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Joe: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome back to the Rabbit Hole of Research down here in the basement studio. We’re all crewed up. Got a full house. You got me, Joe? You got Nick. We got Nick.
Georgia. We got Georgia. And we have a special guest with us.
Sai: I am. Rengasayee Veeraraghavan or Sai the easier version or doctor unpronounceable if I decide to go full evil.
nick: Wait, you said Dr. Unpronounceable? Is that what you just
Sai: Yep. I’ve already decided that’s the super villain
name when the day comes.
Joe: There it is.
nick: love that.
Joe: that was in Unbreakable. When he goes, I knew I was gonna be a villain ’cause the kids all call me Mr. Glass.
Sai: Yep.
kind of
I mean, Growing up, like one of my favorite moments from
any book was at the end of Watchman when
Adrian VI lays
out the whole plan and they get all,
flustered and he is I
did all this 35 minutes.
ago. It’s just,[00:01:00]
Joe: And you, you are a professor
Sai: oh, incidentally, Yes.
I should say I’m a professor of biomedical
engineering
at the Ohio State University.
Yeah. I run
something called a nano cardiology lab where
we study the
nanoscale structure of the heart and how it affects
function.
nick: Yeah.
So you’re just a villain. Part-time.
Joe: part-time villain. Is that a song, like a
Sai: mean, what we do, we call it villainy.
That’s the affection at term for it.
Joe: he’s a part-time villain.
nick: He’s only trying to get control of the tri-state
Joe: right, yes. Only a little piece of the Midwest,
nick: don’t want the whole land, but I just want this little bit.
Joe: Yeah. And we’re gonna be talking about the heart of a superhero, maybe villains also
so I, I got a little, I do a little opening, I guess, monologue now it’s been a while since
I’ve been
nick: You, you just go
Joe: I just go
for it now.
nick: You’re well,
you got me monologue in.
Joe: you got me.
geo: I, I,
Joe: know, the human heart, it’s a fist size pump. Four chambers, valves opening and [00:02:00] closing with the precision of an ancient machine.
It contracts about a hundred thousand times a day, sending five liters of blood pulsing through 60,000 miles of vessels. A pump, yes, but also a drumbeat, our private metronome. But when we step into the world of superheroes, the anatomy of the heart is only the starting point, because the heart is never only a muscle in every origin story, every battle cry, every moral choice.
The true question is, what does this hero or a villain carry in their chest? A heart burden by guilt, broken by loss, widened by love, and an anatomy. A heart pushes blood and myth. It pushes meaning. In this episode, we’re gonna open the chest of the superhero, literally. And figuratively
nick: Wait. We’re literally gonna crack open a
Joe: Oh, we’re cracking. Open some
nick: chest.
geo: Oh,
nick: I should have brought my gloves
geo: on
today.
Joe: But, heroes
geo: have wore that lap coat.
Joe: Every heroic rhythm finds its counterpoint and a twisted pulse of a villain. And [00:03:00] who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.
geo: Ooh,
Joe: shadow
knows. Are there
nick: and hearts
Joe: there?
Are there shadows in hearts?
Sai: I mean, shadows are produced when light hits something and your heart really shouldn’t be seeing any light
nick: If there
Sai: unless you’re a zebra fish.
So yes, there are shadows in a
nick: Oh,
Sai: heart. Those things are transparent.
nick: there you go.
Joe: Yeah. There you go.
nick: Georgia, how did that line up with what you were reading?
Joe: Yeah. Did I get, did I get it right? All the, the, the experts. We got the
book
nick: of
geo: looked
nick: like you just took that whole
monolo
geo: It
was right here.
Joe: the, and Georgia has her reference materials.
geo: Stop
Joe: A 1958, what’s it called? The Illustrated?
No, the
nick: the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Modern
Science. There it is.
Yes. It has some nice diagrams. Nice
Joe: nice accurate diagrams.
geo: Exterior
and anterior and, yeah. I, I, yeah.
Joe: I got it.[00:04:00]
geo: Wow.
nick: was
Joe: alright.
I do have a list also, but you guys don’t, you, we may not want my
nick: you usually introduce the list a little later.
Joe: I do, I have been, but we’ll see. Get talking.
nick: When it comes to different powers and stuff, in a hero or villain.
Do you think that would affect how the heart reacts or is?
Sai: yes. I mean, if quite simply,
we are a machine, our body
and whatever it is trying to do. is? driven by this pump. So
what we’re doing places different demands on the pump, just on the very basic,
level.
and
there’s the
the psychological
aspect. You,
know, you, your heart rate doesn’t just go up when you start sprinting, it goes up when you know, so all Of a sudden
you open
your door in the morning,
if there’s a rattlesnake out
there, you’re gonna feel something It’s going to respond. right? So the emotional side
of
what?
a superhero or villain
is going through, when they’re using [00:05:00] towers and whatnot.
second layer of effect. And then there’s the
physics of whatever their
powers are.
that is going to do something directly to the system.
geo: Mm-hmm.
Joe: I mean a lot of these we talk about and touch on the biology is that you must change , how metabolism works because the calorie load is so immense. But , if we just go by the lore of the comics, the movies, we never see
that much consumption of car of calories.
And so I think the heart’s function and correct me , I’m not a cardiologist, but , it’s function is to pump blood that’s been oxygenated to the various parts of your body to keep you functioning and then keep separate oxygenated and unoxygenated blood and pump it and be the weigh station for that exchange , of blood there going through your lungs and , getting oxygen oxygenated coming back.
So this pump, ’cause you gotta pump the blood from. Your chest where it’s oxygenated down to your toes, back up to your head, your brain, and that takes some effort as you go. The heart is a muscle
Sai: it, is One of the [00:06:00] three kinds of muscle in the body
and, you know, other muscle is
skeletal muscle We have
smooth muscle.
Both of those types of muscles can do
couple of different
things. Right.
We can
squeeze our fist and leave,
it squeeze so
it can stay contracted
or we can squeeze
quickly and let go
which is what
we call
a quick Twitch. The heart is a weird muscle It can only twitch.
Joe: Yeah.
Sai: It’s sort of a single Purpose. device, but It’s also a cool little system.
It looks like one,
pump. But the dirty truth
is it’s actually two pumps that are literally
smooshed together.
There’s
one
pump. running
a circuit to the lungs and back and the other one running a circuit,
to the rest of the body
and back
with a
little connection. between those
and not only is there a demand on the.
heart with all these things, your body, would be doing, especially, if you’re running at super speed or using super strength, et cetera.
your
demands are going to be weirdly different. I mean, it isn’t all of us,
right? You want lots of pressure to get the blood up a
foot and a half
[00:07:00] from just
the top of your head, whereas you want to put it into lungs at very low pressure ’cause it’s going into basically,
a porous bag where it can exchange oxygen and CO2, you don’t want to over pressurize it or you’re gonna drown in your own fluids. So it’s maintaining that balance from scary
in a normal person or an athlete. I don’t even wanna imagine.
what that would look like if
it were
the
Joe: I was thinking, you mentioned running fast and , we did a speedster episode. I don’t think we talked about the heart, but
I don’t think we did.
just while you’re talking there, delivering oxygen to
to
your limbs and muscles that need it without getting that lactic acid burn.
, once you start going
Sai: so you bring up a really Interesting point.
particularly with respect to a speedster like the
Flash. They’re gonna have a big problem with
this, because
the, I mean, Peregrine Falcons have had to develop
a
solution, for this. those things dive at like 240 miles an [00:08:00] hour, Which is more than any of us ever, do.
And they’re going face down
and
how do you keep that
pressure.
of air going up
Your.
nose from bursting your lungs?
So Peregrine falcons actually have a little bone that occludes part of their
Nostrils
and it’s like the scoop on a jet fighter.
So that’s something you never see in the comic books.
There has to be some kind of nasal
adaptation for these guys to not.
Joe: Yeah. , and then taking in oxygen because a peregrine falcon dives, but doesn’t continuously dive, , it will catch its prey
Sai: Well, it’s, yeah, and it’s diving under gravity, right. It’s not exerting for that dive.
Joe: So if you’re going fast now, you need to, either have some hemoglobin modifications also in there that you’re using your oxygen much more efficiently that
Sai: you definitely need E
every level,
because you’re going to be limited
on the top end
by the
physics,
of the lung.
Joe: Right.
Sai: And so you’re,
yeah, you
want better hemoglobin, you want
more red
blood cells in your blood but then you wanna modify
the [00:09:00] clotting system, so it doesn’t
clot. Like when people dope with epo?
there’s a whole slew of madness that has to happen to let this work.
Joe: just for everybody hemoglobin it’s a protein it blood that binds oxygen and then carries that through your body and
delivers ‘
nick: cause I was gonna ask
that.
Joe: I saw your face. I
nick: I was like, hold on, you said a few words and I’m like, I don’t know what those are.
