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Contact us at yondercast@gmail.com
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Ep.2 - Yondercast: John Snow & His Game of Fomes
Ian: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to Yondercast, a show where we do our best to answer your questions. My name is Ian Lake, and this week I'm joined by my good friend Patrick Leitch,
Patrick: [00:00:13] Yo!
Ian: [00:00:13] And my somewhat hostile acquaintance, Josh Baltzell.
Josh: [00:00:18] Hostile acquaintance, Hi everybody.
Ian: [00:00:21] So we've received a lot of questions from listeners about what's going on in the world today. Specifically, we've been asked a number of times about quarantine since we are all essentially quarantining ourselves in our homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So this episode is going to be a quarantine themed episode.
And one of the questions we've gotten a lot is what we are doing to stay busy during the quarantine. So what have you guys been up to and keeping yourself occupied with?
Josh: [00:00:51] So many video games. That's all I've done for the past couple of weeks, and it's, it's probably bad.
Patrick: [00:00:59] Yeah, I've, I've been known about the same, a lot of video games. Taking care of a two year old and a one to two month old has been kind of interesting because usually we get to like go outside and go on walks and use that as a distractor and now ya don't. So I've probably colored. More than I would ever care to imagine, but he just keeps asking me to do it, so I do it.
Ian: [00:01:23] I feel like I could kind of summarize this with just two words and those two words would be Animal Crossing. Cause I've been playing a lot of Animal Crossing. It's pretty relaxing.
Patrick: [00:01:33] Have you gotten any famous visitors. Like a Elijah wood or AOC.
Ian: [00:01:38] No, I've been keeping my eyes out for Elijah wood, but I have not been blessed by, his presence on my Island, unfortunately. But I have been selling lots of turnips and making a good profit on that turnip stalk market.
Patrick: [00:01:51] What's that all about? I swear I've heard of that and seen that in a lot of different places. Am I like missing out? Do I need to go buy a switch so I can sell turnips? Like what's going on here?
Josh: [00:02:00] Yes. Buy the switch.
Ian: [00:02:02] Well, you should definitely buy a switch. But I actually made an announcement that I'm out of the turnip game. I've done my time. Cause it's stressful.
Basically on Sunday mornings you have, the morning to buy turnips and they're usually priced around a hundred bells. Cause bells are the currency in animal crossing. And so you buy as many as you can. Usually I've spent as much as like 800,000 bells on turnips at a time, and then you have one week to sell them. Otherwise they spoil and you lose everything.
Patrick: [00:02:36] That's actually pretty high stakes.
Ian: [00:02:39] Yeah. And throughout the week, prices vary wildly. And I've actually had. Perpetually terrible prices on my Island. And so then what you have to do is like, you get to Friday and you're freaking out because you're going to lose all of your wealth if these turnips spoil.
So then you have to like try and find someone else who's Island has better prices and you have to like go and try and visit them and sell your turnips, and then you have to tip them for letting you come to their Island and sell your turnips. And it's this whole stressful thing.
Patrick: [00:03:09] It sounds like real life in a video game, like it sounds like you're literally having like a, a farmer's market in animal crossing when you're quarantined.
Josh: [00:03:19] See that's what ends up stressing me out. I need that instant gratification. The second it becomes real life and I have to keep track of a stock market. I just, I, I get stressed.
Patrick: [00:03:29] Like S T A L K stock market.
Ian: [00:03:33] That's exactly right. It's the stock stalk market.
Josh: [00:03:38] The stalk market.
Ian: [00:03:40] That's why I'm out, man. I can't handle it. I've made enough to pay off my final home loan and you know, have a little bit extra. And from here on out, I'm just going to live the simple life. That's my plan.
Patrick: [00:03:54] Well, it's funny to go back, kind of like to the video game market, like it's incredible that people create currency within game and actually have their own markets. I remember when I was playing Diablo two a ton, stones of Jordan were like the currency and it's like. You could sell one thing for like 40 of them and that was like the maximum amount, and then all of a sudden you have things going for 40 stones of Jordan that you could trade for more things.
