Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Helium

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why helium is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Visit https://maximumfun.org/boco to get your digital art for Episode 200! There are also posters in the vault for Episodes 50, 100, and 150.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Get tickets to see us LIVE at the London Podcast Festival this September: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/secretly-incredibly-fascinating/

Helium. Known for being a gas. Famous for being a balloon gas and comedy voice gas. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why helium is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of helium? Hang on a second. I got, I got a helium balloon with me right here. No, you don't. Yes, I do. Yes, I do. You can't see me. I turned my video off. So you don't know that I don't. So I am going to now inhale the helium. Hang on a second. Okay. I can't do this. Um, it's, uh, it's we, yeah, here's a fun little technical thing for folks. We use the video chat software Zoom to

talk to each other across the ocean. Have you heard of it? Zoom. It has little filters to take out particularly wild frequencies of sound. And Katie's helium voice was mostly erased. I don't know what she said. Well, maybe it's better that you didn't. Anyways, helium. Yes, it's very cool. I do like balloons. I know I've heard stuff about it. Like we're, it seems like we're always running out of helium. It always feels like it's just a matter of time before we're not going to have balloons anymore. But I've been hearing this for like 20 years. So I still see balloons around. So what gives? Cool. Anyways, yeah, helium. It's great. When I was a kid, I just thought it was super magical because of, I don't know, I was a

real balloon loving kid. The floatiness of them, I really enjoyed. I was, I think, a little scared of actually inhaling helium as a kid because I thought it was drugs. I thought it was like, well, no, you inhale drugs and drugs are bad. So if I'm inhaling helium, that seems bad. It is. Helium voice is sort of like the cartoon depiction of drugs.

Yeah, for sure. Like a Pinocchio's Island of Being Evil Boys drug. Yeah. Yeah. Balloon drug. Yeah. Yeah. Balloon drug. And that's cool that you've heard about the helium shortage because I'll bet some listeners are like you and have seen those headlines and some listeners are like me before I researched and had no idea that's ever happened because yeah, balloons didn't go away. There have been three major helium shortages since 2005,

but you wouldn't really know unless you are in specific industries that we'll talk about. Big balloon. Right. Yeah. If you work on that Macy's Thanksgiving parade, you're freaking out. But otherwise. When I was a kid, I used to think that the hot air balloons were filled with helium. And it was amazing for me to learn that, no, that's just like hot air that lifts it up. And I was like, why don't we do that with normal balloons? And when I would try to like blow in hot air to a normal balloon, it would just fall down. And, you know, it seemed unfair. Yeah. And also with Helium, I want to thank Like the Buffalo for suggesting this topic. Also support from Andrew Bundy and from Venus Subbet and other folks in

the Discord. And folks, this is a big round number episode. This is main episode 200 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. What? Alex, I don't believe you. You're lying. How many years has it been? Basically four, you know, because it's weekly. So I'm just so thankful to all of you listening for making this a show and making it so I'm just excited for the next 50 and the next 50. And I feel like each 50, we kind of milestone it. But we also mainly just celebrate by doing a usual episode because every week we're going for the best show we can. Right. And I felt like helium celebratory because of the balloon element. Alex is always like 110% this week, Katie, 100% of your effort.

And I keep telling him I can't do that. It's mathematically impossible. And as she brings up those good points, I just try to drown it out with a stats song. Yeah. Just try to throw her off. Very cagey. It's got like a gym whistle. Yeah.

Just says, hustle, good hustle. No, this is so exciting. 200 is a very auspicious number, I think. I think so, too. Yeah. And it's also kind of fun that helium is element number two. So that sort of fits 200 in a tiny way. And of course, the song 200 Luftballons.

Oh. No, it's 99 Luftballons. I was just going to yes and that, but you're right. Yeah. No, it's but you know what? 200 is a bigger number than 99 and balloons are good. Therefore, 200 Luftballons seems better to me. Like they should have done that instead of 99.

Why stop at 99 Luftballons? Yeah, this episode is far superior to that song. Take that Germans. Yeah. Take that. And yeah, and this episode is also our second episode about anatomic elements. You know, they're involved in all sorts of topics, but we did an episode about neon. Yes.

Which is number 10 on the table. And so our second element episode is also about yet another noble gas. Helium and neon are the first two noble gases on the table. I do love that when we find noble gases, we figure out ways to make our life more colorful and fun. With neon, it's neon signs, which are great. And helium, it's helium balloons, which are great. Just colorful fun. It's so human to be like, wow, look at this element. I bet I can throw a party with it. Yeah. Yeah. I have good vibes about all the noble gases.

Even the one called Krypton just feels like Superman stuff, even though it's not, you know, they're great. Very pro the whole category. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, we do have to keep Superman in check, I think, because who knows? I apologize to Superman fans. I know he is secure in his masculinity in a non-toxic way. I get it. Yeah, I feel like every good Superman writer understands that. And none of them work on

the movies right now, but oh well, it's fine. Yeah. And I think he'd like balloons too. I imagine Superman on his day off just got a balloon in hand and an ice cream cone. With big lollipop. Yeah. Yeah. He's wholesome. And this party vibe. Let's take it into our set of fascinating numbers and statistics.

And this week that is in a segment called. In three, two, one. S-T-A-T-O-G-O. Listen here for stats to go. S-T-A-T-O-G-O. Count numbers and stats to go. Yeah. I almost did it. I almost did it.

I almost did it correctly. We're a band now. And that name was submitted over email by Anya's dad. So thank you, Anya, and also her dad. We have a new name for this every week. Please make a Massillion Wacky and Bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to SifPod at gmail.com. And now I'm leaving the band because I'm dating someone with different ideas.

Nah, I'm kidding. I'm married. I'm married. Is that Yoko Ono stuff? I don't understand. Yeah. Anyway. We started a band. Now I'm leaving the band. Okay. For an artiste. This week's first number is sixth, like number six on the list, because helium is the sixth most common gas in air on Earth.