Joe: just to
geo: the heart really
Sai: if I say anything
that doesn’t make sense, just call me,
out. I’ll explain it.
nick: explain
it to me like I’m five.
geo: So basically the heart aspect of superheroes and other characters really throws a wrench into the plausibility. A
Joe: lot lot of handwaving is happening. You know,
nick: I mean, would have to alter their heart as
Sai: there are so many layers on which, Yeah.
like , for instance, like these speedsters again, they start, are
Approaching things like the speed of light,
Joe: right? yeah.
Sai: That’s just not possible because at the end of the day, [00:10:00] tiny
parts of individual protein molecules have to move and they don’t move anywhere
Near the speed of
light,
Joe: right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think the same thing with shrinking and things like that. Once you shrink to such a
size, then oxygen, the molecule of oxygen itself is larger than you have shrunk to. You know,
nick: so could you just
hold onto that and suckle to it?
Joe: it? Why
Sai: And even the reverse, right? When you blow something
Joe: Yes. a book called Life’s Ratchet where this author talks all about the
Sai: Sort of motor proteins in our cells.
And he imagines if you took
these little, you know, they’re
like little
Tubules that go up and down your cells. They’re like little highways that are constantly getting built
and Unbuilt and rebuilt.
geo: he imagines.
Sai: What if that
were blown up to the size of an actual street?
turns out?
those individual molecules
that are flying in
would be coming in at the velocity of a planet killing asteroid. The forces that work at the
nanoscale, the Physics there is very powerful.
You can’t just pull
[00:11:00] that out part and
say, now
you will do this at macro scale.
’cause you’ll Kind
of.
tear.
space time if you do some of these things at that kind of force.
geo: And
Joe: And I will say to, , the heart and other organisms is fairly, we’re talking about the human heart and then superheroes, but , you could scale the heart. That is whales, , they have huge 400 pound hearts and they power a large organism granted it’s in water.
So once again, they’re taking advantage of buoyancy so that aids them , in their propulsion and stuff. But still, they have to pump blood.
nick: Is the heart essentially like the same in each creature, or no? Is it gonna be
vastly
Sai: asked An awesome
question.
nick: Thank you.
Sai: So the, I’ll reframe the question. I’ll cheat a little bit.
I’m gonna reframe the question a little bit.
In
What way is the,
heart the,
same in all the animals that we know
of? And that’s actually quite interesting. If you look at
the Unit of
what is the single building block of [00:12:00] a heart? it is a
single heart muscle
cell. it’s
like a little
reverse rubber band that shortens when it turns on and
lets go
When it
turns off, and you take
you know,
two, 3
billion of those.
You make a human heart,
But the crazy thing is from mouse to human to blue whale, the individual cell
size is roughly the same.
Joe: Mm-hmm.
Sai: They just have
More, of them in a whale heart by far.
And blue
whales will actually,
get their heart can get up to a couple of tons. these things
are, the size of a beetle. It’s, I mean, a Volkswagen Beetle.
It, it’s massive machine. And sperm whales have not only big hearts, but those things
dive to
Crazy
depths, so
their hearts are adapted to pump Against this massive water pressure. Yeah. Wa Whales have really,
cool hearts. They can slow Down,
the levels that if we slow down there we’re dead.
nick: Man, I actually never really thought about, other animals’, hearts. Like the idea that they’re all essentially
Joe: similar doing the same function. I mean, you, [00:13:00] and they’re only the opposite in their hummingbirds. So
they’re really tiny hearts.
Sai: Super tiny. They beat it thousands of times a minute. It’s, yeah.
geo: yeah, I was gonna say, it’s actually the, the heartbeat I, I just know that like dogs, when you talk about dog years, isn’t a lot of it has to do with
their
heartbeat.
Joe: You mean the number of times you get how the number of times your heart will beat before you die on average.
Yeah.
nick: so Yeah. The rate is very different.
Sai: There’s a loose
Correlation
, it’s pretty loose in certain,
species. It
goes,
way off,
but by and large
you tend
to see a correlation of.
if you have rapid metabolism, Fast heart rate
short lifespan,
and slow heart rates correlate, with longer lifespans. Particularly
you see this in things like tortoises that have
super slow heart rates and stick around a
few centuries.
Joe: Yeah.
And you have the same number of beats across, . That’s the correlation across
Sai: Yeah, that’s the little bit of a stretch, but it’s [00:14:00] roughly
Joe: The same except humans. Humans are like two, three times that, that number across species so it’s really interesting. Humans are a little different, .
Sai: Human hearts actually are kind
of
you know, they’re with amongst mammalian hearts. They have a couple of superpowers,
right? Like it, it’s
kind of funny,
like this is the superpower. You never see discussed in
the superhero characters. There’s nobody who’s I just run at normal speed, but I’m gonna run thousands of miles.
I’m just a monster
geo: Right
Sai: Fighter But
that’s Actually what we’re,
evolved to do. We are amazing distance runners. There are these
persistence hunters in
parts of Africa and like
uh, Arctic
Circle areas that
hunt animals for
days. Just
run them until
they’re metabolically overheated and shut down.
Joe: Yeah. That is an advantage. And,
Sai: I was thinking.
it would be a.
scary power for a super villain, be kind of like one of those Doctor who monsters that it’s not coming at you fast, but they never stop.
They’re
Joe: never
nick: There
Sai: at you at [00:15:00] marathon pace.
nick: There actually is. And
Mike Myers
Sai: Oh,
nick: He is the epiphany of what you’re talking
a stalker. Yeah. Yeah.
Sai: mm-hmm.
Joe: all the slashers. You, you have that all do the constant moving towards you. Yeah. Like they don’t stop. You don’t ever see them sleep.
It’s like a Terminator.
nick: Yeah.
Except
Joe: They,
geo: So when we sleep, does the heart rate get lot lower?
Sai: Yeah.
So our hearts are kind of funky in how they’re regulated. They
don’t normally sit,
at neutral. they normally sit with a little bit of a,
break pedal on.
We have something called a Vagus
nerve that tends to
slow down the heart. It’s
Normally
on a little bit
when
we’re sleeping, it’s on a whole lot more. Really Calms things down. And
then when we get excited
not only
does the gas go
on in terms of, you know,
adrenaline and stuff,
but
the break comes off.
So That’s why the heart,
can adapt so [00:16:00] quickly,
which again,
that’s another rate limiting or
performance limiting thing is what is called rate adaptation. Suddenly something happens, we need to speed up, slow down,
that is governed by, at the end of the day, some chemical reactions that will take a certain amount of time.
That’s another thing that.
Superheroes just flying around dodging, switching directions they’re gonna have a problem
with.
Joe: So almost I think I, I’ve, I don’t know if I’ve come to this conclusion, over a lot of episodes is that I feel that the, oops, I had licked the rock and got superpowers.
Are
nick: you
trying to
Joe: take a alright. No, I’m not taking a jab
nick: I feel very
Joe: There’s no shade.
No shade at you. I, I’m just making a general thing that I, I think the folks who have superpowers. That are genetically born that way,
probably you can get closer to explaining the adaptations you would need from the heart, from circulation, from oxygen intake nasal structure, all these, you know, new layers of skin to ooze out [00:17:00] fluids or juice your
geo: Oh,
nick: he wanted to bring that up, you know?
Joe: you, you know a jab. Now he says the Yeah. versus versus the
Sai: or anyone that like alters their physics fundamentally.
says They
turn into a
gas, or, right. right. yeah. They get bombarded by cosmic
nick: you’re saying like Spider-Man being bit by a spider, all these different things Well, Spider-Man, he had the idea was that he, he did have genetic change or whatever the spider injected in him
changed his He got mixed with the spider, so he took on.
Joe: Okay. I, spider genes. I don’t know. I, that’s the of, that’s a little, you know, maybe CRISPR. I don’t, so
Sai: the closest would be some kind of lentiviral
delivery so that it goes into your somatic and reproductive
and, uh, it would be some kind of
Crispr type gene edit, but it? would be a massive gene
Joe: It would be, yeah. He, it would’ve been, he would’ve been down, he went awake, waking up the next day with powers. He probably needed to sleep it [00:18:00] off for few, for some time for that to happen. , so you would have some delivery mechanism.
You could think of it in a number of ways. I mean, you could have , lipid body kind of delivery. So yeah, you could think of artificial ways to get it in, so that spider, whatever it was. Which once again , the animal facility probably have some issues with just rogue spiders breaking containment probably biosafety, level three spider there, just with recombinant DNA wandering the lab.
But yeah, let’s say that happened then. Yeah. , yoU would, it would be a genetic change for Spider-Man fits the theory,
nick: so you’re saying Spider-Man is possible and I can become Spider-Man.
Joe: not saying that.
nick: let’s
Joe: I’m
nick: let like a
Joe: I’ll get Yes.
nick: a bunch of different spiders to bite you.
