Radiolab - Bigger Than Bacon

Episode Date: May 10, 2016

Today's story is a mystery, shockingly hot, and vanishingly tiny. It starts with a sound, rising like a mist from the marsh, around a dock in South Carolina. But where it goes next - from submarines to superheroes (and yes, Keanu Reeves!); from the surface of the sun to the middle of the brain - is far from expected. Producer Molly Webster brings her family along for the ride. Enjoy the adventure, before it...implodes.  Produced by Molly Webster and Annie McEwen. Reported by Molly Webster. Guest sound designer, Jeremy Bloom. Special thanks to Kullervo Hynynen, James Bird, and Lawrence Crum.  After you listen to the episode (spoiler alerts): Wanna see the shrimp bubble in super slowmo? Check it out here (and note, of the 1,400 views on this video, producer Molly Webster probably comprises 752). If you want to see cavitation bubbles form, and think you might enjoy watching it happen in French, check this out - the high frame rate makes these shots divine.  Bigger Better Bubbles  Before Dave Stein, soap bubbles were round, smallish, and collapsed with a pop. Now, they are anything but.  Today we explore the story of one man, who - in an instant, changed the art of bubble blowing and what it means to be a bubble forever.  Produced by Simon Adler Special thanks to Megan Colby Parker, Gary Pearlman, David Erk, Rick Findley and everyone who came out to blow giant bubbles with us in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.  You can hear Jad's bubble dance party song here    

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N.Y. C. See?

Yeah. Hey, I'm Jan Abumrad. I'm Robert Krollow. This is Radio Lab. Today, we have a mystery that is vanishingly tiny, shockingly hot. And manages to combine submarines. Keanu Reeves, Red Lobster, and Game of Thrones. And, of course, our producer, Molly Webster, and many members of

for your family. Hello, hello, hello. Where are the children? So you want to begin in the beautiful state of South Carolina? South Carolina. It's on a pier. Yeah. Is my radio gear waterproof?

Yes. No. On a dock? Okay, so we're going to walk down to the docking, which is just like this place where they all put boats in the water. I'm Oliver. And that's where we always... Oh, take a laca, like a bumbo.

Shut up. I'm going to explain what I dock is. Okay. My parents recently moved to this marshy swampy area near the Intracoastal Waterway, which is like a connecting series of salty channels. And we grew up in Ohio, and so this is like a totally different landscape than what we grew up in. And those little people would be my nieces and nephews. I'm riding my bike so we can ride it back.

Do you hear that America? Those are my children getting along and compromised. That would be Chrissy Webster, one of my sisters. Yeah, we sound a lot of life. Anyway. So, okay, so this. This is the story. The story is, so when my parents first moved there, I remember going out on the docks with my dad and we were sort of looking at the beautiful marsh, right? And there was this really weird sound, like, coming off the water. I recently took my nieces and nephew out to see if they could hear it.

Okay, we're going to be... I'm in position. Okay, so we're not going to move, and we're not going to squeak. Not going to talk. We're not going to talk. Okay. So we lean down off the dock. Okay, ready? Now we're going to see if we can hear it. Oh my gosh, I hear some crackles.

That crackling sound? Yeah. What is that? That was the question. It sounds like rice. Most of the scientists you talk to say it sounds like bacon frying or twigs crackling in a fire. Maybe you have a large Perrier factory just up the wall. I would say that except there's no bubbles popping on the water.

Oh, so it's not a gaseous emission. It's a clickety-clacket. Let me just play you a better recording. Yeah, pull it up. Wait, do I have to put it through the producer PC? Wait, uh... Oh, wait, here we go. This is actually an underwater recording.

Oh, my God. Oh. Gosh, in a teeny world, that would be like the Fourth of July. Yeah. Wow. It's bigger than bacon. It's bigger than bacon. It depends on how much bacon you're frying.

So, all right, what is this sound? What is it? This sound is a very... very tiny. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me just back it up a second. Well, the story started in the 40s. That's Michelle Verslauze.

