[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF NASSER: Here you go. Here you go. What are you eating?

SON: It's an apple.

LATIF: Can I have a bite of the apple?

SON: No.

LATIF: Why not?

SON: Too yummy!

LATIF: It's too yummy? It looks so yummy.

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And that is my four-year-old son, who every single night before bed eats an apple. Which seems a little silly to say, just because honestly that's something I never thought twice about.

NICOLA TWILLEY: All right, I'm good.

LATIF: Yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Great.

LATIF: Until I had the conversation I'm about to share with you.

LATIF: First of all, can I just say it's such an honor for me to read this book.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Thank you. [laughs]

LATIF: This is Nicola Twilley. She's one of my favorite living science writers. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Wired, among other places. She hosts a podcast called Gastropod, and she just came out with a book that I had been hearing about from her for years, honestly, ever since I first met her.

LATIF: You were already working on stuff. That was like ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Oh, no.

LATIF: That was, like, 10 or more years ago.

NICOLA TWILLEY: I would say in total it's coming up on 15. I really don't recommend that to anyone. But ...

LATIF: But it's an amazing book. It's called Frostbite. It's all about the crazy things that we do to our foods to get them from the farm to our table. And as the title suggests, a lot of the book is about refrigeration, which is of course why my son can eat a crunchy apple in January. But our conversation actually ended up going way beyond refrigeration to some pretty surreal places, and even psychedelic-seeming technologies.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Oh, yeah. We are truly playing God with fruits and vegetables.

LATIF: So today on Radiolab, I want to play this conversation with Nicola for you. It takes us from apples to salads to meat. It takes us from cold to warm. It completely changed my idea of what it even means to call something "fresh." But it started off actually just talking all about the different refrigerated places that our food lives on its way to our mouths.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Well, this is the food superhighway. It is the sort of behind-the-scenes series of—of spaces that we built for our—our food to live in and move around in. And it's basically invisible and out of sight, and yet that is where roughly three quarters of everything that—that we eat on average spends time in that space. So yeah, that's a—that's a good way of thinking about it. The other way of thinking about it is sort of a—a time machine of sorts. It ...

LATIF: Go—go—say more about that.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Yeah. Well, because—this is a funny thing that it took me a while to realize, but the way refrigeration works is it just makes everything slow. This applies across life.

LATIF: But like—but like, just in general? Or like—like, on a—on a cellular level?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Well, so it's from the largest scale to the smallest scale. So when you work in a refrigerated warehouse, you are slower at doing the same tasks, measurably, than someone in an ambient temperature warehouse. But all of your cells are also working more slowly individually. And your brain is firing more slowly. It's just—it's just slowed down reality. And that's how it preserves food, too. It just stops fungi, microbes, bacteria, by slowing them down. And then for things like fruit and vegetables, which like us are alive, it just slows them down like it does us, so they breathe more slowly and they last longer.

LATIF: Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: So that is literally how cold works. It's a time machine. It slows everything down.

LATIF: Now I have to say at this point I honestly was not even thinking about the fact that fruits and vegetables are alive. But Nicola said as soon as you pick them, they're starting to die. And the whole point of the food system is to ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Prolong the death processes of fruits and vegetables.

LATIF: And she says when it comes to what we do to delay that process, refrigeration is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, okay.

LATIF: And to explain, she actually told me a story that goes back to the earliest uses of refrigeration, back in World War I.

NICOLA TWILLEY: So during the First World War, Britain realized that it didn't have enough food to feed itself. And there was sort of a mass panic. So they set up this institute, and they start to work on apples. Long story short, they're able to keep apples refrigerated for a year.

LATIF: What? I didn't even know that's possible.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Oh, yeah.

LATIF: Like, I get, like, a month or two months or something like that.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Oh, yeah.

LATIF: Okay, sorry. I cut you off.

NICOLA TWILLEY: England. They figured this out.

LATIF: Right. Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Their first lot of Granny Smiths are coming out. You know, they went in in the autumn. They're coming out in the spring. There's headlines in the newspapers. "Wow, wow, wow!" But there's a problem.

LATIF: Okay?

NICOLA TWILLEY: It turns out that elderly apples seem to emit something that is prematurely aging younger apples.

LATIF: Spoiling their younger competition?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Exactly. But they're also messing up other fruits and vegetables. They're—they're causing pea shoots to grow all knobbly. They're turning bananas into mush. No one can understand it. Like, what is this apple power?

LATIF: And it's something that's in the apple—like, that ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Well, it seems to be in the air around the elderly apples.

LATIF: Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Total mystery.