While we’re on the subject of Spider-Man for his spider sense, would that be connected to this heart then? Like with how it like slows down a little bit?
Joe: The focus, you
Sai: No, I mean I, so [00:19:00] honestly
that’s kind of a weird.
Like
nick: because
Sai: misdirects kind of thing. It’s so you
don’t have to slow down, your heart to have high alertness. ’cause, you know,
nerve conduction happens. way Faster than the rate of the heart, whatever the rate is.
nick: Or is it speeding up because isn’t si the spider sense connected to like anxiety,
Sai: so that,
so there could be a coincidental
increase in heart rate If what
triggers his spider sense is That
hormonal trigger of anxiety. If he’s getting adrenaline noradrenaline
Released from,
his pituitary
and it’s going,
in all over the body. I might have said,
Joe: I’m
geo: sure.
Sai: it’s the pituitary that produces, that’s
the adrenal
glands.
Clearly I’m not a
neuro
person. I just showed my clients hopefully we’ll put it in the show
nick: what, I can’t believe this. I thought you were,
Sai: No, it’s your adrenals.
Joe: you have another drink, you’ll be there.
Sai: My biology teachings are just accelerating the near late speed right
now anyway, so if, if
those
are the chemicals [00:20:00] doing the job
then yeah, his heart rate would Speed up.
nick: because
I know in what the end of the Spider Verse people, they ended up doing a short film that they showed Miles having anxiety, being connected to a spider sense. Mm-hmm. And it, having that correlation there.
Sai: That’s actually cool.
nick: yeah, and it’s always been like that,
geo: But then it’s one of those things like, which came first? His anxiety caused the heart. The heart, not necessarily the heart rate caused the, the sense, do you see what I’m saying?
Yeah. That
Sai: that one. we can answer. There’s chemistry that’s going into the blood
that’s doing all of these things, the
chemistry of anxiety. So this is something that is kind of particular to mammals, but worse in humans.
Chemically, we use the,
same
SIGNALING systems to indicate things like,
anxiety
as a physical thing
like I’m running
or
I am being chased by
an,
actual tiger.
Those things get [00:21:00] conflated in the brain in the body chemically with, I’m worried
about somebody or I’ve, received bad news
of some type, that kind of thing. But
with the case of
Spiderman
have
Having this
correlation between anxiety and his
spidey sense now it actually brings up a weird long-term problem he might have to think about the more he
uses his spidey sense, the more you
expose yourself
to.
these stressors
like anxiety, the greater the risk of something called.
stress cardiomyopathy.
Now he’s a little bit,
nick: what is that?
Sai: So it’s a thing where people who, so
there’s a version of it that’s literally called broken heart syndrome
or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.
It is
people.
going through things like extreme grief will
abruptly
start going into heart failure in a matter of weeks. And if sort of the chemical cycles there can be, interrupted, they can also recover from it in a matter of weeks. And
one thing that
Spiderman has going for him, unfortunately
over [00:22:00] spider
women, is women are
five times more likely to develop
stress cardiomyopathy
and we don’t know why than men.
Um.
nick: one a person’s partner passes after being together for a long time, that other partner dies shortly after?
Sai: absolutely
a contributor to that.
Yep. That is a huge element there.
Joe: because I had a question. This was something that it related to heart attacks it, and I learned this while I was back in grad school, so my memory might be a little shaky, but premenopausal women that have heart attacks.
Usually the mortality rate is much higher than men. , and then postmenopausal
geo: Men roughly the same
Joe: The same age. So premenopausal women, same age as a man, both have a heart attack. The mortality rate is much higher in the premenopausal women postmenopausal, , the death rate evens out and it’s about the same.
And , I always thought that was fascinating. And this was back in grad school. I don’t.
Sai: We still don’t.
Joe: with me. And you know
geo: is that
nick: hormonal
Sai: And we [00:23:00] still don’t fully understand how some of these things
work.
Honestly, women’s health, particularly when it comes to the heart, is far too much of
a Black box.
given the
Day
we live in.
Joe: Interesting. Yeah.
Sai: But Yeah, we’re only starting to scratch the surface
Joe: Yeah. Same thing with you were mentioning distance running. There’s, there are studies now that women are actually better at extreme distances, like the a hundred mile races, they actually outperform their male counterparts.
Same physical fitness. So men in the short term , can outrun a woman. And, and this is this is what Sai was talking about kind this in the animal kingdom, the long, you know, kind this endurance, but women really have, between men and women, they actually can outdo. So it really be
was
nick: already a thing people knew because horror movies, it’s a final girl.
That’s
true.
Joe: There it is.
There made
nick: just, it is this
not what everyone knew that is that is
so
true.
Joe: why they can outlive
the, the,
Jasons and Freddy’s
geo: and
those crazy stalkers
like [00:24:00] Myers.
Joe: mean the, the real twist would be if the woman is the stalker, then you would’ve no chance as a man we’re done.
That’s right.
Everyone, there’s no
Sai: You can actually like, that actually made me think of a weird, like very slow over time version of an I am legend concept. Where she is going, one woman is going through all these movies, killing one monster after another,
Joe: that’s
Sai: and the monsters are terrified. They’re like, she’s slow, but she’ll get
you
She gets there
eventually.
nick: it.
Joe: decades later
geo: And
and, if she’s
Sai: And that’s the title of the, the graphic novel, right? Eventually,
nick: I love it. And the thing is, she’s really slow, like a tortoise. So she’ll probably live
You’re right. Long
Sai: yep.
geo: just,
Joe: you know, these ultra marathons, I think , that’s what they call ’em. Yeah. No, there you go. Alright, we gotta get on top of that. We got a couple stories you gotta write down here
nick: I hope you have them all bookmarked
Joe: they’re there. You know, so
geo: Like Superman, he’s actually an alien.
Mm-hmm. has anyone ever [00:25:00] talked about, I’m sure people have, but I am not familiar with Superman’s Anatomy. And does he have a similar heart
Sai: Oh,
there’s a whole book. There’s a book on the Science of
Superman. I can’t remember the name of the author, but
if you want I could run downstairs.
and get it. It’s actually quite a fascinating book. and
it tries to think gonna time me? We’re gonna go fast Yeah, I’ll be right
back with Sai running right now.
nick: Oh, he’s back.
Joe: Oh,
all right.
That took seconds
for Sai. I
Sai: this is,
Joe: I You gotta take a picture, Jordan, or send
Sai: yeah. I’ll, I’ll, so
it’s by Mark Wolverton.
I’ll send a picture.
to you.
Joe: We’ll put
Sai: Uh, it’s called a Science of Superman, and it’s this, it, it gets it to
Every part of
it. Like I’ll even
imagines
that
there’s some kind of bioelectric field around his body.
Joe: Hmm.
Sai: Protecting him
From the air flows when he flies. Like
Joe: Oh, there you
Sai: really gets into some
geo: Does it, so does it mention the heart?
Sai: Yeah. And it
[00:26:00] Basically.
I mean you get to cheat
because
evolved on
a different planet
gets into the
Sort of,
gross scale mechanics of his heart, how like you know which animal heart it would’ve to be built like and so on. We learn a lot from comparing with
animals.
geo: right. Mm-hmm.
Sai: But what it doesn’t get into is it would’ve to have fundamentally different chemistry.
Yeah, it would’ve to be radically different because there are chemical limits, which I mean ultimately, again, physics sets the limits on what US carbon-based beings can do on as evolved on Earth. he
had drastically different chemistry, like Some of the stuff
Superman does, either
he’d have to
do that or change the physics.
of his.
body.
in those moments.
Joe: Yeah. And probably the safer bed is that he evolved differently. Once again, a genetic factor that on Krypton, he grew, he developed
geo: so on,
Joe: they evolved to their planetary conditions.
geo: So on, Superman’s planet, everyone kind of has
Joe: you similar,
and you know what they are, they [00:27:00] would be ex extremophiles.
nick: except a lot
Joe: That’s a lot. Is that that right? Sai? You can say it. Extremophiles, that’s the word of the
Sai: Oh, absolutely.
geo: Except they’d be a lot bigger.
Joe: I don’t, I mean yeah. Much, much
Sai: I mean,
yeah.
Joe: extremophiles
Earth. Yes,
yes. He would be, he would be a large multicellular, extremophiles,
geo: Yeah. There we go.
Sai: I mean, we, we have some of those on earth, even though they don’t strictly get called extremophiles. Some of these, little shrimp and
fish and stuff, they’ve found
Swimming around.
these deep sea
vents in near boiling water, or some of the crazy fish that live under the permanent ice in the Antarctic.
Joe: Yeah. So yeah, they have their chemistry, their biochemistry is radically different than ours to live at
extreme mm-hmm. Conditions.