And it's just pretty incredible that people over time find importance in a single item. Even though the item itself is sometimes obsolete, It just becomes a unit of currency. And that just is pretty incredible, especially been like world of Warcraft.
Like people just control the auction house and can make real money off it. And I don't know if animal crossing is the same way, but like Eve online, I don't know if you guys have heard of that game at all,
Josh: [00:04:43] I was just going to bring that up.
Patrick: [00:04:45] So much money of like actual real money into that fake currency, and they go and have these galactic wars where people can literally lose like 20 bucks on their ship and not get it back.
And that just kind of, that's insane to me. Kind of crazy, kind of fun, kind of scary
Josh: [00:05:00] Well, I've heard that that game Eve, they have a genuine economy inside of it, so there's like a minute amount of resources and when they're gone, they're gone. So somebody can actually monopolize things.
I tried. It was too daunting for me. I'm not smart enough. I got lost in space.
Ian: [00:05:21] This is why cryptocurrency is the future. Right? It's just a demonstration of how something digital can have real value to people. It's crazy.
Patrick: [00:05:30] I honestly remember a kid from high school, no joke, talking about Bitcoin. We thought he was literally crazy and if he still had that, I mean that was like in the early two thousands . I'm like scared to know how much that's worth. I don't even want to like hypothesize who'd had been buying it for like cents and now it'd be worth like thousands.
Josh: [00:05:53] Yeah.
Ian: [00:05:55] Well, we won't go down that rabbit hole. That's a whole nother thing.
Josh: [00:06:01] I was actually talking with some friends of mine and we were going to set up a Jackbox party via zoom, but I have no idea how to do it, and now that I've offered, I'm like in charge of it.
Ian: [00:06:13] It's super fun. I think it's definitely the best way to play games with people, you know, via zoom or Skype or Google meets or whatever system you're using. Cause trying to like set up a card game or an actual physical game with a camera is just, it's too much.
But, Jackbox games were designed for this kind of thing.
Josh: [00:06:33] I've played them before, just in a group on Xbox. It is so much fun. You get to pull out your phone and draw all the pictures and everything. It's hilarious.
Patrick: [00:06:42] I've never heard of this. I feel like I should have heard of this.
How long ago was this, I guess invented, I don't know if that's the best word, but , how long has this been around?
Josh: [00:06:51] They've made a lot so far. They're so much fun though.
Ian: [00:06:56] There's some good ones. I like Drawful. I like Quiplash. Those are some of the classics. I think my favorite is Tee K.O. though.
Josh: [00:07:04] Which one's that one?
Ian: [00:07:05] It's one that I don't think is quite as popular, but I don't know why. Cause it's my favorite cause it kind of combines drawing and phrase making. It's where you design t-shirts.
Josh: [00:07:15] Oh, fun.
Ian: [00:07:16] It's a tournament style. So basically you start by everyone just drawing a couple of drawings of whatever they want.
And then you have to come up with random slogans, like t-shirt slogans and then you have to take other people's drawings and slogans and combine them together.
Oh No.
To make t-shirt designs, and then there's a tournament where you look at two shirts at one time and you vote which one you like better.
And then whichever one gets eliminated gets replaced by another shirt, and then you vote again.
Patrick: [00:07:43] That does actually sound like a lot of fun.
Ian: [00:07:45] At the end you can go and actually buy any of the shirts that you designed.
Josh: [00:07:51] Okay. That's setting people up to look really weird in public.
Ian: [00:07:54] Yeah.
Patrick: [00:07:56] Tee K.O.? I'll have to look that up. How many people does it take to usually play.
Ian: [00:08:01] Eight. It supports up to eight primary players. but then you can have other audience members that don't actually do the designing or do the writing, but they can vote.
Patrick: [00:08:11] What's the next big game that's gonna come out ? What's the next big one that we're excited for? Well, I know. I was like Cyberpunk 2077 it's going to be big one.
Ian: [00:08:21] Last of Us 2 is the big one I'm excited
Patrick: [00:08:23] about.
