The Times They Are a-Changin'

24m
With the help of paleontologist Neil Shubin, reporter Emily Graslie and the Field Museum's Paul Mayer we discover that our world is full of ancient coral calendars.

This episode first aired back in December of 2013, and at the start of that new year, the team was cracking open fossils, peering back into ancient seas, and looking up at lunar skies only to find that a year is not quite as fixed as we thought it was.

With the help of paleontologist Neil Shubin, reporter Emily Graslie and the Field Museum's Paul Mayer we discover that our world is full of ancient coral calendars. Each one of these sea skeletons reveals that once upon a very-long-time-ago, years were shorter by over forty days. And astrophysicist Chis Impey helps us comprehend how the change is all to be blamed on a celestial slow dance with the moon.

Plus, Robert indulges his curiosity about stopping time and counteracting the spinning of the spheres by taking astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on a (theoretical) trip to Venus with a rooster and sprinter Usain Bolt.

We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moon

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Runtime: 24m

Transcript

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Speaker 6 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
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Speaker 6 All they have left is a life raft and each other. This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan.

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Speaker 11 Imagine your arms break off

Speaker 12 and your flesh turns to poison.

Speaker 5 And your body begins turning strange colors.

Speaker 14 Bright yellow and tingering orange. And you suddenly get really good at math.

Speaker 5 Bugs can do math?

Speaker 4 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 5 There is a whole new season of terrestrials coming. Radiolab's family-friendly, ever-so-occasionally musical series about nature.

Speaker 5 On each episode, we tell you a story about a creature that may seem fantastical, it was like unbelievable, but is entirely true.

Speaker 12 Oh my goodness.

Speaker 5 And this season, we scoured high and low, all over the globe.

Speaker 4 Underwater.

Speaker 7 In the desert, in the wind, underground.

Speaker 4 Up to the Arctic. Oh, it is cold.

Speaker 5 Braving dangerous terrain.

Speaker 17 All right, mud's getting deeper down here, guys.

Speaker 5 Wild beasts.

Speaker 18 It bitten me several other times.

Speaker 16 There was blood everywhere.

Speaker 5 And our own confusion

Speaker 14 so honey doesn't come out of bees no it doesn't come out of bees

Speaker 19 to uncover wow

Speaker 17 the overlooked look at them overlooked creatures it's like a fur ball the size of a grapefruit they are dancing on the cone which is extremely beautiful

Speaker 5 and overlooked storytellers.

Speaker 16 I didn't really speak much.

Speaker 16 Or really at at all. I didn't speak at all.

Speaker 5 Waiting quietly beneath our noses.

Speaker 11 There's moments where you are made to feel

Speaker 14 different.

Speaker 5 You have life-changing secrets to share.

Speaker 16 It totally upended everything we know about what we think of as an organism.

Speaker 14 What a witchy little ritual.

Speaker 5 Join us for a nature walk. that just might get you to fall in love with this place again.

Speaker 5 Woo!

Speaker 15 This hippo's barely up to my waist.

Speaker 5 I mean, how realistic is it? Do you think that we could get humans hibernating in like 20 years?

Speaker 4 I think that it would be possible.

Speaker 22 Maybe.

Speaker 23 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Come, hang out with us.

Speaker 16 TA4 for you.

Speaker 5 Terrestrials, Radiolab's ever so occasionally musical series all about nature. Hosted by me, Lulu Miller.

Speaker 4 Kids and adults, Welcome.

Speaker 14 All right. Good luck.

Speaker 4 Thank you. Get busy.
I don't know. Oh my goodness.

Speaker 5 All new episodes coming in September. Terrestrials.
On the Radio Lab for kids feed, wherever you cast your pots. Yeah.

Speaker 14 It sounds like a whole little party.

Speaker 1 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night. Depending on where you are, when you are, this is Radio Lab.

Speaker 1 I'm Latif Nasser talking to you from right now, which is not your right now, even though you are hearing it right now. Anyway, I have an episode for you, one we made a few years ago.

Speaker 1 It is both timeless and timeful. Time-centric is maybe a better word.

Speaker 1 It's an episode about time because the vast majority of us, no matter our philosophy of time, whether you think of it as linear or cyclical, time feels static, right?

Speaker 1 Like no matter what you use to measure it, a second, a year, a millennium, those are constant units, right? Like ticking away the same amount.

