DARK vs LIGHT
5/17/202655 min
Why are black cars more dangerous, white chess pieces more successful, and pandas apparently incapable of coping with minor inconvenience? Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) unpack one deceptively simple question - which would win in a fight between black and white? - and end up exploring everything from colour psychology and radioactive frogs to quasars, fantasy literature, and whether the universe itself ultimately sides with darkness. Along the way, Hannah invents a new category of “cool cult members,” Michael explains how light could theoretically form a black hole, and both attempt to avoid turning the entire episode into a Tolkien podcast.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsHannah Fry· Host0:01
Welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.
Michael Stevens· Host0:02
And I'm Michael Stevens.
Hannah Fry· Host0:03
Now, today's episode, actually, we're cheating a little bit. We're, we're taking one of the listener questions which we liked so much that we are not putting it in an episode of Field Notes. We are expanding it out into a whole entire super-duper long version of our podcast.
Michael Stevens· Host0:19
Point is, we loved this question.
Hannah Fry· Host0:21
Adore it.
Michael Stevens· Host0:22
I think we should get right into, to reading it.
Hannah Fry· Host0:23
Okay, here we go. It's from Kelsey, who asks, "Hello, Hannah and Michael. My seven-year-old is a huge fan and just asked me a question which I can't answer. Which would win in a fight between black and white?" [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.
Michael Stevens· Host0:43
Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA, and for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk.
Hannah Fry· Host1:04
But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.
Michael Stevens· Host1:14
It's a reminder that- [gentle music] For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.
Speaker 31:21
Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections