The huge size of the universe is unfathomably amazing, but so is the size of things way too small for us to see. I’ll talk about some of these teensy, tiny things and hopefully inspire your sense of wonder in this nine-minute episode.
Listen on Podbean:
Listen on YouTube:
A few resources:
Diatoms: tiny factories you can see from space (YouTube)
Harnessing the superpowers of the most resilient life form on Earth
Discover more: the good viruses
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Cover image of tardigrade candy from Pixabay (artist: Terranaut, https://pixabay.com/illustrations/tardigrade-creature-cosmos-universe-8911643)
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hello everyone. I am so glad to be back here, and it’s been almost six months since I did one of these recordings. I did not mean to desert you or to stop doing this, but I got sick. I had a virus, a really bad one in January, and I was sick for several months, and I’m just now getting back into things. So here we are.
And you know, of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about viruses.
I promise this is not going to be all about viruses, because nobody wants to hear about that. I get it. But viruses are these very tiny things that enter our cells and turn them into virus-making factories, and it was amazing to me how something so small could be so bad.
I have always been in awe of the size, or the potential size, of the universe. But I also feel like if you really think about it, the universe is composed of many, many, many minute particles that are so small we can’t even conceive of them. So the scale of size is tremendous. And when I put my mind around it…I can’t put my mind around it. And that is awe-inspiring.
So I’m going to talk about that a little bit more right now.
I’ll talk about viruses a little bit, not the whole time again, I promise. I may have had the Epstein-Barr virus, which is mono or glandular fever, or I may have had another virus like a nasty adenovirus. I don’t even know. But if it was either of those, I had somewhere between a billion and a trillion viruses in my body at one time. So that’s a lot! No wonder I didn’t feel well.
But I started thinking about how small are these things anyway? If you write with a pencil and make a period at the end of a sentence (remember using pencils back in the day?), you can place 20 million virus particles of everyone’s favorite virus, the coronavirus, onto that period at the end of your sentence.
By comparison, only 20 human egg cells can fit on that period. Or by another type of comparison, you can fit 20 trillion hydrogen atoms on that period. So even things that are so small we can’t fathom how small they are can be huge compared to other things, viruses versus hydrogen atoms.
Okay, I promised getting away from the topic of viruses. There are so many other things, like hydrogen atoms, that are incredibly small. So you’ve got things that are even smaller than atoms, right? Parts of the atom, the electron, the proton, the neutron. And I used to think those were the smallest things, but there are things that are even smaller quarks, neutrinos…for example, there are trillions of neutrinos passing through each of us every second right now. Did you know that?
There’s the Higgs boson — don’t ask. The Wikipedia article might as well be written in Japanese. I really don’t understand. Chemistry was not my best subject, and quantum physics is also not my best subject. But anyway, these are way smaller than viruses.
Then you’ve got the bacteria, which are larger than viruses. And I’m not going to talk about those right now.
And even larger, but still microscopic, are the amoeba. An amoeba is a cell that can alter its shape by extending and moving its pseudopods, which are temporary arms. And they’re very small. But some types of amoeba are visible with the naked eye.
Just as an aside, amoeba is something dear to my heart, because that was my nickname for a while. My first year of college, I lived with a couple of other women who were very, very tidy. And if you know me at all, you know that’s not my specialty. So my stuff kind of spread around the room, and they call me the amoeba.
Anyway, we tend to think about microscopic things as either these abstract, you know, atoms, quarks, neutrinos, like abstract things you might learn about in a chemistry or physics class, or things that can make you sick. But there are many, many microscopic things that maybe inspire even more wonder in you, because they’re also beautiful if you were to see them under a microscope. I’ll share some links to places where you can see some photos.
For example, the scales of butterfly wings. They’re arranged like roof tiles on the butterfly’s wing. And a single butterfly wing can have over a million of these scales, and of course they’re beautiful colors much of the time. So this is a lovely microscopic thing.
You’ve also got the diatoms, which are one-celled algae. You need a microscope to see those, just one cell. And the diatoms are called “jewels of the sea,” and they look quite beautiful under a microscope. Of all the plants on this planet that are photosynthesizing, diatoms make up one-fifth of all of them. Diatoms can create algae blooms in the ocean that are so large they can be seen from outer space, even though we can’t see a diatom without a microscope.
Another microscopic organism that you may or may not have ever heard of is the tardigrade. The tardigrades are little tiny creatures the size of a pinhead, so they’re one millimeter or smaller, so you may be able to see one without a microscope. Their nickname is water bear or moss piglet. And the feature photo that I will use if you’re looking at this on YouTube or if you see my website is one of these tardigrades. I think they look a little bit like manatees with no eyes, but they also could look like scary monsters, depends on your perspective.
Tiny but mighty. They live in Antarctica. They live at the bottom of the ocean. They live in the high mountains. No problem, no problem at all for them.
They can tolerate 1,000 times the dose of radiation that would be lethal to us. And they can be heated to 150 degrees Celsius, which is 302 degrees Fahrenheit, and frozen to almost absolute zero, almost the coldest you can get.
So they are very hardy little creatures for sure. Oh yeah, they can also survive being blasted out of guns. They’re placed inside of bullets and then shot out of guns and they’re still alive. They’re fine. And some tardigrades were sent on a mission to the moon that unfortunately crash landed on the moon a few years ago. And although the spaceship was destroyed, scientists believe that the tardigrades probably survived in dehydrated form, so that if somebody went back to the moon and, I don’t know, poured some water around the crash site, maybe these little tardigrades would come to life. Some scientists who study them say that there may be tardigrades around until the sun explodes and consumes the whole earth, which is a long time from now. So they will outlive us for sure.
Now to close here, I am going to return to your favorite subject, viruses. I looked up some good things. I actually looked up, are there any good things about viruses or do they just make us feel horrible or kill us? And you might be surprised to learn that there are way more good viruses in the world than bad viruses. Overwhelmingly, viruses are good, believe it or not.
So for example, some viruses can kill cancer cells and spare healthy cells, and so they may eventually be widely used to treat cancer.
Viruses are also being studied in gene therapy. So they take a virus and they take out its harmful genes and they put beneficial genes in its place, and then these harmless viruses will deliver these genes wherever they need to go in the body. I think that’s really cool. This is all kind of, you know, cutting edge medical research.
Viruses are also vital for ecosystems. In fact, I read that none of us could survive without viruses, and our ecosystems could not survive without viruses either.
And scientists are now learning that there may be 10 times more viruses in our own bodies, normally, not making us sick, but 10 times more viruses in our own bodies than bacteria. And you’ve probably been hearing — even if you think it’s gross, it’s true — bacteria make up more of our body mass than our own cells, and viruses maybe even more.
I will close there, but yeah, as usual, I’ve given you a lot of facts. I hope that you found them interesting, but I really encourage you, and the whole point of this and the whole point of this podcast, is to step back and look at the big picture of this. Like, wow, look at your hand. Your hand is composed of so many microscopic parts. It’s just almost inconceivable.
And isn’t that impressive? Isn’t that cool? That’s all for now, and I promise it won’t be another six months before I talk to you again. Take care.