Professor of physical acoustics and medical acoustics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Basically what he said is World War II is the first war where we're like really using submarines and sonar. And so you've got all of these U.S. Navy submarines down deep in the ocean and they're like listening out for the enemy. But what happens is all they hear is this like crazy crackling sound. The sound levels that were measured, so this sound is very, very intense. He says in some instances it was actually interfering with the sonar. And that was a bit of a problem. Yeah, so I found a classified document that was declassified right after the war, where the Navy,

they actually hired this scientist, this guy named Martin Johnson. This is in California. I believe it was in San Diego at the Scripps. They hired this guy to figure out, what the f is the sound? Like, what is the sound we're hearing like all over the ocean? What is it already? Chad's like, just tell me what the damn sound is. Yes.

Well, it turns out. I don't want to go too fast here. It was noted in those years that that sound originated from. The shrimpie's shrimp. It was a shrimp. Oh, yeah. The shrimp is called a snapping shrimp or a pistol shrimp. Ooh. Pistol.

I like that. Pistol. And interestingly, I found these old Navy recordings that they would give to the Navy guys where they had to learn the sounds they were hearing coming in through the ship and through the sonar. In your work with the expendable radio sonobo,

you will probably hear many sounds other than submarine sound. It was like, this is the sound of a snapping shrimp. It produces a harsh clicking noise. And I was like, Like, okay, shrimp, sonar, cool. I get it. I thought maybe it would end there.

And then I found what felt to me to be a crazy article, which was this newspaper clipping from 1946, basically says, shrimps helped win the war. What? And I was like, what? And it's about how the American Navy

admitted that one of their tactical things during World War II was that they would hide their submarines in the beds of these shrimp. So like the Japanese submarines couldn't detect our ships. Oh my goodness. So it's like a marine invisibility cloak. Yes.

And according to Michelle, the U.S. would also... Put speakers on the hull of the ships to simulate snapping shrimp. Wait, what? It was sound camo. Yeah. So wait, wait, wait, wait. Are these shrimp, are they like normal, normal shrimp cocktail type shrimp? Well...

They're about five centimeters, two inches. So like smaller than a shrimp I might eat. Well, it depends what sort of shrimp you eat. I don't know. Whatever red lobsters there is no, I don't know. Wait a second. If they're that small, how are they making that sound? That is an excellent question.

Wait, where do you think the sound comes from? I'm thinking the shrimpies are eating their food. And the noises their little teeth. Ooh, shrimpi teeth. I think it, for me, I think it comes from their like snappy claw thingies. And that's what you would think, right? Like, especially if you look at these things up close. They have two front claws and the claws aren't the same on each side.

That's Nancy Nolton, a marine biologist, snapping shrimp expert. There's a claw that's specialized for pinching. And that claw is tiny. And a claw that's specialized for snapping. And that claw is like exponentially bigger. It's like 10 times 20, maybe three times bigger. It's quite a bit bigger. And so they use it to defend themselves against potential predators or competitors.

They're very territorial. She says in one shrimp runs into another shrimp. They can get into these prolonged snapping matches where they snap at each other to show who's bigger and who's stronger. Okay, fine. And they can pretty much judge how big they are by the power of the snap. All of which is to say, my niece Sophie's guest. I think it comes from their like snappy claw thingies.

It's like, yeah, of course. It's like the two sides of the claw, just like snapping together. It's just like you snap your fingers like this. Just a snap. Snap. But that turns out not to be true. So not true. Two things were wrong, basically, with that picture.

I don't know if you have ever tried to clap your hands in the swimming pool underwater, but it's very difficult. Yeah, you don't feel very smart when you try. It doesn't work. But there's not a little. lot of sound, and that is because there's a lubrication layer of water in between that prevents a direct mechanical contact. Yes, there's this lubricating layer between the two claw halves, and it makes snapping hard. And the second problem was that the sound just seemed way too loud, like when they measure the decibel level of a single snap. It's about 220 decibels of sound

that can be produced by a single snap. To put that in context, that is basically equivalent to A jet plane from just one snap. But it's very impulsive. So it's in a very, very short duration. But still, it's like one of the loudest sounds in the ocean. So Michelle was like, it's probably more than snapping going on here. Yeah, so. Okay, so it was 1999.