Whoa. I didn't realize that. Yeah, and the immediate next number is only 5.24 parts per million. So a little over five parts per million. That's the amount of air made of helium. So almost none of it. You wouldn't really notice day to day. Right. I mean, it kind of makes sense when you think about it, because it's not like there's so many gases that make up the atmosphere. I mean, there are, but the biggest quantities are things like carbon dioxide, oxygen. What else? And the big one's nitrogen, which we don't think about. Nitrogen, that's right. It's just there. Yeah, we just process it.

Only if you have a fish tank is the only time you actually think about nitrogen. And then the third most common element in air is a noble gas called argon. So not neon or helium. Those three gases are almost all of air and the rest is traces of other stuff. The main trace is carbon dioxide. And then the next biggest traces are neon at 18 parts per million and helium a little over five parts per million. Wow. How much air, I guess, I got to breathe until I get enough to have a silly voice. Right. Like impossible. Yeah. Helium is always around us, but also there's

like three neon atoms or so for every one atom of helium. And you think of neon not being there at all, but like we said on the neon episode. Yeah. It's really just when it's in high concentrations that you notice it. But yeah, I was going to do a bit where I was like trying to huff air, but I realized if I do that, I might actually pass out. So we'll save it. Then the next number here is about 25% because that's how much of the universe is helium. Whoa. About a quarter. That's a lot of helium.

How do we know that? Like all the universe. How do we know that? Like, did we just look through a telescope and see a galaxy made out of balloons and go, well, that's about 25% of the universe? That's a great question. It's a combination of observations of stars and planets and also extrapolating the Big Bang theory.

So what do you mean by extrapolating the Big Bang theory? Yeah, it's the simplicity of helium and also hydrogen. Because we think about a quarter of the universe is helium and maybe up to like 73% of the universe is just hydrogen. Wow. Number one on the periodic table, one proton. Because we think when the Big Bang happens, all that energy forms mainly super simple elements right away, like hydrogen and helium. And then later some of it became more complex stuff. And a lot of the Earth is that more complex stuff. But when we look at gas giant planets like Saturn, we see Saturn

is about 75% hydrogen, about 25% helium, and then just traces of stuff. Also, big stars, including our sun, are a pretty similar situation where it's almost entirely hydrogen and helium. And so we think like most of the universe is hydrogen and helium. And our topic is maybe the most universal topic we've ever done. It's about a quarter of everything. Wow. Yeah. I guess I didn't think about it that way, but yeah, it is a very simple element. So I guess statistically, it makes sense for there to be more of it. Because if I remember anything from my classes in, I don't know, I guess high school about the table of elements, it's that the more simple elements are more stable and the more complex you get, the bigger the element, the less stable it is. That's right. And helium has extra stability because this is super simplifying it. But in

general, if helium has two protons, it has two electrons, and those two kind of fill up a shell. And so it's a noble gas and tiny in a way that makes it extraordinarily stable. Wow. Yeah. No, that's so cool. It's like just when I think about helium, I think about it as being this kind of cool, interesting thing that's kind of rare where you fill it with a balloon. But the fact that it's just so it is such a fundamental building block in terms of the universe. Yeah. And then hydrogen even of the universe. Yeah.

And then hydrogen even more vastly so. Yeah. And then kind of the whole rest of the periodic table is almost an exception to how the universe works. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. This stuff's there, I guess, too, if you squint. Yeah.

Like, oh, okay. Yeah. Because our Earth is so, it is really funny because in the context of talking about helium shortages and then, but then the universe is just like 25% of helium. Yeah, I love it. Like, oh, we're running out of helium and then everything else is helium. Yeah. Or hydrogen. We just can't reach it.

Our arms aren't long enough. We can't get there. The next number here is seven times less dense. Seven times less dense. That is the density of helium versus air on Earth. Makes sense because it floats. Exactly. Like helium is so much less dense than air. You can put the solid material of a balloon's outside around it, and that combination is still less dense than the air. So that's why it goes up. That's why balloons go up.

That is why balloons go up. Just like that documentary, Up, How Balloons Work. In the bonus show, we will talk about Up being a little of a documentary. I'm very excited. It's going to be great. So I didn't know that. So is that one of the reasons that helium is, there's like shortages sometimes? Because if it goes up, I would imagine that it could, can it like escape essentially our atmosphere and just drift out into space? Yes.

Oh. Yeah. When helium forms on Earth, almost all of it escapes the atmosphere and leaves. Yeah, so that's part of why we're low on it. Get back here. You're going to make a kid smile. Get back down here.

It feels just so easy to make balloons. It's mind-boggling to think about us having helium as a precious resource and a hard-to-keep resource. I have never not been able to get balloons. Not that I try precious resource and a hard to keep resource. Like I have never not been able to get balloons. Not that I try to get them a lot, but anyway. So that's, that's mind boggling. And we'll keep talking about that. Right. I mean, it's fun. Cause like we can observe that because balloons are always trying to escape just like the heliums. And you know, I, when I was a kid, I always thought that balloons would just keep

going and then just go into space forever. I understand that's not how it works, but I guess it kind of is how it works because the stuff that really makes the balloon a balloon does keep going into space. It's just, it's, it's exoskeleton of latex that is left behind. Yeah. And we'll have numbers later about the exact limits of that too. Yeah. This is so great. Yeah. And that helium density is also the explanation for a whole nother fun helium thing. It's a big part of why your voice sounds different when you inhale helium as a person. Right. Right. Okay. I love this. And we'll explore that with takeaway number one. Helium changes human voices by anatomically remixing the sounds.

Whoa. And knowing that helps us theorize what dinosaurs sounded like. What? I'm like, I love animals and dinosaurs, and I didn't know this. The metaphor is like a sound engineer moving around dials on a soundboard. The actual mechanics are two related things that helium does to your vocal tract and also the way the sound travels. Right. So the way that I understand how voices work in humans and anything that has something similar to a larynx or like in birds, it's called a syrinx. Birds are dinosaurs. And so I would imagine that their vocal cord structures might be similar, but the larynx or syrinx, the idea is that you push air through these membranes that makes up your larynx and the muscles of your larynx

vibrate these and stretch them. And so as you're pushing air out through them and changing sort of the muscle texture, you are vibrating them at different frequencies. And that's how you get to do things like, vibrating them at different frequencies. And that's how you get to do things like, woo. Yes. Perfect demonstration. Yeah. A bunch of sources here, including WHYY Public Radio in Philadelphia and BBC Science Focus Magazine and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Because when our vocal cords vibrate to make human voices, it turns out that's a combination of a lot of different pitches and tones. And then that adds up to one sound in our perception of that with our ears and our minds.

