SciShow Tangents - Flying Machines

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Humanity’s quest for flight has been, all things considered, extremely successful! Sure, we aren’t all zipping around in jetpacks yet… but honestly I don’t think we’re ready for jetpacks. Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out SciShowTangnets.org![Truth or Fail]Donut-shaped aircrafthttps://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?CC=US&NR=2014319274A1&KC=A1&FT=D&ND=3&date=20141030&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EPhttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/flying-saucer-patents-alexander-weygershttps://patents.google.com/patent/US2377835A/enWilliams X-Jethttps://patents.google.com/patent/US4447024https://www.theguardian.com/science/2000/sep/14/technology2More pictures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_X-Jet#/media/File:Williams_X-Jet_-_side_view.jpgFlying magic carpet https://books.google.com/books?id=biYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/3/2504531/jetpack-history-future-passed[Fact Off]First aerial photographhttps://www.geriwalton.com/felix-nadars-giant-balloon-le-geant/#:~:text=Felix%20Nadar's%20giant%20balloon%2C%20or,known%20by%20the%20pseudonym%20Nadar.&text=Caricature%20of%20Nadar%20as%20a%20ballooning%20photographer.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/books-felix-nadar-france-photography-flighthttp://www.artinsociety.com/the-adventures-of-nadar-photography-ballooning-invention--the-impressionists.htmlhttps://papa.clubexpress.com/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=808138&module_id=158950Drone organ transporthttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/uomm-uom042619.phphttps://www.jems.com/2020/01/29/new-partnership-in-drone-delivery-system-for-human-organs/https://weare.techohio.ohio.gov/2019/10/30/vyrtx-pioneers-air-corridor-for-drone-delivery-of-organs/[Ask the Science Couch]Alberto Santos-Dumonthttps://www.britannica.com/biography/Alberto-Santos-Dumonthttps://www.cnet.com/news/were-the-wright-brothers-really-first-not-in-brazil/https://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/10/brazil.santosdumont.reut/http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_Airplane/Who_Was_First/Santos_Dumont/Santos_Dumont.htm[Butt One More Thing]Airplane stinky poophttp://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/31908620/ba-flight-forced-to-land-early-because-of-smelly-poo

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Today, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chen. Hello. Stefan, what's your hair care routine? Very relaxed.

I don't, I wash it occasionally. Stefan, do you use combination shampoo, conditioner, body wash, like the three-in-one? I do, and I buy in bulk. Of course you do. From my local warehouse store. What's your tagline? Up, up up and away. Thanks.

Sam Schultz also came with us. What's your tagline? Future voice of America's favorite orange cat, Garfield. Whoa. Sam's going for that big Garfield money. I like it. I like that dream. I'm much more, as is everyone,

I'm much more here for that than you being Santa Claus. That's not fair. I'd be good at being both. Yeah, and who's to say that Santa Claus isn't the voice of Garfield? That's the thing. Santa has nothing to do for most of the year. Sari Riley is here as well. Hi, Sari.

Hello. What's your tagline? Tiny bubble wrap. In the wine. In the wine? It's an old song. Yeah, tiny bubbles. Hello. What's your tagline? Tiny bubble wrap. In the wine. In the wine? It's an old song. Yeah, tiny bubbles. It's an old song. And I'm Hank Green, and my tagline is Hank Green, mistress of

hair. Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic,

but judging by previous conversations, we won't be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care. Now, as always,

we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me. I want to be a bird. I'm going to say it louder because I don't know if you heard. I want to be a bird. I want to build wax wings

and go to a cliff and just lean forward. I want to be a bird. Put a spinning corkscrew above me and spin it until it's blurred. I want to be a bird. Go to Kitty Hawk with my brother and just try something absurd. I want to be a bird. Go to Kitty Hawk with my brother and just try something absurd. I want to be a bird.