We had a new high-speed camera in our lab. And so they're like, okay, we're going to point this camera at the shrimp. And see what happens when this shrimp snaps its claw. So they take the little shrimps and they glue screws on their butts. They glue screws on their butts. Yeah, and they screw them into tiny platforms in like a little aquariums. So that they were fixed in space. And that was important.

Because it happens in like a microsecond. And they need to keep it still so the camera can just focus right on the claw. And to do the experiment, what we needed to do was to tickle them a little bit with the paintbrush. You tickled them with a paintbrush? Yeah, exactly. Then they cocked their claws and then they snap and then it fires. And the camera captures the entire thing with like thousands of frames per second. And did they see anything?

They did see something. What is it? When they looked at the footage of the moment just after it snaps in super slow-mo. We saw a very blurry object in front of the shrimp. What blurry? It was just like bloppy blurry something? It was bloppy, blurry. I mean, it turned out that we were sort of out of focus. So they refocus the camera.

They do the same thing. They tickle the shrimp. The claw snaps. And they see that when the claw snaps, they see this like bubble in front of the shrimp claw. And it turns out that it's that bubble that's causing the noise and so much undersea turmoil. The bubble is at the root of everything. Okay.

And with the high-speed camera, they were sort of able to see how it all breaks down. And it sort of unfolds like this. What actually happens when this claw closes is that the water that is in between these claws is squeezed out at high speed. The typical speed can be up to 60 miles per hour. Like as fast as a car goes? Oh, yes, yes. So this jet of water shoots out like 60 miles per hour.

and what happens is, like, behind the jet is that this, like, empty space is created. Like a little void in the ocean, and all the water molecules in that space, because they're like, ooh, look at all this room. They start to expand outwards, and essentially they just become, like, a little gas bubble. They actually change from liquid to gas? Yeah, they actually go from, like, liquid is, like, tightly packed molecules, and then as they spread out, they become, like, gaseous. and they create this little gas bubble pocket

in the middle of the huge ocean. And as they have all the space, they get bigger and bigger and bigger until the ocean's like, no. Like microseconds later, the ocean starts pushing back in on this bubble. And all the little air molecules in this bubble have nowhere to go and they're getting forced

closer and closer together. And so they really want to get away from each other. All those air molecules, but you're pushing them together really hard. And since they can't get away from each other, like the energy builds up super, super huge. And the pressure rises and the temperature rises. Really rises. 5,000 degrees.

The surface of the sun is also 5,000 degrees. And the gas that's inside the bubble turns to plasma. And that plasma emits a very short, intense flash of light. And then the bubble implodes. And then, the bubble implodes. And then... Like a microsecond later. It generates the shockwave.

And that shockwave will basically kill or stun any prey that is nearby. Somebody from the College of Exaggeration graduated this particular explanation. Because you've got this teeny little animal with an enormous bubble as hot as the sun. And then I think, oh, yeah. Okay. It's fairly crazy. But it's amazing how evolution has created this kind of sonic weapon. So basically, yes, shrimps, they're like super awesome because they're just claw that generate huge bubbles of heat.

And it's like, go mess with the shrimp because it's a black belt. Wow, so it's spitting out light and hot, hot, hot temperatures. Yeah. Does that mean that God. I know, the sun thing is crazy. That's crazy. I feel like it should be like a Marvel character. Totally.

Yeah, because if you scaled this up, the bubble would be the size of a basketball in human scale. What could I do with a basketball of sun, heat, and light? I could rule the world with that. I'll be having that cat. Hey, hey, hey, hey, that last piece of cake is mine. That was what when my sister was hanging off the dock, she asked, like, can we use this to power, like, the world or something? No, the answer was no. But the same physical processes that are involved in the shrimp bubbles, right?

So like the temperature and the heat that bubbles can create, researchers became really excited about, is there a way to harness this bubble power? Yeah, there's also a Hollywood movie. I think I did it. Is it stable? On powerful bubbles with Keanu Reeves, I believe. Really? Really?

Yes, yes. There is enough energy in this glass of water to power the city of Chicago for weeks. they went too far Boom Taken with the weapon possibilities Yeah my nephew got excited about this too

My name's Oliver But I hate to tell you I don't think there are any I mean you can't make a bigger claw Put it on a sub No Sorry guys

Well there is this one thing Where researchers are thinking about using bubbles, and this goes beyond the shrimp bubbles, in a way that could save lives. My name is Joseph Thackard. I'm calling from Columbia, South Carolina. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

This is Radio Lab, and now we're going to go back to the story from Molly Webster. So you were saying people here are trying to use bubble power to save lives? Yeah. So when I was talking to Michelle Risslaus, we're talking on the phone and he explains all the crazy bubbly stuff. And somehow like in the middle of the conversation, he just said, if you think the shrimp bubbles are cool, everything we know about the shrimp bubbles like can also be like adapted to use bubbles in the body. Oh. And I was just like, what? Wait, wait, but bubbles in the body, isn't that? Isn't that an embolism, though?

Yeah, totally. I had the same thought, like, when divers get the bends or when they, like, tap bubbles out of IV lines and stuff. But these are very, very small bubbles, smaller than red blood cells. According to Verslauss, they're like one-twent the size of human hair. And they are completely harmless. And he told me about how in Toronto, and they actually just did this for the first time in November,

on a patient, they're using bubbles to get across the blood-brain barrier. Huh. What exactly is the blood-brain barrier? Is it cells or is it tissue? Yeah, it's super, super-titely packed cells. It sort of sits between the bloodstream and the brain. It's like this protective wall, and it keeps out all of, like, the nasty stuff. So it keeps out any, like, bacteria or viruses that would be in your bloodstream,

can't get past the wall to get into your brain. brain. I kind of keep thinking of it as like, I'm never actually watched Game of Thrones except for like one episode. And in it there was this giant wall. Yeah. To protect civilization from sort of all the bad things, the wild things. And it was made of ice and it went up forever.

I've never fallen before. I kind of feel like that wall in Game of Thrones is like the barrier between the rest of the body and the brain. But you said it's there to. protect the brain. So why would you want to punch a hole in it? Well, you can imagine that if somebody has a brain tumor and we want to deliver chemicals in there that we think can help fight the tumor, those chemicals the brain does not want in there. So the blood brain barrier can create problems, according to Todd Main Prize. I'm a neurosurgeon at Sunnybrook. He's part of the team in Toronto

that's using this new bubble technique. And here's how it works. Okay, so say you've got a tumor on the right side of your brain, right above your ears. So main prize and his team will stick you in a chair and then they'll put a helmet on you. Special helmet. This helmet has 1,024 ultrasound transducers. And we aim the 1,024 all to the same spot. Right on the spot at the wall where the tumor sits just down the other side, just out of reach. Okay, so that all the ultrasound waves kind of focus at that one area. And then we inject the bubbles. How many bubbles are in a dose? Like hundreds of thousands.

So they just put an IV in your arm, and the bubbles go in, and they'll go like into your arm, like over your shoulder, into your heart, to your lungs, back to your heart. Eventually, some of them will get up to the brain. We know it takes approximately 28 seconds from the time we inject the bubble into her arm vein to by the time they start going into her brain. And eventually some of those bubbles get up to the blood brain barrier, that wall, to the spot where that laser beam is focused. that specific spot that the tumor is sitting on the other side of, and when they cross paths with that beam... The ultrasound waves causes the micro-bubbles to oscillate in size. They'll go big and small, big and small, big and small.

Big small, big small, big small, oscillate in size. I think of it as like a bubble dance party. So with this really specific part in the brain, and it can be smaller than like one millimeter by one millimeter square, all these bubbles are dancing. are dancing, and what that does is it causes the wall, that specific spot to almost loosen. And so, like, a little, like a window of space or a little hole is created in that wall.

And if you happen to have chemotherapy in your blood, which you will, because we'll give it to ahead of time, the minute that hole is open, the idea is the chemotherapy in your bloodstream would be able to just sort of flow through that opening and get straight to that brain tumor tissue. So they're using sound to turn the bubbles into a little dancing drill bits. Yeah. And drill through the wall. Yeah. Wow. Now, the body's a living organism. So over the next six to 12 hours, they will close those gaps. It's transient, meaning it heals itself in about six to 12 hours. And you're saying they tried this on someone already? Yeah, last November. And they think it went well. One of the things these researchers said was once you're able to open these passageways to the brain,

it's not just chemo that can get in there, but like suddenly any type of drug you might want to send through can get through. And we've just never had access to the brain before in that way. And there's this question of like, how will drugs interact with the brain? We kind of don't know. They've, they've never been there before. It's like a whole new frontier. You think shrimp in time is done? Yeah. So, I mean, basically all boils down to the same sort of physics of bubbles that we have learned from this shrimp and that we can apply to many other applications.

We're going to put it on the radio, so you'll hear it the people that like shrimp. What if people don't like shrimp? Then they'll just skip it. I can't believe Molly's putting this on the radio. Oh, I make no promises that this is going on the radio. Oh, yeah. Molly Webster. This piece was produced by Molly and Annie McEwen.

With help from our guest sound designer Jeremy Bloom, special thanks to Kulevalli, James Bird, Lawrence Crumb, and Elliot Sophie Oliver and Chrissy, all of them, Webster's. Next up, a story from our producer, Simon Adler, who got interested in bubbles, after Molly found her shrimp piece.

He got interested in bubbles, and he managed to find a guy named Dave Stein who has taken bubbling to a whole new level. Why is the bigger, bubble, better? I think trying to make things bigger is a function of growing up. I don't know.

I always thought that this was kind of inherent in the human psyche is to want to do things bigger and better. And so, well, we might even make this a Stein's Law. Okay. Stein's... Stein's Law.

Stein's Law of Bubble. of bubbling? Stein's law of size. That's kind of off the top of my head here, but for any given object, there is a larger size such that the nature of the object is transformed.

In simple English, what would that mean? as something gets bigger, it gets what? Okay. Take Jupiter. Okay, gaseous planets. Okay. All right. If you make Jupiter bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger, there is a size at which it becomes a star. It ignites.

It becomes a sun. It transcends what it was. Then can a bubble get so big that it's no longer even a bubble? Well, before the invention of the bubble thing, For the bubbles, we always thought of as being relatively small and relatively round. But as soon as you get up to a certain size, say, five foot diameter, kind of in that range, now suddenly they're not round anymore. And they don't pop in the same way.

People would think of bubbles as popping instantaneously because they're thinking of the little round bubbles from the dime store. And what really happens in very large bubbles like the ones I and my friends make, the bubble doesn't pop instantaneously. It gets punctured at a certain point, and then it rips open like a zipper. And there's a sound to it. It kind of goes s like that. So it's not, it's not, it's.

It's good. S's from one end of this long. bubble to the other. Can we back up to tell me the story of how you, like, why, who were you in 1984 when you're like, I'm going to make this bubble thing? What motivated all of this? Well, what motivated all of this was I was an architect at the time. I was working for Hardy Holstman-Fiefer, a very fashionable firm downtown here. And he says he spent his days designing these really intricate buildings where, like, glass staircases meet the stonework. of the building at a 45-degree angle, and the roof is going up at another angle.