Oh, that's right.
Ian: [00:08:24] that's next month, I think June.
Patrick: [00:08:26] Oh, is it really?
Ian: [00:08:28] Yeah.
Patrick: [00:08:29] Oh man.
Josh: [00:08:30] Subnautica below zero is going to do full release here pretty soon. For those of you that follow it,
Ian: [00:08:35] You're a big Subnautica fan josh.
Josh: [00:08:38] Subnautica in my opinion, is the greatest game ever made. I have it on PS4, Xbox and PC.
Ian: [00:08:45] Wow.
Josh: [00:08:46] So that I can play it in any position anywhere in the house.
Patrick: [00:08:52] I do remember you showing us that deep sea monster
Josh: [00:08:54] Oh yeah. The ghost Leviathan.
Ian: [00:08:57] Yeah, that thing was freaky.
Josh: [00:08:59] There's nothing quite as scary as being in the pitch black ocean, and all of a sudden you just hear this like monstrous roar behind you.
Ian: [00:09:07] see the turnip stalk market is stressful enough for me, let alone being stocked by giant underwater fish shark beasts.
Josh: [00:09:18] Fish shark beasts.
Ian: [00:09:20] Well, you guys, I think we thoroughly talked about our video game habits.
Patrick: [00:09:24] I don't know. We could probably go for another like six hours.
Ian: [00:09:29] I don't know if our listeners would appreciate that. Should we get to our, question for the day our academic question.
Josh: [00:09:36] Yeah, let's do it.
Ian: [00:09:37] Awesome. Well, I'm going to hand the reins over to Josh because Josh has taken the lead in researching a little bit about the history of quarantine since that's our theme for this week.
So Josh, take it away, man.
Josh: [00:09:53] Yeah. Actually, I was going to tell you guys a story of my favorite scientist.
Patrick: [00:09:57] Ooh. Let's hear it.
Josh: [00:09:59] Yeah. So, there's this guy named John Snow. not to be confused with the. Yeah, yeah. Everybody always thinks of the game of Thrones, but this was, old school, John Snow, and this guy was the father of modern epidemiology.
For those of you that don't know what that means, epidemiology is just a person that studies how diseases transfer. So today's story is actually brought to you by cholera, at least.
Ian: [00:10:27] Our first sponsor.
Josh: [00:10:29] Yeah. Cholera.
Patrick: [00:10:31] I like backed out of this sponsorship.
Ian: [00:10:33] This was not a group decision.
Josh: [00:10:36] it was a surprise. I thought you guys would enjoy it. so cholera is actually what caused this first quarantine. So this story goes back pretty far to the mid 1800s. Cholera, as we all know, really horrible disease. it actually kills you by draining all of the water from your body. and after that happens, all of your internal organs slowly shut down.
last but not least, your brain stops working. So pretty horrible disease.
Patrick: [00:11:03] I don't know how I feel about that.
Josh: [00:11:05] I know, right? This story is starting out really depressing.
So cholera is caused by a bacteria. symptoms are usually vomiting, diarrhea, leathery skin, all caused by the dehydration. and the really gross part about cholera is that it's spread through fecal matter in the water, but we didn't always know that. I know this is appetizing. Hopefully nobody's listening to this before getting something to eat.
So, cholera is still exists today. people still are affected by it. I had to look this up cause I didn't know this, but the world health organization says that anywhere between 1.4 and 4.3 million people get infected with cholera every year still. I know that's a lot more than I would have thought.
Ian: [00:11:49] Wow. is that pretty evenly distributed over the globe or is that kind of concentrate in one place or a couple places.
Josh: [00:11:57] it's concentrated to areas that don't have access to clean water. Okay. So anywhere where they have to, go out and get their water from sources that aren't easy to obtain, that's usually where Cholera strikes. And the worst part about cholera is if you don't have access to clean water, then you just keep drinking the water that's contaminated and it just makes you more and more sick. So our story actually begins. I feel like this is where we get into the, why aren't you a partner time. So
Patrick: [00:12:27] Let me fluff up my pillow a little
Josh: [00:12:30] there you go. Get comfy.