LATIF: But what they eventually realized is that in the air, floating around these elderly apples, is something called ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Ethylene.

LATIF: Ethylene?

NICOLA TWILLEY: It's a hydrocarbon.

LATIF: It's one of the components in oil and natural gas. And in fact, a Russian scientist, earlier in the late 1800s had discovered that plants, and in particular trees living and growing near gas street lamps would not grow as well. They would—they were being poisoned. So it was known, ethylene was, as a sort of plant poison. But ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Weirdly, the same thing that the street lamps are emitting that is a plant poison, the plants are emitting themselves. How—how is this possible? But it turns out that ethylene is something else as well. It's actually a plant hormone.

LATIF: Plants, it turns out, use ethylene as a sort of developmental signal sent between cells.

NICOLA TWILLEY: So what it does is it tells a plant to move on to the next phase of its existence. Like, if you spray ethylene over a field of pineapple plants, they all burst into bloom.

LATIF: [laughs] It's like puberty.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Exactly. The way that, you know, in our bodies, testosterone might tell your hair to grow.

LATIF: Right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Like, you know, the apple is using ethylene to tell its little, you know, apple cells, "Hey, time to lose your crispiness and your crunchiness and become mushy, so that a bear will pick you up and eat you and scatter the seeds in the forest."

LATIF: So the British scientists figure out how to block ethylene, which for these apples that they're trying to store, it's like they're telling them ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: You must stay in eternal youth.

LATIF: And it solves the rotting apple problem.

NICOLA TWILLEY: But then they figure out how to use it for other plants, which is—also turns out to be an amazing tool, because it turns out to be the key to ripening bananas. So a banana, if you want to harvest a banana that grows in a tropical country and you want to eat it in a non-tropical country, you have to harvest it when it's green and unripe, and refrigerate it. And then you get it to the destination, it's not gonna ripen on its own.

LATIF: Oh, I see! I knew that part but I didn't know the—that's like the switch to turn it on on the other side.

NICOLA TWILLEY: That's the switch. Ethylene is the—is the cue to the banana to be, like, "Great, now I'm gonna ripen and become a yellow, squishy banana." And then you have, like, 48 hours to get it to the grocery store before it, you know, starts turning into banana bread.

LATIF: Yes, that's right. Right, right, right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: So ...

LATIF: And wait—and so—okay, you said—so it ripens—it ripens apples, it ripens bananas.

NICOLA TWILLEY: No. It—it ripens bananas and avocados. It keeps celery white, prevents it from going green. It turns lemons yellow and oranges orange. I mean, every lemon you buy, for example, has typically been blasted with ethylene to be yellow. And it turns out if you expose root systems to ethylene, they get bigger. So tomatoes, for example, will have their roots dipped in ethylene before they're planted. I mean, our whole fruit and vegetable world is built on using ethylene to control fruit and vegetable responses.

LATIF: Wow. They should just give us that to do that at home. They should just give us the green bananas and a little pack of ethylene and then you could just do it at home.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Well, I think—here's the problem, Latif. It turns out to also be super-fun to huff.

LATIF: No!

NICOLA TWILLEY: [laughs] Yes!

LATIF: Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: It was like the party drug of the 1920s. It was ...

LATIF: Really?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Yes.

LATIF: Real quick, the story is that these scientists who discovered ethylene ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: You know, they did what scientists always do. They huffed some of it themselves. And it's an amazing paper. You can download it, you know, and read it. And it's the Journal of the American Medical Association.

LATIF: And what does it say?

NICOLA TWILLEY: They're like, "We felt a sense of well-being and exhilaration." But you can tell that they are having the time of their life.

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: And one of their friends just can't stop giggling, which they report.

LATIF: [laughs]

NICOLA TWILLEY: One of them says—his report is like, "I felt such bliss that I would be satisfied to lie down under the influence of this drug for the rest of my life."

LATIF: This is just one more reason to buy apples, you know?

LATIF: So just one more historical note about ethylene, and then we'll get back to food I swear. I just can't resist. So it turns out that as Nicola was researching this book, she came across a very fascinating theory.

NICOLA TWILLEY: That ethylene is what the priestesses at the oracle of Delphi were huffing.

LATIF: What?

NICOLA TWILLEY: The oracle at Delphi, of course, was the—one of the most famous oracles of ancient Greek history, and anyone who was anyone would go there and ask for, you know, advice. When should they plant their crops? Should they invade their neighboring country? Whatever. And the way it worked was a priestess would hear your question, they would go down into this little subterranean cave under the temple, where there was a spring, and they would quote-unquote, you know, "commune" with the oracle and drink from the spring. And then they would relay a message to a priest.

