Tiny Matters
Take a dive into the genes, microbes, molecules and other tiny things that have a big impact on our world with Tiny Matters. Join scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti as they take apart complex and contentious topics in science and help rebuild your understanding. From deadly diseases to ancient sewers to forensic toxicology, Sam and Deboki embrace the awe and messiness of science and its place in the past, present, and future. Tiny Matters releases new episodes every Wednesday and is brought to you by the American Chemical Society, a non-profit scientific organization advancing chemistry and connecting the broader scientific community. Tiny Matters is produced by Multitude.
Tiny Matters
In defense of plants: Pitfall traps, rancid aromas, and other wild pollination strategies with Matt Candeias
On Tiny Matters we just weren’t giving enough love to plants, but we’re dedicated to fixing that! In this week’s episode, we chat with Matt Candeias, the host of the podcast In Defense of Plants. We tackle a subject that we had definitely oversimplified in our minds: pollination. From stinky corpse flowers to pitfall traps to faux fermentation, the way plants have evolved so many strategies to reproduce is beyond fascinating. We can’t wait to take you all on this pollination ride!
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Sadly, when we learn plants as kids, it's like well, here's the parts of a flower which is important, but you're never told these stories. At least I wasn't and I don't think a lot of people are. You know, we go and watch these David Attenborough documentaries and you see the wildest things that animals are doing and the cool, clever ways that things have evolved to survive, eke out an existence out there, but we think it's only reserved for animals.
Speaker 2:That's Matt Kandais, an ecologist and the creator and host of the podcast In Defense of Plants.
Speaker 1:Matt loves plants, Any plant, I mean any plant. You go out and look there's something weird going on there. There's some weird relationship it has with the organisms around it. It might be a microbe, it might be a beetle, it could be a bird, and they're doing it in such weird and alien ways creative ways, genetically speaking, because they can't move. They're stuck in place. So evolution and natural selection have just pushed them to these wild strategies. And to say we've scratched the surface is being too generous. It's the wild west out there and the sad part is is because animals are so popular, we've studied plants far less, except when you think about every animal you love, every ecosystem you enjoy visiting. Even your lifestyle as a modern human being living in wherever you're living right now. You need plants. Everything we do relies on them and we know so little about them, comparatively speaking.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to Tiny Matters, a science podcast about the little things that have a big impact on our society, past and present. I'm Sam Jones, and today I'm joined by drumroll. Please, deboki Chakravarti. She's back, I'm back. We've had some wonderful guest co-hosts in your absence, but I've missed you, and I know our listeners have too. How are you feeling being back? I feel good.
Speaker 3:So, just as a little update for listeners, I had a baby over the summer. Everything went well and he is very, very adorable, and I'm just really glad to be able to have taken this time to recover from giving birth and to figure out how to take care of a baby. But I am also ready to get back into the world of science. It's been so much fun to listen to the podcast as an audience member, but I have missed getting to talk about all things science with you and our listeners. I'm really glad to have my first episode back be such a fun one and, let's be real, very informative for you and me, who have mentioned many times that our collective plant knowledge is lacking.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it really is. So while you were out, one of our listeners, summer, wrote in saying that Matt Kindeas, the host of In Defense of Plants, would be an awesome guest. And Summer wrote in after I think you and I were chatting during what was, I believe, a Tiny Show and Tell Us bonus episode, saying that we should really do some episodes focused on plants because, a we know nothing and, B they just don't get enough love on tiny matters. So thank you, summer, for the suggestion.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you, Summer. Sam and I are definitely benefiting from this too. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about something that many plants rely on to survive pollination. Before this episode, I had a pretty simplified view of what pollination was and, Sam, I know you did too but you learned pretty quickly how wild it can be.
Speaker 2:When you called up Matt, I sure did, other than thinking about like bees and like your very standard pollinators. I really know nothing, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think you hit the nail on the head. When you think of pollination, or someone says pollination to you, most of us our heads are going to go to a flower and a bee. It's a very like since childhood imagery that has been absolutely solidified in our minds. But pollination is so much weirder and it's something plants have been at since long before flowers even, and bees for that matter, evolved. So it's really interesting to think of like what the early days were like. Uh, you know, you you think about like dinosaurs. We can't really see them unless you're looking at birds today, which is a vastly different organism compared to like what you think about in childhood as a dinosaur.