Design an engine that multiplies the thrust of combustion like a nerd. I want to be a bird. Sit in a rocket until mission control says lift off the final word. I want to be a bird. Yes. The topic for today is flying machines. That was great. We all need the snap now i think so the topic for today is flying machines which i guess encompasses most of the ways we currently fly but does it also

include some of the ways we wished we could fly but turned out we couldn't i think so yeah i feel like that da vinci corkscrew flying machine thing is a flying machine even if it wouldn't work uh anyway sari what's a flying machine i mean basically that the harder part of this to define is flight which we argued about in an earlier episode like is a jump flying i don't know but you have to take that definition of flight and then instead of imagining a human doing it or a bird you imagine a mechanical thing doing it right i feel like flight requires something to do with air so if i was on a very small planet like really small and i just jumped and i like reached escape velocity i would never land but i don't think

i'd be flying yeah i sort of feel like you have to get into the air and then some wing or something has to provide lift of some kind right and like a sustained lift you have to generate more lift than gravity so the space shuttle isn't flying around up there in your no it's not flying it's just falling okay it's just falling and missing all the time i even think that like a rocket that's like going through the air and and like if it has no no like lift surfaces and is only like shooting itself through the air with thrust. I don't even know the bats flying. Yeah. But yeah, we get the point. And also, I don't think that we're going to figure out the etymology of flying machine because I think I got it.

It comes from flying and machine. I looked up fly and machine separately. And fly is from the Proto-Indo-European pluk, which is an extended form of the root plu, to flow. So like pluvial or pneumonia all come from the same root. So you're flowing through the air. You're flowing, yeah. And then machine comes from the root mag,

which is to be able or have power. And so that's part of dismay or might, machine, mechanic, mage, magic. So all of those words fall into the same category as machine. So now that we know what a flying machine is, I guess, it's time for where you can play at home at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents. So Sari has brought three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The rest of us have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. And if we do, we get a

sandbox. If not, then Sari gets the sandbox. Sari, what are your three facts? Which of these weird flying machines was real? Oh, okay. Sure. Plain and simple. Number one, a donut-shaped aircraft that could hold over 100 people. This design allows for structural resistance to cabin pressure and more space for passengers. But after it was constructed and tested, it wasn't flown regularly or mass-produced because people feared there would be much more panic surrounding UFOs and possible attacks against these weird donut planes.

I'm confused, but we'll talk about it more in a second. Number two, a personal flying machine that looks kind of like a Segway and a snowmobile that had a baby. It's powered by a jet engine, and you lean in the direction you want to fly, and you can fly for about 30 minutes at a top speed of around 60 miles per hour. Or number three, a flying magic carpet, which is basically a flat piece of light but sturdy padding

with opposite rotating fans beneath it to generate thrust and a control panel to steer test designs carried as many as two people that were sitting or lying down prone sort of like planking and the plans were to scale up to create large chains of these for commuting over land like trains or water but people had trouble balancing and they were prone to accidents so development ceased yeah it seems very dangerous like That seems like a bad idea. A flexible thing above two propeller blades doesn't seem great. Yeah, I'm confused about how I don't immediately fall into the giant weed whacker, but we'll start at the beginning here.

So we've got the donut-shaped aircraft that could hold over 100 people. We've got a personal flying machine that looks like a Segway snowmobile that can go 60 miles an hour for 30 minutes. Or we've got a flying magic carpet that's just two giant person shredders inside of some kind of

flat thing that you can lay down on and move around with. So we're going to start with this donut. Sari, what's the lift surface on this boy? Is it like a whole donut or is it like a Boston cream donut? What are we talking about? It's like a donut with a hole in it, but there are wings that stick out that make it a little bit wider. Why is there a hole in the middle?

According to the patent, it says so it can withstand the loads induced by the cabin pressurization. So something about the hole in the middle of this plane, engineering-wise, in this patent says that it helps physics. A circle is a very strong shape. Yes, and so is a toroid. So when you say that these things are real, what do you mean? I mean that someone built it. So like the story in a hole is real. These all are based on patents, to be clear. So I can pull up patent specs for all of these machines. They just may

or may not be for this machine. So and then we've got our personal flying machine. Is 60 miles an hour fast enough to generate lift? Well, it's powered by a jet engine. It feels more like a jet pack, but not like a backpack shape. It's a segue shape. Yeah, and it feels like if I stand on it and it's got a jet engine, I feel like it's got to go faster than 60 miles an hour. Well, I know that there were these platforms

with the huge helicopter blades on the bottom of them that the military was testing. I don't know anything about a jet engine one, though. But also they had these in Johnny Quest, so it could just be. But I don't think Sarah's ever seen an episode of Johnny Quest. I've seen an episode of Johnny Quest.

