Photo Credit: Netflix
Bill Nye returns with more world-saving ideas in Bill Nye Saves the World, everything from bringing religion and evolution together to how to live forever.
Netflix’s hit series, Bill Nye Saves the World, has another strong season with its lead still one of the best assets on television. He manages to make a lot of topics interesting, and viewers will be happy to have Bill Nye back on their screens again.
03.01 Cheating Death
Everything wears out, except for musician/producer Tyler the Creator. He wrote the theme song. With Tyler, Bill Nye uses everything from a broken door handle to a broken bicycle to a shoe wheel of death to illustrate how things wear out.
“Every day we’re closer to death,” says Bill. He pauses. “Thank you and goodnight!” He’s funny. Bill Nye explains why death is necessary. If animals lived forever there would never be a need for reproduction, which you need to evolve and adapt to changes.
We have 35 trillion cells, each with a life expectancy. They do their job and they die. This is called Apoptosis – when cells self-destruct through a normal and controlled process. Like skin cells, which get replaced every two weeks. But brain cells never get replaced, making neurological diseases especially devastating.
That’s why we have everyday things that help us adapt to the dangers of aging. There’s skin cream for wrinkles, shoes, and helmets to protect your body, vaccines, medicines, eyeglasses, all sorts of things to help you more easily survive the dangers of life.
Case Study: What is the future of organ transplantation? Derek Muller goes to Boston to check out a new death-defying technology, the future of organ transplant as developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Biomedical engineers Glenn Gaudette and Josh Gershlak noticed one day how spinach has a vascular network similar to what you see in the body.
They use detergent to wash away plant material, which leaves behind a cellulose skeleton of veins. They can implant that vascular network with beating human heart cells to help regenerate heart tissue, maybe use broccoli to grow lung cells, or bamboo to regenerate bone. This technology is about 5-10 years from being used in practice trials.
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Stem Cells: Special types of cells that can develop into a wide variety of other cells.
Case Study: Can I stay young forever? Joanna Hausmann investigates anti-aging treatments with physician’s assistant Sabrina Seidman. She takes Joanna’s photo through a pigment photo generator, which shows skin damage due to sun exposure and other factors. Dermatologist Dr. Ashley Wysong tells Joanna what treatments have been scientifically proven.
Hydrafacials utilize dermabrasion, which is basically traditional exfoliation and not worth the money. CVAC (Cyclical Variations in Adaptive Conditioning) is a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and is great for healing wounds but probably doesn’t have cosmetic benefits.
Low-level light therapy might decrease inflammation in the skin but probably doesn’t live up to other claims like increased muscle strength. Laser light therapy specifically targets melanin to decrease pigmentation on the skin and hemoglobin, reducing redness. There is proven science behind laser tech for cosmetic use.
Panel of Experts: What if you want to actually live forever? Correspondent Joanna Hausmann. chief science officer at the Sens Research Foundation and author of Ending Aging Dr. Aubrey de Grey, and Founder of the Death Salon and associate director of the Norris Medical Library at USC Meghan Rosenbloom.
Joanna learned that sun is the greatest enemy in aging and that retinol is proven to help restore your skin – but these don’t actually help you live longer, just look younger.
Dr. Aubrey says there are medical therapies not too far off in the future that might be able to actually rejuvenate people. People in their 60s could look, feel, and function as if they were 25. Sounds like it would be a huge and expensive medical procedure using a combination of therapies and processes. I wonder if when and if this medicine becomes available that it would be considered elective, thus making it mainly available to the very rich, creating an even wider gap between the rich and the poor.
Meghan doesn’t buy the necessity for this medical technology, she believes that there’s a reason for the natural life cycle.
People are scared of death, so the best way to alleviate that fear is to talk about it, make plans for it, and not to avoid it making those decisions.
MAD SCIENTISTS! with Rosalind Franklin (Ginger Gonzaga). She is often overlooked as an essential contributor to the discovery of DNA. She produced the x-ray photograph that allowed James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins to identify the double helix structure of DNA.