And it all has to work down to the 16th of an inch. I wasn't very happy at it, actually. In fact, I used to worry about structural collapse all the time. He says he'd be walking down the streets of Manhattan, imagining some building he was building in his mind. Say the addition to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. So he's imagining this building, and then all of a sudden his mind would shift to worry about that building collapsing. And he says this just kept happening with every project. All these buildings kept just crashing to the ground.

Like, did this keep you up at night? Did you wake up? Yeah, I felt I had to. I felt that as a architect, it's my responsibility to imagine all the possible disasters. He says it became this not-so-healthy occupational obsession. And why? Why? All right, that's a good question. Let me tell you something. I'm probably getting some of these details wrong.

But my grandfather, Clarence Balke, was a metallurgist who had something to do with building the atomic bomb, and so did my uncle. And my mother was quite traumatized by being a daughter of the bomb, so to speak. Dave says it became part of the family legacy and maybe warmed its way into his psyche and poisoned his work. Well, that's just the way I read. registered it. What I'm trying to basically trying to say was that I was not really happy as an architect. Anyway, that summer in 1984, my little daughter, Kayla, who was one and a half, saw a man blowing bubbles with one of those little dime store wands and she was just transfixed. She was transported to another realm. You know, like any kid. And so...

Dave says from that point on, we were always blowing bubbles. All kinds of small. small bubbles, medium ones, large ones. And he says pretty quick, he started to wonder, how can we make these bubbles bigger? And we used, you know, we cut out the ends of coffee cans. You know, dipped one end in the soap, blew through the other, got... Get maybe a bubble that might be a foot in diameter. Then he tried getting a coat hanger and bending it into a circle, dipping that into a frying pan full of soap.

With that, you can make a bubble maybe two-footer or something. And is your daughter getting more and more excited as the bubbles get bigger? Is this about you? She was getting kind of bored with it, actually. But Dave started to get a little obsessed. Yes, that's definitely true. And I was thinking, you know, this is an interesting design problem, maximizing the size of bubbles and know how you go about that.

And initially his thought was, and this is kind of everyone's thought when they start thinking about this, you just need a bigger circle, a bigger hoop through which to blow the bubble. Like a hula hoop with a handle on it. And you would need one of those little plastic swimming pools full of bubble soap, which starts to seem kind of like a lot of soap. And from a design perspective, like, how do you scale that up? You can't just keep making the hoop and bucket bigger. Like, that seems crazy.

So at that point, I was sort of stuck. But whatever, he was going on with his life, designing buildings. But then he says, one day in the summer of 1984. I was lying in bed one morning. I can still remember the pattern of cracks in the ceiling. The idea hit him like a ton of bubble-shaped bricks. Why not have a collapsible hoop? I sort of instantly saw this thing in my mind, which was...

What we now know as... The bubble thing. Dave leaps out of bed, heads to the hardware store, buys his stuff. And I bought the dowel and the chain and the fastenings and so... Hurry's home, starts assembling the device. Were you in your kitchen? Where were you when you were doing? Oh, you don't do this indoors. Ultimately, he stepped outside, and what he had in his hands was really...

really nothing more than like a stick with a loop of chain attached to it. And one end of the loop you can kind of slide up and down on the stick so that you could expand and collapse the loop. That's the beauty of this design to have that control and be able to close it. Anyway, back in the backyard. I closed the loop. So it was just like a cord, like a straight cord. I dunked it in the bucket of soap.

I raised it up. I opened the loop. Right away, there's huge. bubble tube starts coming out. The tube stretches for seven, eight feet. He's not sure, but at a certain point, he closes the loop to pinch it off. And now it's a free-floating bubble, and it's sailing away over the house top. And through the fog.

Suddenly there's this gigantic bubble floating away, the biggest bubble ever blown, I believe. He says it was somewhere between the size of a refrigerator in a car, iridescent and wobbly. and then suddenly it popped. What did you feel in that moment? Were you Dr. Frankenstein who had just let this monster out into the world? I got this cold thrill going down my spine. I'll never forget that.