And when somebody inhales helium, the one big change that does is it allows the higher pitched tones to resonate more in our vocal tracks. And it also makes the lower tones resonate less. And so it's your exact same voice, but there's more resonance in the high end that your voice always has and less resonance in the low end that your voice always has. And so it's like a sound engineer messing with it and turning up frequencies. And is that because as you're squeezing the air, like pushing the air through your larynx, there's a higher content of helium inside the larynx, causing sort of this tonal shift?

That and from the density of helium. Because it's a lot less dense than air, those higher parts just vibrate a lot better and more easily in a way that kind of drowns out the lower parts. That's really interesting as both a person who does audio engineering on my own podcast and then also who has interacted with balloons. So I also heard that, um, I've also heard of, uh, that if you inhale barium, it has like the opposite effect. It actually makes your voice sound really low. That's true. Yeah. And so this, the reverse happens with denser gases than air. Yeah. And it can make your voice sound lower. Yeah. Which I've never tried. And also don't try the helium thing,

actually. It turns out it's no positives for your health and can be negative. So don't do that. If you already did it, it's fine. So I was right as a kid when I was like, is this balloon drug that I shouldn't inhale? Yeah, it's the very simple problem of less oxygen is going into your body, into your brain because there's helium instead. Whoa, right. So like, just think that through. It's not good.

I see. And it also turns out it can be fatal to take helium directly from one of those really pressurized tanks that we fill balloons up with. Oh, God. Well, yeah. Like you can rupture something or something, you know, so it's bad actually. Yeah. I feel like even if it was like full of air and it was a pressurized tank, you could like pop something. That sounds really bad. Just intuitively don't do that. Yeah. And basically everyone doesn't do that, but a few people just try it because they've heard of the balloon thing and then they like die. Yeah. So don't do that. Don't do that. Yeah. And basically everyone doesn't do that, but a few people just try it because they've heard of the balloon thing and then they like die. Yeah. So don't do that. Don't do that. Also with barium and those other gases, like when you inhale it, you actually have to stand on your head

to get it out of your lungs because it's so heavy. So that creeps me out a little bit. So I don't think I would do either, but I feel like the Barium one, for me, as someone who has a voice in the upper register, I think the Barium would be more fun because then I get to sound like Darth Vader for once in my life. You know, it's very hard to sound menacing when you have my voice and I would like to try it. Since I can't do handstands or stand on my head very well, maybe not. There's also a second related phenomenon happening with helium and the voice or those denser gases. In helium's case, it also changes the speed of your sound waves. So it's the vocal tract, but also your sound waves move a little faster through helium. BBC Science Focus magazine says it moves about 2.7 times faster than it moves through air. The other way it's changing your voice is the perception of people's ears and minds. The waves are reaching them faster, and that sounds higher. I never knew why either of those things happen, but it's all helium density stuff.

Then also how that interacts with our anatomy. Yeah, and I never knew why either of those things happen, but it's all helium density stuff. Yeah. And then also how that interacts with our anatomy. And then you're bringing up birds. That's very relevant because humans and birds, one of the ways we're most similar is those vocal tracts. It's not exactly the same. The anatomy is slightly different, but in terms of like we kind of have like one main tube and I think birds have kind of two tubes. Um, but the, the, the overall way in which the, the structure works, uh, it's pretty similar. And then also, uh, for parrots, uh, and other talking birds like parrots, corvids,

Parrots and other talking birds like parrots, corvids, starlings, myna birds, their syrinxes are actually quite similar to our larynx and can produce more human sounding words and stuff. And they also have the capacity to copy human speech or other things. So that's one of the reasons that like parrots and other birds can talk. Yeah. And with all that, a very fun scientific study in 2015 built on that knowledge by experimenting on a crocodile. They gave doses of helium to a crocodile. Because crocodiles are very vocal, especially they make a bellowing sound. Oh my God who the person who wrote that grant and got money for that is a genius and it was at the university of vienna so i think austria is up to something great i don't know what but good yeah come and check out

her crocodiles they are also sweet and cute and again, you need oxygen to your brain still. And so they did a basically special tank with an approved mix of oxygen and helium. They put a female crocodile in it and then they played recordings of crocodile bellowing to her so she would respond. And they found that her bellowing got higher because of the helium. And that's the first time we've recorded that sort of effect in reptiles. And because that is similar to what birds or humans would go through, that makes us think that dinosaurs are also a general species where if you gave them helium, their voices would get higher because birds and crocodiles, that covers a lot of dinosaur lineage. And so we just figure

the soft tissues that dinosaur voices would have had. If you had a dinosaur inhale a helium balloon, its voice would probably get higher. So, okay. I mean, I'm a big fan of science that doesn't seem to have any specific purpose that is more just about kind of further understanding our world, making it richer. But why do we ask the question, what would dinosaurs sound like if they inhaled helium from a balloon i i need to use babel and learn the german words for because it's there like an everest climber you know like because i was thinking like is it because there was like more helium in the atmosphere at that time do we think like what was going on? Did they throw little dinosaur parties? But, you know, all right. Somehow they got money to put a crocodile in a balloon chamber and get some cute little crocodile squeaks.

Right. Because I'm sure it was some sort of glass tank, but I'm imagining it's a giant balloon. It seems really silly. Yeah. Yeah. So that's just astounding. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's just astounding. I love it. And we have a lot more numbers later in this episode, especially about some balloon things.

But one more number for now is the year 1868. All right. The 60s. Are we going to get a crocodile high? Right. The hippies of the 1860s dying on a hill at Gettysburg, you know, like, yeah. But so 1868 is the year

when a lot of the Earth, including India, experienced a total solar eclipse. Okay. It was a solar eclipse year. And that leads us to an amazing takeaway number two. The discovery of helium got mocked as a myth about the sun for decades.