Speaker 4 Not so fast.

Speaker 1 The times, as they say, are a change in.

Speaker 15 Set your watches and let's go.

Speaker 20 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 4 I'm listening to Radio Lab

Speaker 2 Radio Lab. From

Speaker 11 WNYC.

Speaker 25 Hey, I'm Jad Ab Umraj.

Speaker 8 I'm Robert Krulwich.

Speaker 27 I want to tell you a story about a discovery I made.

Speaker 30 Not me, I just learned about it from other people, but it has made me completely reconsider what a year means and specifically how big a year really is.

Speaker 33 How big a year?

Speaker 20 It what?

Speaker 32 How big a year really is.

Speaker 33 I don't know what how is a year how long.

Speaker 34 Well, if you're confused now, I think I can confuse you even more.

Speaker 37 I'm going to begin this investigation by introducing you to a little creature in the sea called a coral.

Speaker 4 Coral's a shelly animal, a little creature.

Speaker 7 That's Neil Schubin.

Speaker 39 I'm a paleontologist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Just like a clam has an animal, a clam shell has an animal inside it, so do corals.

Speaker 26 A little fleshy, wormy thing?

Speaker 39 Exactly, and it wears its skeleton on the outside. And because they sit in the same place for their whole life, they're really sensitive to local environmental changes.

Speaker 12 Meaning what?

Speaker 40 Think about it this way. Let's just sort of think about what happens to a creature as it lives its life in the water, which is what these things do.

Speaker 4 You know, we live in a world of cycles, of cycles on cycles.

Speaker 10 Temperature rises and falls. Light rises and falls.
The tides rise and fall several times in the course of a day.

Speaker 45 So you think about what that means for creatures living in water.

Speaker 28 What it means for corals, says Neil, is that they're growing.

Speaker 39 They're slapping slapping on new skeleton, if you will, new shell.

Speaker 28 In time with these cycles of rise and fall, of light and dark, hot and cold, and hello, hello.

Speaker 4 Hi.

Speaker 46 You can actually see these changes written onto their shells, maybe into their shells.

Speaker 25 Emily. Andy.

Speaker 13 And that's why Andy Mills and I called up our pal Emily Grassley, whose job is.

Speaker 28 What is it?

Speaker 18 I'm the Chief Curiosity Correspondent of the Field Museum in Chicago.

Speaker 46 That's your actual title.

Speaker 18 The Chief Curiosity Correspondent, yes. It is.

Speaker 48 You brought some corals, did you?

Speaker 18 We have many corals. We have corals all over the studio desk right now.

Speaker 4 All right. All right.

Speaker 18 Let's cut it.

Speaker 46 Because when you cut into these shells...

Speaker 18 Oh, it's warm.

Speaker 17 You have a little bit of water we can spritz it on there to cool it off.

Speaker 46 Right off, you can see a pattern.

Speaker 49 You see these gray stripes.

Speaker 18 And they're all, I mean, they're all different variations of gray, but some are really dark gray and some are tan.

Speaker 37 They're like bands running either through or across the shell.

Speaker 18 They kind of radiate out like the bands of a tree.

Speaker 28 And between the bands, there are spaces. So you got a stripe, then a space, a stripe, then a space, a stripe, then a space.

Speaker 18 But when you hold it up close to your eye.

Speaker 31 If you look closer in, between the stripes, you can see sort of.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 18 You can see the lines.

Speaker 46 Wow.

Speaker 30 You can see that the spaces are filled with faint little lines uh and that's where the piece of this story is just so fascinating because in 1962 a paleontologist professor john wells was looking at some corals just like these he was just sitting there saying okay well what can we figure out from coral shells so what he did is he did something really simple he says well golly gee why don't i count the number of little lines between these bands just you know just to see

Speaker 28 So he starts counting.

Speaker 12 It's, you know, 100, 200 lines, 300 lines, 310, 320.

Speaker 22 And every time he counted...

Speaker 10 He got a number.

Speaker 40 Around 360, 365.

Speaker 20 Wait a second.

Speaker 22 Familiar number, no?

Speaker 2 Doesn't take a whole lot of inference that, hey, maybe those individual rings represent

Speaker 10 a daily pattern.

Speaker 31 Meaning each of these little lines actually equaled a day.

Speaker 25 And why?

Speaker 33 They're not just making a gray mark after 365. What are the gray lines?

Speaker 27 Well, the thicker lines are the times of the year when the coral grows a lot.

Speaker 28 But if you've got a summer coral, then it grows a lot in one summer, then it goes quiet, then it grows a lot the next summer.

Speaker 50 So that's, again, that marks a year.

Speaker 28 Those big bands are kind of like,

Speaker 41 happy new year.

Speaker 2 Happy New Year.

Speaker 9 Happy New Year.

Speaker 40 There are actually calendars and clocks inside each of these things. You just have to know how to read them.

Speaker 27 So this guy, Professor Wells.

Speaker 42 What he did was then, this is the really

Speaker 4 bold bit, I thought, which is

Speaker 43 he then said, well, okay, that's a living coral. Let's look at some fossils.

Speaker 28 He was, after all, a paleontologist.

Speaker 40 You know, so he was at Cornell University, and Cornell University is surrounded by rocks around, you know, 370 or so million years old.

Speaker 10 And he collected some nice corals, and there are a lot of nice coral fossils known from there.

Speaker 30 And he opened up these ancient skeletons and he did the count.

Speaker 22 Found 100 days, 200 days.

Speaker 40 He was expecting 300 days 360 to 365 368 then lo and behold he found 400 between 400 and 410.

Speaker 26 really yeah and he looked lots of specimens that number the 400 number kept showing up what does what does that mean well that means that it's it's now reasonable to think that back in the day you know, 380 million years ago, there were more days in a year.

Speaker 27 and he published a paper saying more or less that and right away

Speaker 40 clam scientists said well if that's true for corals then it's got to be true for my animal the clam and the oyster people said well it's got to be true for oysters and muscle folks it's got to be true for mussels this paper set off a bit of a cottage industry of folks applying this technique to other species In looking at these other species, they found that the general trend is absolutely correct.

Speaker 41 That when you compare modern animals to ancient animals, you will find they record the old ones more days in a year.

Speaker 40 So you go back to a time period called the Ordovician, which is about 450 million years ago.

Speaker 39 A typical year had about 415, 410 days in it.

Speaker 39 If you go to the time period I work on in the Devonian, about 360 million years, probably about 400.

Speaker 42 So what you see is the number of days in a year has declined from over 400 to what we have now, which is 365.

Speaker 13 So we have lost 40 days since the time.

Speaker 15 Yeah, since creatures first started to walk on land.

Speaker 30 So now comes the obvious question.

Speaker 41 Why?

Speaker 27 Why would there be more days then than there are now?

Speaker 33 Okay, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. So a year is a trip around the Sun.
That's a trip.

Speaker 22 We are trying.

Speaker 33 And days, days are when we spin around and since we're going around the Sun. Okay, so maybe if you want to squeeze more days into a year, maybe it just means the trip around the Sun

Speaker 4 took longer back then?

Speaker 27 Well, if you ask astronomers about that, I asked Chris Impey at the University of Arizona, and he says.

Speaker 51 There's no sense that the length of time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun is changing.

Speaker 27 Because the Earth's orbit around the Sun is basic physics, and it hasn't really changed significantly.

Speaker 41 He's pretty sure of that.

Speaker 47 So then what is it?

Speaker 30 Well, Chris says the answer takes us back about four and a half billion years to a time when the Earth was very young.

Speaker 51 So there was this crazy period of time lasting about 50 million years.

Speaker 7 Which they called the Great Bombardment Period.

Speaker 51 There was still a lot of debris left over from the formation of the solar system. So the meteor impact rate was thousands of times higher.
The Earth was still like a tacky magma.

Speaker 51 And so there was a hail, brimstone, endless rain. I mean, a kind of crazy time, really.
And a bit of that mayhem, of course, we think gave birth to the moon.

Speaker 50 There was a huge collision and a rock about the size of Mars banged into us, flung a hunk of Earth shrapnel into orbit, and those pieces coalesced and became our moon.

Speaker 29 Which is now sort of parked right next to us.

Speaker 51 And so it sort of tugs us around in a kind of hefty way. And the biggest.

Speaker 11 I thought we tugged the moon.

Speaker 51 Oh, it's it works both ways. You know, we tug the moon and the moon tugs us, and the force is actually equal.

Speaker 11 So it's kind of like a dance.

Speaker 25 It's a dance.