They showed it on whatever, Boomerang, I think, that showed Scooby-Doo and other old cartoons. Now, Sarah, I do need to ask, where does a person sit on this flying magic carpet? So it's like, if you imagine a carpet, but like made of metal instead with fans underneath it. So there's a sheet of metal separating the person and the fans. It's not flexible. It's not flexible in, it can like turn.

And if you really set it off balance, it it'll flip but it's not like a bendy magic carpet right right okay but you could put a carpet on the metal surface for comfort and that's basically what they did they like created or used a synthetic material to line the metal surface to make it more like a passenger car that you'd want to sit on but no walls yeah no walls no a completely flat surface that you either have to sit or stand no one stood in the patents but i guess you could sit stand lay down and they mostly tested it with sitting and laying down why not put a chair in some walls and a ceiling all things that would make it less likely that i would fall off and have it land on me. There's less materials.

Yeah, I guess weight is important. I would hope there was like a seatbelt or something. Oh, no, because you got to be able to jump off of it really easily when you get to where you're needed militarily, I assume. Or do they just want these things to be like people movers? It was military developed, but part of it, the discussion around this invention was like uh commuting from backyard to office may be a possibility so either a personal flying

device or a mass transit flying device i think most people in the world shouldn't be flying probably yeah we're all okay just walking around. Sam doesn't trust us. At some point, everyone thought flying was the future, though. Hover cars and pneumatic tubes and things like that. Stefan, you go first. I'll say the personal flying machine, the Segway personal flying machine. That one does sound the least fake, which makes me think it's fake. This donut is really appealing to me, but I don't think that everybody would be afraid

about panic from UFOs. I mean, people did seem to be panicked about UFOs. Yeah. I just don't know how this thing gets off the ground. Oh, no, I'm not worried about that. I'm not worried about that. I'm going to go with the fucking donut. I'm in.

I'm going to go with the snowmobile Segway because I'm like 99% sure that I read an article about it. Fuck. Fuck. Well, Sam, you did read an article about it. And I saw some really cool 80s guys with big mustaches flying. They all have very good pictures. I'm sad I'm not in the same room as you

because I could show them, but they're all in the show notes slash you can Google them. It's called the Williams X Jet after the company, I think it's an aerospace company called Williams, that worked on it. And it's like a personal compartment with a jet engine on the bottom. It looks not so much like a snowmobile as like a trash can with skids on it. It looks like I'm about to ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland or something.

Oh, yeah, it really does. Yeah, it looks like the kind of thing that a lot of dudes in country clubs would be crashing and exploding if they were made mass produced. Yeah, definitely like an eccentric, rich person kind of invention. But it was developed as a small, single-person, lightweight, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

So I think you just like launch straight up and then you can start leaning and then you land straight down kind of like a drone. So is the main way that you decide where the thrust is pointed by leaning your body weight? Yes. Because that sounds terrifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's just like, whoop, a little too far. I guess I'm going to die now. Now we're going down. I guess I'll land on my head with this thing on top of me. So the way that this thing works is basically a jet pack that instead of strapping on your back, the jet engine is between your legs and i'm watching a video of it right now and it looks awesome it looks awesome it looks so so fun i absolutely like now with like computers i feel like we could make this thing a reality. Like, I feel like this is way more doable now than it was when it was made.

I'm going to go ahead and say, by the time I'm dead, this thing's going to be a thing. And it will have killed you, and that's why you'll be dead. I think that a lot of people are on the same page as you, Hank, because a lot of writing I found about it on the internet was a bunch of people being like, why doesn't this exist? And the only answer anyone can give is that it was functional.

