Unexplainable takes listeners right up to the edge of what we know ... and then keeps right on going. This Vox podcast explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown. New episodes every Wednesday.
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Heber. I've admired his work for years, and his book grapples with a question I have also been fascinated with. Can we think of the Earth itself as a living entity? It's probably one of the most ancient beliefs that we know of in human culture and there's so many different religions and cultures and mythologies around the world that have written or spoken about the world, the planet, Earth being alive in some sense. One of the most famous versions of this idea, at least in modern western spaces, is called the Gaia hypothesis. It was developed in the 19 sixties seventies, a couple of scientists, one was named James Lovelock, other Lynn Margolis, they basically said, look how interconnected everything on earth is. The water cycle, volcanoes, the ocean, the atmosphere. They all play into one another. So the scientists suggested that all of this ended up to a self sustaining system. Earth didn't just have life on it. It was alive. The guy hypothesis was a roundly criticized it was even ridiculed. And for many decades, the guy hypothesis was considered kind of this fringe sort of woo woo idea that wasn't completely ludicrous, but it certainly wasn't rigorous science. And many scientists remain very opposed to the idea that an ecosystem could be considered live or that a planet could be considered live. To this day, biologists don't have a perfect definition of life, but still, Gaia did not fit in with the conventional ideas that were out there. What a living thing is is is quite a specific thing, and it is typically thought of as an organism that is a product of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. And, you know, reproduction, genetic inheritance, natural selection. These are all fundamental properties of life. They're defining qualities of life and Earth as a planet does not
The wolves saw me move, and and that startled them. And they stopped, turned around, and ran away. And then I felt kind of foolish because, actually, they were afraid of me. And that was the last time, that he ever packed a gun. He actually thought that it would be more dangerous just to have a gun on him as he was hiking throughout the island than to just walk around in the wild with Timberwolves around him. So Dave, his eyes are open for the first time Yeah. As to actually these these, nightmare creatures. Right. Are more complicated than it might actually seem. Yeah. Definitely. And also in that moment, he realized that he made a mistake. He's a scientist. Yeah. And so he regretted the instinct to be, a hunter. I think in that moment, he made, he realized that he made a mistake, and Dave's a guy that owns up to his mistakes and he's like, it's okay. If you correct him, it'll be alright. But later on, he would understand that there are some mistakes that no matter how hard you try, you can't correct. Right. Right. And so Dave Meach, this true believer, this man who has his eyes open now for the first time really to what wolves might really be. He's confronting this mistake that brings us directly to this book that's been sitting on this desk. So this book titled again, The Wolf, originally published 1970. This, Bradley, is the text that Dave Mech brought down from this mountain top. And it was where and how the alpha wolf concept took off. Like, this is where we trace it to. Yes. Yeah. Research. Totally. I mean, even at the start of the, the national the recent national championship game between Michigan and University of Washington, Yeah, they were talking about how Jim Harbaugh likes to play videos of, of predators hunting to his team to get him fired up and he says the most, like, lethal
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Patients who want to undergo the diagnostic surgery to confirm their symptomatic state. People do not jump into the surgery. They often push it off for years. But, also, there's a chance of a false negative here. So, like, a situation where a surgeon goes in and says, I don't know. Like, I don't see the right kind of lesions. There's no endometriosis here, even when there actually is endometriosis there. And because Christine and Peter's study sizes have been fairly small, one false negative could really mess things up. You need to have a situation where the surgeon that is doing the evaluation is highly competent at saying, yes, there's endometriosis, or no, there's no endometriosis. So they are taking their time, kinda checking their work, confirming that this diagnostic test works. But even then, their work won't be done. Christine says that figuring out endometriosis' signature pattern could actually help with more than just diagnosis. Because there's a lack of effective and tolerable treatments for patients with endometriosis. One of the treatments out there is the pill, which helps some people, but not everyone. Doctors can also try to remove endometriosis lesions by going in to surgically burn them or cut them. And that does sometimes help, but the effects don't always last. In our study, we have people who have had 2 surgeries, 4 surgeries, 6 surgeries, 8 surgeries, 12 surgeries, 20 surgeries. It can go on and on for some people. Some people get hysterectomies, but even that doesn't always help. The reason we don't have good treatments for this disease is that we don't understand the what I'm gonna call the biology of the
