Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Mercury (element)

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the element mercury is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Mercury, known for being an element. Famous for being liquid metal element. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Mercury is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. 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. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden, Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of Mercury, the element? It's, it's, it sure is an element. I, you know, I don't interact with Mercury a lot. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't touch it because you're not supposed to.

You know, I think the first I heard of it was when I was a kid and I heard of it being called Quicksilver. I don't know if it's still called that. Not really anymore, but it has been. Well, you know, I'm from the 1800s. Right. Time Lord, Katie. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting. I think it used to kind of scare me a little bit. Like I heard it was in thermometers and it was really bad for you. So I was afraid of thermometers for a bit. Other than that, you know, it seems kind of neat. You shouldn't breathe it in or touch it. I know that like mad as a hatter and the mad hatter comes from mercury being involved maybe in making tricorn hats or something or some type of felted hat.

I don't know. And then that's it. That's all I know. I know it's a metal and it's a liquid at room temperature. And then that's it. Other than calling it Quicksilver, I have basically the same relationship. Yeah. I was basically told right away, it's a liquid looking metal, like the T-1000.

I was like, that's pretty cool. And they were like, also never be around our touch or anything, it will kill you immediately. And like, be afraid of a thermometer ever hitting the ground and breaking, even though most thermometers are not made with that anymore, you know. Yeah, no, I was like legitimately very afraid of thermometers breaking, even though I'm fairly certain zero of the thermometers I interacted with had mercury in it. Right. It's more of an old-timey thing, which we'll talk about.

Yeah. So, yeah, Mercury is like so extraordinarily dangerous. I think I've never found it as cool as maybe some other people do. Like, it's cool, isn't that it's dangerous? But I've never been like, I got to get some mercury, you know. I think that might be the standard position. I don't think that most people are trying to get their hands on mercury. Good.

Good job, everyone. Yeah. Because, yeah, and that Mad Hatter thing I heard at one point. Apparently it's partly arranging the fur on hats and also the felts. It helps, like, separate things and also stick them together. But now we just don't. do that. Like, come on, it's super dangerous. They used to just put

the worst stuff, like, here's some arsenic toothpaste, or here's, you know, eye drops, but it's made out of acid. And, you know, people just coped with that. They just lived like that. They were rubbing mercury

on their, you know, feet to make them shiny or something. Yeah, like a few progressive people, especially in the early 1900s, made it so we all stop poisoning each other so much. It's great. Ah, those dang hippies, a bunch of bleeding hearts. That's why we can't have cool thermometers anymore that you can crack open for a nifty snack. I like the idea of Teddy Roosevelt being a hippie.

It's just fun, just a good time. Yeah, bear-hugging hippie. And thank you to Ducpe Bear Bear. So in two separate poles, D'Coup bear suggested the Mercury element and the planet named Mercury, right? They're both called Mercury. And they both were runaway hits in the polls. So next week, we're going to do the planet called Mercury. Yeah.

And they're both named after a guy named Mercury. Pretty much. We'll talk about that, too. From ancient Greece. Yeah, Roman name of a Greek god, yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. It was the original Greek name Zephyr or something?

It's Hermes. Hermes. Hermes. Another god, kind of the same vibe, yeah. That's a different guy. Yeah, Hermes, if you've seen Disney's Hercules, it's Paul Schaefer with the piano and the sunglasses. Those Hermes. Yeah, he's the messenger of the gods, and he's got those neat little sandals with the wings on them.

Yeah. That's what I've always seen. Yeah. Because he scoots around real fast with Dodd mail. He's so zippy, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, great suggestions all around, that people. are really excited about. And we've done elements and done planets before. If you want to hear other

sifts about elements, we have done neon, we've done helium, we've done copper, and most recently Bismuth. And that Bismuth show actually had Mercury and a story there. So if you want to enrich your Mercury experience, you know, go for it. Yeah. You got to get your kitty because then we can be like, El Mertory, my dear Watson. Because my cat is named Watson. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mainly after that guy. Yeah. And we also have a cat named Birdie, who's just great. Yeah.

She's not named after them. And she's not picked up as easily. Watson just would hold like a baby and then it trained me for Schmidt baby. Because he's orange and big, you know. Watson is a sack of little potatoes. On every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called, Oh, how does it?