It was functional to the point that they could make a video of someone flying it around. There was just, it was slightly too expensive and not useful enough for a military purpose to be mass produced. And no rich billionaire, whatever looked at it and was like, I want one for all me and all my friends.

So you can be the rich person, Hank, who gets one, brings it to a country club, makes everyone jealous. And then explodes. Yeah. Yeah.

To make myself feel better about me. I looked up this donut plane and it looks great. And I, and like it totally should exist yeah so there's a there's a donut plane designed by airbus operations that was a patent filed with the european patent office in 2014 i believe as far as i know no one's made a donut plane and i have no idea how the physics of it work it's really cute though yeah it is I mean I think it's just like the whole thing functions as a flying wing and the like central hole that is just ignored by air flow and and I guess the

the idea of the donut is just like this is the pressurized area of the craft. The problem is that like, it appears to not have any windows. That was a problem listed too. Also how to get people on and off of the donut, like where to put the door. That's a great point. Yeah, the door and the patent is on the inside.

So you like drive it, you have to like lift the staircase up into it. What's up with the magic carpet? So in the 1950s, the U.S. Navy was working on what they called a flying pie pan. I found a popular science article from 1955 that has pictures of it. So you might be able to find it as well. But it's just like this big circular disc. And in these pictures, the man has a cage around him.

And he's also attached to a wire above in case it drops but I think that's what it is. It's like basically an unprotected platform that they just wanted you to step onto. Also lean to control so no sort of control pad or anything like that. Not comfortable. And they warned that if an engine went out

it would drop like a brick. So it seemed extremely dangerous. And they did make if an engine went out, it would drop like a brick. So it seemed extremely dangerous. And they did make one of these? Yeah, and they had at least one Navy man fly around on it while strapped to something above him. And also, it seems like, held on by a lot of ropes of people around him. So they really didn't trust it. I think you could put all the ropes you wanted to

and it wouldn't really make that much of a difference, probably. Yeah. So they made it far enough to be like, let's get a man on here and have a cover for a bit before realizing like, this is a bad idea. We should not do it anymore. All right. Next up, we're going to take a short break.

Then it'll be time for the fact off. Hello, welcome back, everybody. Sandbuck totals. We are all tied at one. That never happens. Problem is, Sari and I have no other opportunities to get points because it is time for the fact off. Stefan and Sam have each brought science facts

to present to Sari and I in an attempt to blow our minds. We can award a Sambuck to the fact that we like the most and we will decide who goes first with this trivia question. Commercial aircraft typically fly within a narrow range of altitudes. What altitude is the upper limit of the sweet spot of flying?

They say the number when you're there and they're like, we're cruising now at this altitude. And you just don't have that number in your head? I think I do, but I want Stefan to say it first. I'm going to guess 32,000 feet. Okay, I'm going to guess 37,000 feet. It is 42,000 feet. That's too high.

That's as high as they can go. I mean, it's like functionally the same for you, right? I guess. Now that I know, it's scary though. All right, so Sam, that means you get to choose who goes first. Oh God, I guess I'll go first. On October 4th, 1863, in Paris, France, celebrity bohemian artist Néedar took flight in what was, at the time, the largest hot air balloon ever built. The balloon, called Le Giant, or The Giant, I guess, in French,

stood 200 feet tall and was made of 12 miles of silk that Nedar claimed had been sewn by 200 women working for a solid month. But he said a lot of things, so people aren't sure if that's true. women working for a solid month. But he said a lot of things, so people aren't sure if that's true. The balloon's wicker basket was two stories tall and included a billiard table, a dining room, a bathroom, and a darkroom. And the darkroom was there because Nadar was the

world's first aerial photographer. So for the previous years before the balloon actually launched, Nadar had been working on combining his career as a world-famous portrait photographer who was one of the first of his trade to treat photographs of people as works of art with his hobby of ballooning. So after a lot of trial and error, including problems such as having to develop his plates