Patrick: [00:12:31] Yeah.
Ian: [00:12:31] Give me a second. I got to adjust my lighting. Turn it down a little bit. Hold on.
Josh: [00:12:35] There you go. Light some candles. So we're going to talk about London, and this was back in like 1854, I think. Yeah. 1854. London had about two and a half million citizens, which was a pretty big city given the time period. lots of people were crammed close together, and to make matters worse, we didn't really understand modern sanitation.
So we didn't really have indoor plumbing. People got their drinking water from pumps that were located all throughout the city and people had the job of going out, pumping water and then taking it home and using that for the rest of the day. That's something that we take for granted nowadays. We just have sinks and we turned it on.
Patrick: [00:13:17] I have to like lift my hand like four inches to turn on my water.
Josh: [00:13:21] I know, right? It takes too much. So to make matters worse, this was a time period where now think about, this is London. They had farm animals just in people's homes, so they didn't have space for farm animals to just kind of roam in the streets. They would just have them live in their living room.
Patrick: [00:13:43] These weren't like, like pygmy goats and miniature pigs, right? These are like the real deal.
Josh: [00:13:49] They didn't specify in my research, they just said that there were farm animals inside people's homes. I hope it's not like a cow. That just sounds like a nightmare.
Ian: [00:13:59] I'm imagining like an alpaca
Josh: [00:14:03] See that seems fitting to me cause my life's dream is to have a Llama as a pet. Like treat it like a dog.
Ian: [00:14:10] Is it?
Josh: [00:14:11] Yeah. I know. I know. My, my lofty aspirations of having a Llama as a dog.
I would sell my car and just ride it to school every day.
Ian: [00:14:21] Well, Christmas is coming.
Patrick: [00:14:23] true.
I can not wait to see you show up on an Alpaca at our new school. That's going to be the highlight of my day.
Ian: [00:14:32] They didn't install a, camel hitch at the new high school that they're building. And I think that it may not be too late to request that.
Josh: [00:14:39] I'll put it in a word with admin about getting my, my Llama hitch.
So left off animals living inside homes. Not exactly sanitary, pretty gross. and we had to use specialized pumps to pull water out of the ground. So, cholera used to spread like wildfire, and we had outbreaks on a regular basis.
But there were no really good ways of actually tracking it or figuring out what it was. And the science on diseases in this time period wasn't exactly strong. We used to think that all diseases were just floating in the air, and we called it miasma. So people would spread diseases person to person because of some kind of energy that was just in the air and would make you sick.
So it's safe to say that our knowledge wasn't exactly strong, or at least not as strong as it is today.
Ian: [00:15:36] It's like half. Correct. Right. Like disease does spread from person to person often through the air, but they had no idea what that actually meant.
Josh: [00:15:46] Exactly. And sometimes they weren't even really sure that it was person to person. They just kind of assumed that illness would strike you from some kind of contaminated source. They didn't really fully get what a disease was. Cause during this period of time they didn't pay attention to the microscopic world. So cholera, they assumed was airborne and they were basing their knowledge off of flues, colds, things like that. They just knew that if one person got sick, came into contact with someone else, that person would end up getting sick. So enter this guy named John Snow, my favorite scientist right up there with Rosalind Franklin.
I'm forming a little club of scientists. So he had this theory. Remember, this is before germ theory, but he started to think that maybe it wasn't that it was floating in the air, it was something else. So what he did was he actually started investigating dead bodies during an outbreak.
And this was a really big outbreak. 500 people died in just 10 days, which given COVID-19 right now, that seems like nothing, but this was a pretty big outbreak at the time. But what he started doing was performing autopsies on some of the dead bodies. And what he found was that there was no cholera in the body's lungs.
Instead, it was in their digestive track. So fellow science teachers, what does that mean?
Ian: [00:17:10] They ate it or drank it.
