Polymetalic Nodules Are Weird

Welcome to the rest of science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. And we're doing field notes today, which is where one of us brings a little object. My object starts with a story. Have you heard about that? That Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire. I've heard of him, yeah. You've heard of him? He comes up. You know, in the middle of the Cold War, he built this massive ship. Do you know this story? Like a ship that floated. The ship that floated. No, I knew more about his airplanes. Okay, it's called the Glomar Explorer. Oh. And he did this big announcement to the whole world. And he said that he was going to go out on the ocean and he was going to mine these worthless looking black rocks at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. For what? For iron? I mean, for whatever. For whatever. For whatever. Okay. Just about plausible enough to seem true. Yeah. It was actually this massive stunt that the CIA were doing. What he was actually doing. Do you know about this? Wait, I remember this story vaguely. Let me guess. what he was actually doing was no i don't tell me he had nothing to do with it at all really he was just a cover it wasn't his ship the cia was doing something yes the cia wanted to steal a sunken soviet submarine for its technology yeah what they were doing on there so they needed to send over this massive ship that was going to go down to the bottom of the ocean but they needed this cover story and they were like how are he used and you know this whole like oh yeah rocks at the bottom of the ocean lol yeah um and it worked it was this really great piece of theater this episode is brought to you by cancer research uk here's something strange your dna contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave. It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Describe bottom of the ocean. Like how deep? Oh, I'm talking bottom. Bottom. Bottom of the ocean. That's cool. Okay. Now I have to tell you first, before I hand this to you, this is now I think one of my prized possessions, but I feel very guilty because somebody, I don't know who, sent this to me as a gift to my Cambridge office. Okay. And they had a really lovely letter in there And there was a map from exactly where it was recovered from what part of the ocean. And I can't find the letter anywhere. I can only find this. Do you remember if it was the Atlantic or the Pacific? It was the Atlantic. It was the Atlantic. Okay. So anyway, whoever it was that sent me this, I'm really, really, really grateful. But this is what is known as a polymetallic nodule. It's in a little necklace thing, but you can pull it out if you want to. Okay. Oh, cool. Right. I promise these are exciting. I promise. Okay. So it's inside a pendant on a string necklace and the rock is black. It's about the size of a die and it is black. I can pull it out. So the pendant that it's inside is a wire that's coiled up into a big helix egg shape. Yeah. And it's like a copperish brass wire. So I'm going to. How do I get it? I don't want to stretch this. You can stretch it. Okay. I'm going to stretch it like I'm breaking an egg open and I'm going to get the rock out. This is a great way to hold the rock because it won't fall out in normal use, but it does come out poly metallic nodule yes so it has many different metals in it yes and it feels really metallic i gotta smell it i don't know i've it's it's got it's got almost a chalky texture does it does it does can i lick it yeah go on what's gonna happen oh no wait no wait no it's really dry is it it's like drier than i would expect most rocks to be i think it's it's a little porous is it volcanic uh no it is not volcanic okay it's leaving dust on my fingers yeah and now i know i got i'm gonna clean my tongue i'm sorry because of what if there's probably lead in it oh god hold on anyway i did it for for you all i hope there's not letting it it's not very dense no it i'm making it sound like it's made out of polystyrene but no it's definitely a rock i'm just going to do a quick little mouthwash i probably should have risk assessed the idea of you licking a polymetallic nodule before i suggested you do it better me than like my child i agree okay i'm sure you'll be fine okay i mean surely the ocean washed it surely the ocean washed it okay so right the thing about these rocks okay they have the most unreal history present and future right as three separate entities so the way that they're created these rocks i mean why are you getting rocks at the bottom of the ocean surely it's all sand right it doesn't make any sense that you would have these rocks but what happens is that a tiny bit of debris right and and it's things like a shark tooth or even longer ago maybe a megalodon tooth or a little bit of a meteorite something like that floats down in the ocean and then settles in the mud right at the bottom and then they begin their life like this but over millions and millions of years i think you've got all of these underwater volcanoes. So they're spewing out this very sort of metallic, rich debris all across the place. And over millions of years, manganese, nickel, cobalt, they slowly come out of the seawater and end up bonding to this original seed, this original piece of debris. And this is, by the way, one of the slowest geological processes on the entire planet they accumulate at about one millimeter every million years wow right it's unbelievably slow when you find them they're they're roughly the size of a of a potato or a grapefruit maybe really they're like these unbelievable pearls you know with this like incredibly interesting center and then extremely rich surrounding so the fact that they're so old you know you have to And that was probably, the original seed for that was probably around the time of the dinosaurs. Okay, that's what we're talking about. These grapefrues that are sitting at the bottom of the ocean that have been there since the time of the dinosaurs. But because they have so much metal in them, no lead, thankfully, we hope. Is that confirmed? Let's check. Just pretend to check and then tell me that it's fine. What is this process of rock formation called? Okay, it's called hydrogenous precipitation. So the idea is that the top half of the nodule is kind of exposed to the seawater. And then it just absorbs all of these dissolved metals as they flow past. And what, do they attract more? Yes. So it really is like a pearl forming in an oyster. Yes, it really is. Except the oyster is the entire ocean. Uh-huh, exactly. Wow. So the other thing about these is that they essentially act as natural batteries because they've got these really tightly layered metallic isotopes. Yeah. They have this naturally occurring electrical charge in them When you get loads of them together and you do you get sort of because over the course of millions of years you get them when you have thousands of them that are clustered together the combined voltage can actually be like a volt two volts or so which means that you can split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen yeah and it oxygenates the bottom of the ocean yeah i mean that's cool oh my gosh that's fun isn't it you're welcome fish you're welcome fish enjoy um but the thing about them that in terms of their future is that all of the metals that are in here, which are extremely rare once you come up to the surface of the Earth, but you find them in this incredible concentration within these nodules, are exactly the same metals that you need to make, for example, electric cars, batteries in electric cars. So there is this kind of paradox that's going on at the moment, which is that to make cars greener, maybe we should do this really quite environmentally damaging thing, which is going back. Sorry, I thought you were going to say we should do this as an episode. No. Say that again. No, maybe we should. They're really damaging. I'm like, yeah, we should. Well, I don't know. It goes back to Howard Hughes' idea. Maybe we should really do the Howard Hughes thing. Well, yeah, especially if metals and especially rare metals are congregating together because it's easier for them to move through water. We're never going to find nodules that form in that way in dirt. No. So mining, especially rare earth minerals, is a very intensive process. but the oceans already allowed time to collect them together. Yeah, although I think it probably would be quite disruptive to marine life if we went down there and got them. But there's like a lot of them. I mean, the ocean can spare some. The ocean, we can just borrow some. Yeah, exactly. We'll leave some trash down there in its place. I'm pulling Indiana Jones like, and here's a bunch of straws. Yeah, you know, I sort of feel like I should lick it as well so that at least if you die, I die as well. I think it's one of those things that'll just slowly kill me or it'll lead to faster cognitive decline in decades to come. Look, you mess around with yellow cake. All right. This is licking a bit of rockers. I didn't lick the yellow cake. OK. Should we do some questions? Let's do some questions. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of LungVax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. LungVax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash the rest is science. So this question comes from Mike. Mike asks, can we train ourselves to be ambidextrous? I learned to shoot a basketball with both hands, but I feel like my non-dominant hand left will never be as good as my dominant right one. Well, you can. You can definitely train yourself to be ambidextrous. In fact, many left-handed people were forced to do this and to this day still train themselves away from it. It takes time. But handedness is a pretty big mystery still. We have some evidence of handedness in non-human animals, but it's not nearly as strong as it is in humans. And so the origins of handedness are kind of unknown. About 10% of people are left-handed. Only about 1% of people are ambidextrous, like truly they can do fine and gross motor skills equally well with both hands. I think the less dominant hand gets a bad rap, though, because maybe it's not good at certain fine motor skills, but it is a fantastic helper and follower. Like if you try to write on a sheet of paper with your non-dominant hand, which in my case is the left, not only does it have trouble forming the little letters, but my right hand has no idea what to do. I'm like, where do I put it? it's supposed to be holding the paper or moving it and I can't do it. But my left hand instinctively just is like, yep, here's where I'm going to be. I'm the dominant guy. And when it comes to throwing a ball, the left hand, in my case, again, the non-dominant hand does a lot of work in terms of balance. And I find that when I throw with my dominant hand, my left hand knows exactly where to be to balance everything out and give me really great leverage. when I throw with my left, my right arm is like, hey, I'm in the way. I don't know how to how to work them together. So really, they're like this great team. It's like a little Abbott and Costello, a little Hall and Oates, a little Simon and Garfunkel, a little peanut butter and jelly, a little. OK, I ran out of famous pairs off the top of