Speaker 1:But we still have great examples of what early pollination would have looked like, and that, to me, is exciting because I love to go out and actually experience these things, or at least you know, know I can, if I have the right amount of travel time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's so true. I feel like when we think about, you know, creatures of the past, we think about sharks right, they're so ancient. We think about birds and their connection back to the dinosaurs, and we don't really give plants much credit, which is part of you know why I'm talking with you today. I think mine and Deboki's backgrounds are very, very animal focused particularly human, but animal focused, and so we, you know plants. It's time they deserve a lot of our respect.
Speaker 1:On Tiny Matters, I got into this because of animals too. Like, don't feel bad if you're not giving plants the attention you think they deserve, but every image of a dinosaur there's a little cycad or like a palm tree hiding in the background. And now, to me that's the most interesting part.
Speaker 3:Let's start with pollination. It's the process where tiny pollen grains, which contain male gametes or sex cells, are transferred from a male plant to a female plant, fertilizing the female gametes. The plant can then go on to produce seeds and fruit. Early pollination would have likely involved the male gametes moving through a film of water in their search for female gametes. This is still something you see in many mosses and ferns today. But as time went on, plants grew larger and began conquering greater swaths of landscape. Matt told us many species soon relied on wind, much like pine trees or grasses that you see today.
Speaker 1:And really you got to stop to think about like why are plants reproducing this way? Animals, we get in our heads it's the whole act of creating new life involves finding a mate, settling down in some form enough to exchange gametes in most cases and going about your business after that. Plants completely locked in place. They don't have the luxury of getting up and moving, which really sets the stage for everything they're doing, from reproduction to defense and dispersal.
Speaker 3:So if you're like us, there's a good chance that when you picture pollination, you're imagining something like a bee transferring pollen. This type of pollination is called directed pollination, because pollen isn't just wafting willy-nilly through the breeze, it's deposited directly into a structure called the stigma, where the female gametes are harbored, and it's a great reproductive strategy.
Speaker 1:It's way less wasteful Because, think about it, the reason we're suffering from hay fever is because there's millions upon millions of pollen grains missing their mark and ending up in our sinuses. And you know, pollen's cheap but it still takes energy to produce. And if you can kind of direct that and have to not produce as much, it's that direction that really starts to give a selective advantage. And I think that's kind of a leading hypothesis as to why beyond, when mediated pollination strategies started to evolve. But really it just comes down to getting a gamete to another gamete and swapping DNA and creating a new organism, because that's the way genes make it into the next generation.
Speaker 2:The first pollination story that Matt brought us involves cycads, so to me these kind of look like super stout palm trees or like the top of a palm tree was chopped off and then placed on the ground. Like Matt mentioned, you often see them in the background of dinosaur paintings.
Speaker 1:It's a lineage that stretches back just many hundreds of millions of years and again, we still have modern examples of these things, which I think is so great to be able to say hey, I've seen fossils of this, I can go to the nearest nursery and potentially see a living example. I can touch and feel what the trunk feels like or what the leaves feel. I can get a sense of, like that connection to the deep time which I really appreciate. But as weird as they look, as much as they look like fern or a pollen, they're neither. They don't do anything like either of those two groups of organisms. They don't produce flowers. They're actually more similar, I guess, to pine trees. They produce cones.
Speaker 3:When mature cycad plants produce cones. The male cones hold pollen and the female cones are both larger and hold seeds. Because these plants have been around for so long, matt said they've had a lot of time to do evolutionary experiments.
Speaker 1:Really one of the earliest windows we have into what pollination was going on involves these cycads and thrips, which are these weird little insects that if you've heard about them, it's probably because you have houseplants and you have unfortunately gotten a thrip infestation.
Speaker 3:Thrips are very small, thin insects, typically less than a millimeter long. There are over 7,700 species of thrips.
Speaker 1:So they have these little, weird asymmetrical mouths and they will slash into plant cells to drink the contents within. And what you'll end up seeing because they're so small and they can reproduce at such high rates you'll see this like weird silvery pock marks all over the leaves and the plant just eventually declines and dies.
Speaker 3:Thrips are generally considered pests, but there is evidence they've been important in the evolution of plant reproduction and it goes a lot deeper than a thrip getting pollen from one plant and depositing it on another. Matt told us a pretty wild story of co-evolution with a genus of cycads called macrosamia and a genus of thrips called cycadothrips.
Speaker 1:So you're already seeing some of the specificity here in cycadothrip. So it's even saying like this is the cycadthrip, and it really does bring up this point that some of these relationships are so specific. Like one species of thrip will pollinate that type of cycad, only Another species of thrip, maybe a different cycad.
Speaker 2:Thrips feed on pollen. They go to the male macrosamia cones, crawl into the scales and then start feasting on the pollen inside. They'll also mate and lay their eggs in the cones, so their offspring will end up developing there.
Speaker 1:But the cycads got a little trick up its sleeve. So you can imagine, if you're crawling around in nothing but pollen dust, you're going to get covered in it, right? Well, here's your perfect as a plant little vessel to deliver your pollen to a female cone.
Speaker 2:The pollen cones of the macrosamia start to heat up, which in science terms is called thermogenesis. They do this with an enzyme in the mitochondria called alternative oxidase. As the macrosamia is turning food glucose into energy, the alternative oxidase enzyme produces excess heat.
Speaker 1:So they're burning their fuel, the carbohydrates from photosynthesis, to produce heat, and the cones will actually start to heat up to like about 12 degrees Celsius hotter than the ambient world around them, which is bonkers for a plant.
Speaker 3:And as they heat up, the macrosemia plant also releases beta-mercine, a compound that's toxic to thrips.
Speaker 1:So the combination of the beta-mercine and that extra heat, it makes it a really unpleasant place for thrips to be. And so, a, it's winning because it's chasing some of them out. They're not going to completely destroy all of the pollen efforts, but as it's doing so, b, it's chasing them out. For them to go try to find a different place where they can finish up doing their own reproductive cycle, and with any luck, some of those will be female cones. And there you go, bingo, instead of wind doing it, you have this perfect little thing that needs you to survive, flying directly to your reproductive structures and making that happen.
Speaker 3:It's so cool and so specific. The co-evolution of plants and animals is so fascinating, sam, I know while I was out you covered this in an episode on pesticides, but from the perspective of plants, evolving mechanisms to deter insects from feeding on them. But this is very different in that it's actually a mutually beneficial relationship.
Speaker 1:This specialized pollinator thing is so fascinating to me because I think again, for a lot of us who haven't thought about it more than like bees and flowers, I had this. You're seeing a lot of examples of that, but there's also so many examples of specificity. But what you'll see a lot of cases is a plant that will have plenty of insects visiting it. Maybe one of those insects can only visit that plant, but there's a lot of other opportunities there as well. Now, it's also worth mentioning that not everything that's visiting a flower is a pollinator, right? Okay, this is not a real test, but, like other than bees, what's the next thing you think of when you think of pollinators? They're very pretty and they have great PR.
Speaker 2:I was going to say butterflies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perfect. Yeah, butterflies are actually terrible pollinators in most instances.
Speaker 2:Why? Why is that?
Speaker 1:It's not to say that they don't. They definitely are pollinators of some plants, but because of their dainty, long legs and the way they usually orient to feed, in many, many, many cases they're simply stealing nectar without doing any sort of reproductive payback in the process.
Speaker 3:I guess butterflies are not team players.
Speaker 2:Yeah it sounds like rarely Okay. So plants heating up to aid in pollination efforts is so fascinating to me and I wanted to talk with Matt about it a little bit more, so the next example he gave me was a stinky one.
Speaker 1:People have gotten really excited in recent years of the corpse flowers that have been blooming at various botanical gardens all over the place and they famously smell like corpses. It's usually a fly or beetle pollination syndrome there, because it's trying to attract things that are attracted to rotting animal matter, but they also do thermogenesis. I mean that's one of the big things is that giant structure will heat up, and what heat does for a lot of plants is it helps get that smell a lot farther.
Speaker 3:As the plant heats up, certain compounds will volatilize, meaning they'll evaporate from liquid to gas and travel around in the air, which is a great way to reach more pollinators. And the compounds that corpse flowers release will definitely get your attention. Some of these compounds are sulfur-based chemicals like dimethyltrisulfide and dimethyldisulfide, which smell like rotting cabbage or garlic, and earlier this month, researchers reported that corpse flowers also release putrescine, which is a compound found in rotting animal flesh, including in decaying humans. Eek yeah. So you have this flower that can be around eight feet tall, releasing death smells, but for the pollinators, what they see is a warm, cozy microclimate.