Josh: [00:17:13] There you go. Exactly. So that helped narrow it down just a little bit. And so what snow started doing is he started going around to all of the different homes in the area where the outbreak was, and started asking questions like are you sick? Do you know someone else who's sick? What's going on? And what they ended up finding out was that a lot of people that had died drank from one specific well that was next to a pub. And the name of the pub was the Broad Street Brewery, and it's actually still around today and it's world famous because this is where epidemiology first took off and it's a big science landmark.
So what snow actually started to notice was that everybody was getting a disease after coming into contact with an object, not from another person. And so it wasn't this whole miasma idea that they had originally thought, but the sad part was he went to a big group of scientists, the medical Academy that was in London, and told them what he found out and they thought he was an idiot.
Patrick: [00:18:24] Oh boy.
Josh: [00:18:25] I know right, you can see where this is going. So when he spoke with them. They ended up saying, no, we already know what causes the outbreak. We know that it's from person to person. We know that it's miasma. It's something that we're all familiar with.
Ian: [00:18:41] You know, nothing, Jon Snow,
Josh: [00:18:44] Exactly!
Patrick: [00:18:46] And the dead may never die.
Josh: [00:18:48] Yep. I was there. That's exactly what they said.
So John Snow got really ticked off. Said, you guys are idiots. You're not listening to me again. I was there, so I know word for word, but he said, he said, forget it. I'm going home.
Patrick: [00:19:03] Are you right over his shoulder, like having his back the entire time
Josh: [00:19:07] Yeah. I was his hype guy. I was standing behind him going, yeah, what? Okay. I don't know how to be a hype guy.
Patrick: [00:19:14] you were the little John of the 1800s
Josh: [00:19:16] I was the little John of the 1800s
Ian: [00:19:19] Oh little John and John Snow.
Yeah.
Josh: [00:19:27] So to get back at the medical Academy, he actually wrote an entire research paper about cholera and was trying to point out to them like, look at all this research that I've done.
Ian: [00:19:38] That's how you do it.
Josh: [00:19:40] Exactly. You write a paper. So he got out this map. And he started just keeping track of everybody that got sick. No one would listen to him though. So I want to put you guys into his shoes at this point. You've spoken to the medical Academy, you've written a paper, and bear in mind he wrote that paper on the mode of communication of cholera.
Nobody read it because they thought he was insane. What would you guys do?
Ian: [00:20:09] I would start a podcast about cholera.
Patrick: [00:20:16] I would infect myself with cholera in front of them. Sometimes you get more famous after you die, right. For scientists, at least.
Ian: [00:20:26] I think I would have just tried to go straight to the press or something.
Josh: [00:20:31] Oh, so you'd go over their helmet. I like it.
Do you guys want to hear what he did?
Ian: [00:20:36] Yeah. I'm really curious.
Josh: [00:20:38] So John Snow is considered the rebel scientist. Cause what he actually did was in the middle of the night he took a wrench and he disassembled the water pump. He took the handle off so that people could no longer access the water pump.
Oh yeah, no, he got arrested for destruction of public property and he had to spend the night in jail. the sad part though, in this story is that by the time he disassembled the water pump, so many people had already died and the disease was already running its course. But in hindsight, all of the scientists involved actually look back and they reviewed his data and they noticed something really, really weird.
So remember that I mentioned that the water pump was right next door to a pub.
Patrick: [00:21:29] Oh no.
Josh: [00:21:31] Everybody that worked in the pub did not get cholera, and everybody that went to the pub on a regular basis did not get cholera. Any guesses why
Patrick: [00:21:42] They were boiling the water to drink to make the beer.
Ian: [00:21:45] Or they were just only drinking beer.
Josh: [00:21:49] Exactly. So because they were in drinking the water, they actually didn't get sick.
Nice. Yeah. We have discovered a cure.
it's the moral of the story. Don't drink water. It's bad for you.
So what's crazy about this whole story is that John Snow, even though he got arrested and he was charged with destruction of property. He ended up proving that diseases don't just kind of form out of nothingness. And we still use John Snow's method today. epidemiologists will actually lay out a map.