Speaker 26 I tug the moon and the moon tugs me.

Speaker 51 Exactly. It's a celestial waltz.

Speaker 49 And it's that dance, that waltz, that explains why the Earth used to have 450 days in a year, then 400 days in a year, and now only 365.

Speaker 33 Well, I don't see how this explains anything yet.

Speaker 49 Well, first of all, let's just remember what a day is.

Speaker 50 A day is a full spin of the planet from the sun coming up in the morning, then going down, coming up the next morning.

Speaker 27 So, one spin, a total spin, equals a day.

Speaker 22 So, we all know that.

Speaker 36 Now, today we make 365 of these spins as we orbit the sun.

Speaker 41 That would be a year.

Speaker 47 But back when the Earth was born, when it was all by itself dancing alone that in those days did spun faster

Speaker 28 it was making more of these spins as it went around the Sun so a year had more days in it but then along comes the moon to join the dance and now here's the key according to Chris Earth is spinning faster than the moon is orbiting it A dance party takes a month to come around us.

Speaker 2 We take fume 24 hours. Fume.

Speaker 28 And you know how it is when you're dancing with a partner who's slower than you are?

Speaker 46 Then you have to tug them along, which is what has happened here gravitationally.

Speaker 27 We are constantly tugging the moon along.

Speaker 46 It is constantly dragging us down. There's a transfer of energy here that over billions of years has caused the Earth's spin to slow down just a little bit, a teeny, teeny bit.

Speaker 10 And as the spin has slowed, well, our days have gotten longer.

Speaker 51 And if you do the math, you calculate that the day is getting longer by 1.7 milliseconds each century.

Speaker 33 1.7 milliseconds each century.

Speaker 27 What this means on a daily basis is that today was 54 billionths of a second longer than yesterday.

Speaker 36 And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before.

Speaker 41 And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before that, which was 54.

Speaker 39 And if you extrapolate that out over the millions of years people like me think about.

Speaker 36 That's Neil Schubin again, the paleontologist.

Speaker 40 That becomes quite significant. So

Speaker 11 you're telling me that today is the shortest day of the rest of my life.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 29 Andy worries about these things.

Speaker 40 Well, you're not going to live longer because of this, I'm sorry to say.

Speaker 31 No, so this moon dance does not affect the ticking of time.

Speaker 46 It just affects what we choose to call a day.

Speaker 30 And by the way, one of the consequences of this dance is we lose a little energy to our moon every year, and the moon picks up a little energy from us because these things are always equal.

Speaker 41 Think about like when you throw a ball, the more energy you use, the further the ball is away from you.

Speaker 12 Well, as we add add a little more energy to the moon, the moon very slyly moves a little further away from us.

Speaker 28 Every year, it's about a couple of inches, according to Chris.

Speaker 51 The length of a worm.

Speaker 27 Really?

Speaker 22 So the moon is getting a worm's distance further away from us every year.

Speaker 31 Yeah. And he says if you go back about four billion years.

Speaker 51 The moon was originally about 10 times closer than it is now.

Speaker 4 Taylor, you can imagine.

Speaker 51 Imagine the moon looking 10 times bigger than it does now. That would have been crazy.

Speaker 51 Also, the days would have been six hours long.

Speaker 33 Six hours long?

Speaker 44 To me, what this says is that everything that we take for granted as normal in our world, you know, ice at the poles, seas in certain places, continents configured the way they are, the number of days in a year, all that is subject to change.

Speaker 43 And all that has changed.

Speaker 44 All that has dramatically changed over the course of the history of our planet.

Speaker 10 And that includes how we measure time itself.

Speaker 42 So, you know, when I'm sitting in a hull in the middle of the Arctic digging out a fish fossil, every now and then, you know, I pinch myself and say, here I am in the Arctic, digging out a fish fossil, you know, that lived in an ancient subtropical environment.

Speaker 39 You know, the juxtaposition between present and past sometimes is utterly mind-blowing.

Speaker 39 But it's very informative about our own age and that we, you know, we take we think things are eternal but they're not they're they're everything is is subject to change change is is the way of the world

Speaker 1 we are going to change now to a break but we've got more coming up after that

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Speaker 1 Hello again. You're listening to Radio Lab.
I'm Latif Nasser. We are discussing the flexibility, the surprising flexibility of time today.