Hmm. Interesting. The first people to observe the idea that helium might be its own elements and might exist got mocked for almost 30 years by most scientists. might exist, got mocked for almost 30 years by most scientists. Well, that's a pretty typical, I guess, pattern when it comes to discovering new things. There's first they mock you and then they give you awards and then they mock you about all your awards. Call you a nerd. They give you a swirly. They say, OK, you were right, but you're still a nerd.

Yeah, and they're two parallel first observers of helium, and they both got vindicated in their lifetimes, which is great. And it seems like they had cool lives too, which is nice. The key source here is an amazing book. It's called Periodic Tales, A Cultural History of the Elements from Arsenic to Zinc. That's by science writer Hugh Aldersey Williams. It's a great read. Also citing Smithsonian Magazine, a piece by Lorraine Beausenoir, and digital materials from the American Physical Society. The background of this came up on our past episode about neon because noble gases were a really controversial theory in general. When people started laying out a periodic table, especially the creator of that table,

Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleev, publicly fought with the idea of the entire category of noble gases. He said, this seems like it breaks down my whole system. And he later learned it actually supports it, but it was a big fight. And he later learned it actually supports it. But it was a big fight. Yeah. I mean, we think that scientists are above being petty, but they're really not. It's a slap fest.

Yes. Yeah. And the slap fest, the other side of it was especially a few British scientists, in particular Lord Rayleigh and also a guy named William Ramsey. And in 1895, Ramsey and colleague Morris Travers isolated helium. So that's considered the date of scientific proof for the element helium, 1895. How did they do that? With that one, they got it out of decaying uranium. One way helium forms newly on Earth is the decay of radioactive materials.

All right. All right. So they just like got some radioactive uranium and then put like a balloon over it and waited for it to fill up. That's basically it. Yeah. It's like more complicated, but not. Yeah. That's one way to fill your balloons,

kids. Radioactive decay. Right. It sounds really out of nowhere and dangerous, but that's the way. Yeah. At the time, especially. That makes sense because with radioactive decay, with radioactive elements, you generally have a very high table of elements. And so you have more protons and neutrons and they're more unstable. And so as it decays, stuff is coming off of it. And so you will get more simple elements from that decay. Exactly. Yeah. And so, yeah, a few heavy elements like uranium and thorium are one key way that the earth produces new helium for itself and then most of it escapes to space but but yeah that's one way helium forms on earth

because helium's two and the the heavy ones are much bigger numbers yeah and so 1895 the scientific community agrees okay helium's helium's real. Between 1868 and 1895, scientists got mocked for believing that helium exists and is its own element. Well, you know. The initial observation of helium, it does actually make sense that some people thought it was fake and a mistake and silly because it happens in a wave of false different observations of the sun. But this was like the one correct observation. And the wave comes from the 1868 total solar eclipse. Oh, okay.

And a French astronomer goes to India to observe it. Pierre-Jules Janssen, he uses a relatively new tool called a spectroscope. Wait, so they had already figured out how to predict when the eclipse would happen? Yeah, that was kind of relatively new science, like knowing when and also where to go. But they had that ability already, yeah. And he actually got a huge grant from the French government to go all the way to Bengal in what was then British India to observe it. And when he used a spectroscope on the solar eclipse, super short version of a spectroscope is you use the light spectrum to identify materials, like what they're made of. And he got an extra yellow band on his spectroscope that he didn't expect. And he said, that must be a different gas than hydrogen. We think the sun has hydrogen, but

this yellow band, it's not sulfur. What is it? And it also turns out you don't have to have an eclipse to see this. He just was looking because of the eclipse. And totally independently, a second scientist, British astronomer Norman Lockyer, did spectrometry of a regular sun, compared that to a tube of pure hydrogen. And he also saw this separate yellow line and said there must be a second important gas in the sun. Lockyer also guessed that it's only in the sun, maybe. And so he named it Helium after the ancient Greek god of the sun named Helios. Oh, so that's where the name comes from. It's the Greek sun god. Oh, wow. I guess I kind of had thought I had sort of made the connection between Helios,

but I thought it was like because like he flies around in a chariot and helium also flies around. So I was wrong about that. That kind of fits. Yeah. It's not, I think I would have guessed something like that too. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't know this connection until researching at all. Yeah. But that's cool.

So it's a, it's a sun name. Yeah. Like in the Greek God. And we didn't, but we didn't just call it sunium. Right. didn't just call it sunium. I like that joke, sunium, because basically as the scientist Pierre Jules Janssen and also the scientist Norman Lockyer independently guess about helium, a bunch of other scientists made wrong guesses about other elements of the sun. Two American astronomers seeing the same eclipse claim they saw a new

element called coronium in honor of the sun's corona. And then it took several decades for other scientists to prove that it was just a misread of iron in the sun. There was another claim about an element called nebulium in the sun. It turned out that was a misread of some oxygen. bulium in the sun. It turned out that was a misread of some oxygen. The weirdest one is that in 1909, two pseudoscientists published a book called Occult Chemistry, where they claimed to have made a bunch of observations of elements using their clairvoyant third eye. Right? We all do this. We all use our third eye to look at atoms. I use my third eye for doing better bird watching, but to each their own. Just reading birds' minds. Yeah. It's like I can look at my Audubon guide and look at

birds at the same time. You're just hearing the ProBirdWrites tweets in your head and you transcribe them. There's no creativity. I have a spiritual connection with the birds. We both like chips and crackers and that's about it. maybe as technology and scientific understanding advances, you will have these sudden, I guess, explosions of research into certain topics. And if that topic of research gets really, I guess, inundated, you'll get a bunch of bad research along with the good research. It kind of reminds me with like COVID research where early on there was like, I don't know, maybe like ivermectin works, right? And so you would get sort of a

bunch of research and a lot of it was really good research and a lot of it was complete bull doodoo. Once you get a bunch of research that's not really very good or is kind of like junk, then it gets harder to identify the right research unless you are really familiar with, say, the, you know, with the topic or with, say, the method of these studies, right? And so I think it caused, like, there was a lot of loss of trust, I think, in public health. Reminds me of this, right? Where it's like you have these guys who are actually making good scientific observation, but then you also have a bunch of like cranks who are being like, I can see the sun with my, with my, you know, third eye,

or like, I can, I can feel it with, with my fifth hand or whatever they were claiming. with my fifth hand or whatever they were claiming. Exactly. Yeah. The Cranks even did a bunch of diagrams of the different atomic structures they were seeing. And they specifically said that helium was so different from what people believed because they published this 1909 after helium was isolated and confirmed unknown. But they said everybody else was so wrong about helium. It was a totally different element that they were naming occultum. And they were like, everybody's so wrong about helium. It's a different element that we found is their claim. Why did they name it occultum? Did they think it was demonic or something? As like a celebration of the occult. Okay.