Speaker 2:Mmm the pollinators. What they see is a warm, cozy microclimate. And Matt told me one last thing related to heat that I just really have to share. So philodendrons are a plant that have these heart shaped leaves. If you Google them, I'm almost positive that you'll recognize them. And there's a type of philodendron that produces so much heat that its metabolism is very similar to that of a hummingbird, which is remarkably fast. I mean, hummingbirds have evolved a metabolism 77 times faster than a human's and their heartbeat can reach up to 1,200 beats per minute. It's wild to think of a plant being even close to that, although granted just for short bursts. So heat aiding in pollination by attracting insects and then getting them to leave and bring pollen elsewhere is really cool. But another, I think equally cool thing in the pollination world is mimicry.
Speaker 1:Mimicry. That is another amazing world, and some of the wildest, absolutely mind-blowing examples come down to pollination. So a great example would be in the genus Serrapegia, which are these absolutely bizarre milkweed relatives that you generally will find in places like Africa. They're vining, they. Generally what they'll do is grow underneath a shrub and then crawl out on top of it and use the shrub to help them get all the sun that they need.
Speaker 3:And if you look at their flowers, you notice they're these kind of bizarre tube-like things with a swollen base and an elaborate structure on top where the opening is. That's called a pitfall trap, which sounds like a great way to catch something to eat, but what they're actually doing is catching pollinators.
Speaker 1:They're not digesting prey like a carnivorous plant would, but they have convergently evolved on a way to trap bugs, which I think is kind of fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like we got to catch it. How do we do that? Well, you make a long tube and you make an enticing somehow.
Speaker 2:Okay. So then what is the goal? Once they trap an insect, that insect is carrying pollen, and then, at that point, they're just like whatever the insect dies, we don't care.
Speaker 1:No. So this is where some of those really weirdly specific great guess though timing instances come into play. There's very specific timing in this. So they capture the insect. It stumbles around down in the base going like what have I done? But in doing so it touches the right parts of the flower to pick up these little sticky pollen sacs called pollinia. And then, once the pollinia have been removed, the flower will wilt and when it wilts, all the backward pointing hairs of the slippery surfaces kind of dwindle and they're able to escape to go hopefully make the same mistake again, which, if it just stopped, there is already bonkers, but the way they attract some of these insects is where it gets even wilder.
Speaker 3:You might expect that plants are luring in insects with the sweet promise of nectar. But in this case, the seropegia plants are luring in insects with the sweet promise of nectar. But in this case, the Seropegia plants are luring in insects with something weird the scent of a dying bee. Yes, really, the plant is working to draw in kleptoparasitic flies, which Matt describes as the jackals of the insect world. If, say, a spider catches a bee and injects it with venom, the bee won't die immediately but it will be understandably freaking out and, as it's dying, it'll release stress hormones into the air, hormones that kleptoparasitic flies are drawn to. The flies will actually drink the lymph coming out of the bee as it's being eaten by the spider, and that lymph will help the flies grow and reproduce. So the plant takes this already weird interaction from the bug world and co-ops it, releasing the same compounds that a stressed and dying bee would release.
Speaker 1:And so these flies, they're not coming in to get a sweet nectar reward. They're coming in thinking like, oh, a spider caught a bee I'm going to eat tonight. And the smell emitting parts of the flower, actually the tip, those elaborate structures I talked about at the opening of this weird pitfall trap. They crawl around on that and then they slip and fall in and that's where the whole stumbling around and picking up pollen does. And so, by smelling like a dead and dying stressed out bee, it's attracting these weird flies that already have a bizarre life cycle to begin with, but that's who they've teamed up with in an evolutionary sense for pollination.
Speaker 3:Wow, the specificity is really remarkable. There are so many species of plants and insects, and to think that there are these one-to-one pairings.
Speaker 2:I know it's really wild. Okay, so the last pollination story that I want to share from Matt is about plants called pawpaws that are native to the eastern United States. We definitely have them in DC, andi looked it up and they seem to be in Massachusetts too, although not as widespread, so I'm not sure if they're anywhere. You lived, boki. Yeah, I have no idea. Actually You'll have to go on a pawpaw hunt. Okay, so pawpaw trees produce large yellowish-green to brown fruit that to me kind of looks a little bit like a pear. They don't ship or store well, so it's become very popular in recent years to go out and pick them. They've become kind of like a trendy fruit, I guess you'd say.