Andrew Montgomery lost a leg in a motorcycle accident after getting cast as a gymnast/dancer in La Reve. With a prosthetic leg, he was still able to join the cast, dance in the show, and perform impressive gymnastic feats.
#billmeetsciencetwitter: Dr. Channah Rock is a microbiologist and water quality specialist in Arizona. She specializes in turning wastewater into pure water through a five-step process. You begin with raw wastewater, but then it’s filtered through traditional water reclamation facilities, then it goes through ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, UV advanced oxidation, and chlorine disinfection. To remove the stigma from this pure water process, 24 brewers in Arizona are competing to make the best beer from water recycled through this pure water process.
Photo Credit: Netflix
03.02 – Surviving in a World Without Water
How do we avoid cases like Flint, Michigan? How are we even in a position where there isn’t clean drinking water available in a US city?
Even though the earth is 70% water it’s about to become our scarcest resource. We can partially rely on rainfall and snowmelt, but climate change is drastically shifting rainfall patterns on earth, and maybe it doesn’t rain or snow where you are. Which leaves Bill Nye ranting about climate change again. Which is great because climate change and water resources are the most serious problems facing humankind right now.
Sure, the Earth is covered with oceans, but desalination is hard. It takes energy and then you’re left with a lot of salt that can be toxic if you dump it back in the ocean. Countries like Australia and the United Arab Emirates are making desalination work, but they have the money and resources. But everyone else around the globe will have to save more water and find a way of making more of it.
Case Study: Can a city sink? Derek Muller goes to Mexico City which is slowly sinking while water resources become more scarce. Hydrogeologist Dr. Erik Morales Casique explains that Mexico City was built on a lake when the Spaniards took it from the Aztecs. But as the inhabitants consume the groundwater, the city starts to sink down. Derek is shown a number of dramatic examples of the city sinking, including a 25-foot tall pipe whose opening used to be at ground level. Buildings along the street clearly display warping.
Former director of the Mexico National Water Board Dr. Fernando Gonzalez Villarreal says that the city uses 62,000 liters of water a second.
Loreta Castro Rivera, a professor at UNAM say that although it rains a lot in Mexico City, there’s nowhere for the water to collect. She says there could be rainwater catchments sites in every public space and a distribution system that would provide it to the local community. A large-scale deployment would supply a quarter of the demand for water, which would make the problematic Cutzamala pipe system obsolete.
Some parts of the city are dropping a foot a year. In the studio, Bill drops a banner from the rafters to illustrate the 25 feet that Mexico City has sunk – and it is significant. Many people don’t connect their water problem with the sinking of the city.
Bill in the Weeds: Water is weird. Bill runs a number of different simulations to demonstrate the different ways water behaves in its different forms.
Panel of Experts: This panel discusses the possibility of future water wars. Correspondent Derek Muller, head of Climate Initiative at Princeville Global Melanie Nakagawa, and associate professor of international affairs at George Washington University Marcus King.
Is water the new oil? King says no because oil has many substitutes and water doesn’t. But it can be used similarly to oil as a geopolitical tool to fight wars or force change.
Nakagawa notes that times of scarcity it prompts innovation and the same is true of water conservation.
King has seen water and water infrastructure used as weapons used in wartime strategy.
Nakagawa maintains that access to clean water is essential in stimulating the economy by allowing women and girls – who as of now are spending hours every day collecting and transporting drinking water for their community – the time and access to education. Bill agrees that one of the best things that can be done to combat climate change is improving the standard of living for women and girls, which starts with providing clean water.
Case Study: How do I survive in a world without water? Nazeem Hussain meets in the desert with survivalist Thomas Coyne to learn how to survive in extreme climates.
The first step is to change clothes. Nazeem’s jeans and a dark t-shirt would kill him in a survival situation in the desert. Willow trees indicate the presence of water in the ground, so you can harvest water from the tree using transpiration. Just seal a plastic bag around the leaves on the tree and tree will breathe out water into the bag.