So if you, if you had someone living in those conditions and come to Earth potentially, then they could take advantage of whatever changes in gravity, changes [00:28:00] in, oxygen content in the atmosphere. You could then go,
Sai: this would be the ultimate
superpower
right? In terms of cardiovascular performance for a superhero.
If they
could switch
chemistries,
Joe: Hmm.
Sai: if they could be, you know, sort
of glucose
burning, oxygen,
driven, when that’s available and all of a sudden, boom, I can switch into some kind of sulfur chemistry based metabolism if I’m
swimming near,
a deep sea vent.
That kind that would be an altering superhero.
They could get to some places.
Joe: Aquaman.
nick: Who?
Sai: Yeah. He, so he
might have to have some of those abilities.
nick: Was gonna say, isn’t it convenient that Superman looks just like humans on Earth,
Joe: earth.
nick: even though every other aspect of him is completely different, but that he looks just yeah,
Sai: so it’s, it was initially left as a convenience and I think at some moments
there were some.
attempts to recon it and say that the Kryptonian sent
out these
sort of little, you know, DNA
[00:29:00] experiment boxes to various
planets and hence humans.
Yeah.
Joe: RA Radio
Sai: Sort a, not hand sperm as much as Krypton sperm theory of human evolution.
Joe: an idea of Radio Genesis is that DNA from other places came and bombarded Earth and started everything. Yeah. or maybe
nick: he’s just able to
geo: Shape shift
shapeshift and look like, you know what I him more powers
Joe: we got
nick: All I,
Ma that’s a, that’s Martian
Joe: manhunt. outside of Cannon now. You’re like, he’s, you’re gonna get,
no, you’ve turned him into
John this is the first episode we’ve mentioned DC as much we
I know. and you’re gonna get us yelled at.
Sai: Hey, I’ll take credit for that arm DC note and that.
Joe: so I, you know, so I, I do have questions probably right in your wheelhouse. ’cause you didn’t, you didn’t talk a lot about what you study, but I, what about the superheroes with electric abilities that , are ascending surges through, you know, you know, black [00:30:00] Lightning.
geo: Yep.
Joe: And you know, who has these powers and the effect of that on the heart.
And you can, you can actually, I’m, I’m giving you an end to what you studied somewhat in, in looking at.
Sai: Yeah, I obsess
over electrical
currents that flow.
through the heart. These are incredible little processes that, you know, the heart’s 3 billion dominoes
And
it has to go
in just the
same sequence
every heartbeat.
And it somehow does that
for a couple of billion
beats
on the
trot in most of us.
right? That is mind blowing, to me. that’s what I study. And these
people Yeah. That are directing huge amounts of electricity.
through their body in any capacity,
whether they’re producing it like an electric.
yield Or, you know, they’re just conducting what’s
available. The first thing?
they have to evolve is amazing insulation
somewhere within their body. For one thing, we should be seeing these people eating nothing but sticks of butter,
the amount of myelin they would’ve to put
around their nerves alone.
nick: what? Big
Sai: They would just need to
Joe: Yeah, [00:31:00] tons. Yeah.
Sai: Bacon and butter
all the time.
Joe: And myelin is a, a lipic wrapping around axons to help the transfer of signal across your body
geo: that means a fat.
Joe: Oh, lipids. Yes.
Sai: Yeah. our
brain is 60% fat.
Joe: Yeah, That’s right.
A big, some people go, you got a big lump of fat on your head. That’s probably true.
Yes.
That’s a
compliment actually. You know,
Sai: Yeah.
nick: someone told me the other day, I have a smooth brain, Joe. Is that good?
I, I hate,
Joe: I don’t know
what that
nick: I hate to bring it to you.
it to you.
Sai: Oh,
that, that is an old school insult. That is early 20th century insult.
Joe: Yes.
But yeah, no, I thought it was just, it is interesting that you would have these surges, which then could cause arrhythmias and things like that in the heart,
Sai: at minimum,
they’re gonna have arrhythmias, Right,
they’re they’re basically defibrillating
themselves every time they do
this stuff, but past a certain voltage and amperage,
the bigger
problem is
[00:32:00] you’re just
gonna burn.
stuff.
Joe: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
nick: Mm-hmm.
Sai: Bags of water,
nick: Like the com.
Sai: we’ll conduct up to a
point, but this conductor will burn.
It’s not
like platinum or
gold Or something. that can withstand a lot more.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah. No. What you guys laughing about?
nick: Oh, about combustion. Oh. And just having our foot left here.
here. Just a foot, A foot.
Joe: The foot. Oh my gosh. Spontaneous combustion. Throwback to episode
nick: I did think of a reference to heart in a superhero type, although I was thinking of Iron Man. Mm-hmm. Yeah, because because
Iron
Man, of course, he’s not a superhero
in
a, I guess a traditional sense.
I don’t know if there is a traditional
sense, I guess.
Joe: in, you mean he doesn’t have, I mean, he, his biology hadn’t been altered,
geo: He’s basically a, a human, and then this happens. So how, how plausible is that scenario.
Joe: You mean artificial heart scenario [00:33:00] or
nick: keeping strep metal away from your heart scenario?
Joe: with the electromagnet,
nick: the whole, just the whole
just Ironman
Sai: whole bunch of pieces here that are interesting, right? So literally, let’s start with the shrapnel in the original version in this part is extremely implausible.
They said,
it had started to
Penetrate his heart,
And it was
stopped by the electromagnet
just short of going
through the wall and making him bleed out.
But if that’s the case,
his heart is contracting
with shrapnel in the muscle. It’s injured, it is constantly being
injured. That’s okay.
Let’s assume it
didn’t hit the heart. It stayed
out. We stop it there. plausible. That could work
but
he would need some
kind of chemical.
augmentation or biochemical or gene editing, augmentation of
his heart,
to
withstand the,
crazy workloads he’s putting himself through.
just controlling
the suit, just the speed of
information he’s processing and even with all the cushioning, there’s the crazy forces that he’s getting [00:34:00] subjected to
flying, being hit, getting knocked. The about.
Joe: Mm-hmm.
nick: Like the, the amount of padding he’d have to have in that to withstand the G-Force that he’s able to pull Yeah. Is revolutionary in and of
Joe: The other thing they don’t talk about is dissipating the heat load from the arc reactor that’s strapped to his chest. So to do all that work.
nick: I thought that was clean.
Joe: need to. Even any energy like, so energy conversion, usually it’s not a hundred percent. And so there’s waste involved and that waste is usually heat. And so to power something like that, the energy input and output, you would generate a good bit of heat either way.
So having that
Sai: Even if you assumed it was monstrously efficient, let’s assume some freakish, you know, violating thermodynamics, 99.9% efficiency. It’s still a bucket load of
heat
Joe: yeah.
Sai: like he’s gonna need to drag a server
farm worth of fans
behind him.
geo: he needs that extremophile
Joe: he [00:35:00] needs to become
an extremo fell. That’s right. And so
he would, he would need to have some genetic modifications so , he might be a superhero in other way. I always talk about that, that we have the genotype and phenotype and sometimes you don’t know you have a particular genotype because you’re not challenged.
geo: And then it gets, and then it turned
Sai: also with that much heat evolution, he would’ve to stop and refill coolant in his
suit, even if the fuel never ran
out. He’d have to stop every little bit and go, okay, I got, I need more liquid helium in here.
Joe: But he could have a adaptation. So in a world, you know, Tony Stark lives in a world where the X-Men live, so he could be a mutant and just not feel the heat load or is, has some sort of modifications in himself to actually process that. And
Sai: possibility is if his
nano technologies developed advanced enough, you could assume he’s just re-upping himself with these, some kind of
nanotech way that’s constantly repairing his body.
Just eat the damage and [00:36:00] be
absorbing and repairing on a molecular
Joe: And you’re getting to the Gray Go Theory if that gets out. , And the Gray Go Theory is the one where nano particles machines break free and try to take over the world.
Sai: But Michael Crichton Prey, I think what was it, Prey or different one?
Joe: It might have been prey. I, I think it
Sai: I think it was Prey. Yeah.
Joe: always think of blood music. That was one early one with Grey Guo theory. But yeah. , I’ll throw that in the show notes, or at least I hope and , better at the show notes. But the heart, you’re right, it’s iron Man is there.
Darth Vader also had a mechanical heart, his heart was replaced .
Sai: An interesting parallel we could study to understand what these particular characters would go through, which is, you know, what we have from,
medieval sword manuals and such about fighting an armor
and what they said and, and, and, you know, historical.
records of what people could and could
Not do.
One of the things they could not do is run any real distance. All
the things in, like the Lord of the Rings and all those movies where there’s [00:37:00] people in armor just bolting across a field. would go there, be tired and not even need to be fought. They would just collapse.
nick: And no one wants to see that
Joe: no one Right. What a sad
nick: just gonna slowly move to each
Sai: don’t even do anything
Joe: that’s
nick: get there. Don’t worry. That’s a long
Sai: and Tony would’ve a real problem in
his Hulk buster armor. ’cause the
scale of that thing
Joe: I think he’s moving. Weird. that’s all the energy to move all those mechanical parts. And that’s why they switched it to the nano suits, right?