LATIF: Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Who would then interpret that back to the person who was asking the question.

LATIF: Anyway, a couple of decades ago, the Greeks were wanting to build a power plant over the same area, and a geologist who was studying that land discovered that this area had oil in it underneath the spring. And it seemed like some of the ethylene was sort of off-gassing into that spring and into that cave. So the theory is ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: The priestesses at Delphi were huffing ethylene. They were talking in excited and incoherent sort of gibberish. And then the priest was relaying that message. That's what was happening. This plant hormone that is a hydrocarbon that is, you know—turns out to also be the real oracle.

LATIF: Right. That's the real oracle.

NICOLA TWILLEY: But yeah, it's also—I mean, I was like, "Wow, ethylene is so powerful. This is incredible!" And then it turns out that the fruit and vegetable use of ethylene is, like, this tiny, tiny little drop in the ocean because ...

LATIF: Compared to what?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Plastic.

LATIF: Huh.

NICOLA TWILLEY: All plastic is made using ethylene.

LATIF: Really?

NICOLA TWILLEY: It is the building block of polyethylene, which is everything. So basically this is why ethylene turns out to be the most produced organic chemical in the world.

LATIF: Wow!

NICOLA TWILLEY: Because it is the bedrock of all plastics. And so we're making this oracular fruit and vegetable messenger, we're using it to make plastic bags.

LATIF: We're gonna take a quick little break. When we come back we're gonna shift from apples to arguably an even fresher food, and we're gonna talk about, believe it or not, plastic bags.

LATIF: This is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. We are back talking to Nicola Twilley about how the food we eat gets to our tables. We are gonna move away from apples and ethylene and ancient Greek prophecies to a kind of surprisingly futuristic technology stolen partly from nuclear submarines in the form of a certain kind of plastic bag ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Salad bags.

LATIF: ... that holds salad.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Well, first of all, one thing to understand about salad is until the 1920s no one bothered with it. It was pointless.

LATIF: What do you mean?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Well, at this point in human history, people are moving to cities in the United States. And it's really hard to get people a salad when it's not grown nearby and you don't have refrigeration. So salad was just really—like, if you were super rich, you might have a nice salad of an evening, but it was not a part of people's lives until the iceberg variety is discovered. And it's sturdy enough that if you bury it under a crap-ton of ice, you can ship it across the country and you're gonna be able to sell it.

LATIF: Which is where it gets the name "iceberg lettuce."

NICOLA TWILLEY: Because as it travels, it's just these train cars full of lettuce covered in a mound of ice. So iceberg is the only lettuce that most Americans could eat for most of the 20th century. And then what happens is a guy called Jim Lugg.

LATIF: In the '60s, the 1960s, Jim Lugg was working for a salad baron in the Salinas Valley in California. And he was trying to help them figure out how to sell more salad and send it more places. Now right around the same time ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Whirlpool, the company, has come up with some new technology that was spun out of Cold War nuclear submarines. Cold War nuclear submarines stayed underwater for a really long time, and so they had to get really good at controlling the atmosphere.

LATIF: Like, within the sub?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: You know, how much oxygen and how much carbon dioxide? And Whirlpool had developed controlled atmosphere warehouses. So ...

LATIF: So when Jim Lugg learns this he's like, "Wait a second. In addition to keeping things cool, if I could control the atmosphere of the salad, if I could control how every bit of the salad is breathing, maybe I could slow down its decay process."

NICOLA TWILLEY: He's like, "We need to take this thing that—you can control the atmosphere in a building, but for a bag."

LATIF: Because then there'd be all kinds of delicate, leafy salads that could survive better being shipped across the country.

NICOLA TWILLEY: And he comes across a polymer scientist who's like, "Oh, yeah. Differentially permeable membrane. That'll do it."

LATIF: [laughs] Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: And so what differentially permeable membrane is is something we have in every cell in our body, which is—it's just a membrane that will, you know, know to let out oxygen or take in oxygen preferentially at a particular rate.

LATIF: So in the mid-1970s, these scientists, taking inspiration from the cells inside living things ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Figured out how to do it. You layer together these membranes, one that lets in oxygen at the right rate, one that lets out carbon dioxide at the right rate, one that lets in water vapor at the right rate or out at the right rate. You know, you just kind of sandwich these all together, plus, you know, a layer for the label and a layer for, you know, some kind—just—so these things are, like, a minimum of five layers—sometimes more—thick, delivering a controlled atmosphere inside that bag. It is a respiratory apparatus for lettuce. It is not a salad bag at all.

LATIF: That is crazy!

NICOLA TWILLEY: But your point ...