Leading them there. Yeah. But that does sound very cool. I want there to be like a science fiction movie, like a Ghostbusters where they're like, we've identified a cultum on this ectoplasm. Right. It sounds cool. And it sounds cool.

Janssen and Lockyer had the misfortune of being, that metaphor you described is perfect, like they were onto something in a genre of science that was mostly bunk. And so Hugh Aldersey Williams describes an in-joke among some late 1800s chemists where they used the name helium as a sarcastic shorthand for false readings about a new element on your spectroscope. They would be in the lab, and if they got something weird or busted from their readings, they would say, hey, look, I found helium, waka waka. It was famously fake to people. I can imagine these 1800s nerds being so smug about that little joke of theirs. Because they're already smug about everything. They're Victorian men, right?

Like, come on. It's a bad time already. But you said they were vindicated within their lifetimes. So that's good. It's always frustrating when you hear about a story of a scientist who's like, please, guys, blood is real. It's inside of people. And then they're like, you idiot. And then they die before ever being vindicated. And it's so frustrating. Yes. Yeah. It's a nice thing. And there's a lot of nice elements to their experience here. Nice elements? And there's a lot of nice elements to their experience here.

One is that- Nice elements? Whoops. Because one good thing is Janssen and Lockyer both had this independent observation. After a few years, people put them in touch with each other because they're like, you guys kind of think the same thing. And then they proceeded to become close friends, share credit, support each other. Even though one was English and the other was French? Right, that too.

Like, yeah. For all the reasons you would think selfishness or cultural difference they would fight, but they just supported each other through this hard experience. And then they also got a huge boost from a third scientist in 1882. A third scientist, an Italian named Luigi Palmieri. He took spectroscope observations of lava erupting from Mount Vesuvius. Why did his name have to be Luigi? That's so on the nose. Yeah. And even the most famous Italian volcano and stuff, like it feels very... Yeah. Because I'm like, because I live here and whenever I'm like, you know, I live in Italy, we're like, oh, like Mario and Luigi. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then some people are actually named Mario and Luigi. Right. And then when they study the volcano, they go down the volcano. Brr, brr, brr. Right. And then... I've seen Vesuvius. It was fortunately not very active at the time.

Yeah. So he saw a lava eruption in 1882 and did the wise and cool thing of pointing a spectroscope at it. And his readings had the yellow line that these guys had gotten from the sun. Because there's also helium in the earth, either from radioactive stuff decaying. There's also a recent theory about helium from the Big Bang being under the earth. And either way, there's helium there. And so when he saw that, not only was he another voice saying this might be a new element, he was a helpful tip that it might not just be around the sun. And maybe we can look on earth too. So man, we've, we've got an Englishman, a Frenchman and an Italian all working together to give us balloons. Yeah. It's beautiful.

That's so beautiful. It's like an until recently European union story or something like, look at all these rivals coming together and Eurovisioning it. Until England decided to just make things a lot harder for themselves. Yes. I'm so sorry to all the British people who did not vote for Brexit. That's got to be rough. That's got to be so frustrating because you know life is now harder. It's harder to travel and stuff. And it's just, well, I guess people did this.

Yeah. But I don't know. Maybe the good vibes are there. Maybe we get Irish unification. We'll see. Hopefully it works out. Hey, you know what? Yeah.

And yeah. And so then at the same time, other scientists solved the fight about whether noble gases exist at all. And once they worked that out in isolated helium, Janssen and Lockyer were both alive. The British scientist William Ramsey personally delivered a tube of isolated helium to Lockyer as like a present and a celebration of his work. Oh, that's so cute. Yeah. And then Janssen kind of had an even more amazing life. Helium is just one of his many things. He was mainly an astronomer, spent his elderly years developing better technology for

observing space, incorporating new stuff like better photos and the earliest versions of moving pictures, which is awesome. Wow. That's very cool. And at age 69, he was able to climb Mont Blanc, that huge French mountain. That's very cool. And at age 69, he was able to climb Mont Blanc, that huge French mountain. Oh, come on. To get better pictures of space in the elevation and the thinner air.

Overachiever. Yeah. And there are some overachievers where it's like, for me, I'm like, I, I do, I do a little bit of writing in some podcasts and there's like,

I have discovered helium and space and I climbed the mountain. Yeah, like he was so celebrated. He got to cameo in early movies by the Lumiere brothers. Right? Like as soon as you can be in movies, he was hanging out. So he died a celebrated hero of astronomy and chemistry. And, you know, both these guys like not only discovered a big element, they discovered element number two. You know, it's huge.

But does he know the joy of sitting on your butt and scrolling through Twitter and TikTok for, like, two hours a day? So maybe we do have something over him. Yeah. I just saw a really good baby sheep this morning. Yeah, man. It's just a clip of a baby sheep. I saw some goats. I saw,

I saw a polar bear wrapped around a polar bear cub. So it looked like the little polar bear cub's head was just coming out of the side of the polar bear. We folks were just going to take a break and go look at tick tock, but that's two, that's two giant takeaways and some numbers. We're going to come back with way more numbers about even more balloon stuff and also the amazing stockpiling and tech uses of helium. Folks, just a fun reminder, this is the 200th episode of the podcast.