Because then you would free up, that would be a natural kind of flowing, fluent kind of suit. But the Mark one that he made in the cave, if we going
was,
yeah, I mean it was, that was made out iron. I mean, that was right. I mean, that
was,
that was just a heavy, piece of equipment, you know?
Sai: And, and it would also be
very susceptible to certain very easy attacks.
You wouldn’t need to
do anything serious to Tony, just screw up one of the major
joints on [00:38:00] his suit and run away.
Joe: Yeah. That’s it. I mean, you gotta get close enough, but that’s, that’s it. I mean, that’s a,
geo: a
Sai: an SUV into, into Iron Man’s knee. You’re good. You just walk away.
nick: so I do have a question about an episode that we had done earlier this year, or maybe last year. I don’t remember time, but
Joe: is that time travel question?
nick: No, it’s a Doctor Who question.
Would having two
Joe: Yeah. two hearts
anything
nick: to better a body or No
Joe: Who has the Two Hearts and it came up in a Doctor Who episode earlier with the Tara, and I, I touched on it and I had some ideas, but Yeah, you’re, you know,
Sai: I mean, octopi have
three
hearts like it can, one
is
just distributed processing, right? You let each heart handle the load for a part of the body,
and therefore it doesn’t have to pump that heart.
And it would, it would
actually.
help explain some of the longevity that you see from the gala France,
the Time Lords, that if you had two hearts and neither one is actually red lining as [00:39:00] much at a given moment, you’re gonna actually extend your lifespan.
You’re gonna go tortoise mode.
Joe: Yeah. Interesting.
Sai: Uh,
nick: Yeah.
So if I go ahead and crack my chest open to put another heart in, I can
live
Joe: my gosh.
Sai: I would not necessarily recommend
nick: that’s right. After you
get
Joe: The Rabbit Hole of Research is not recommending you add a second heart a, there’s some question of where we
nick: are there animals with
Sai: Yeah. And I’ll put it this way,
Joe: not supposed said the octopus has three hearts, right?
Yep. So
yeah.
nick: Okay.
Sai: I mean, I, I, I’ll put it
This way,
right?
There’s another
game we could play here and I’ll talk about that ’cause it’s actually a therapeutic technology
called an LVAD or lift
ventricular assist,
device.
but in terms of adding a second
heart, we do do it in certain
patients, right?
There’s, that’s the LVAD thing
Where if their heart is so badly,
beat up,
but they need to.
wait to get a transplant. It’s gonna take some time. But we don’t think they could survive that window
Then they.
get this LVAD device and
conventionally it’s a larger pump, [00:40:00] it lives outside the body. You literally plum tubing from the pump
into the
left ventricle of the heart, which is the, the
side that pumps to the whole body handles the high load so That
the blood,
that goes into the left ventricle, this pump is pulling it and then pushing it back out
where it needs to go.
And that’s the other end of this pump.
geo: Wow.
Sai: that’s
the smallest,
we’ve able to, we’ve been able to make
it until very recently
There is a smaller version of it that is now being implanted in
patients undergoing heart
attack and treatment for that. And the
reason there is also interesting,
a Heart.
attack is when a small piece of the heart dies and basically,
turns into scar.
And
something funny is,
these happens. I mean, the funny thing is, they happen, first of all, when blood flow
to a region of the heart is stopped or inadequate and it’s
working without supply.
it dies.
But the funny thing is when
we restore
flow we don’t fully understand how
but the damage gets worse.
A
larger chunk around
this region dies.[00:41:00]
It’s called reperfusion injury. And One solution that looks
Interesting is there’s a
way of implanting a tiny pump inside there. A The
big blood vessel coming out of the left
side of the heart. That
sends a little snorkel
into the heart sucks the blood out
and ejects it. So in that vulnerable time, when you’re restoring flow to that piece of the heart,
if you unload the heart.
don’t make it work.
So,
hard in that vulnerable
moment, it seems to reduce the damage. So that’s the best augmentation we’ve been
able to do.
We could build a heart good enough that it would be worth adding to somebody’s chest, we’d already be doing it.
We just don’t have that kind of technology
Joe: right. Yeah. Nick,
Oh,
nick: don’t do it. Don’t
Joe: do it. Nick.
nick: Why? It sounds fun. Like he’s
Joe: gonna get dog No, wait a, wait a couple of centuries
Sai: for the technology to
Joe: A couple centuries.
nick: I’ll wait like a decade. All right, let’s time do time travel maybe.
travel Now.
Joe: We’re close to some holiday season here. The holiday season.
nick: I don’t know what you’re
Joe: Okay.
I wanna ask about the Grinch whose heart [00:42:00] grew two sizes.
Sai: Cardiomyopathy. Yeah. You would’ve been dead in a very brief window after that.
Joe: So he had a very small heart, which, you know, probably struggling to live. And,
Sai: Yeah.
Joe: and
Sai: Three sizes, wasn’t it?
Joe: three, was it three or two? Two or three sizes, yeah. It was two, it was two sizes
too. It was two sizes too small and then it grew three sizes to go larger than, yeah. It was one size larger than after he got filled with the spirit, the Christmas spirit
nick: just
Sai: I mean, that actually sounds like worse than hypertrophic. It’s what’s called dilated cardiomyopathy, where the heart has gone big and baggy and is struggling to pump anything
Joe: Yeah. He seemed
Sai: Those are the people who usually end up needing the LVAD. That’s what we should have seen. The Grinch with an LVAD hanging out.
geo: Wow.
Joe: the Who, people taking care of him. They do the surgery and then he is very thankful. That’s the real,
nick: no.
Then he goes back to being grumpy again.
Joe: Maybe that’s why he
Sai: No, but then he Can’t
do anything about it. [00:43:00] ’cause it’s hard to move around with an LVAD hanging out of your chest and a battery pack on your back.
Joe: And that maybe that’s why he was grumpy at the beginning. He had this little heart. He, you know, he used deprived of oxygen. He is just, you know, just,
nick: is that why he’s green?
Joe: Maybe not.
geo: Maybe
nick: that is
why he is green
Or would
Joe: Wouldn’t you be blue? I think yeah, you’d be blue. Yeah.
So
nick: I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. Yeah.
So why do you think we are so romantic about the heart?
Like we have made
Sai: Oh, that’s a great question. Right. It’s all over poetry
literature. It’s everywhere. We associated with emotion.
I think it’s one where we are led to think that way because the heart is one of the places we
feel it.
nick: Mm-hmm.
geo: Mm-hmm.
Sai: When you have emotion. You are having two things happening. One is your
autonomic nervous system, you get excited. There’s, this is the nervous system that connects the base of
your Brain involuntarily to your heart. So that,
it can adapt.
so the heart’s, I’m
gonna back up a little [00:44:00] bit
’cause I like the science here,
and I think the heart’s a cool little machine,
right?
This thing You can pull it outta the body.
It doesn’t.
need the brain.
to tell it what to do. It’ll keep on pumping. It’s self-sufficient. and It’s self
adapting. You.
In
transplant patients, we don’t know how to reconnect the nerves to their
heart. Their hearts. The new heart that the transplant patient gets.
is
beating away.
We
Think mostly without any input from the nerves in their body. but it will still adapt. when they get, when They start moving. The heart rate will go up. When they sit
down,
and really chill and you know, start dozing off, their heart rate will drop.
All of these things are
happening because
the heart
is
tuned by, the amount of blood getting into it. on a given beat.
Joe: Yeah.
Sai: It just has a simple thing of whatever comes in, I’m gonna pump it. out. And that is the mechanism by which it adapts. On top of this, we
all have another layer of control. actually, two more layers of control.
There’s chemicals coming in through the blood. You get excited.
If you
get really [00:45:00] excited
Or scared you might have
felt this bitter taste in your mouth. You’re literally, tasting the
effects of a
huge adrenaline jolt. That would also be a Moment where you’d feel it in your
Heart And so people talk about,
the
bitter taste of defeat. Yeah. They’re tasting not Just
Incidental,
and
the same way they’re feeling their heart,
respond
to their emotional,
tones because
of both these autonomic nerves coming
in and,
you know, electrically stimulating, or electrochemically stimulating it,
and.
the chemistry in the blood.
so when we feel emotion, we feel our heart do things. So I think we associate it with where the emotion is happening.
Joe: Interesting.
Yeah. And that it probably, I want to
maybe
think about it, the heart might have been the first organ we actually knew what it, what, what its function was in, in terms of biology.
Sai: There is a brilliant book on this by a guy named Charles Singer.