And as he sent more and more of these into the air, pretty soon people started arriving in their cars and trucks. Everybody was totally astonished. And I thought this might be my ticket out of architecture. So Dave was able to patent the bubble thing and made enough money to get out of architecture. And in the process, he transformed bubble blowing from a thing that just like kids do to this, I don't know, kind of sport where you have like bubble athletes. My name's Gary Paroleman. Megan Parker.

Rick Findlay. All over the world. In Mexico, they call me El Burrujo. I currently am the. champion, the heavyweight, the big boy. And people are blowing like really big bubbles. You could picture, say, two 18 wheelers stacked on top of one another.

That's about how big the bubble was. That's a slight exaggeration. But anyways, there are debates going on about what kind of soap to use, which is the best polymer to add to that soap and what kind of fabric to use for the loop. But despite all this experimentation, pretty much everyone uses a variation

of Dave's original idea. These people are sort of my followers, you see. I find it very interesting that you had this fear of your buildings collapsing. And here you go into this world where all of the things you're making are meant to collapse. Well, here's the thing. It's true that every bubble will collapse, but there's no blame. I see. Nobody got hurt.

I think we might be able to get some here. So that night, Dave took me out bubbled. We got baking powder, we have thermometers, we have test strips for measuring pH. He'd been watching the humidity, said it was okay, but the wind... This amount of wind is usually very difficult. Not so good. So we'll go down and try to find some shelter. Okay, so we're on the corner of what, West End and 106th here.

Midnight in Manhattan. Pretty much empty, a couple cars, almost no one walking. So now I'm going to dunk it in the soap And now I'm going to raise it up And I'm going to open the loop And I'm going to see if I can make my bubble here There we go, okay, that one's pretty good It is sailing along into the intersection

And now it's now chasing The bubble is now chasing the taxi How big is that one? That's about the size of a killer whale, I'd say. Maybe 20 feet long. When you get these giant bubbles sailing around among these buildings, it activates the space. He says it seems to transform the architecture, and it definitely did. Like it made the city look suddenly beautiful and like a lava lamp and alien.

And we've got some people walking by that are now taking videos of this. Gee, look at that one. Oh, that's a great one. That's the size of a smallish baby elephant maybe. Okay, and a taxi has now just done a U-turn to watch us and see us. We've got a bike messenger who's rubbernecking as he goes by. Even at midnight, an audience just materialized. It's just incredible.

Like, everybody, okay, New Yorkers are assholes, and people are stopping with... Stopping with smiles, and they're... Like, this taxi has just stopped in the middle of the road to watch you do this. So do you often stop your taxi to look at things? Totally different things. So big.

I see the small one before, but this is totally different. Yeah, like this. It's so silly, right? It's very silly. Not silly. It's very wonderful. Very wonderful. See, you see?

It's very creative. Oh, there, that's the size of a killer whale for sure. You ever feel silly out here? I sometimes do, but I also sometimes compare myself to my grandfather and I'm much happier to have invented the giant bubble thing than having invented the bomb. I also think, you know, I, in a way I feel like I have started an art form and that is going to go on and evolve. Thanks to producer Simon Adler.

And we also want to thank all the Radio Lab listeners who came out recently in Blue Bubbles with us in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Message 1. This is Chrissy Webster. R. West Oliver and Sophie by proxy in her friend's house. But we are reading the Predators. Radio Lab is produced by Chad of Rood Red. Lauren Tees is our Director of San Stein.

Doran Wheeler is... This is senior sugar. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Eddler, Brenda Farrell, David Debbled, Matt Kelsey, Robert Krullwich, Coney McEwen,

Kennedy Mill, with East and Feecear, Melissa O'Connell, Kelsey Padgett, Gary Ann Wack, and Molly Wester. Molly Waston. With how much.

from Alexander Lee Young, Stephanie Tamo, Micah Lohenka. Our fact checkers are Eva and Michelle Harris about science. End of message.