Speaker 1:But it's flowers don't get enough attention because really people are after the fruits. But I love going out and seeing pawpaw flowers because they're beautiful. They're like this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful burgundy, maroon, wine-colored looking flower. They're very wrinkly, they've got like this leathery texture to them. But if you get up close or you get in a grove where there's a lot blooming it's very quick to realize like it's very fermented sort of yeasty, like if you leave apples out for too long, kind of thing.
Speaker 3:As it turns out, it is actually fermenting. It mimics rotting fruit during a time of year when there are a lot of fruit flies and beetles that specialize in seeking out rotting stuff.
Speaker 1:So the flies really, and the beetles think they're getting a place to mate and lay their eggs, like, hey look, we've found some rotting fruit. There's no rewards in there for them. This is a dead end for them. But all they need is for them to make that mistake at a couple of different plants and then, in the process of mating and trying to find a place to lay eggs which they call brood site mimicry they're crawling around, getting covered in pollen and hopefully, with a little luck, depositing that on an unrelated plant.
Speaker 3:If this tiny matters dive into pollination made you think, hey, I want to get more into plants, I want to appreciate them more, and you're wondering where to start. Matt says get some, particularly ones that are local to your area.
Speaker 1:So I think to me it's one area where you can't feel guilty about being indulgent.
Speaker 1:You can have as many as you can possibly handle and the more native stuff you're putting outside whether you live in an apartment and you just want a window box or put it out on a balcony, or you're lucky enough to have some yard plant, some plants You're going to see cool things happening because as soon as you do, it's like a beacon for other things to come in and you get to just go out sip your coffee in the morning or go out with your kids at night and just look at what's out there.
Speaker 1:I mean you'd be surprised and amazed that the new things that are going to appear as soon as you start putting more plants out in the landscape. And you know, because so much of what is the world is in private hands, sitting not in national parks or protected areas, it's in our yards, it's in, you know, our commute to work or school. We could be doing a lot better because, again, every plant you see, if it's native to your area, has more interactions with the world around it than you could ever imagine and every one of them that's out there is helping to support that. So go plants.
Speaker 2:Go plants, go plants, go plants. Check out Matt's podcast In Defense of Plants. We've left a link in the description. He also wrote a book that goes by the same title, all about the wonder of plants.
Speaker 3:All right, we're back with a tiny show, and tell Deboki how does it feel we're doing a tiny show and tell for the first time in months. Is it crazy that my first thought was like who?
Speaker 2:went last. Oh my gosh, I should have actually looked it up before and been like.
Speaker 3:Well, you went last in July.
Speaker 2:So you're back, let's ease you in. I will go first this time. So today I want to talk to you about social snakes. I can't remember. Are you anti-spider and anti-snake or just anti-spider?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm not anti-snake, but I'm scared of snakes.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm not super anti-spider, unless they like can kill you.
Speaker 2:Okay, I think that's what it was. I'm like I have a recollection of some tiny show and tell that we did where you were. Like I don't want to think about these spiders at all. That's fair. If it can kill you, that's warranted. Okay, so today I'm talking about social snakes, specifically the ball python. So ball pythons are the second most popular pet reptile in the world. Like in the, world.
Speaker 3:That's pretty amazing. I kind of buy it Like so, despite sorry I'm totally going to sidetrack you but like despite being scared of snakes, I weirdly also am compelled by them and I have spent time in the snake subreddit because I just am fascinated by the world of having a snake and I feel like ball pythons are all over it. Do you know what the number one reptile python is? I?
Speaker 2:actually don't. I want to say like a turtle, but I don't know. Oh, yeah, I'm making that up, though I'm not sure. Hold on Now. I kind of want to look. Wait, whoa, the most popular reptile species so this is from 2004 to 2020, was the bearded dragon, oh, followed by ball pythons and leopard geckos, so not turtles.
Speaker 3:What happened to all the turtle pets?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know. I grew up with a pet turtle, or my sister did. She was not the best turtle owner, though, let's be real, she was also five when she asked for it. So there you go.