And in the Maximum Fun Drive, we funded special digital art to celebrate episode 200. It is only available to supporters of the show who are members at MaximumFun.org. So if you support this show, that art is waiting for you. Right now, there's text in the description of this episode about how to get to that art if you've never done it before. You also have art for episodes 50, 100, and 150 that already exists if you support the show. And if you'd like that art, that's four entire posters of amazing characters for all 200 episodes of the show. I think that's one of many good reasons to support the show. Please go to MaximumFun.org slash join if you aren't part of that party yet, and you can give yourself the gift

of that amazing art to celebrate this milestone that you all got us to. Thank you so much. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year.

Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. We are back and we're back with more balloon stuff. The amazing number about that to me is 53 kilometers. Wow. Which is almost 33 miles. Wow. The highest a helium balloon has ever been on earth, 53 kilometers into the air. So once it gets up there, what happens? Does it pop? Does it get really cold and start to sink

down? I had always just kind of wondered this. There's two very specific reasons a balloon does not go up to space forever. Right. And one of them is the physical outside of the balloon. It just probably can't do it, right? Yeah. Because then if it could, why wouldn't we make spaceships out of balloon? Kind of, yeah, right. Why not? But the more crucial limit is what's called Archimedes principle. It's another density thing. A balloon rises because it's less dense than the air around it, but that's the air down here where humans live. And air just gets less and less dense as you move upward in the atmosphere. So even if a balloon had a perfect outside material that would never break or rupture or anything. Eventually a balloon would just reach a point where the

density of the helium plus the outside is equal to the air and it stops rising. So you just stop. Right. Yeah. So then it would just kind of like sink back down and then maybe rise about a little bit when it gets back down and then sink back down again until it's basically runs out of helium. down again until it's basically runs out of helium. Yeah. That's why balloons are limited. And the highest one of 53 kilometers, it was built by a team of scientists in 2002, specifically a team led by Dr. Takamasa Yamagami at Japan's Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science. It's a division of JAXA, their space program. And they built and launched a helium balloon that rose 53 kilometers. Most toy type balloons don't get higher than 10 kilometers, which is still a little more than six miles. That's pretty good, but they have to stop.

Was this like a weather balloon, like a big balloon or something, or was it a normal balloon size? It was like even more advanced than a weather balloon apparently those can go up about 30 kilometers and this was an experiment like just helium in a balloon how high can we get for our own edification and space research what can we do i often wonder how high can we get now we're on pinocchio's island of illicit stuff now we're talking oh no i'm a donkey oh well well i guess i'll go to getting my whale or whatever weed turns you into donkeys kids i've seen it happen and speaking of the law the next number is 10. Because as of April 2024, 10 U.S. states have a law on the books against balloon releases for celebrations.

That makes sense. I feel like those balloons come back down and then that latex has to go somewhere, like in streams and rivers. And that seems bad so i agree as cool as it is to see a bunch of loof balloons in the sky i don't like the idea of a fish just like with a bunch of uh popped balloons clogging its gills makes me sad for the fish. Yes, that's right. Yeah. And basically the whole environmental problem is the outside of the balloon. Yeah. The helium is fine. Like we don't want to waste helium, but releasing it is fine. It's inert. It's noble. And the states that have done this are mostly states with coasts or waterways, Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland,

Delaware. Yes. Just the environmental impact of the outside of the balloon. It's just better to not randomly shoot a bunch of balloons into the air and then plastic pollute with that. Yeah. I mean, everything's so riddled with microplastics and nanoplastics now. I don't think we need to add to the problem. Right. That's also kind of the main reason not every state has gotten around to it is we're

figuring out so many ways to stop plastic pollution. So, you know, it's probably just in the future. And several cities have also done this. Also, several universities, most recently, the University of Nebraska, have put some kind of rule against on-purpose releasing balloons to celebrate. There's got to be a market then for inventing a biodegradable balloon where you could fill it with helium and then have it be able to safely disintegrate or break down. Yeah, that's kind of the new thing. And yeah, I think we've just been slow to get that going because in my head, balloons are basically free.

I know they cost money. And if you're doing a big party, it's actually an expense. But we're like, why would you make sure to make balloons more effective? Isn't that just kind of like ballpoint pens or something that's just around like whatever? Yeah. I mean, also, yeah, just I think I think also but I think latex balloons are better than mylar balloons, right? I thought that mylar balloons were even worse in terms of the environment, that mylar was even more nasty. That's true, and they're basically both bad differently. Mylar balloons have metal foil in them that never breaks down, and then the latex becomes microplastics, but some of it does break

down. Ah, so they're just both bad. Yeah. And I'll link an article from theconversation.com where they tried to compost biodegradable balloons with mixed success. Right. Man, I would love a biodegradable balloon, even if it doesn't work as well. Just that seems cool. Yeah, and totally doable. Like it doesn't take an extraordinary material to hold helium. Like why not? Like I'm going to start filling sheep's bladders with helium and see what happens.

Because that's biodegradable. And I would only take it from sheep's. I would only take it from sheep's that are already dead. How's that? Yeah. Or who did a crime or something. Yeah, sure. Or who did a crime.

The sheeps who get the death penalty. I'm anti-death penalty, but not for sheeps. Yeah, yeah. So that we can turn their bladders into balloons. I just think of this Shrek thing where they turn like the frog and the snake into balloons while still alive. That's so messed up. Right. And if people have heard the Beef and Dairy Network podcast, they know that lamb consumption is dangerous in general, right? Like people who are bo-peeping and doing the crazy meat that is lamb, you know, this is a satirical podcast. You're fine, folks.

And with Bolognese, the next number is 2019. That's recent. Because in 2019, the U.S. store chain Party City announced that they were closing 45 of their 870 locations. So a significant closure, but not the whole chain. All right. And then the internet developed a weird theory about Party City closing 45 locations. Because of like helium running out or something?

Was that it? Yes. The New York Times covered this really well. Internet sleuths read real news about helium shortages that most of us don't think about and presumed that's killing Party City, when it really isn't. That's not the main reason that they closed doors. I thought that helium shortages were more, it was more relevant to industrial use of helium,

not the small amount used for balloons. Yeah, exactly. It turns out industrial uses of helium use such vast quantities, we can have an entire balloon industry without anybody caring. It's just kind of fine. But all of the helium we use for all our balloons is kind of a joke compared to industrial use. Now, speaking of Party City, to me, Party City has a very distinctive odor. I don't know if this is just me because I do kind of have – I have a dog nose, so I'm very sensitive to smell. And like every Party City I've ever been in has some kind of weird mixture of what I assume to be like different types of plastics used in all these like mass-produced tchotchkes, like latex. Maybe – I don't really know the different words for plastics, but it's not it's a weird smell. It's like, you know, those like Halloween masks that are like made out of some kind of like rubbery material and smell the inside of it.

