesn't explain kind of random itches or the contagious itches that we would consider more psychosomatic right that that are free of a particular stimulus to the dermis and i again i didn't see any literature that explained those as a distinct phenomenon uh but even as i've i'm answering this question talking about itching i have just started to itch all over my scalp [ \_\_ ] my arms itch right now my ankle itches and so when we think about itching or we see someone else scratching that can often cause us to itch as well now this may be like a two-way phenomenon where we think about itching and then we scan our body more closely and then these neurons uh maybe express in ppb or release in ppb and make us itch i'm not sure but it does make a lot of sense why itching would be contagious or why we would have sort of phantom or random edges there's very little penalty for a false positive on an inch right if i think i might need to scratch and scratch i don't really do any harm to myself i don't spend a lot of energy but if if i ignore a stimulus that should cause an itch that could be harmful right i don't notice bugs on me and it also makes sense that itching is kind of contagious if i see a human scratching nearby there's a decent chance that human may allow me to get a similar itching vector like a bug you know if it's if it's uh mites or lice those those tend to propagate fairly well in human populations so contagious itching makes a lot of sense but the literature i saw said that such itches may not involve the same uh in ppb at all that it may be a completely distinct phenomenon that we don't understand yet so you're pushing the scientific frontier with your question about phantom or random itches maybe there's just a little bit of stimulus but i don't know again i'm just sitting here uh scratching myself like crazy just by answering a question about itches [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hi mike my husband and i were driving past a field of grazing cows and my husband totally flipped out all the cows were facing the same direction truthfully it was creepy after we determined that we were not in a horror movie i looked it up online and found that cows have a sensitivity to the earth's magnetic fields which leads them to align themselves in a north-south direction while grazing and resting seriously is that true and if so what evolutionary benefit does this trait have for cows do other animals do this how have i never noticed this before are they finding god in the magnetic waves my husband added that part thanks so much sarah mack okay full disclosure this question made it through the system on its own i didn't uh i didn't game the system but i was thrilled to see a question from sarah mack she's a good friend of mine and an incredibly talented singer and songwriter and performs with the group called the saramac band so i would encourage you to get on your music platform of choice and check out the sarah mac band uh as soon as humanly possible honestly one of the most powerful beautiful voices i've ever heard and an incredibly talented lyricist to boot anyway so back to the question about magnetic cows there's lots and lots of animals that show sensitivity or awareness of magnetic fields and that can be stuff as small as bacteria but we do see it also in worms that don't necessarily have all that sophisticated a nervous system but then on the larger or more elaborate nervous system level we certainly see it in birds and we see it of course in cow and deer is fascinating why would evolution have favored this adaptation well navigation you can navigate via sunlight the sun rises and sets in a particular pattern but that would require some awareness of what time of day it is in order to navigate that way and at night navigating by starlight means you have to understand a very sophisticated relationship between different stellar bodies it requires a lot of visual acuity it requires the ability to build a map of the stars in your brain somehow so it turns out the magnets are pretty consistent system for navigation so animals that migrate over long distances this is very very useful so evolution would certainly reward it now cows domesticated though they are don't have any particular need to navigate long distances but their ancestors certainly did right uh so that's where that comes from now here's here's what's uh interesting we notice that cows uh have a magnetoreception that's what we call that in a study that was aimed at seeing if humans were magnetoreceptive by examining campgrounds and the alignment of tents and uh turns out to be very frustrating and difficult humans tend to camp in places that are under tree canopy and this study was being done via satellite imagery but when we noticed by we i mean humanity when the the people conducting the study noticed that their pastures nearby they noticed cows were all facing the same direction which then shifted the direction of the study and the research and they found really consistently that cows do in fact align themselves in north south directions so when we determine animals have magnetoreception that's the method we do this sort of direct