Two hours will get you a mouthful. If you happen across running water you can’t trust that there might not be a dead animal upstream contaminating the water. You can purify the water using distillation. Iodine can also purify the water but tastes nasty. Adding vitamin C helps.
Water sommelier Martin Riese joins Bill and Nazeem in the studio. He’s America’s only certified water sommelier, which he acknowledges is a little silly. Still, water from different sources does have different flavors as they have different mineral content and additives. They sample LA Tap (distinct notes of chlorine), Triple Distilled (the fast food of water), and Astronaut Urine (has a sweet note).
This is followed by a silly segment about the future of wet t-shirt contests in the year 2047 when access to water is scarce. It may be silly, but it highlights how frivolously we are able to use water now, and how soon we will have to start worrying about it.
#billmeetsciencetwitter: Rianne Campell, Researcher at the University of California Irvine, studies the effects of drugs on the brain. If you can identify the proteins in the brain that form during drug abuse, you can maybe inhibit that protein to reduce cravings and cure addiction.
Photo Credit: Netflix
03.03 The Addiction Episode
Bill demonstrates increasing levels of various addiction, from coffee to prescription drugs to gambling to the internet. He claims that he’s not addicted and in total control.
This is how addiction works. Say you enjoy eating an orange. This enjoyment releases dopamine in the brain, which triggers the making of memories, traveling all the way up to the prefrontal cortex where you make decisions.
This is the reward pathway that helps us make decisions that are good for us. But drugs overwhelm and hijack the system until we can’t think of anything else. At the same time, the brain adapts to the drug and we need more of it to get the same reward. Nature and nurture both affect addiction.
Maria Bamford (Lady Dynamite) has had experience with depression and addiction. For eleven years she struggled with anorexia and bingeing. She emphasizes the importance of addiction is defined as a disease. Not only is it accurate as a condition that has a recognizable progression that could end its death, the idea of it as a disease lessens the stigma associated with addition.
Case Study: What is happening inside the brain of a gambling addict? Cara Santa Maria goes to St. Louis University to investigate behavioral addiction.
Dr. Alyssa Wilson, a behavioral analyst and Dr. Mark Dixon, behavioral psychologist work at the casino replica research lab. Test subjects sit down and play casino-style games in a realistic casino setting (no clocks, no windows, air conditioning) and undergo observation and testing.
They take MRI scans while showing subjects a number of different gambling outcomes. Pathological gamblers brains light up way more than non-addicted subjects. The theory is that behavioral therapy may be able to change the way the brain responds to the addictive stimuli.
Panel of Experts: Correspondent Cara Santa Maria, chair of psychology at Columbia University Dr. Carl Holt, Lieutenant with Lucas County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio, Bobby Chromik.
This panel was really something special. Often times these panels can be a little disjointed, but these people came together to make a really cohesive argument.
First of all, Bobby isn’t putting everyone in jail. Instead, he’s getting people treatment. Why waste tax dollars putting people in that revolving door of addiction? He has had 2400 clients with an 81% success rate. That’s huge.
Cara points out that while 12 step programs don’t have anywhere near that success rate, something to keep in mind is the individual. Treatment needs to be tailored to an individual’s needs, and 12 steps don’t work for everyone’s needs. Addiction is often linked to other factors, deep psychological or physical issues that need to be addressed in conjunction with the addition. It is most important for the individual to receive a comprehensive assessment to determine treatment.
Dr. Holt says the vast majority of people who use drugs do not become addicted, so you can’t blame the drug. Co-occurring illnesses can greatly exacerbate addiction, as well as environmental factors. Bobby agrees. The most important thing is a specialized treatment for the individual.
Dr. Holt says that people get so much wrong about addiction that there’s not enough time to talk about it. One of the main things is the moral frame in which we view addiction, the stigma that we place on it instead of getting people the help they really need.