Speaker 1 And in the first segment, we learned all about how Coral has marked the ever-changing march of time, how days were once shorter, years once longer.

Speaker 1 Now we're going to pivot to

Speaker 1 a more, I mean, I don't know, it's like taking that idea of time flexibility and just taking it to an absurd, absurd place with our host emeritus, Robert Krulwich.

Speaker 26 So I just want to play you a little bit of a, can we do this? Can we just add an end to the end?

Speaker 37 Because that's what I'd like to.

Speaker 30 I was talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an astrophysicist and who thinks about spin, which we've just thought about, thinks about the inner solar system, which we've just thought about.

Speaker 47 So here's him and I talking about holding on to time.

Speaker 25 It's a little goofy, but here it is, just for the fun of it. So if you're on Earth and you're walking

Speaker 7 around Quito on the equator,

Speaker 13 if you're walking at four miles an hour,

Speaker 34 your day will go sort of the normal way.

Speaker 29 The sun will rise behind you, go overhead, and then go down the other side.

Speaker 19 Well, if you're stationary, if you're stationary, a 24-hour day, yes.

Speaker 20 If you started walking on the equator, depending on which direction you walked, your day will either last longer or shorter.

Speaker 20 So if you walk west, The faster you walk, the longer your day will become.

Speaker 35 You could walk at a pace where you have a 25-hour day, a 27-hour day.

Speaker 20 There's a speed with which you can walk on the equator and the Earth going west, where your day lasts forever.

Speaker 19 And that is the rotation rate of the earth.

Speaker 15 You would have compensated.

Speaker 34 What is roughly what that would be a gerbil?

Speaker 37 A gerbil running on a beach ball, a rotating beach ball. So that would on the top of

Speaker 37 a beach ball.

Speaker 35 So that speed for the equator is about a thousand miles an hour. So the equator moves a thousand miles an hour, and that gives it gives us the 24-hour day.

Speaker 35 If you want to go a thousand miles an hour to the opposite direction, you will stop the day.

Speaker 53 The sun will never move in the sky, and you'll have a and your day will last.

Speaker 34 Superman did that once, I think, when he had this thing with Lois.

Speaker 35 Superman would have so messed up everybody on Earth for having stopped the rotation of the Earth, reversed it, and then set it forward again.

Speaker 52 Yes, he did that. He would have scrambled all, anything not bolted to the Earth would have been good.

Speaker 7 He would have flown off?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 So depending on your latitude, any equatorial residents, if you stop the Earth, They were going at a thousand miles an hour with the Earth. You stop the Earth and you're not seat belted to the Earth.

Speaker 52 You will fall over and roll due east a thousand miles an hour.

Speaker 35 In our mid-latitudes, we're in New York, you can do the math, moving about 800 miles an hour due east, and stop the Earth.

Speaker 35 We will roll 800 miles an hour due east and crash into buildings and other things that are attached to the Earth.

Speaker 4 That are attached to the Earth.

Speaker 34 But let's going back to Venus now.

Speaker 48 Oh, you want to go to Venus?

Speaker 4 Isn't this enough for you?

Speaker 34 No, I wanted to, the whole point was to go to Venus because it's so different there. Yeah.

Speaker 52 On every way.

Speaker 35 No, it's about the same size and about the same surface gravity.

Speaker 4 But that's it.

Speaker 52 It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

Speaker 35 It's a runaway greenhouse effect. It is heavy volcanic activity that repaves the surface periodically, so there are very few craters on Venus.

Speaker 25 Just unpleasant in general.

Speaker 15 Unpleasant.

Speaker 54 It rotates very slowly.

Speaker 19 Well, that's why I want to stop.

Speaker 25 So how slowly does it rotate?

Speaker 4 I don't remember the exact

Speaker 34 four miles an hour or something like that.

Speaker 54 Yeah, it's some very slow rate at its equator,

Speaker 53 slow enough so that you don't need special, you don't need airplanes to stop the sun.

Speaker 35 You don't need special speed devices. You could probably trot and stop the sun on on the horizon or wherever the sun is.

Speaker 48 So if you're that guy from Jamaica, what's his name?

Speaker 15 Hussein Bolt.

Speaker 34 Hussein Bolt.

Speaker 34 And you happen to be on Venus for a little while, and you decide to go for a run. What happens to Hussein during the run?