LATIF: And I gotta say, like, I just grabbed one of these just a second ago from my own fridge and, like, it feels like I'm holding something between, like, an advanced technology and a living cell.

NICOLA TWILLEY: This is one of the things that, you know, people who study fruit and vegetables sort of impressed upon me is, like, a baby lettuce, you're harvesting it when it's so tiny that there's only maybe five true leaves on the plant. And it is breathing so fast. It's such a tiny—it's a little baby.

LATIF: Oh my God!

NICOLA TWILLEY: And because its breathing's that fast, it is going to die. It's gonna burn through all of its resources and it'll turn into green slime. So you have to slow down its breathing.

LATIF: You're giving me a vision of, like, someone at a grocery store with the, like, defib paddles on a, like, a little piece of spinach or something.

NICOLA TWILLEY: It's life support. Honestly, when you visit the labs of the people who are doing this research, all the fruits and vegetables are, like, hooked up to monitors, and then you can measure how fast they're breathing. You feel like you're in the ICU. It is—it is like ...

LATIF: That's so weird!

NICOLA TWILLEY: It's so weird. I never had a sense of my fruit and vegetables being alive.

LATIF: [laughs]

NICOLA TWILLEY: And now I'm sort of like, "Wow, are we taking care of you? You okay? You need something?"

LATIF: Yeah, right. Seriously.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Anyway ...

LATIF: The point is, this seemingly simple plastic bag ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: It was like this transformative salad technology. People went from eating iceberg to, like, the salad revolution we live in now, because you had this life support technology in the form of a plastic bag.

LATIF: Who would have thought that that was more than a bag? That just looks like a bag!

NICOLA TWILLEY: Well, so this is—this is actually a really interesting bigger point, is because the food industry goes to this enormous effort to keep our food alive, right? We are really good at prolonging the life of fruit and vegetables. Like, you know how all those Silicon Valley billionaires are, like, injecting themselves with young people's blood and whatnot?

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: I'm like, they—they—those regimes have nothing on what we have figured out for fruits and vegetables. But at the same time, they don't want you to think about that. Because people are weirded out. Like, "What do you mean my apple's a year old?"

LATIF: Right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: "What do you mean my—my lettuce leaf is a month old? I don't want that. That's not—that's not right. That's not fresh."

LATIF: Right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: And so they have to go to all this effort and then make it invisible, like it's fresh. It was just picked yesterday, you know?

LATIF: Right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Of course it's fresh. And so one of the most exciting technologies I came across is—it's like Jim Lugg 2.0—Mr. Salad Bag 2.0. He took, you know, something that was a building-sized technology and made it a bag-sized technology.

LATIF: Yeah?

NICOLA TWILLEY: These guys have taken something that's a bag-sized technology and made it, like, a nanoscale spray-on layer-sized technology. So they have figured out how to create this differentially permeable membrane, this layer that lets in the right amount of oxygen and lets out the right amount of carbon dioxide. They have figured out how to create a spray that structurally does that out of lipids.

LATIF: Lipids are basically just like a fat molecule in our body, and they're the actual thing that cell membranes are made out of.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Literally.

LATIF: Wow!

NICOLA TWILLEY: And it's the way—the guy who invented it, he spent his PhD figuring out how to spray paint particles on solar panels to make them more efficient at harvesting light. And it has to do with how they dry and the little structures that assemble as they dry. Same deal with this spray on fruits and vegetables is to do with how it dries and the little structure it creates as it dries.

LATIF: So how would it—so you would just spray an apple, and then you wouldn't have to refrigerate it?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Correct. So when I went there ...

LATIF: Whoa!

NICOLA TWILLEY: ... I went into a room where there were red bell peppers at room temperature. And they had been there for eight weeks. So if you left a red bell pepper on your countertop for eight weeks, you can imagine it would be a pretty sad looking thing.

LATIF: Shriveled and ...

NICOLA TWILLEY: Not good. Maybe even moldy.

LATIF: Yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Not—not something you were going to eat.

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: And the ones—the comparison ones, you know, that hadn't been sprayed, that's how they looked. They were gross. You weren't gonna eat them. The ones that had been sprayed, you weren't gonna, like, cut them up and dip them in hummus. It wasn't like crudité platter time.

LATIF: Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: But it was definitely stir fry time. It was—like, they were fine, you know?

LATIF: Huh!

NICOLA TWILLEY: They were the kind of thing you'd look at in your vegetable drawer and be like, "I should use that."

LATIF: And—and this thing doesn't have a taste?