That's feel Do do Do do do Do do How does That's feel To use a microphone

Do do Like a podcast Unknown Do Numbers Rolling Stone That's a great Impression of

Bob Dylan Thank you That name was submitted by Tom. Thank you, Tom. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a miscellian wagon badge possible. Submit yours through Discord or to SIFPOT at gmail.com. And the first number is 80, because that is Mercury's atomic number. Wow. It's a pretty heavy metal. One atom of Mercury has 80 protons. It's number 80 on the periodic table. And it's also kind of hard to, it's much easier to find by number because its abbreviation

is confusing. The atomic symbol is the letters HG. Yeah, it does feel that way. This doesn't really sound like it would stand for Mercury. Why is it HG and not like M.E or M.R? Right. And no elements are M.E, which I feel like is because Mercury sort of deserves it, you know? But it stands for, the HG stands for the Latin word some people used to call Mercury. So beyond the name Quicksilver it sometimes had, it was called the Latin name Hydrargyram.

The HG is the hydrar and the gyram. Rolls up the tongue. Hydro gargum? It's got way too many letter R's to be. Hydergiram. Hydrar gyrum. Yeah, it's chewy. And it means either water, silver or liquid silver.

Hydrar? Hydrar gyram. Dryr gyram. Hydrar gyram. If we're warming up for theater. Yeah. it's like hi jar right or no no what is the first hi drar hi drar it's like i'm saying hi to a drawer high drawer hi drawer and then dry and then dry rum high drawer dry rum

gyrum but yeah oh gyram okay wait let me adjust the mnemonic then that's important information okay so hi drawer that part is correct like i'm saying hello to the drawer hi drawer and then gyram. Jairum, yeah. Gyram. Yep. Okay. I don't know.

Jairum. I don't have a fun thing for that one. I'm sorry. Latin's supposed to flow to me, but this one's like and it means water, silver or liquid silver. At the end of the show, we'll get into how this element ended up being named Mercury. Got it. Because it had many other names for most of time.

Right. So it's 80 on the table of elements. Yeah, number 80. And so kind of near Bismuth. Bismuth is 83. Hey. The name, it simply refers to the color of the element and its liquid state at room temperature. Because it does look like the color of silver, which is another element number 47.

And then the melting point of mercury is ridiculous. The melting point is around negative 39 degrees Celsius, which is around negative 38 Fahrenheit, kind of the same, fun. But that's incredibly cold. So in all typical situations on Earth, mercury is either a liquid or a gas. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Wait, a gas, you say?

Yeah, mercury can be gaseous, and there are many hundreds of tons of mercury in Earth's atmosphere. Oh, but so we're just breathing that right in there? A little bit gets down to us for breathing. The bigger problem is when it gets into life forms and then we eat it. Ah. So the gaseous forms get into life forms or you mean the liquid forms getting into life forms? It's a little of both. It can rain down from the atmosphere, like rain with mercury in it.

And then that either cools to a liquid or aerosolizes and gets to us. Mercury rain. That's not great. That sounds bad. Is that related at all to acid rain that we hear about? A little, and we'll talk later about mercury pollution because it's a real thing. And also there's some like complicated and amazing things happening with it. So we'll get into it.

But yeah, apparently every metal can be a solid or melted into a liquid. It's just that mercury is much easier to melt than the rest. According to MIT material science and engineering professor Craig Carter, the element tungsten has the highest melting point of anything. metal, you have to heat it to 3,422 degrees Celsius, which is over 6,000 Fahrenheit. None of us can conceive of it, you know. Yeah. But the second easiest metal to melt is gallium.

And some people play with that in science class because the melting point is a little less than 30 Celsius or 86 Fahrenheit. So it's solid. And then if you, like, hold it in your hand, your body heat can melt it. Right. And gallium is non-toxic unlike mercury. So it's fine. You can play around. I think I have a vague recollection of that happening in chemistry class.

Yeah, and apparently it took a little time to discover that gallium is a separate element because it visually looks sort of like mercury, but it melts differently. So people say it's got to be different. And all these melting points, Craig Carter says the difference is due to bonds between the atoms. And mercury melts so easily because each atom, holds its electrons relatively tightly. So the atoms aren't bonded to each other very much. And then as you heat it, they just go different directions like a liquid.

It's like when you're with your bestie and you're sort of like loosely holding hands because you're in a crowded area and then someone bongs into you. And then you sort of just like unhold hands for a minute because, you know, someone's bonged into you. Yeah. And then if you and your bestie are tungsten, you're just plowing through people. Right, right. Like screw you, child. They just knock them down.

Clothes lining people like, yeah. Just like, this is the power of friendship. Tungsten friendship. Yeah. Yeah, and so that's why Mercury has looked liquidy and in a very unique way among all the elements. Because in our experience in Earth temperatures, it's really special. and also it does freeze. We don't think of metals as freezing.