observation of a behavior related to magnetic north but we don't actually know what sensory organ allows an organism to be magnetoreceptive that's still a mystery this makes a lot of sense it could be a very small organ brains are large and so we haven't yet sort of found what the mechanism of magnetoreceptivity is is it an organ is it a more pervasive thing across uh more cells than systems in a body we don't know but the fact is we do observe the phenomenon and uh a cow is a pretty good compass hey science mike a couple weeks ago nasa released a statement that they had found seven potentially habitable planets or exoplanets surrounding a dwarf star named trappist-1 about 40 million light years away from earth i was wondering if you could uh kind of give your take on what the implications would be of multiple planets near each other potentially having life maybe even intelligent life what would it be like for a planet looking up at another planet as if it were our own moon both both planets hosting life i know that's a little bit too theoretical so let me ask a question that is maybe a little more substantial in addition to that when do you think we'll have the technology available to really dive deeper into whether or not these planets are habitable i've read some things about a telescope uh that will be available to us in about two years that might be able to look into truly how habitable these planets might be i was wondering if you could elaborate on that and other technologies that are coming down the road and maybe uh looking into our neighbors among the stars and and whether or not there might be life thanks mike and this is like the most uh science questions we've had on the show in a long time so so much fun these these are easier questions to answer than some of the really intense life questions that get sent in yeah this is really fascinating finding with uh trappist-1 and these multiple planets orbiting a star now what would that look like if several of these planets had intelligent life on them from a local level well first of all when you look up at a planet in the night sky think less about looking at the moon and more about looking at you know mars or venus those are two planets that are in the habitable zone uh around our star right and they're just little points of light in the sky so at first uh as civilizations emerge it wouldn't be any different than what it's like here but as these civilizations got into an astronomical age it started to examine the sky and realize there were other planets in their system if you had civilizations on two planets at the same time the question are we alone in the universe would be much much much easier to answer we probably could have answered it you know in the days of uh following galileo and certainly in once we got into the radio age uh because it'd be really easy to send signs of life between these planets we would notice uh you know the lights of a city on another world now this assumes both civilizations uh can see visible light which may or may not be true at all depending on how the organisms evolved but basically civilizations as far as we know the one we're away aware of tend to send signals out into space that we exist look at the earth from space at night and if you can resolve the earth with any detail which you certainly could from mars or venus you would see the cities along its surface if you tuned into radio you would get these very obviously non-natural artificial radio signals so you would imagine that if there is life on a couple planets intelligent life with civilization they know they're not alone in the universe they've learned to communicate they've maybe shared notes they've maybe even voyaged to each other's planets and met right if you knew there was a civilization on the other planet that would really prioritize space research as being important in a way that maybe the the looking for microbial life in our solar system doesn't really seem to excite world governments so you know we would imagine that would be a possible outcome or the planets go to war which would be incredibly expensive right because they're just entering the space age and really expensive to throw things to the orbits of other planets in your solar system so i'm not sure how an interplanetary war would look honestly unless they've learned to manipulate um asteroids and they just fling asteroids each each other and then that's totally mutually assertive destruction so kind of the cold war played out on an interplanetary scale which is kind of depressing so let's that's all hugely speculative everything i said is massively speculative we have no idea what non-earth-based life could be like because we have absolutely no data no data zero non-earth life has been discovered by us in the universe so far so let's talk a little bit about how we find exoplanets today and how we learn about them and hopefully that will tell us when we might have a better idea when planets are habitable so uh the og way of looking for planets is the radial velocity method and there we're looking at the doppler shift that's caused by stars wobbling as planets orbit them okay so think about that