NICOLA TWILLEY: No. It's a nanoscale layer of something that is a food. Like, it's like a fat. So it's not—but it's—you know, and people are like, "Oh, you're spraying it in fat." It's, like, zero calories, it's so thin. It's—but it's—it's not a chemical. I mean, it is a chemical in the sense that everything is chemical, but it's not a, like, weird chemical in the sense that people—when you tell people it's a coating they think of, like, the wax that you get on lemons and stuff.

LATIF: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: No. It's—I mean, I licked these bell peppers. There's nothing.

LATIF: [laughs] Okay. Okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: There's nothing.

LATIF: As I usually do around bell peppers that I see in the wild.

NICOLA TWILLEY: I did—I asked permission first.

LATIF: Okay, okay, okay.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Yeah, so—and at the moment, listen, they use this technology and they use it to just extend shelf life. So you can still refrigerate the bell pepper, and then this just makes it last a little bit longer. The same way that salad greens still go in the refrigerator, but the bag makes them last longer.

LATIF: Right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: But the thinking is, in parts of the world where you don't have a, like, refrigerator, or for fruits and vegetables that don't work in the refrigerator, like, if you could spray this on them and keep them fresh for longer that way?

LATIF: Yeah.

NICOLA TWILLEY: I mean, it's ...

LATIF: And you think this could—you think this could scale?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Oh yeah. Yeah. You have to figure out for every single different fruit or vegetable what's the right breathing rate.

LATIF: Oh, a different—right, right, right, right, right, right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: But they have a production line to do that. They're in commercial-scale production. And here's the interesting thing of convincing people that this is a good idea. You know, people a hundred years ago thought refrigerated food was dangerous and immoral.

LATIF: And now we're the opposite, right?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Yeah, now we're the opposite. I mean, there's technology as well that's enabling that same—different technology, but same idea for meat.

LATIF: Whoa, seriously?

NICOLA TWILLEY: One of the consultants I spoke to was, like, "Listen, we might get to a stage where we're shipping meat around the world with this technology. It's not refrigerated, but then it's sold out of the chill cabinet at the supermarket so you don't freak out, basically."

LATIF: Hmm.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Because I mean, for example, that's what happens with soy milk. Soy milk doesn't need to be refrigerated.

LATIF: Right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: It just is, because people think that milk should be cold. But the idea of buying non-refrigerated meat—I mean, I don't—even my ...

LATIF: That would be dicey. That feels dicey.

NICOLA TWILLEY: That's, like, terrifying.

LATIF: But you think that's possible? There are people doing that? There are people working on that?

NICOLA TWILLEY: They have product. Like, it's—it's about scaling it up.

LATIF: Really?

NICOLA TWILLEY: I mean, they're further behind, and they're also introducing their product first into restaurants because consumers are freaked out. But restaurants ...

LATIF: Right.

NICOLA TWILLEY: ... you know?

LATIF: Restaurants are like, "We'll try it. It'll cut our bottom line."

NICOLA TWILLEY: Exactly.

LATIF: It does—it did give me—just as you were describing it, it did give me a little bit of the creeps. Like, it just feels weird. Like, you're like, that should be rotting. But it's not rotting.

NICOLA TWILLEY: But that's what we all thought about refrigerated food.

LATIF: I know. It's so funny. It's so funny how quickly that becomes natural.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Totally.

LATIF: So that was my conversation with Nicola Twilley, whose insights I always find to be non-perishable. Her book is called Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves. Thank you to Nicola for coming on, and if you want to hear more from her besides the book, you can also check out her podcast called Gastropod.

LATIF: Big thank you to Jim Lugg and Jeff Wooster, who we also talked to about lettuce bags. This episode was reported by—let's be honest, it was reported by Nicola Twilley, but also Maria Paz Gutiérrez and myself did a little bit of reporting. It was produced by Maria Paz Gutiérrez, fact-checking by Emily Krieger, and edited by Alex Neason.

LATIF: Okay, one last tiny thing, I swear. We often—at the end of the episode, we say the name of the whole staff of the show, because we are proud of the people we work with. But the people we don't mention is there is a whole station who works with us here at WNYC. And one of those people who works at the station, who was integral to getting this show out from week to week, he's leaving the station. Steven Gangaram. He is one of the most skilled and consistently competent people any of us has ever worked with. He was responsible for IT and fixing our computers all the time, which happened—I mean, I can't even count. So anyway, thank you so much, Steven. We really appreciate you and we'll miss you.

LATIF: I will catch you in—if it's an apple a day, I will catch you back here in seven apples. In the meantime, stay crunchy, stay crispy, stay healthy.

[LISTENER: Hey, I'm Lemmon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, my name's Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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