And it's so bad and I hate it. That's what Party City smell like. I feel the same and I've never talked to anybody about it who thought about it. Yeah. Right. It's like they all need to be aired out or something. I don't get it. Yeah. There's dozens of us. Yeah. The only worst store for me is like a Yankee candle store because that melange of different candles almost kills me. Because that melange of different candles almost kills me. But that feels like on purpose, right? That's on purpose.

That's definitely on purpose. But that feels like a full frontal assault. Also, Lush Cosmetics, the store where like that is's killed some brain cells because I called it foigwences. Listen, Doc, there's a lot of foigwences. Yeah, a lot of foigwences. Yes. Wow. Yeah. And so so many of us have these party store experiences. And so the internet

said if there's a helium shortage, that must be why Party City is on the way out. But no, it's never mattered for that that much. I will link a CBC News news report where they actually interviewed a party store owner in Vancouver who said that during the 2019 helium shortage, they had to pay about triple the price for helium. So that definitely matters. And yet, you can still have balloons. They're not suddenly impossible to make and fill. It's okay. Right. Also, I feel like Party City could still stay afloat just based on selling those Groucho Marx glasses that they sell where it's like the nose and the butchy mustache and the glasses. That's got to be a top seller. Everyone wants those. Yeah. And it turns out they were just closing those locations for

all the reasons brick and mortar stores close in recent eras. Like you can just buy those glasses online now. So what do you do? You know, it's that kind of thing. Yeah, I don't know if you've noticed, but retail's not doing so good. Closing 45 of your almost 900 stores is not a disaster by current retail standards at all, actually. Like, they're not Sears, you know? Yeah. And so the actual helium shortage impacts massive uses of primarily cooled down helium. It turns out helium is extraordinarily useful in all sorts of modern technology because it's a super stable, super simple gas. And so you can make it very, very, very, very cold

and it does fine with that, but in a way that other elements don't. So you can use that for like industrial cooling? Yeah. The fun number there is negative 452 degrees Fahrenheit. Seems a little chilly. Negative 452 Fahrenheit, which is negative 269 Celsius. That's the temperature where helium goes from a gas to a liquid. You have to make it that cold just to make it a liquid, let alone a solid.

Yeah, what happens if you chug that? Oh, it's bad. But people don't, because how do you even get it, you know? Good. So helium, as a gas or super-cooled liquid, it's able to be extraordinarily cold. And we use it for too many things to list. We use it for cryogenic freezing. We use it for the cold conditions to make super detailed tech like smartphone chips and fiber optic cables. It's the coolant for the magnets and particle

accelerators. It's the coolant for nuclear reactors. It also turns out an MRI machine, which is advanced tech, but is in the hospital near you, right? It's around. Each of those needs about 2000 liters of cooled helium to keep the machine cold enough to run without exploding. So it uses these huge electromagnetic coils. So yeah, I could see how that could get pretty hot. Yeah. And oddly, that means any helium on Earth suddenly became a lot more valuable in the last few decades as we develop these really high-tech uses of it. And that's what people mean by a helium shortage, and that's the industries that freak out if we run low. And that relates in a really interesting way to our last takeaway number three. The U.S. government spent an entire century stockpiling helium for the silly reason of

combat blimps. Later on, they realized, oh, this is for everything high tech but the u.s was a first world leader in stockpiling helium because we found a bunch of it and we thought we would use it for an era of air ships like some kind of steampunk novel yeah zeppelins and blimps really didn't take off, did they? Take off. Yeah, they did not. Yeah. Blew up mostly. Yeah. No. I mean, when I think combat, I do think giant explodable balloon as being the pinnacle of security. Right. And it is more secure with helium. And so it turns out a lot of modern blimps, like the Goodyear blimp, for example, are full of helium. But that's because it's safe and because we don't really rely on blimps for very much. Yeah, it's more just for funsies. Because yeah, like with hydrogen, the other very light gas, when they tried to do that with the, what is it, the Hindenburg? Yes.

It exploded because it's very flammable. Exactly. Like the key source here, it's a piece for JSTOR Daily by Livia Gershon, and also a piece for Popular Mechanics by Darren Orff. They talk about how right after World War I, there was sort of an inflection point where there had been some early air forces and planes, but people said, okay, are the world's flying militaries going to be blimps or planes? What do we do? And one big disincentive for blimps was massive explosions.

Yeah. I mean, I guess if you time it right, that's actually a boom, but yeah. Right. Like a Hindenburg missile. Yeah, sure. Right, right. Like send a very slow sinking balloon down to your enemies. Yeah, and the Hindenburg's famous for a few reasons, the name and the radio broadcast, and it blew up in New Jersey, so Americans know about it. But that happened in 1937. There was also a less notorious explosion of a British airship in 1930. It was called R-101. And the goal was to use hydrogen airships to carry huge amounts of cargo to tie together the British Empire and interconnect the colonies through the air.

But R-101 exploded on its very first flight. And people said, oh, hmm, okay. The thing is, those exploded because they were full of hydrogen. Gases like hydrogen and methane have a lot of lift and a lot of flammability. Helium is why stuff like the Goodyear blimp is safe. It's super inert. And you can make a noble gas react in an extreme situation, but it doesn't blow up like that. But there are a few reasons the airship pushers did not use

helium. And the main one was that helium was hard to get. Airship pushers. Yeah. Right. Listen, you can go right over the Atlantic in this baby and slaps it and explodes. Yeah. And for two reasons, like in the modern day, we probably won't ever have a totally crippling helium shortage. Because one is that we've gotten good at finding helium in the ground. One is that we've gotten good at finding helium in the ground. And the other is that we've gotten good at capturing helium from fuel utility processes, such as nuclear plants and also natural gas plants. You can just capture helium out of that.