and we actually cause our sun to wobble a little bit as the earth orbits it right and so when you look at the doppler wobbling effect of a star you can do math you can figure out how many planets there are uh and and what their minimum mass is orbiting a given star and that was the only way we could find planets before the kepler space telescope so we didn't find very many planets before kepler and and that technique again it tells you very little about the planet just establishes a minimum mass that's it and then a more sophisticated technique is transit photometry and here's where we look at a dip in a star's brightness as a planet passes between the distant star and the observing telescope and this actually can tell us about the planet's atmosphere its mass and its distance from the star using a spectronomy where we're looking at the the spectrum of the light and the gaps in the spectrum that comes to us as the planet when i say transit it means the planets passing between us and that distant star which would not be visible with the naked eye whatsoever requires a space-based telescope and this only works when the orbits are edge on meaning at some point this planet passes between the star and earth and depending on the tilt relative to us of the orbital plane that may never happen and this is the technique that allowed the kepler space telescope to find so many exoplanets and how we know more about those planets than older fines using radial velocity now there's some other techniques that are quite sophisticated but aren't useful nearly as often one is called microlensing where you use the gravitational well of an intermediate body to focus light on a more distant system obviously it only works in very specific circumstances and then occasionally we can directly image a planet that happens if you have a very near very dim star with a very large planet um that has happened i i only know of that happening once maybe it's happened more than once but i'm only aware of one instance where we've direct imaged a exoplanet so again an exoplanet is a planet not in our solar system i probably should have explained that for the non-astronomy nerds listening in the audience so radial velocity and transit photometry are primary techniques so what's next the james webb space telescope this is going to be a really massive infrared telescope that will have a hood blocking the sun blocking the light of earth it's going to give it a very clear view of the sky and it's going to be at lagrange point two l2 those are points where gravity and a two body system cancels out basically a million miles from the earth so it's gonna be in deep space it's not gonna be in low earth orbit right it's technically going to be an orbit around the sun and it's going to stay coincident with the earth because it's going to be a lagrange point otherwise uh its orbital period would be different than ours so that scope because it's infrared and its size will have greater sensitivity when we execute transit photometry and we would hope then we could learn more about planets learn about smaller planets it's it's going to be more of the same with kepler just greater sensitivity and that should tell us a bit more about these planets and then we would also look for other cues hopefully if we can start to see how many moons a planet might have we understand in our case our large moon has helped uh life on earth evolve because it stabilized our tidal periods stabilized our climate the moon has been very helpful there but this is this is difficult science and it's extremely expensive to build the kind of hardware and man that hardware with scientists and researchers to do this kind of work and it depends on how devoted our global civilizations are to space exploration to when we'll have the technology to be able to truly verify the habitability of exoplanets both near and distant from our sun [Music] okay our last question came in via email and it reads i am in the middle of a crisis that has lasted approximately 36 of my 44 years of life which doesn't sound like an emergency although it often feels like one i just read your book finding god in the waves and i want to say thank you for including the part about god speaking to you at that conference it resonated with me my story is different than yours and yet at its core it's quite similar we face the same questions we're devastated when we reach the same conclusions and we're able to eventually bypass our logical conclusions because god spoke to us directly however i have never felt comfortable in church i am a scientist not a christian the bible never made sense to me or helped me find god so although i was brought up around christianity my discoveries of the inconsistencies in the bible when i was only in the third grade has meant i have had issues with the bible almost my entire life i struggled and searched for god throughout the years and two years ago he spoke to me much like he did you four words spoken to me when i was alone at long last revealed god's existence to me and changed me at a very deep level here's my question though why did you interpret the voice as jesus not another non-christian god

