Curiosity Daily

How Life Expectancy Doubled in Just 150 Years (w/ Author Steven Johnson)

Episode Summary

Learn how we doubled life expectancy in the last 150 years. Plus: “impossible” quasicrystals formed from nuclear bombs. Additional resources from Steven Johnson: Pick up "Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/594501/extra-life-by-steven-johnson/  Website: https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson  The first nuclear detonation created "impossible" quasicrystals shaped like 20-sided dice by Briana Brownell Castelvecchi, D. (2021). First nuclear detonation created “impossible” quasicrystals. Nature, 593(7860), 487–487. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01332-0  ‌Bindi, L., Kolb, W., Eby, G. N., Asimow, P. D., Wallace, T. C., & Steinhardt, P. J. (2021). Accidental synthesis of a previously unknown quasicrystal in the first atomic bomb test. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(22), e2101350118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101350118 ‌ Università degli Studi di Firenze. (2021). Quasicrystals in the first nuclear explosion [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkuLjTlUO7A  Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! 

Episode Notes

Learn how we doubled life expectancy in the last 150 years. Plus: “impossible” quasicrystals formed from nuclear bombs.

Additional resources from Steven Johnson:

The first nuclear detonation created "impossible" quasicrystals shaped like 20-sided dice by Briana Brownell

Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!

 

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-life-expectancy-doubled-in-just-150-years-w-author-steven-johnson

Episode Transcription

CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.

ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how we doubled human life expectancy in the last hundred and fifty years, with bestselling author Steven Johnson. Then, you’ll learn about “impossible” quasicrystals that were formed from the first nuclear detonation.

CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.

Steven Johnson - How we doubled life expectancy in 150 years (Cody)

It's no secret that human life expectancy has made big increases in the last few centuries. And they didn't happen by accident. Today's guest is going to tell us how our longer lives are a result of incredible accomplishments in science and public health —accomplishments we hardly ever notice. Stephen Johnson is the bestselling author of thirteen books, along with this latest entitled "Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer." We started our conversation by asking him why he wrote this book.

[CLIP 5:34]

Science isn't worth much if there's no one around to fight for it, right? Again, that was Steven Johnson, the author of "Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer." Steven will be back tomorrow to argue why we need memorials for the world's medical breakthroughs.

The first nuclear detonation created "impossible" quasicrystals shaped like 20-sided dice (Ashley)

How might you figure out whether a secret nuclear test has happened? It has nothing to do with radioactivity. Instead it’s all about a very peculiar kind of material: trinitite. And recently scientists have made a big breakthrough in their analysis of a 76-year-old sample of this strange material.

It came from the first nuclear bomb test site in New Mexico. In 1945, scientists detonated the first plutonium bomb, which was first placed on top of a 30-meter tower. That tower was full of sensors and equipment designed to take measurements as the bomb exploded. 

After the blast, the scientists found loads of a strange green glassy material that was the result of the sand being liquified. They called it trinitite, after the Trinity nuclear test.

But some of the trinitite in a particular place was red, not green. It had a different chemical composition too. The green trinitite is mostly silicon dioxide — quartz, essentially — but red trinitite has copper and iron in the mix. It was a pretty weird set of elements to find in the desert sand.

Turns out, there was an unexpected culprit: the sensors and cables from the wiring setup, as well as the test tower itself. Those materials were mostly copper and iron. And as a result of the high-energy blast, they were fused into the red trinitite. 

And recently, scientists discovered that these particles also have a peculiar shape. They’re icosahedrons: a 20-sided shape where each face is a triangle. Dungeons & Dragons fans will know that shape as a D20, or a 20-sided die. In science, these shapes are called quasicrystals.

Regular crystals are stacked in a lattice of regular rows and columns that follow certain rules of symmetry. Like, think of a cube. You can rotate a cube one quarter of a turn, and it looks the same. But quasicrystals have a different sort of symmetry. In these quasicrystals, rotating them one-fifth of a turn will make them look the same. That breaks the normal rules of crystal symmetry.

Crystals can also completely fill three-dimensional space with their repeating lattice of atoms. But quasicrystals leave spaces between them. Luckily, quasicrystals have a cool quirk: they come with atomic sidekicks that fill the space between the quasicrystal units. All together, they can fully fill a three-dimensional space.

So far, scientists are just beginning to understand the extreme conditions that form quasicrystals. This red trinitite is the oldest human-made quasicrystal we know of, but natural quasicrystals have been found in meteorites. By studying their unique properties, scientists can understand how extreme temperatures and pressures work to form exotic materials like quasicrystals in the solar system and beyond.

RECAP

Let’s recap the main things we learned today

  1. CODY: According to Steven Johnson, it’s harder to see progress in public health than it is to see progress in technology. That’s because when medicine gets better, you see LESS of bad things happening, like people dying of deadly diseases. Even just a hundred years ago, it was a lot more dangerous just to be alive.
  2. ASHLEY: As a species, our average life expectancy was around 35 years for pretty much all of human history — although that average was mostly kept down by childhood mortality. But today, global life expectancy is over 70. We’ve doubled the human lifespan in the span of about a century, thanks in large part to safe milk and clean drinking water.
  3. CODY: The first nuclear detonation created "impossible" quasicrystals shaped like 20-sided dice. Regular crystals are symmetrical when you turn them a certain way, but these crystals don’t follow those rules. Scientists are studying their unique properties to better understand how extreme conditions can form exotic materials like this — both here on Earth and out in space. 

[ad lib optional] 

ASHLEY: The writer for today’s last story was Briana Brownell. 

CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also an audio editor on today’s episode

ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.

CODY: Roll a d20 for an intelligence check — and add a temporary +5 modifier for listening to this podcast. Then, join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.

ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!