while they were still in the air and the fact that hydrogen gas ruined the plates on exposure, he ended up with a super stable gas-proof balloon darkroom that in 1658 he used to take the first aerial photos that were over Paris. So why did he want to take aerial photos in the first place? It was probably mostly for fame and fortune because he was like a larger than life personality who was super famous in Paris for being larger than life. And he had a lot of over thethe-top self-promotion going on in his career. But another more noble reason was that Nadar was a futurist, and he and his close friend Jules Verne were sure that human flight was the future, and Nadar in particular thought it was the next step in map-making, surveying, and military operations. So, unfortunately for them, the best that anybody had to work with in the 1860s was hot air balloons,

which everybody knew were too dangerous for people to use like regularly because there was no way to steer them at all. And any stray wind could like send you off course at best or send you plummeting to your death at worst. So he and Jules Verne started a club slash like advocacy group called the Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier-than-Air Machines. And the club was formed with the goal of designing and promoting safer aircraft of the future, which brings us back to LeJount, which was in their weird bohemian minds, a way to promote the promise of future human flight, expose the dangers of ballooning, and make money for the club all at the same time because they would charge people to look at it and to fly up in the air in it.

Even though the point is that it's dangerous. Well, yeah. So then it only did one of those three goals really well, and that was be dangerous because on its second flight, the giant was taken by a gale and crash landed and then bounced over the French countryside for half an hour.

Nobody died, but everybody got smashed up really good. Oh, so there were people inside while that was happening? Yeah, he would bring 13 people at a time with him up in this balloon and take pictures and serve them dinner and stuff. You can't say he would do that when he did it twice. No, no. My story's not over.

He kept doing it. So after he did it, he wrote a manifesto called The Right to Flight, in which he coined the term dirigible, which means steerable or directable. And the manifesto was about like, we can't use balloons anymore because we're all going to get killed if we keep using balloons. And Victor Hugo, who wrote Les Miserables, I think, I think that's right, replied to the manifesto with an open letter that called Nadar a prophet and a hero. So then he didn't stop flying LeGent after that and he did like hundreds of more flights with it.

A semi-sad fact is that none of his photos from the 1858 photo shoot exist anymore. So that was the first ones ever. So the actual earliest surviving aerial photos are called Boston as the Eagle and Wild Goose see it. And they were taken by James Wallace Black over Boston in 1860. Very good. I love it. He also invented airmail. Did he invent airmail?

Did he draw things from his balloon? He said we should use balloons. And everybody went, oh, okay. We will. And they did. And it worked. But they're unsteerable. How do you deliver mail when you don't know which direction you're going to go?

They could only send it the direction they meant for it to go, and then they couldn't get it back. I don't really know why. Because that's the way the wind blows in France, I guess. All right, Stefan, what do you got? When I think about drone delivery systems, I think about ordering a giant pack of ramen noodles or something and getting that delivered straight to my door in 30 minutes or less.

Okay. But it turns out there might be another area where utilizing drones for transport could be super useful, and that's in human organ transplants. One of the news reports that I was reading said that about 25% of organs don't make it to the destination in time. A kidney can last about 30 hours, but like a heart or lungs only lasts up to maybe six hours, but the fresher it is, the better. So if you end up with a heart,

you have to like figure out right away, like, are there any heart transplant recipients within a couple hours? And so the distance that these things can travel is pretty limited. And the way that they do it right now, it's pretty inefficient because you often have to book like a charter flight, or sometimes they even use commercial flights. And then you have to book your ground transportation to actually get it from the airport to the hospital. And there's multiple handoffs. So it's just hard to get things to where they need to be. But if you replace this whole system with like an automated unmanned drone or other aircraft, you can save a lot of time and you could potentially fly straight to the hospital and land on the roof. So in mid-2019, the University of Maryland was the

first to use a drone to deliver a kidney that was then transplanted into a patient. And this team had designed their own custom drone because it's obviously complicated to transport in Oregon. You have to keep it at the right temperature and all that. But they also were conscious of public perception of drones and lack of trust in drones. So they were like, we need to make this super reliable so we can save lives, but also so we can build trust with the public. The drone that they developed has redundant propellers, motors, batteries, circuits. And if all of it fails, there's a parachute that will catch it on the way down. And then it also has the systems to maintain the temperature of the organ, the barometric pressure inside the container,