It’s called A Short history of Anatomy and Physiology from the Greeks to Harvey.
And The title’s a misleading title in
that it starts way before the [00:46:00] Greeks even. He talks about cave
paintings from
35 to 50,000 years ago
Where there
are
these diagrams of
bison and deer and
And there’s precise diagrams from different perspectives.
marking with an X where the
Heart
is. Because that’s how you’re gonna chuck a spear in the Right.
spot and get dinner instead of get trampled.
So people started studying the heart
very Early just to get food and
not die. And.
then they started studying human hearts
as well. And there were these
scientists back
In ancient Egypt that were
cracking open Chicken eggs at various.
points of development
figuring out
how the heart develops from embryo to you know,
Full
Chicken.
Joe: Yeah. No,
Sai: So yeah. we’ve been studying the heart a lot,
but there have also
been some silly ideas. ’cause if you read
William Harvey’s book,
the first chapter
is Comedy Gold. Just Comedy Gold. He
Talks about all the competing ideas of what people thought the heart might be doing in
certain parts.
of the world. They thought it was a chilling system for the blood, [00:47:00] which needed a
Refrigeration unit. They thought it was a supplemental
lung, that it could do extra breathing when your lungs weren’t enough. There were some hilariously
bad ideas around too.
Joe: trying to explain superheroes, right? I mean, if , you’re flaming on, if you’re running at super speed, you need to have, your heart might take on some other function chemically and, and do it.
nick: Alright, so where did the shape like that everyone, the iconic heart shape come from then?
It’s nothing like the actual heart.
Joe: Do
nick: you have that
information too?
Joe: The actual, I, I
Sai: I happen to not know this one.
nick: guys, come on. This is why I’m doing this episode.
Joe: the, the, I
nick: I think we have to do some more
Joe: know we have to go and
nick: Because it looks nothing like it. And also another question. Why do people misremember where the heart is on a human? Because
Sai: Wait, ask. say
that again, sorry.
nick: when, you know, we we’re, we’re here in America and people say, put your hand over your heart for the Pledge of
Sai: Oh yeah. Everybody
puts their hand on their
[00:48:00] lung immediately,
nick: But
that’s not where the heart is. Like
Sai: No,
nick: why
Sai: it’s it’s down
here.
nick: It
Joe: Yeah.
Sai: But it would look, it, it,
I mean, Conventionally
From a cultural perspective.
it would look like you have
indigestion,
rather than you’re, you know, showing respect. ’cause we associate the pectoral muscle because
that is sort of where you’re gonna feel the thump of the heartbeat. I think people disassociate that spot,
But the heart is,
first of all.
it’s, it’s a cool little thing. It’s hanging
like
in a sling inside the chest
So it can beat freely and it’s hanging, pointing slightly forward. And
to your left.
so it’s kind of diagonally sticking out, just
under your pectoral muscle
almost so if you wanted to really put your hand.
on.
your heart.
yeah, it would look like, you know, get me some intestine now, please.
Joe: Yeah. Interesting. I’m looking this up because this is a, a fun thing and a heart shape. It, it does have a rich history going back into the middle Ages, even before that and looking at it. But some of it’s just, it’s [00:49:00] fun. It’s based on plants.
, in ancient times, based off the seed of the Silphium plant. And it was a , herbal contraceptive and stylized depictions of features of the human female body, such as breast, buttocks the public pubic mound. Was the shape that, that stylized into the shape of the heart
so very botanical, botanical and female in nature. Then it got tethered to romantic love in about 1250s.
geo: I can see how, if you were just imagining you were, you had never seen a heart and you were just imagining, I don’t know, like the two sides, I think maybe you just imagine that’s what it looked like.
like.
Joe: Lot of it is like, it, it was really depicting foliage. That’s what, but then it got. Entangled into, , love .
nick: Sorry, I don’t know if that took us down
a weird rabbit
Sai: There’s also some conventions
of art history.
thing going
on here
Joe: Yeah. No, for sure.
Sai: because that symbol has [00:50:00] been
depicted in sort of Greek VAEs and
stuff.
And
the Greeks definitely had a very stylized way of
showing humans and different
geo: Mm-hmm.
Joe: Yeah. But you’re right. It, it is not the heart, the actual physical heart doesn’t look like the symbol.
Yeah.
As
Sai: and.
when I say Greeks, I really should be saying the Mediterranean peoples ’cause. This is something I’ve been st I I’m a bit of a history nut on the side, just for fun. And I’ve been learning about how much of what we think of as the Greek and Roman mitts
are really Mediterranean myths. The other half came from North Africa
nick: Oh, wow. Exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sai: people, boats have been going back and
forth for a long time along with stories.
nick: Oh gosh, I just, I just read something where someone said like they were correcting the terminology and it was like, it made no sense what we say. Where we just get used to saying, we label something and it’s totally inaccurate.
But because we’ve said it so much, that’s what we,
Sai: Of the heart being on the left side, there’s a fine [00:51:00] example of that in the word we use in a very different way. That just means left sinister. Dexter and sinister were right and left, like right and left-handed.
And left-handed people were
considered so evil. The word sinister has
come to mean what it means.
Joe: Yeah. Wow.
geo: Wow.
nick: I mean, I get it. You don’t like the left-handed people.
Wow.
Joe: In storytelling you have the removed heart stories or missing heart, and so you see that a number of times Davy Jones and the Pirates of the
Sai: There’s that. Yeah. That even the trope of the soul in or, preserved
heart. Yeah. It goes back. There’s the,
Joe: Yep, yep. Fairytales did the Telltale Heart kind of of guilt and things like that.
Sai: In Arabian folk tales, there’s a wizard always whose
heart is in a box over
the seas, over the seven seas.
Joe: yep. You have the, it was a Norwegian fairytale, the giant with no heart in his body, and that was the hardest hidden to avoid death. That, so that story [00:52:00] comes up a lot in fairytales where you have it.
So I think that’s really, ’cause then , how does one live without this crucial pump in their chest? so I’m gonna take this out and. It. And then when you put it in a box and , you’re now immortal, this gets to the heart in a box isn’t necessarily beating. And so now you’re preserving the beats and you’ve now connected your physiology in some way that you are, , you’re maintaining life or , like you’re, some sort of magical handwavium rock is put in its place.
nick: I just said necromancy. I didn’t say a rock.
Joe: you know, but I, I thought that was kind, you always wanna lick a rock to get superpower. So I’m just going, I’m just you know,
nick: I want them. It’s not,
Joe: I thought that was another way , in the heart and it’s of, , its power. , and that tether even then to longevity , was at some kind of [00:53:00] fundamental level. Understood that this was,
Sai: back to sort of
paleolithic
practices of things like, you know, eating the hearts of enemies.
Joe: Mm-hmm.
Sai: There was
definitely an association.
between the heart
and somebody’s life force. Somebody
sort
of, even
psychological qualities like courage and their sort of force of character and things like this were considered to rec reside in the heart.
And
Joe: yep. Yeah. The
Sai: I think it started with
Hunters eating the
hearts of animals because they’re rich
in minerals. It’s very good for your body. Anybody who’s from the tropics knows if you’re sick, somebody’s gonna give you a bowl of chicken, heart
soup, and it will
Actually treat you well.
But I think they extended that to the level of saying, okay, now we’ve defeated. our enemies. We Wanna consume their power
We need their hearts.
Joe: yes.
And it’s one of the most, obvious recognizable organs, I think, in the human body , maybe besides intestines,
Sai: But also one of the safer ones to
Joe: and the safer ones eat.
That’s right. Exactly. You, you can actually probably [00:54:00] pull it out, eat it,
Sai: yeah, not that I recommend eating human hearts.
Joe: No, do, do not.
Sai: they, should be,
nick: There’s a lot of with the
a lot of disclaimers on this.
Joe: Lot of disclaimers of this episode. Yes. Do not,
geo: do,
Joe: don’t do it.
Sai: I mean, okay, I’ll say from meat animals, it is a delicious cut. If you’ve
eaten you cow Heart or
sheep Heart, it’s delicious.
nick: I mean, I prefer the brain to be honest,
Joe: Oh boy.
nick: What? You don’t like head cheese?
Joe: No.
geo: Oh, boy.
Sai: Head Cheese is not brain, mostly head Cheese,
is just cabeza. It’s the outer part of the head, but brain itself is also tasty. But again, you wanna source it,
right?
nick: gotta do the mixture of the two. You gotta nix
Sai: oh, I, there’s brain. Oh,
Okay. So I, didn’t realize I was
eating brains there as
nick: this has gone down a really
Joe: We’re in some other rabbit hole.
Rabbit. This is a zombie episode here. I mean, we’re, we’re getting some,
geo: I’m already,
nick: already halfway there.
Joe: I was gonna say as a history, you can correct, but the Egypt, the Egyptians, when they mummified, [00:55:00] they, the heart was preserved, but the brain wasn’t like, they didn’t actually, typically, , they, the brain had no function really.