Speaker 2:Okay, so, and I didn't know this, but snakes, I guess, generally speaking, are sort of seen as loners. But according to researcher Noam Miller, who was interviewed in this story in the New York Times called the Surprising Social Lives of Pythons, the study of snake social behavior has been undergoing, he says, a renaissance over the past few years, and people are learning. That's really not the case. So first, back in 2020, he and his colleagues placed a mixed sex group of six pythons for 10 days into this large enclosure, one that had enough little individual plastic shelters for each snake so they could separate if they wanted. They left a camera running and they saw that all six snakes squeezed into the same shelter and then spent over 60% of their time together there Kind of shocking. So then they thought maybe there's just something weird going on here, like we need to try this right. Like anything with science, you can't just do it once and say it is what it is.
Speaker 2:So, they kept repeating these experiments for years with a bunch of different cohorts of ball pythons, and what they found was that they continued to really want to spend time together, and so twice a day, they would shuffle these snakes around, placing them in different shelters, and they kept wanting to pile together. So that's really it. Like these snakes are very, very social, and so I guess if you're hoping to get a python, like get two. I don't know, I probably ruined the day of some parents by saying that. But yeah, wowee huh, just a cute, a cute little social snake story.
Speaker 3:yeah, I mean so. Like I just want to be clear because I know that, like snake people are very protective of like the snake reputation and like I am scared of snakes, but I also acknowledge they're cute and I feel like a pile of snakes both sounds terrifying to me, but also when you put it in the context of they just want to be with their buddies.
Speaker 2:Like they're cuddling. Yeah yeah, Snake snakes cuddle.
Speaker 1:Like that's really sweet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that. I'm still not getting a Bob Python but I like that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, I am back with one of my kind of classic. This is more a recommendation for an article, tiny show and tells, also kind of more of a. This is more about the world of science than like a specific scientific discovery. So this is an article in the Atlantic. I've been during my leave I've just been like trying to make sure to like note down all the fun science articles I read so that I can like share them with people. So I'm just also so excited to be back with this.
Speaker 3:So this is an article in the Atlantic called A Simple Lab Ingredient Derailed Science Experiments, and this is one of those articles where I just think it's a really fun read.
Speaker 3:I don't want to get too into detail because it's kind of a lab mystery.
Speaker 3:The answer comes very early on, but it starts with this like very familiar feeling that I'm sure you've had I've had any of our listeners who have worked in the lab has had where you just have this one experiment where nothing is working, like you're just at it forever trying to figure out what is going wrong with this experiment and it's just like months of troubleshooting and then eventually you find out what was wrong and it's something that's so annoyingly silly or simple that it's just like ah. And so in this case, the experiment that starts off this article. It involves two months of failure, which sounds terrible, and it all comes down to like, as the article suggests, to like one simple lab ingredient, and so I'm just going to leave it here for listeners to hunt down the article to find out more about what was going wrong. But I just really enjoyed it because it also dives a little bit more into like, where this very common lab ingredient comes from, and I just this is my favorite type of article because it's about how mundane and annoying science can be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and now I feel like you have to guess. I need to like go read this immediately, because I'm like was I using that too? Yeah, you could have been Totally. I'm like, what would it be in some like of the media that you use in lab, like something. You're on the right track. Yeah, I'm like there's got to be something in like fetal bovine serum or some sort of serum that maybe it's like a protein, that's like blocking something, I don't know.
Speaker 3:So it's even simpler than that. So, blocking something I don't know? So it's even simpler than that. So I can just tell you. I don't want to give it away to listeners, but I'll tell you, okay, we can just edit it up, okay? Well, listeners, sam knows the secret. You all will have to go read this article.
Speaker 2:I just cut it out. I just cut it out and you're gonna have to check out the article. Awesome, thanks, devoki to check out the article.
Speaker 3:Awesome Thanks, deboki. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Tiny Matters, a production of the American Chemical Society. This week's script was written by Sam, who is also our executive producer, and was edited by me, deboki Chakravarti and by Michael David. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. The Tiny Matters theme and episode sound design is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts and Leisure team.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much to Matt Kandais for joining us. A reminder that we have a newsletter Sign up for updates on new Tiny Matters episodes, video clips from interviews, a sneak peek at upcoming episodes and other science content we really think you'll like. We'll see you next time.