and it controls the vibrations of the craft. And then it's constantly communicating with ground systems so they can track it the whole way. But I guess in Ohio, they're trying to create statewide air corridors that they can use specifically for this. So they can use a combination of autonomous planes and drones to like make it easy to distribute organs throughout the state really quickly. Do you know what the range of this this beefy extra souped up drone is? I don't know, but I think that the drones specifically are more short range. And then it's like handing off to autonomous planes and like small craft that fly the longer distances. autonomous planes and like small craft that fly the longer distances.

But the idea is that you could potentially like fly across the country. If you had a nationwide system, it's like the pony express of drones, the droney express, the drone. It is time to decide who our winner is. Sari, are you ready to vote for the fact that you like the most?

Yes. Three, two, one. Sam. All right, it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a science question for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at Andy Kishu, who asks, why is Santos Dumont not recognized as the inventor of airplanes? My completely uninformed perspective on this is that he's not

American. Yeah, that was my first instinct too and I think it is a combination of nationalist interests. So, Alberto Santos Dumont was Brazilian and he's apparently in Brazil he's taught as as instead of the Wright brothers as the main pioneer of flight.

But as is with many stories in the history of science, it's complicated. And it wasn't just one person forging ahead and coming up with a genius invention. He made like a pretty hefty contribution to powered flight. There's a difference in timing and there's a difference in technicality that I feel like add up to the answer to this question. So the Wright Brothers Kitty Hawk flight was in 1903. The condition that they may or may not have met is that the machine has to take off by its own means with the man on board because the Wright brothers used something called a launching rail to help their plane take off possibly because of the windy conditions in Kitty Hawk. It seems like they didn't use it all

the time, but some of the time, and it's kind of like a catapult that helps the plane with the initial acceleration and taking off the ground to my understanding. Yeah. It's like a, it of like a catapult that helps the plane with the initial acceleration and taking off the ground, to my understanding. Yeah, it's like a tower with a weight and the weight goes down and it pulls the thing forward. So there's like a group of people who are looking at aviation history and being like, the Wright brothers cheated. They don't count. Alberto Santos Dumont comes in is he won a competition in France in 1906 with a winged aircraft that flew 200 feet that took off by its own means.

So no sort of launching catapult or something like that. And the France Aeronautics Organization, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, that was half French, half English. Like, established a bunch of the standards and only started recording results for the first aircraft in around 1906.

So, like, they didn't even record the Wright brothers' attempt. And it was still somewhat disputed at the time by scientists. Like, were there enough people observing it? Does the launching rail count? And things like that. So, I don't know. It's just like very wishy-washy. People are very pro-Wright Brothers or very pro-Santos-Dumont.

And really, they all did a lot for airplanes. Good job, everyone. No one does anything alone. We need all kinds of eccentric weirdos to move forward if you want to ask the science couch you can follow us on twitter where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week

thank you to at sneffin at little grayfish and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode final sandbox scores sari hank and stefan are tied with one sam jumping up with three points. Yeah, you did. I'm coming for you, Stefan.

I am irredeemably in behind. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. First, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and apparently does something to some algorithm somewhere. Second, tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for

SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It was created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz,

who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Toboki Chakravarti and our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled,

but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. In 2015, a British Airways flight was about 30 minutes into its journey from Heathrow to Dubai when it turned around because of, quote, liquid fecal excrement. This wasn't poop all over the airplane or anything. It was just a particularly stinky poop in one of the airplane toilets, which the airline decided was a health and safety and comfort problem because of the way that the air is recirculated. So they turned it back around, stuck everyone in a hotel, and launched them the next day. Did they try to deduce who did it, or did they just let it lie?

Did they arrest the person who pooped? I think they just let it lie. Did they arrest that man? Arrest him! I'm tired of this motherfucking poop on this motherfucking plane!