Sai: There, there’s another argument. that the chemistry Is
easier.
to preserve a heart than to
preserve a
60% fat based brain.
Joe: , oh, they didn’t have
they didn’t have,
they didn’t have glutaraldehyde and osmium tetra oxide, obviously, because, , from electron microscopists, the brain is much easier to preserve. But yeah yeah,
Sai: Yeah. In fact, with that stuff,
the Heart.
is the harder target.
’cause I have to cocktail the GL with p
param so it fixes
Joe: And, and
Sai: quickly.
Joe: A little behind occur in aldehydes will cross link proteins inside of cells and then osmium tetra oxide, which I mentioned actually fixes lipids. So unsaturated, double bonds, lipids, and so in, in the heart, the brain has a lot more lipid, and that’s, so the osmium will fix that and it’s easier to make sections and take high resolution images, whereas the heart [00:56:00] has less lipid content and
Sai: the heart is so dense with protein. The fixative will hit the surface of your chunk
of tissue, fix it,
Joe: Yeah.
Sai: And then it will create So many crosslinks. it can’t go further and it gets traffic lot jammed
on the outside.
Joe: Yeah. So it’s hard to actually fix the tissue reliably and, and to process it. So really from that point of view, the brain is easier, but yes.
And the, the Egyptians probably didn’t have, I don’t know what they had. I mean, maybe they had alde hides in some way, but, you
Sai: I, I think, yeah, they, I think they had access to at least some impure
Alde
heights. It’s pretty Easy Byproduct of a basic distillation.
And we know they were making beer.
The Egyptians made a lot of beer.
Joe: That’s right. That’s
Sai: So somebody put
some of it in a thing and.
Joe: Yeah. And alcohol’s a a good fixative. Alcohol’s a good fixative. So they could’ve used that. Yeah. So it, there is lots of ways, whereas Osmium might’ve been what they didn’t have.
So the
Sai: Yeah.
Joe: be very difficult. Yes. There we go. Yeah. And Osmium is a mined mineral. So you actually, [00:57:00] it’s mind and extracted.
geo: not
nick: mindd. Mindd
Joe: Mind as in you know, diggers like Minecraft, which is like,
geo: Yeah. No, I was think mine.
nick: Minecraft. You are digging.
Joe: I always thought Minecraft was like mind.
’cause you are using your mind to craft
nick: that’s MIND. I know.
Joe: but I didn’t, I didn’t see the word spelled out for some time. So I always start, Minecraft was like, oh, the kid’s I wanna play some mind. Oh yeah, go. That’s great for your mind. And it’s no,
Sai: Yeah, the the, the full
version is, you know, through
telepathic
Joe: That’s exactly right.
I’m like, this is gonna be cool. You’re learning some, you know, you’re using your mind, but yeah.
no,
nick: they just want to dig.
geo: There’s
Joe: osmium in Minecraft.
nick: Sure. I don’t know.
We’ll take your word for it.
Joe: I don’t know.
nick: I, guess you played more than me. I don’t know.
Joe: I was just throwing it out there. I don’t, you know
how many
nick: like in that little box, like
Joe: Yes. It’s in a little box. Yeah, so we’ve covered some ground
nick: You never actually went through your list.
Joe: Yeah, I mean, we, we did, [00:58:00] we
went through the list.
We went through the list without going through the list because I just had the hearts and fiction and different motifs. We see extra multiple hearts. Cover Dr. Who missing or removed hearts. I kind of scooped that one up. Mechanical artificial hearts. We touched on that.
The symbolically warped heart. We, talked about the villain and haunted gothic hearts. We probably didn’t touch on that one as much mythic or cosmic hearts, and that had hearts of as power
Sai: And the heart is also a symbol of good or evil, right?
You have the sort of golden heart of somebody who’s good and the dark heart of,
you know, it’s a,
Joe: had that as, as a, the hearts of power.
That’d be like Care Bears or Captain Planet. If you’re
old
nick: didn’t Sailor Moon also have a heart?
Joe: Heart, yeah. Symbol or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I think I
nick: think I sent it to you. Yeah.
Joe: to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sai: And on the other side they can picture Melville’s, you know, Ahab
stabbing at the whale, screaming about
his, you know, from the black heart of hell, stab at
Joe: that’s a big, that’s a big heart there in that whale,
Sai: yeah,[00:59:00]
but also that’s a deep target. He’d need to be very good with that harpoon to
get anywhere near that thing.
Joe: He went crazy at the end. I think he was just going out
against better judgment, , he’s out there doing it, but I, I maybe you notice reference it came up. I was, especially the hearts, his power and culture, Kingdom Hearts as a video game. I
nick: love that game.
Joe: the hearts are tangible.
They could be stolen or they
nick: they, you, you, get the heartless and Yeah.
It, I mean it’s a super convoluted storyline. I don’t recommend anyone trying to go through it and understanding it,
Joe: but
nick: it was fun. I think I remember that being fun.
Joe: done.
nick: That
Sai: I still don’t know what
genre of game this is. Is this an RPG is this?
a
puzzle?
nick: kingdom Hearts is a final fantasy crossover with Disney.
Sai: Oh wow. Oh wow.
Okay.
nick: That
is the convoluted part.
And then the storyline, you get [01:00:00] people from Final Fantasy Games and Disney, and then you get an original character, which is Sora. And you can just get lost in lore and then still don’t know what’s going
on,
on
Sai: In my brain that turned into yeah, we have some bourbon in this glass and we’re gonna add heavy cream.
nick: Yeah. Yeah.
Sai: No, please
don’t
Joe: do it.
nick: It
like, it’s cool to see the worlds that they go to, but there’s so much filler of trash that it’s so hard to get through. All of it
Joe: you can trade hearts. So that’s,
nick: no, you can’t trade hards. What are you
Joe: about or steal hearts?
nick: I mean, the, there’s a group that does that. Yes,
but not you,
Joe: you don’t do it. All right. So
nick: No, you’re, you’re, you’re, working with Disney and,
Joe: okay. I don’t know who you’re working with.
nick: Mickey
Joe: I didn’t play this game. The Mickey Mouse isn’t on a black market stealing hearts.
nick: No, but he’s, he, he’s in his
he’s
a dark hood at, I don’t know.
Joe: Yeah. I
think Mickey’s in a dark hood.
nick: he, he, he goes through his emo phase
Joe: There you go.
nick: Had no idea.
Joe: I had no idea. Yeah, no. And then, yeah, that was, those [01:01:00] were in there. That’s all I had. And gothic hearts vampires, but we did the Telltale Heart.
Sai: I have one more piece. I’ll add healing factors when it comes to
Joe: healing factor. Yeah.
Sai: Yeah.
Joe: Mm-hmm.
Because
Sai: when we run our heart ragged,
it
has to heal It literally takes damage.
right?
This is,
like athletes
will actually undergo remodeling of
their, heart. So when somebody starts running more and more, their heart will
get bigger and a little bit beefier and whatnot. But the
way That
happens is it is literally getting injured
on a subcellular scale here and there little tears, things are breaking and it releases chemical signals that brings in machinery to build more. And that’s how it’s getting bigger. So recovery times are super essential.
This is something that either the superheroes would’ve to be taking breaks after every big exertion,
Joe: Yeah.
Sai: they’ve all got a little bit of a healing factor
through one means or another.
Whether Wolverine style built in or you know, just
injecting something that treats stuff.
Joe: that’s like , all [01:02:00] their muscles though. That’s, every muscle, like if you’re the Hulk throwing cars or whatever, you’re getting a bunch of micro tears and you have to then recover , so the heart is just another example.
And , you had the real world example of athlete. When you weightlift, that’s what you’re doing. You’re actually causing micro tears and then your body rebuilds stronger and build more muscle. So it is it, and you’re right, if you go to that next extreme level, the athlete, , professional athlete, then you go beyond that to superhero.
You’re right that, and that’s that point that I think there’s a lot of characters in the fiction world that appear not to have super, powers in some way. , but I think that maybe they do, maybe they have some other innate powers. And this weren’t test genetically
they
Sai: the ones that.
Joe: right?
Sai: The ones that fly around.
in space and spend extended
times there. Our hearts don’t like
absence of gravity.
Look at what happens to people that come back from the ISS.
They have to, they have some, you know, remodeling of their
hearts that have to [01:03:00] reverse.
Joe: also have lack of oxygen. There’s a whole bunch of problems flying around in space. I
geo: when it gets really
Sai: Here’s a simple
thing, right? Let’s assume they trap
nick: and no
one can hear
Sai: bubble of gas around them,
Joe: Yes.
Sai: but if they do that, do
they Know how far they’re going. to know how much air to
pack?
some point does it get crazy?
Joe: Yeah. Yeah.