my head. But yeah, you can train yourself and it's it's worth doing as a party trick. But otherwise, I don't know. It's fine to just have a dominant and a non-dominant. I do wonder whether it is better for your brain, because of course your brain is sort of cross-wired, right? Like the right-hand side of your brain controls the left-hand side of your body and vice versa. So I wonder about, I'm thinking about dementia here. I wonder whether if you train yourself to become ambidextrous, whether you're, I mean, in general, the more that you do to support your brain, to push it in directions that it doesn't feel comfortable in, the better that you can stave off dementia. I wonder, it could be good for your brain health, because it's certainly a cognitive exercise of a unique kind. Could you train yourself to be the opposite of ambidextrous? Could you train yourself to be ambasinister? That's what it's called when you're not good with either of your hands. It's not a real thing. But yes, sinister means left and dextrous meant right. Is that a Google whack? Ambasinister? I don't think so, but look it up. but yeah sinister meaning left shows you historically how we have treated left-handed people it is it's a real word it's a real would i lie i thought you on this podcast sorry i thought um yes i thought you did well i mean did you think that i made it up though it was would technically be like a word for it yeah but it is a real thing i did a program once on on left-handedness and I spoke to this neuroscientist called Sophie Scott who's absolutely amazing like really brilliant science communicator as well as a scientist anyway she told me this incredible story about something called left neglect have you come across this no so it's this really strange phenomenon where somebody gets a brain injury to the right hand side of their head okay to the right hemisphere. And then they, as a result, just don't pay attention to essentially anything on the left hand side. In the visual field even. Yeah. And it's not that they can't see it, because if they are told to look at it then they see it but they just don pay attention to it So for example you get people who have left neglect shaving half of their face eating half a plate of food not noticing it I have a feeling that Dickens had this actually Or there was some famous writer who had it and then talks about just not noticing that lampposts are sort of appearing on the left-hand side. Anyway, Sophie was telling me about this study they were doing in hospitals in Manchester, where they were following doctors who had been on extremely long shifts. Okay, so I'm talking about serious sleep deprivation. Under these conditions, you also see signs of left neglect in these doctors, but only if they are right-handed. Oh, what if they're left-handed? So you don't see it. You don't see it. You see sometimes flickers of right neglect, but it's way more transient. Oh, strange. And I think there's some idea that you have this sort of resistance to these severe spatial biases because your attention network is better distributed across the whole of your brain rather than just on one side. But it's like, yeah, I mean, active areas of research. Well, you got to give those researchers a hand. Which one? But which one? we should also look more into the origin of handedness because until that question from mike i thought we knew what caused it and what the advantages were and i thought that it was widespread in the animal kingdom but one thing is it's hard to find the origin because although we have pretty good evidence that neanderthals exhibited handedness that'll come from things like how did they sharpen tools and how did they hold something down while they worked on it there's a way to figure it out i know that With early humans, we find a lot of handprints, right, where someone put their hand on a rock and then they sprayed the pigment on it to leave a negative impression of the hand. That almost all of those are left hands, which implies perhaps that more of them were right handed because they were using the right hand to apply the pigment. But when you want to look at really ancient prehistoric people, the evidence is very conflicting. So we don't know when distinct human handedness emerged as we have it today or why. We can promise you an episode on that's coming up at some point in the future. Here's a question from Asha. Do taller animals get struck by lightning more often? If so, I guess it's dangerous to be a giraffe. Do you know? I do know. What's the answer? Yes. Oh no. Yes, but it's not the worst thing that can happen. So it is true. It is true that giraffes do get hit more often because they are sort of poking out of the savannah um quite a lot more which is a little bit tragic there are also actual documented cases of giraffes getting hit by direct strikes during heavy thunderstorms actually i think there was in 2020 there was there was an observational study people out in south africa you know watching watching what was going on and two giraffes were killed by a single bolt i think they were standing quite close to each other oh no so yes it is more dangerous to be a giraffe essentially makes sense It is, but it's not the most dangerous thing when it comes to lightning, because actually a direct hit from lightning from the sky is the least common way that electricity can kill large animals. What is way more dangerous is because it's much more likely to hit the ground. And then you have this millions of volts of electricity that are rippling outwards through the soil. and here's the thing if you're an animal who is on four legs yeah two of your legs are going to be