We just think of them as already being solid, but you can make Mercury salad and I'll link a video from Britain's Royal Institution where entirely for fun, they froze Mercury using liquid nitrogen. They made it into a really lumpy-looking hammer and like hit rubber nails with it. Yeah, it's bad.

I sent a picture to Katie. It looks stupid. It's rubbish. They did a rubbish. job. This hammer doesn't look very good at hammering things. Yeah, like I get it. It's

a fun little joke but, you know, I don't know. They should have just like talked to a hardware company and gotten a normal mold for a hammer. So it would look like a hammer. It looks like a cow tool. Like it's not good. Oh, it does. They should have just, if they had just labeled it

cow tools, then that would have solved the problem because that's exactly what it looks like. Yeah, yeah. Perfect. But and also what you freeze mercury, you get basically what you would guess. It's just the silvery, metaly thing, but it's not a liquid anymore. It doesn't look all that different when it's solid. Okay. So it's, it's kind of strange and rare to see it solid ever. I like that we can link the video. But it's a dumb hammer to me. Yeah. No, it's, it's cool. I'm being mean. It's a dumb hammer, but it's a cool idea. And the property of the mercury atoms not staying close together with each other, that's also why it was a long-time material in thermometers. Because when you heat that group of mercury atoms, they move more, they collide more, they increase the distances between them.

So that spreads up the tiny tube that's contained in when it's hotter and then goes back down when it's colder. Oh, okay. And then you just, in order to calibrate it to sort of the, say, Fahrenheit or Celsius. that you want it to display it, you just change how much is in the tube? Yeah, and the markings on it. It seems like it was just trial and error for people. They figured it out eventually what the right ratios are. Right. And then you can use it as a pixie stick when you need a nice little snack.

No. Always eating the materials. And then wash it down with some WD-40. Yeah. The San Diego treat. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and then today there's so many safe alternatives for what's in a thermometer or the other uses for mercury and basically every human application in products. One material mostly made of gallium can be in thermometers.

There's also a range of just special alcohols with dyes that make them more visible in thermometers. So if you have a mercury thermometer, it's probably pretty old and you don't need to do that. Right. Right. Yikes. But it is like a famous trope of the element that might keep lasting, especially with old people. Got it. Yeah. Because now most thermometers are digital. Yeah, that too. We've just digitized most of them and that has no weird metal elements in it at all. So it's great. Yeah.

Yeah. And then another physical number here about Mercury is the year 2018. 2018 is when a YouTuber posted a video of an iron anvil floating in Mercury. Oh, yeah, I think I might have seen this. Yeah, his name's Cody Don Reeder. His channel is called Cody's Lab. I think he's not responsible. He took basically no safety precautions and let Mercury slosh all over himself while he was doing this. It's incredibly dangerous.

Oh, my gosh. He showed a basic thing, which is that even if mercury is a liquid, it's still an incredibly dense heavy metal. And because it is about twice as dense as iron, iron stuff floats in mercury. So you can do this trick with an anvil. It's fun. It's all density. It's why, like, you know, water, we can float on water. But then if you, like, you know, take our weight and, like, scrunch it down into a little ball, you would sink.

Exactly. And yeah, I'm linking popular mechanics because they have the video but also a good write-up of it. And science writer Caroline Delbert points out that the iron anvil in mercury is just a much more elaborate version of a simpler party trick, which is bowling ball and water. Apparently, like, the volume of a typical bowling ball, that volume of water weighs about 12 pounds. So if you get a bowling ball that's lighter than 12 pounds, which a lot of them are, you can just float that in water. It's not like magic. You know. Yeah, I mean, like a ship weighs a lot. A ship, yep. A person, yeah, a lot of stuff floats. And so basically our like cultural perception of liquid is that it's weaker than a solid or something. But all kinds of metal things can float in mercury because it's extraordinarily dense even if it's not solid. You're very quickly disabused of that notion if you've ever had a really bad belly flop.

Yeah. Because, yeah, like, if you, if you. Gotta respect water. Water. And also because of the surface tension, because that is, you know, from a certain height and landing on it bad, like, that's just like landing on concrete. It's legitimately dangerous. Yeah. And I think this guy got a lot of mercury on himself, too, so I don't like it at all.

Now, obviously, the ideal amount of mercury to be exposed to is zero. but like if you get some, if you get a little mercury, just a little bit of mercury splashed on you, are you going to be okay or is it something, like, is it something that you have to be exposed to a number of times? Or is it basically one time you get some mercury on you and that's enough to, you know, really do some damage? You should see a doctor immediately. Okay. Well, I'll see you later. Alex.

