Menu
Sign In Search Podcasts Libraries Charts People & Topics Add Podcast API Blog Pricing

Betül Kaçar

👤 Speaker
1813 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

I mean, there are very few people in the world that can do this really well.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

It's very easy to mess this up.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

So I respect to them, but we can identify if it is just like amino acid on an asteroid versus a microbe that wants, or a once living microbe.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

So we can do these sophisticated studies and we are getting there now with the sample return, right, with the Bennu.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

Like it's just so much happening.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

And in fact, it was today a paper came out, I was reading it on the way here, that took Deinococcus, this really resistant, crazy bug that can, you know, survive under really harsh conditions and radiated and it put this insane amount of pressure on it to understand whether this bug can survive planetary travel.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

And they found that it can, at least numerically, it can handle really, really high pressure.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

Wow.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

So that's kind of amazing.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

I mean, they're kind of linking into that as well, very carefully, because that one line of data doesn't make an entire concept, you know, doesn't prove the whole thing.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

But it is fun to think about it.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

Well, protein engineers showed us about seven years ago, a paper came out that showed that in an enzyme, they could replace the carbon with silicon.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

So at least engineering-wise, we demonstrated that you can, to some degree, push an enzyme to use silicon instead of carbon.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

Yes, albeit with some variations in the sense of it's not maybe as efficient, but it's fine.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

Sure, sure.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

But in whole organism, look, nobody wants weird, strange life forms more than me.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

But I also want to be able to study something and not hallucinate, right?

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

There's a part that imagination is great, but then you got to be, I think, a little careful and not go a little... Go too far.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

Alien hallucinations can be a little too much.

StarTalk Radio
How Did Life Begin? with Betül Kaçar

Go too far.