Treatment programs take money of course and leaders need to invest in treatment and detox centers instead of incarcerating people. Bobby saved his county $500,000 last year in incarceration costs by having 460 low-level offenders put in treatment instead of spending 10 days in jail. Investing in social services is the best way to solve the problem and ultimately save money. Dr. Holt suggests that leaders can help by staying out of it and letting the experts do their jobs.
MAD SCIENTISTS! Albert Niemann (Michael Ian Black) isolated cocaine in hopes of using it for medical purposes. Of course, it is used for certain medical applications, but no one thinks about that when they think about cocaine. Not only does he go down in history as the inventor of cocaine, he also died at the age of 26 in the process of inventing mustard gas.
Nyegress: Bill demonstrates how the brain adapts to addictive substances by comparing drugs to music. He loves music but uses earplugs in order to protect his ears from the volume. In order to enjoy music through the earplugs, he has to turn it up louder, which forces him to use better ear protection. So on and so on, as the brain adapts to the effects of the drug, the user has to increase usage to continue receiving the effects.
Special Report with Julie Chang who has an exclusive interview with Addiction (Judah Friedlander). He’s super annoying and not your friend.
#billmeetsciencetwitter: Dr. Halley Froehlich from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis is researching the future of seafood and marine conservation. Aquaculture is basically farming in the water. Fish are super efficient to farm, needing only one pound of feed per pound of fish.
Photo Credit: Netflix
03.04 Recipes from the Future
Danny Trejo actor/restaurateur asks Bill what the future of food will look like. Will he still be able to make his delicious Trejo Tacos?
Bill talks about the evolution of food, how we adapted due to scarcity or overabundance and how we may have to adapt again in the future. Maybe eat more crickets, for example. The population is growing, the climate is changing messing with where we can grow food, and the food we are growing isn’t getting to everyone who needs it. We need to reduce our food-print.
Case Study, what is the future of farming?
Karlie Kloss visits Researchers at Chiba University in Japan who are working on a way to grow more food using less space. They grow tomatoes without soil, in a bunker meant to withstand natural disasters. Here they research how different spectrums of light affect crops.
Dr. Toyoki Kozai, the director Japan Plant Factory Association, is the father of vertical farming. People have bad feelings about growing food under artificial light, but it is safe and efficient. The 808 plant factory uses vertical farming, grows plants in foam without soil under artificial lights, and uses 90% less water than conventional farms. LED lights grow plants at twice the speed. The factory runs completely on solar energy.
MAD SCIENTISTS! with Robert C. Baker (Michael Ian Black) inventor of the chicken nugget. He wrote 290 papers on food science and published a recipe for what to do with your leftover chicken bits. Then McDonald’s came along and made millions off of his idea. But he’s a member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame, so that’s cool.
Panel of Experts: Aly Moore, founder of Bugible, Marine Biologist Dominque Barnes at New Wave Foods, and Dr. Uma Valeti CEO and co-founder of Memphis Meats. It’s a special cooking panel! Dominique makes algae shrimp.
Aly is making mealworm lentil salad and ceviche with scorpions on top and Chapulines (Mexican grasshopper) inside. Uma grows meat directly from animal cells and makes duck sliders. Margaret Cho, who was on the original Bill Nye the Science Guy, helps Bill eat it all.
Crickets might be the super food of the future, especially since they are a complete protein and high in B12. Cricket (Josh Robert Thompson) doesn’t want to be eaten through and offers some other choices.
Lemon ants contain calcium, sago grubs are rich in unsaturated fats and taste like bacon, mealworm farming cuts land use and CO2 emissions one half to two-thirds compared with other livestock. Grasshoppers are full of iron and micronutrients – and are racist apparently and deserve to be eaten.
#billmeetsciencetwitter: Natasha Agramonte is a research entomologist at the University of Florida and studies how insecticide resistance affects mosquito behavior. She’s trying to control insect populations to keep humans safe from insect-borne illnesses.
I think it’s incredible that all the Science Twitter guests have been women so far and that women are well represented on the panel of experts. Bill and Bill Nye Saves the World really seem to encourage diversity in the scientific community, which just makes him even cooler.