Sai: And also,
Joe: yeah.
geo: Exing
Sai: if you’re exerting inside
the Bubble. man, you better bring some nose clips or something.
It’s gonna re
Joe: Yeah. No, I, that’s one of the things, I think we’ve touched on a few episodes with the force field model that , you start hand waving ’em away, these issues with the forest field, but then no one takes, how do you get oxygen transferred?
How do you scrub the air in there? You just fill it with CO2 and die. You will start to have other problems that you can’t just wave away. With that simple, we’ll put a force fuel around ’em and then they can do whatever. And it’s no, they, you really can’t. You’re, you’re in trouble.
Sai: In the heat evolution, right? You’re
driving yourself to do
all these
things, fly fast, lift stuff.
Joe: Yeah,
Sai: I mean,
this came up, Randall Monroe [01:04:00] did a beautiful video on could you
use a Submarine.
as a spaceship? These things are built to be airtight. Could you just take one to space and would it work? And what he worked out was, no, it
Would absorb so much.
heat. It would cook the insides in no time. And every spacecraft we build, we build
half of it to deal with the amount of
heat that they’re dealing with.
nick: Yeah.
Joe: Yep. Yeah. Cool.
nick: Were you gonna say something there? Yeah.
so I, I did forget for a second, but when your heart tears and rebuilds, does it tear every time that you’re doing that
or no.
Sai: It is tearing right now. It
sounds,
scary.
but it’s.
not. It’s just the
more we exert, the more these micro tears happen.
But the fact that it’s,
beating right now means there are some tears happening. And like I’m talking about tiny, if there’s a cell, there’s a little puncture in the cell membrane. There’s
a whole
bunch of things.
that
proteins and stuff that come out and
start [01:05:00] patching it.
It’s just constant. It’s like the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s always being painted.
It’s always being torn, always being repaired.
Sometimes the tempo is more.
Joe: Hmm.
That’s why working out and things, it’s helpful. Yeah.
nick: Yeah. I just didn’t know if like, all right, I did this exercise really hard today, but I’m gonna do it again two days from now, is it still gonna rip and everything? Or tear? Not rip. Tear. That’s why I was like, oh, is it just like, all right, that’s, it’s new norm now.
right?
Joe: This is it.
Sai: so that’s where a lot of
Exercise, physiology science gets into is how do you program your workouts and
recovery, periods, in what ways to achieve desired target performance for whatever you’re trying to do. And that’s different if you’re trying to say, you know, be a
power.
lifter versus a
distance Runner. and whatnot.
But that’s where a lot of this effort goes into is in various tissues, not just the heart
muscles. Your nerves are getting a little bit [01:06:00] beat up and have to
recover. That’s where if you play like a really hard tense game of something like basketball. You’re
not gonna be able to play another one of those.
immediately after that.
It’s not even if your muscles magically recovered, you won’t.
have the reflexes.
nick: Oh yeah, I totally get that. With playing Dark Soul.
Sai: Actually, I was gonna say video games. I have frayed my nerves while leaving my muscles untouched. Just overdoing it with video games.
nick: So often rate,
Joe: your anxiety, everything. You, you get it?
Sai: Oh. yeah.
nick: I can’t wait for the new resin evil. My heart’s gonna tear
Joe: Yeah. There, it’s,
nick: tear
Joe: right
now. Cool. All right. We probably, we, we can, we’ve come to the end of the beats.
nick: what would be your ideal superhero? Heart?
Sai: My absolute
ideal Superhero. Heart
Is something that
this is getting into full.
on handwavium, but that’s the
easiest out is
saying that’s a trans dimensional heart. [01:07:00] It’s doing
all of its energetic business in another dimension where it’s got huge amounts of space to disperse with energy, like heat cleanup, chemistry, and then it’s just this
tiny Little chunk,
of whatever here, and it does
everything
I want.
geo: That’s,
nick: there you go. There you go.
Sai: It’s tTARDIStar heart. That’s what I want.
Joe: no, that’s always my, my bailout is, is the dimensional kind of dumping ground.
Sai: I mean, it’s the same game we play in image analysis. If you have a problem here, just create an extra dimension and dump
Joe: There’s dump it in there. Yeah. Yeah. There’s no free lunches in physics
unless you,
nick: I hate hate and all those, all those beings in that other dimensions oh
Joe: but that, that was the premise, just a, a throwback about this kind of idea. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Mov. Where they went and they realized that energy was being, they, oh, we got free energy, but really they were taking it from this other [01:08:00] dimension that was gonna go supernova , kind of big buying theory.
And it was like, hold on, something’s taken from us now. Like it’s this whole little, you know, kind of a, a game. Yeah. It’s fun. It’s a good a, a good book. One of, one of Asmo, one of my favorite Asimov’s books. The Gods themselves. But yeah, there you go. Multidimensional, always energy dumps.
nick: Always good.
geo: Cool.
Joe: All right, is that any last thoughts, words
nick: you wanna, do you have any things coming up? Anything you wanna plug?
Sai: I mean, other than some Research
papers,
from my lab,
nick: do
Sai: Yeah, I mean uh, we’re I’m trying to remember what just got but we actually something exciting. We just speaking of our hearts, we worked out
what
happens.
in
Patients with
COVID that started getting new cardiac?
arrhythmias because of
that
One of my former students.
was able to reproduce that effect in a mouse and figure out that it’s
literally your own
immune system
was doing the dirty work there. You didn’t even, like, when we looked at samples from patients in a [01:09:00] previous study, their hearts
showed
no sign
of the virus,
having made it there. In
some, of these,
patients the ones
with
myocarditis,
yeah, there’s virus in those hearts, but the ones with just arrhythmias,
it was just
spike protein
from the virus.
But that’s like a red flag to the
immune System. that says There’s
a foreign thing here
and the immune system
goes after it
and shreds the heart.
and we figured out exactly.
How
that happens and you know how that leads to AFib.
So that, that’s one good thing that’s coming out soon Now.
Joe: Very cool. Yeah. We’ll put a link, to your web, your labs webpage. It’s got cool stuff on there and Yeah. Should check out with side us it really, you know, a bio engineer is what I, I like to call him. That’s a, yeah, so a tinker.
nick: Thank you so much for being here with us today.
geo: We
Joe: gotta have
Sai: Thank you This was so much fun.
geo: Yeah,
Joe: yeah, a fan. So s always comments on episodes and things like that on LinkedIn, which is a professional page, but he is that’s where he hangs out.
nick: Wait, we have a LinkedIn.
Joe: No, we, the [01:10:00] podcast doesn’t have a LinkedIn. Maybe we should
geo: yeah. You didn’t know. that’s right.
nick: I wouldn’t have been surprised with Joe.
Joe: No. Maybe,
maybe it needs a LinkedIn page. I don’t know. We’ll see. But yeah, no,
Sai: Shit. I think that’s absolutely a great forum on which
To connect with people. who’d listen to this kind of thing.
nick: a good
point.
Joe: So maybe I’ll break off from my own page, my own fandom. But
Sai: because I don’t know there, There’s,
a lot of us.
geeks in academia.
Joe: There are no, yeah, we’ve, I mean, this season we’ve had, a ton of great guests from academia come in and yeah, hopefully you’ll join us again because I think Yeah.
Sai: Yeah.
Joe: you’re you.
I, I know you, you like heart and thinking about this episode, but , you’re also, we’ve had conversations over drinks at the bar at a conference about just comic book stuff. So not even science, it’s just,, did you read, this new indie comic? Did you read this one? And yeah, so that’s it was just fun.
So I thought, yeah, that’s what we want people to have fun with science, be curious,
Sai: I can’t believe I made it to the end of the [01:11:00] episode and I didn’t bring up Batman. I feel like I
have
betrayed 6-year-old me badly.
nick: Oh no.
Joe: There it is. All right. So you got, so
nick: Maybe we’ll have to do a
Joe: We gotta do another, a
nick: Batman, episode
Joe: see
Sai: Absolutely.
Joe: what SI’s setting up. He’s like plugging for a new you know, you know what? I didn’t get to talk about my favoritest superhero ever, so you gotta have me back.
Cool. All right. I think we’re gonna leave it there and keep you hanging on the seat for. The heart of Batman episode.
nick: mean hanging on the ledge?
Joe: hanging on the ledge,
nick: Yeah. ’cause he’s always,
Sai: Off the gargoyle.
nick: yeah,
Joe: off the
nick: always something else. He’s never on his seat. Come on
He could be in his Batmobile
No, he’s just copter. Or the bat wing or the constantly.
Joe: He’s got a bunch of, he’s got a bunch of vehicles he can sit on. All right,
Sai: Yeah.
Joe: on that note, you have me, Joe.
you got Nick. got Nick, we’ve got Georgia, and
nick: and [01:12:00] we went down some.
some.
Joe: we love y’all. Stay curious. Be safe. Cheers.