further away from the site than the other two which means that there is going to be a differential right between those two points this is called a step voltage it's totally deadly for four-legged animals um and you know you could maybe get really lucky where you were you know standing in a way that was perfectly parallel with the rings as they emerged. But at any other angle, there's going to be this difference between your front and back legs. So a current will pass through its body. Yeah. Giraffes are more prone to this as well, because obviously they're very big animals. Their front and back legs are really far apart. But this ground current effect, it was this incredible morbid mystery that sometimes you would see news reports of, you know, in history more generally, you would see i don't know like an entire herd of reindeer or like dozens of cows that are just instantly killed in a single storm and it could just take out an entire herd at the same time and it was probably because lightning hit the ground and then a difference in charge between their feet across space yeah got them all this little electrical bridge basically that their bodies their body their bodies were the shortest path between the two so if i'm stuck in a field during a lightning storm should i keep my feet together yes and tuck down on one leg or get in a car well yeah okay if i had a car then i consider myself not stuck in a field or a giraffe yeah i wouldn't get in a giraffe giraffe we've got we've got a lot of books from this country for my daughter where the rhymes don't work in my accent oh really yeah there's one about like put a scarf on a giraffe and i'm like uh marnie that's my wife you have to read this one and she's like oh put the scarf on the giraffe and i'm like okay that sounds ridiculous but it rhymes now excuse me it sounds sophisticated it sounds sophisticated and sexy actually she keeps saying that the new zealand accent was voted the sexiest accent i'm like that must be a comedian's joke because just kidding i think it's obviously true money he listens to this podcast yeah um i heard it was the irish accent are you serious wouldn't it should be drinking they have a new vote every year italian french not british come on yeah well come on like uh like uh uh what what was her name um glamour spice glamour Victoria Beckham. Posh Spice. Posh. Posh Spice. Do you, are you joking? She's got like an Essex accent. I guess I haven't listened to her speak. Oh, maybe that's why you think she sounds great. But I would imagine Elizabeth Hurley. Yeah. That, her accent is, it's sophisticated, right? Like. That is very RP, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think when people say English accent, I just imagine people from my hometown who are like, Oh yeah, shut up, yeah. Oh my God. I don't think that's sexy at all. But I imagine Italian people are the same. This question is from Paolo. I study statistics in Padua, Italy, which is in the middle of Pianura Padana, a region characterized by coldish, foggy winter days. I come from a city in the Alps that gets way colder than Padua. And whenever I tell my mum it was cold in Padua, she blames it on the dampness in the air, swearing that to her, A humid cold feels colder than dry cold, even when fully clothed. So is a 10 degrees Celsius, 80 percent humidity day colder than a zero degrees, 50 percent day? Well, I mean, yeah, it's colder because the temperature is lower, but it will feel different. The humidity does make a difference. Humidity makes a hot day feel hotter and a cold day feel colder because water is a much better conductor of heat. So if it's cold outside and the air is cold but really dry, you might not feel as bad because you're not losing heat as efficiently into the air. But if that air is the same temperature but much more humid, then you can have that heat taken away from you much more quickly. I remember experiencing, I think in North Dakota, a night where it wasn't even that cold. It was like 20 Fahrenheit. It was below freezing but it felt painfully cold And I like it been this cold in Kansas before And someone was like the humidity is so high um but do you do you have anything else to say about this is that true yeah yeah no i agree with you i think i think one of the one of the additional weird things here i think this strange biological quote i can never get my head over is that humans actually can't sense wetness right we don't have like a wetness center the only way that we can tell that something feels cold is if is is by the temperature differential to what we were expecting i mean you get this if you put uh veritasium did something on this recently you put your hand in a in a glove and into a glass of water and it feels like it feels wet yeah i saw that too and i've noticed that too like i will often wear gloves when i'm uh in the kitchen and then i'll wash the gloves and i'm like hey my hands got all wet and i'm like oh no they didn't but yeah it's just that temperature difference so you can tell the humidity of the air because of i mean how it's interacting with your skin and temperature change but and also how it interacts inside your body with temperature change in your lungs so but you're not actually physically feeling the wetness funny enough too humid air do you think that it's more or less dense than dry air i would guess more it's less no yeah because water molecules uh water vapor which is what is in air that makes it humid is just H2O. So it's two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. That's it. And what is it replacing? It's replacing oxygen, which is two oxygen atoms, or carbon dioxide, which is carbon and two oxygen, or it's replacing nitrogen, which exists as N2. So the water vapor is replacing molecules that are much heavier. So humid air is a lot less dense, even though it feels like oppressively dense, it's not. And so there actually was a case where a baseball team got in trouble because they had an indoor baseball stadium. And whenever their opponents came up to bat, they would turn on the air conditioning to make the air thicker so that balls wouldn't go as far. Wow. Yeah. And when they were up to bat, they would let the natural humidity come back in so that the air became thinner and balls were slowed down less. That's incredible. And they were told to stop. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely. But that's really counterintuitive because humid air, you go down to like the Gulf Coast and you're just like, oh, this is so thick. The air is thick and it feels heavy, but it's actually much less dense. Well, actually, I mean, if I'd pause to think about it for longer, of course, humid air has to be lighter because otherwise clouds, you know, clouds wouldn't work. Clouds wouldn't be up there. They'd be down there. I guess so. Well, if they come down, also the pressure increases and the temperature goes up. mm-hmm so the water well yeah no i'm sure you're right yeah i don't know enough clouds were really heavy and dense then they'd be let be below but clouds aren't water vapor clouds are drops of liquid water that are visible oh yeah okay i take it water vapor is completely invisible but once it condenses into droplets of water that that float because they're so small then you've got a cloud okay all right i take it back it's kind of like a pedantic thing i get into as Class can stay where they are. Like when you've got your kettle on and you see the steam coming out. No, you don't. Because steam is water vapor, which is invisible. What you're seeing is water vapor, water in a gas form that has condensed into liquid droplets. And those are what you see as the white smoky steam. But that's not steam. That's just hot drops of liquid water. This is why we love you, Michael, because there are very few other people on Earth who would be like, no, you're not seeing steam. You can't see steam. You can't see steam. Okay, just to round off this episode, I've actually, I've looked up the, what has been voted the sexiest accent. Okay, tell me. Okay, the... Wait, let me guess. Go on. Tell me, tell me two and three. Okay. Tell me third place, second place, I'll tell you first. They kind of, they change around a little bit depending on who's asking, who's asking. I'm sure. But the top four, we got all of the top four. Okay, so the top four are French, Italian. Not French, actually, sorry. Oh, what are the top four? Italian, British, Irish, Kiwi. Number one? Yeah. So my wife is right. Yeah. In a heavily debated 2019 poll by Big 7 Travel, it took first place out of 50 accents. They described the New Ziled accent as outrageously charming, allowing it to beat out South African accent and the Irish accent. Yeah. I stand corrected. My wife is right. There you go. Yeah. There you go. Your marriage can go on happily. I'm trying to do an impression of a New Zealand accent, but it's going to be so offensive and wrong. Go on, do it anyway. I just think it's like, this is my New Zealand accent. Oh, do you like a beer? Oh. Is that good? I'm not sure what you were saying. Go on the dick. Like that. Go on the dick? Yeah. Oh, that sounds better. I don't know why I make it so high pitched. I enjoyed it so much more that you're the side of it. I'm going to try, like, lower. I'll come out on the dick, go be a sweet ass. That was good. That was straight out of New Zealand. I think that was undeniably sexy. How do they say hello? Hello, I'm from the South Island, eh? That was good. I felt like I was there. That was... And the North Island is more like, hey sweet ass oh give me some uh milo yeah it is a wonder that you didn't choose acting as your career isn't it yeah absolutely is i think i think that if you've been offended today let us know you can email us at the rest is science at gold hanger.com send us in your questions your your ideas things you want us to answer and any medical advice for somebody who's consumed a small amount on fellow polymetallic nodules. Deep sea lead. Or yeah, nodules. Goodness me. See you next time. Why did we really go to war with Iraq? And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction? I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of The Rest is Classified, and in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures, Iraq WMD. In 2003, the US and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but they were wrong. This wasn't a simple lie. it was something far more complicated, far more interesting, and far more dangerous. Spies who believed their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat, and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons. In this series, we go deep inside the CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made, and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war. The Iraq war reshaped the Middle East and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies, and its consequences are still playing out today. Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who were at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Deerlove. Tony Blair's former communications director, Alistair Campbell. And former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell. So get the full story by listening to The Rest is Classified and subscribing to The Declassified Club wherever you get your podcasts.