is it just because that is what your family taught you and your community believes is it because you used to be a christian and your wife jenny still believes in jesus

nothing in my experience has convinced me that jesus is real or that the voice i heard belonged to a god associated with any particular religion

god's existence was made very clear but his identity remains hidden from me

i found god but i'm still lacking religion or the community of a church"

okay fascinating question first of all you describe this as a crisis and the language you're using to describe this will dramatically color your experience right

so let's step away from the crisis depiction of uh your exploration of faith and spirituality and maybe think of it as a journey or an awakening or a discovery and approach it with an inquisitive mind an open heart uh maybe even a thrill

life can be pretty boring and pretty traumatic most of the things we deal with are paying bills and mortgages and a 24-hour news cycle that's increasingly depressing and you have what you've experienced a moment with the divine it sounds like you've had a mystical experience you said that it deeply changed you and that's one of the characteristic descriptions of a mystical experience so just be grateful for that moment uh and leave it at that maybe for a while just think about the beauty of that moment think about how it changed how you see the world now you did say that god's existence was made clear but his identity remains hidden from me by assigning a male gendered pronoun to god you're actually placing god within religious traditions already right i mean that's the assumption that this voice was a male voice that it represented a male god um that that does you're you're not talking about completely divorced from religions symbolism or imagery god there [Music] now in terms of why when i heard a voice why i ascribed it to jesus is because the message from that voice was particular i was there when you were eight and i'm here now okay the god that was there for me when i was 8 was jesus it was jesus i prayed to out in the trees at the edge of the playground hiding from bullies so i ascribe that voice to jesus specifically because of the content of the message and so i'm guessing whatever you heard from god was less distinctly attached to any particular religious imagery here's the deal i'm a terrible person to ask like why should i believe in jesus particular why should i be a christian why should that be my practice of faith i don't know why it should be your practice of faith i only know why it is mine because for me my connection to the divine my awareness of god has always happened through the name of jesus the identity of god to me the reconciliation happens through the christ as incarnate in jesus that's it that's it that's my whole way of believing reason for believing now of course you know don't let the inconsistencies in the bible chase you away from christianity i think a better read of the bible would celebrate its inconsistencies as a library of books written by different authors if you haven't read any of pete n's books on the topic i recommend all of them um i think probably my favorite is the bible tells me so uh you could check out biblical literalism a gentile heresy by john shelby spong coming out soon is a book by rob bell called what is the bible it's fantastic so if if the bible's holding you back those books can help help you read the bible better the bible is a is a fantastic book of ancient wisdom and spiritual guidance a library of books really it is not a memo from god so that's going to cause confusion there but if if you feel connected to god without any particular religion uh or church that's fine if you're longing for a community church makes a good one but they do tend to be very focused on a christ-centered expression of the spirit of the divine now you could check out a unitary universalist church if you'd like something that is less tied to a particular practice the baha'i also have a very inclusive approach to spirituality and religion they view you know all the world's major religions as expressions of the divine as valid revelations so there's a lot of options out there but you've asked a christian i am a christian although i acknowledge the the beauty and truth of all religions and i can only tell you that i only find god through jesus but that's just that's just me that could absolutely be cultural that could absolutely be because of my family but that's part of a part of knowing god we're a social mammal we have a social consciousness so of course social structures are going to play a role in the way that we know and experience the divine the ultimate reality the ground of being the source of all will inevitably be understood not only through how we see the world but how our community sees it because how we see the world is a function of how our community sees the world so here's what i would say just celebrate that moment with the divine and then find a community if you desire where you can explore that experience more deeply and non-dogmatically and non-judgmentally and without a culture war the gift you had of experiencing god i think it's its best if allowed to transform you into a person who helps others but i believe that because i understand god through christ who was broken and poured out for the world wow was it good to be back i have missed all of you uh i'm gonna be getting on facebook and twitter more often although not as often as i used to um i'll be releasing shows regularly again so send in your questions to ask sciencemike.com you can send in a question type it out send in a form or you can record a question and uh and hear your voice on the program i will tell you you have a way better shot of getting on the program if you record a voice question than if you uh type out a question just because we get a lot more uh written questions every week and we have a 50 50 share of questions that go on the show because i like the recorded questions um also thanks to our patrons the people who donate every month to make this show possible they picked out the questions for the show this week and and every week that's not a live show uh so really appreciate them if you'd like to be a part of that crew go to ask sciencebike.com and click the patreon button you can learn more about being involved with the program on that level uh ask science mike is produced by greg nordeen thank you so much for that greg pre-production is handled by andrew golucky and the ask science mike theme song was written by jed botifer thanks for listening everybody [Applause] [Music]