They'll tick off areas where people get sick, and then that helps them to kind of create a ring of infection and they can look at the center and usually figure out what's causing it.
Patrick: [00:22:36] I feel like this is contact tracing. Now with COVID-19 if people go out to restaurants, they're going to keep track of who is there and if someone gets it in the restaurant, that can pinpoint a specific spot. I don't know if that's similar or not, but that's what resonates
Josh: [00:22:49] Oh, it's exactly that. Yeah. That's exactly what they do.
Patrick: [00:22:52] Oh, we got to thank John Snow for that baby.
Ian: [00:22:54] I want to just point out something more for our listeners because some of our listeners might be, you know, young and, we might be an influence on them. So I wanna just point out that the way that you start making scientific discoveries is not by going out and destroying public property.
You have to have the data first. Before you go out and vandalize
Josh: [00:23:18] Yeah. But once you've completed the scientific method, vandalize away.
Ian: [00:23:26] Josh said that
I didn't say that.
Patrick: [00:23:28] Was he the only person doing that at the time then?
Josh: [00:23:32] So he was really the frontline scientist. He, started to notice the trends. He started collecting data. it was really his expedition,
which is exactly why he got so famous over it, is because he was willing to go out there, present his data, and stick to it going so far as to actually break the law and inconvenience a bunch of people that were very upset that they didn't have access to water.
Patrick: [00:23:57] I feel like that always happens in the scientific community. There's always some idea that just seems so outlandish and so out there, and everyone kind of just feels like it's jibberish and it's never gonna make any sense. And then all of a sudden it's like, Oh, go. Okay. Maybe that was actually pretty sound, especially if it's backed up with a bunch of data.
Ian: [00:24:18] that's the story of Avogadro, right? We tell that in our classes.
Josh: [00:24:21] Oh, I don't know that story. What's the story of Avogadro.
Ian: [00:24:25] I think that just Avogadro when he, first proposed his initial ideas in his findings, people were like, you don't know what you're talking about. And it wasn't until after his death that he got credit for way ahead of his time. That's a pretty oversimplification of the story, but that's about as much as I remember off the top of my head.
Patrick: [00:24:46] And I know Mendeleev was the same way with predicting unknown elements on the periodic table. Everyone's like, dude, you're nuts. That's not how it is. And then, oops, it is a little bit.
I think, Moby Dick too the book, the novel, I'm pretty sure, that book was not super popular or well received or anything else. And after the author Herman Melville after he died. I think it then got huge as well. So I know it's not just isolated to the scientific community.
Sometimes in the literature, the arts, maybe van Gogh was another one.
Ian: [00:25:17] I think when Freddie Mercury and Queen came up with the idea for Bohemian Rhapsody and combining elements of opera and rock and roll. critics and producers, and everyone was like, this is a terrible idea. You can't do this. And they, pushed through it and it ended up being one of the, you know, biggest, most famous songs of all time.
Patrick: [00:25:40] Freddy Mercury had such a voice though. Like if you ever get the chance, just do like a Freddie mercury vocal track where it has like none of the music, none of the instruments, and just listening to him seeing is pretty incredible.
Ian: [00:25:51] How was John Snow's singing voice, Josh?
Josh: [00:25:53] if I remember correctly, that was like his second hidden talent. He was like the greatest singer ever, but they didn't have recording studios.
Patrick: [00:26:02] You were there, so you could probably like reproduce it, right?
Josh: [00:26:06] Do what
Patrick: [00:26:07] Like I remember you being his hype man. So I'm sure while you were at his concerts and stuff, you kinda sang it enough
Josh: [00:26:14] I knew the words to his songs, but I just can't match the falsetto.
Ian: [00:26:18] Let's really build this alternate backstory behind John Snow and his record label career.
Josh: [00:26:24] Somewhere there's a science historian listening to this really upset.
Ian: [00:26:30] we should probably like include some sort of like an audio cue in our show when we're joking and when we're not joking.