Photo Credit: Netflix
03.05 – Evolution: The Fact of Life
Evolution is hard to see in practice because it takes time and changes are often small. Its easier to see in things that reproduce quickly, like bacteria.
Scientists reasoned that 375 million years ago some animal must have made it from the sea to land in order for land animals to evolve, and when scientists figured out where that was likely to have happened at the time and what kind of creature they were looking for, they went to find fossil evidence and they found it!
Case Study: How fast is evolution? Derek Muller visits London to investigate an unlikely tale of evolution that started with the opening of the Underground in 1863. During WWII people used the Underground tunnels as bomb shelters. Mosquitos migrated with them and started to bite humans and mammals instead of birds.
After 100 years they are now a new species of mosquito. They evolve super quickly because their life cycle is so fast, which poses a huge problem for humans trying to control the spread of mosquito-borne disease. Chelci Squires, Research Scientist Arctic Labs is working with mosquitos to test the effectiveness of various insect repellents.
Mosquitos have killed almost half the people who have ever lived on this planet and kill one million people a year even now by spreading diseases like malaria, west nile, zika, yellow fever and others. Malaria has even evolved in a way to make carriers more attractive to mosquitos than non-carriers.
Bill Needs a Minute to explain evolution. People have a hard time accepting evolution because of the word “theory”. The word means a different thing in science than how we use it in life. A theory is a special idea that has already been tested and proven.
Panel of Experts: Correspondent Derek Muller, a former Dominican priest, and biologist at University of California Irvine Francisco Ayala, Dover, Pennsylvania high school science teacher Jennifer Miller.
The school board at Dover High famously wanted intelligent design taught alongside evolution. Jennifer Miller was one of the teachers who refused to teach it and became part of the court battle which eventually overturned the school board’s decision.
Ayala says evolution isn’t necessarily at odds with faith. In fact, the Catholic church openly accepts the validity of evolution and has even been endorsed by the Pope. Ayala sees religion and evolution as two complementary ways of looking at the world rather than necessarily antagonistic or independent from each other.
MAD SCIENTISTS! with Alfred Russell Wallace (Michael Ian Black). He had a hand in discovering the theory of evolution but was mainly forgotten. He was friends with Darwin and shared his notes on evolution with him, but he never got credit when Darwin published his book.
YES! Paul F. Tompkins comes for a visit! Bill Nye uses balloons of four different colors representing the four domains of life (bacteria, vira, eukarya, and archaea). Paul pulls a lever that drops a bunch of balloons from the ceiling, each being filled with smaller balloons that represent all the different species in the different domains. Each balloon represents biodiversity.
#billmeetsciencetwitter: Behavioral ecologist from Deakin University in Geelong Australia Andrew Katsis is researching how and why zebra finches communicate with their unhatched young and how that affects their growth. Human fetuses also interact with their parents, developing behaviors based on that interaction.
Photo Credit: Netflix
03.06 What Is Your Pet Really Thinking?
Arnold Schwarzenegger videos in with his dog Gustav to ask if dogs have a sense of humor in Bill Nye Saves the World.
Our brains use the exact same kind of cells as every other animal with a nervous system, even house flies. That is why we see complex behavior in other animals, from the society of chimps to the friendship of snakes. But how similar are we to other animals, and how similar are they to us?
MAD SCIENTISTS! with Claire Cameron Patterson (Michael Ian Black). In 1965 he discovered that cars running on leaded gas were pumping poisonous lead into the air. Lead can cause brain and nerve damage. Leaded gas wasn’t phased out until 1995. He also discovered the age of the earth.
Case File: What can we learn about humans from birds? Cara Santa Maria visits the University of Washington and researchers, Loma Pendergraft and Kaeli Swift. They study crow calls and behavior. Crows are very human in some ways. They remember faces and pass down information. They mourn their dead.
Dr. John Marzluff studies crow brains. He puts live crows in a scanner and sees how their brains react to stimuli. American crows are much smarter than most birds and are almost at the primate line in terms of intelligence. They have large brains for their body size.