And so the shortages are mostly a lack of infrastructure and finding the next deposits. But I'm going to link about a new deposit we just found in Minnesota, a recent one in Tanzania, a recent one in Qatar. The world has helium around. Time to plant the idea that Minnesota has weapons of mass destruction. Twin cities? That sounds more powerful than one city. Also terrifying.

But so now we're pretty sure we can just, with effort and spending money, keep getting helium. But in the airship experiment times, they didn't think that. They didn't have nuclear power. They hadn't found a lot of deposits yet. And then in 1917, people looking for oil found a massive deposit of natural gas in Northern Texas near the Oklahoma border. And it's the traditional land of the Comanche, Kickapoo, and Wichita peoples. Natural gas is mainly methane and other hydrocarbons. When you hear about that as power, natural gas, but that can contain large amounts of helium and then you can also capture helium from burning it. And so that was something that people realized in 1917 and they said, oh, is the United States the world's helium power now? Maybe. Like, are we the helium leaders? And could we make a giant airship fleet with this? Like, can we lead the world's air forces? a giant airship fleet with us? Can we lead the world's air forces? Yeah. I mean, there's a certain appeal to having military stuff be really silly and funny. I do kind of like that, but also, yeah, maybe not the best. It's just every time we find a thing,

right? We're like, how can we use this to kill people? we find a thing, right? We're like, how can we use this to kill people? Yeah, like we started stockpiling it because we were like, can we rule the air and the world? Right. Right, it's like, cutest breed of dog

found. Can we use this for military advantage? Can we create a dog so cute it kills people? Right, just a guy with a bunch of medals like we will build mega dog like what i don't know how would that even so many questions yeah well god bless the united states of america wait hang. God bless the United States of America. Yeah. And they basically didn't follow through on that by accident because...

Did someone like open the door to the helium vault and it all just got out? Like a janitor, like whoop. So it is actually very difficult to store helium, no joke. But the U.S. proceeded to build a giant helium strategic reserve nearby in Amarillo, Texas. And that still exists. They just like found an area where they could store it under dolomite rock a few thousand feet underground. And to this day, there's that infrastructure and like chamber. It's just like a very, maybe like a very dense, non-porous rock or something. Yeah. It's sort of like the Missouri Chiefs caves. They just found a pretty handy underground space and adapted it. Yeah. I see. Okay. And so then they mostly stored it because 1917 was just a little too late in World War I to develop and deploy helium airships in Europe on a large scale. And so the U.S. sat on it, said, we'll wait till the next war.

Great. There were even some congressional moves where we wouldn't export our precious helium, you know? But in the meantime, people also found a lot of oil and made planes better and also Hindenburgs happened. And so the world's countries said, we're going to go planes, not airships. And the next war didn't happen for a while. So they had time to make good planes in the meantime. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. And it seems like planes can go faster than airships. And the maneuverability. From there, the US kept sitting on the helium. And then, especially with nuclear power,

we found all these other uses for cooled helium. So they accidentally made a really useful stockpile, just not for the original intent. And that story has kind of wrapped up this year. And that story has kind of wrapped up this year. They made this in the 1920s, a strategic helium reserve, and then just kept sitting on it and using it. And then in 2013, Congress passed a Helium Stewardship Act, which commanded the Bureau of Land Management to start privatizing the helium stockpile because as useful as it is, it's just not national defense stuff totally. So it like kind of makes sense to privatize that. And they accepted a bid in March 2024 for an auction to like start using the helium. To party city. It's some German conglomerate actually with a U S branch, but, uh, Hindenburgs. Um, but, uh,

but yeah, so like for basically a century, the 1920s to the 2020s, the U S sat on helium initially for combat airships and has now started to sell it at basically a profit to fund the government. Um, but for every big tech use. And that's helium shortages. That's what those are. If you read about it, that's what we worried about. Okay. Well, I guess that makes a little more sense than just like we won't have balloons anymore. I do love just that we've cornered the market on helium in the U.S.

Yeah, we're still the biggest producer. And it's the Middle East and the U.S. are leaders of oil. But we're kind of like that for helium. Right. Us and Russia and the Middle East are the helium leaders. Time to plant the idea that the U.S. has weapons of mass destruction. Wait, we do. You just zoom out of the satellite picture of Minnesota.

Like, oh, no, it's in the United States. Oh, no. I thought Canada, but no, it's just close to Canada. This Minnesota seems to be part of a larger conglomerate known as the United States. Oh, no, they're working together. Oh, no. It's a conspiracy. Folks, that's the main episode for this week, and I'm so excited for the next 200. Thank you for being here, in particular the people who fund the show and make all of these possible.

Welcome to the outro for episode 200. It's got fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, helium changes human voices by anatomically remixing them and knowing that helps us theorize what dinosaurs sounded like takeaway number two the discovery of helium got mocked as a myth about the sun for decades takeaway number three number three, the U.S. government spent the entire past century stockpiling helium, initially for combat blimps. Plus so many stats and numbers this week, including numbers about the entire makeup of the entire universe and every way balloons work, and so many other things about this number two element.

so many other things about this number two element. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Cluster Ballooning, which is pretty much the real-life version of the Pixar movie Up. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 16 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, including last week's new episode of the Inspectors Inspectors, plus a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows.

It's special audio, and it's just for members. Truly thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. The whole regular thing can only exist with support. And then we try to make that support feel special and get you something extra with bonus shows and more. Additional fun things. Check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include one of my favorite books ever written about science.

It's called Periodic Tales, A Cultural History of the Elements from Arsenic to Zinc. That is by science writer Hugh Alder C. Williams. Also lots of digital expert resources from the American Physical Society, the Smithsonian, and NASA, as well as tons of science writing from WHYY Public Radio Philadelphia, BBC Science Focus Magazine, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that

in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, in all the helium deposit and stockpile locations of the United States, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord, where we are sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding something randomly incredibly fascinating. By running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator, this week's pick is episode 20. Knock the zero off 200. Episode 20,

that's about the topic of chairs. Fun fact, there is a tree farm where they guide trees to grow branches in the shape of entire complete chairs. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly

incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.