Patrick: [00:26:36] Probably a good idea
Ian: [00:26:39] Well awesome. That was, really fascinating, Josh. Thanks for putting that together and sharing that with us,
Josh: [00:26:44] Yeah, no worries.
Ian: [00:26:46] Well, do we have one more listener question to think about today?
Josh: [00:26:51] Yes, we do actually. Are you guys ready for it? Okay, so the question is, Do viruses and bacteria get viruses?
Patrick: [00:27:01] I feel like that's a good little tie in from last week. the CRISPR thing, I feel like there was a point where we talked about how sometimes the bacteria can take DNA from the virus and insert it into its own DNA to remember, I don't know if there's like cognitive remembrance.
I would just remember thinking like, man, it's like these bacteria almost creating vaccines themselves? it was just getting my mind kind of racing last time. Just cause it is crazy concept to think about.
Ian: [00:27:30] Or like, you know, a vaccine trains our bodies to fight against something, which is also what the bacteria were doing with these CRISPR segments as they are training themselves to fight back and cut up viral DNA if it ever got into them. But I guess the advantage that they have is that they're, offspring inherit that cause it's in their DNA.
So it's heritable disease, immunity. Whereas, antibody immunity isn't really inherited the same way. So I guess that the answer is definitely bacteria get viruses for sure. I don't think that viruses get viruses. Never heard of that happening. And I don't know how that would even work. Cause viruses don't, there's question as to whether they're even alive cause they don't like replicate DNA or anything. So I don't know how a virus would even
Josh: [00:28:22] Yeah, that's what I was trying to think of. Like, I can't picture there being a mechanism for the virus to latch on to the other virus to even get their genetic code into the other one.
Ian: [00:28:33] I mean, I don't know if like viruses can hijack other viruses or if viruses have ever interacted with one another in any way like that. I mean, I've never heard of anything like that, but that's actually really an interesting concept.
Patrick: [00:28:47] I feel like there has to be something, you know, cause like there's little tiny water bears that are so microscopic. What if there were little viruses for those guys?
Ian: [00:28:57] Are we talking about tardigrades.
Patrick: [00:28:59] Yeah. I don't really know too much about them. I just know that they exist and I saw one literally crawling through microscopic algae and it's probably the cutest thing I've ever seen in my life.
Josh: [00:29:08] They are so cute. If I were to design a tee shirt, it would definitely have a tardigrade on it.
Patrick: [00:29:16] I feel like we should have one as a pet.
Ian: [00:29:19] I actually kind of try to, make my students do the grunt work of finding tardigrades in moss that I found on trees in my backyard. Cause I heard that you can find tardigrades and we actually did find one or two. They're probably in your backyard
Josh: [00:29:37] Well. That's just fun.
Ian: [00:29:39] They live on Moss and stuff. So if you like get a chunk of Moss and you put it in some water and you put it under a dissection microscope and you just search around, you might be able to find some.
Josh: [00:29:50] What?
Okay. Well that's what I'm going to be doing after this,
Patrick: [00:29:55] Problem is I don't have a microscope, but I really feel like I need one.
Josh: [00:30:00] There's no way that this would be strong enough to actually see a tardigrade, but if you have an iPhone, they are surprisingly strong microscopes. You can get like a microscope app. I had a student that she was impatient because she wanted to see everything that was going on. She pulled out her phone and actually set it up to zoom in.
It was impressively well zoomed in.
Ian: [00:30:21] I bet you could see one with one of those hand microscopes. Patrick. if you zoomed all the way into like 120 times zoom. that's actually probably more magnified than most dissection microscopes, so you could probably find em. It's just a lot easier to search larger areas with a dissection microscope. All right, you guys, I think I'm going to say that that is it for this episode of Yondercast. So thank you all so much for listening. And if you have a question that you would like us to answer on the show, please fill out the survey you'll find linked in our show notes. And if that doesn't work or you'd like to contact us directly, shoot us an email at yondercast@gmail.com. Goodbye everybody!
Patrick: [00:31:05] Bye.
Josh: [00:31:06] Bye.