Do other animals have the same intellectual curiosity or ingenuity as humans? Is there another animal who sits around inventing calculus so they can do rocket science? Or create art? So there is something that makes humans special, that separates us from the animals.
Panel of Experts: Anthropologist and primatologist at California State University Northridge Natalia Reagan is also a comedy writer and host of Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a professor of cardiology at UCLA, visiting the professor at Harvard’s department of human evolutionary biology, and co-author of Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health.
Do animals have morals? They probably don’t call it morals but they have altruism. They sometimes risk themselves to protect other species. They grieve.
Animals can also get depressed. We see symptoms of depression from eating disorders to anxiety. Bill Nye is adorable about how much he like animals.
One of the things we can learn from how animals behave about how we behave is that the stigma surrounding things like depression is misplaced. Non-human animals are as vulnerable to addiction, eating disorders, depression, and anxiety as humans are.
Understanding that has the potential to expand how we think about our own problems. I love how Bill Nye encourages the anti-stigmatization of mental illness.
Bill tells a story about a gorilla that lived in Seattle when he was growing up. It grew up in a family home but then was kept in a cement basement when he got too big. It was obvious to see he was depressed. Years later when he was transferred to the Atlanta Zoo the difference was obvious.
Animals are social, but do they have religions? The comedy writer in Natalia comes out when she says she hasn’t seen a baboon in church for a really long time. But what religion gives people primarily is a built-in community. And why shouldn’t animals have a sense of awe about nature that approaches spiritualism?
Case Study: Do animals like magic? Joanna Hausmann and magician Kid Ace head to the Santa Barbara Zoo to find out what animals think of human tricks. How are human brains similar to animals brains? Some social mammals might have more matter in a certain part of their brains than solitary fish or reptiles.
They show a trick to a piranha, but its close to feeding time and the trick involves live food so it’s hard to say whether it liked the trick or the food. They show a trick to elephants and they definitely react. They’re obviously surprised and excited. One elephant claps the ground with its trunk. Kid Ace is super social with the animals as if they’re a regular human audience.
They show some primates some tricks and they’re startled and curious. They try to find out where the cards actually went, looking behind his hand and trying to figure it out.
Bill Nye and Joanna run an experiment where Joanna’s arm is hooked up to a neurotransmitter that sends her brain and muscle impulses through the device to Bill’s arm. She can control Bill’s muscles with her mind and it’s obvious a pretty weird sensation for Bill Nye.
#billmeetsciencetwitter: And now for the guy who started the hashtag, entomologist and Ph.D. candidate at University of Missouri Columbia Dalton Ludwick. The purpose of the hashtag was to connect the science community to Bill Nye but to also connect science to the public. He’s researching corn and the western corn rootworm and how to control infestations to protect crops.
Photo Credit: Netflix
Review: Bill Nye’s enthusiasm and curiosity are so contagious. Not that the material wasn’t fascinating and cool on its own, but having smart, passionate people present and discuss the material makes it that much more engaging. He knows how to engage an audience throughout Bill Nye Saves the World.
And his priorities are all in the right places. He encourages diversity in the scientific community, especially women who historically have struggled with equality in science.
He is passionate about climate change awareness and how it affects basically every aspect of life on Earth. He encourages the destigmatization of mental illness and addiction, which drastically hinders the help available to the people who need it most.
And while there were times in the past where he might have antagonized people of faith, he himself grew up religious and doesn’t see evolution as being incompatible with religion. He is inclusive. It’s part of what makes Bill Nye Saves the World so interesting to watch.
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There were honestly times when a topic I am passionate about was discussed and argued so eloquently that I got a little emotional. Specifically the panel of experts on addiction and on religion/evolution.
The idea that evolution and religion are just complimentary ways to view the world was such a beautiful idea to me. And overwhelming support for the treatment of drug addicts over incarceration – and from a police lieutenant as well! – was just wonderful to hear.