Speaker 35 Okay, so normally the Sun would rise in one direction and set in the other. Depending on which direction you chose to run in,

Speaker 35 you could reverse your day and have the sun rise in the opposite side of the sky than it normally would.

Speaker 23 But I think Venus is rotating rotating slowly enough that you wouldn't have to be Usain Bolt.

Speaker 15 I'd have to check my numbers on that.

Speaker 25 Well, I don't think you would.

Speaker 34 Maybe you'd, in order to have the Sun actually sort of seem to go backwards.

Speaker 48 That's what you're saying.

Speaker 4 Is the Sun would go backwards. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 So you'd be having lunch, you're Usain Bolt, and you'd decide, now I'm going to run.

Speaker 48 And the Sun's going backwards towards the morning horizon.

Speaker 54 You can reverse the Sun.

Speaker 52 That's correct.

Speaker 10 In fact, that is a really good reason to sprint.

Speaker 29 I think.

Speaker 15 Well, but who cares about the Sun anymore?

Speaker 48 Me? If I were Usain book, I go up to you.

Speaker 15 Is the sun telling you when to eat lunch? I don't think so.

Speaker 35 Your stomach is telling you when to eat lunch. You're saying, okay, Hussein, you eat breakfast, but you want to have lunch real soon?

Speaker 15 Run so that the sun is now at the top of the sky, so now you can legally have lunch.

Speaker 48 No! You are not buying my poetic premises at all today.

Speaker 15 This is the 21st century, Jack.

Speaker 4 And the sun is...

Speaker 52 We wake by alarm clocks, not by roosters and sunlight.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 Just doesn't matter.

Speaker 25 I wish I could help you out by thinking.

Speaker 22 Let's suppose.

Speaker 24 I am not going to depend on running so that this on Venus to get the sun in the middle of the sky at my command so that I can have lunch.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 34 All right, but let's suppose you're a rooster and you like to crow at dawn.

Speaker 27 That's just a deep feeling.

Speaker 37 You could totally mess with a rooster this week.

Speaker 19 Yes, that's what I want to do.

Speaker 15 Usain Bolt carrying a rooster with him.

Speaker 34 Usain Bolt carries a rooster on Venus.

Speaker 48 He does it in a remarkably fast sprint. The rooster, having started the run in the middle of the day, well past the crowing period, feels a strange compulsion to crow two hours into the run.

Speaker 35 Because he ran backwards to the sunrise rather than.

Speaker 48 Well, he ran forwards, but the sun went backwards, really.

Speaker 35 Yes, he ran in the other way to reverse the sun back to sunrise.

Speaker 20 Yeah, and the rooster

Speaker 54 will need therapy.

Speaker 54 Step by step,

Speaker 54 to the mountain top we fly, climb

Speaker 54 Not all at once

Speaker 54 But one step at a time

Speaker 54 Every day

Speaker 54 every day every day

Speaker 54 every day every day

Speaker 54 every day every day

Speaker 54 every day

Speaker 4 One step

Speaker 4 at a time

Speaker 4 Well, um

Speaker 36 I think it's time for us to definitely go now.

Speaker 10 Yeah, we should definitely go now.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 10 I'm Jad.

Speaker 4 I'm Robert. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 55 Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont, and here are the staff credits.

Speaker 55 Radio Lab was created by Jad Eben Rod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.
Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Speaker 55 Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 55 Harry Fertuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Guterres, Sindhu Nianusum Bumdum, Matt Gilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 55 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 56 Hi, this is Ellie from from Cleveland, Ohio.

Speaker 56 Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assimons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 56 Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Speaker 3 Radio Lab is supported by Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Speaker 3 Just ask the Capital One Bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way.
He'd also tell you that Radiolab is his favorite podcast too. Aw, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank guy.

Speaker 3 What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com slash bank, capital One NA, member, FDIC.

Speaker 3 Radiolab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit transforming America's love of nature into action. for our forests.

Speaker 3 Did you know that national forests provide clean drinking water to one in three Americans? And when forests struggle, so do we.

Speaker 3 The National Forest Foundation creates lasting impact by restoring forests and watersheds, strengthening wildfire resilience, and expanding recreation access for all.

Speaker 3 Last year, they planted 5.3 million trees and led over 300 projects to protect nature and communities nationwide. Learn more at nationalforests.org/slash radiolab.