I knew you were eating a pixie stick of your kind. I knew it. No, apparently mercury poisoning, the symptoms take a while to show up, so you need to get tested, like, immediately. I see. I see. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, we'll talk a little later about the pollution and the poison and so on. Yeah. It's a scary substance. Yeah. Yeah. It's also, Mercury is, like, used for amazing stunts, too, because it really has extraordinary properties. It's the only element like it in the universe.

And one number doing that, it's the year 1937. 1937 is when the artist Alexander Calder, who's most famous for like mobiles and other metal sculptures and stuff. Calder built a huge mercury fountain as like a nightmareish work of art that was a protest against war. Oh yeah, I know this guy because of the mobiles. Yeah. We were both actually probably in the market for mobiles recently, and there's like a lot of mobiles in the style of his kind of thing that he does. They're so cool. And Chicago has a few colored things, not just at the Art Institute.

Between that and his name being Alexander, I've been excited about him for a long time. It's like a bunch of sort of branching nodes and then from them, delicate little abstract, colorful shape. and then it's all very delicate so that it moves really cool and very slight breeze that just exists in a room from walking around. It's very cool if I can get my hands on one that doesn't break the bit. Obviously, it's not going to be something that this guy made, but, you know, but maybe not the mercury fountain. That might not be good for a nursery. Yeah. I love his work so much and I'd never heard of this, but it is still on display at a museum now in

Barcelona. It debuted in Paris. Also, it is behind like protective glass and stuff. So visitors are fine. But the idea was to make basically the hell version of a water fountain. Like what's an evil water fountain was the premise? I love that concept. Tell me more. Yeah. And it was in protest of the right wing forces in the Spanish Civil War, like Francisco Franco and his other autocratic fascist type movement. Yeah, man. People. And the story, it's from a key source for the whole episode. It's a book called Periodic Tales, A Cultural History of the Elements from Arsenic to Zinc.

And that's by science writer Hugh Alder C. Williams. It's an awesome book. But he writes that 1937 there was an international expo in Paris, and Spain's government put together an art pavilion. And so Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso and a few other people accepted commissions from them. And then Francisco Franco starts leading insurgent forces to try to overthrow Spanish democracy, which he will. He'll take over the country. So these artists still have these commissions, and a couple of them do really profound anti-war stuff. Picasso makes the Gernica painting, the incredibly famous painting about that horrible bombing.

And Calder does his own thing where he builds a hellish version of a water fountain where hundreds of leaders of mercury are going through super powerful pumping. because it's so heavy to like slide across metal plates and basically be the opposite of, you know, a water fountain feels lively and like full of life-giving force. And this is supposed to be the opposite and represent what the fascists were doing in Spain. I'm looking at a video of it. This is incredible. It's actually, so it's pretty in a sort of unsettling way. Yes. You know?

It's an evil kind of pretty. Like, it really is pretty. Yeah. It's an evil pretty. Like scar from the Lion King. He is. I like it. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he is pretty, right? He's got nice, you know, hair. It's like if Baron Harkinen had a villa or something. Right. He's like, come to my villa. And you're like, I guess. All right. Yeah, sure.

That is true. This is very Baron Harkonan coded. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah. And you could only achieve it with how mercury is. It's like this unsettling liquid that has fascinated people for thousands of years.

Yeah. How did he get his hands on so much of it? Apparently it was partly because people were not 100% careful about it. Like he gave them a bunch of extra mercury when he installed it on the basis that, yeah, some will probably splash out or get lost. And there wasn't really protective stuff around it when it debuted. But people were just not, even in the 1930s not being safe enough with. It was in thermometers and stuff. Like, it was just around.

Hey, my mom told me this story about how, like, back before they knew how dangerous it was, they would use it to, like, polish coins and kind of, like, play with it. And it would be fun. Yeah, it was like the treatment of gallium and the modern science class fun. Right. But with something horrible. Right. Exactly.

It's not great. Well, you know, you live and you learn. And sometimes you get mercury poisoning. The next number about Mercury Amazing People is 1950. In the year 1950, Mercury was used for one of the most amazing early special effects in movie history. It was an entirely practical special effects where the French filmmaker Jean Cocteau, he made a movie called Orfei. It's a version of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where in the myth, Orpheus needs to go into the underworld to retrieve the soul of his love, Eurydice.

So in the movie, they're like, how do we represent the doorway to the underworld, right? Like, that's so magical. And they basically got a giant, thin pool of mercury and then rotated the shot so it looked like it was vertical instead of flat like it needed to be. And it was apparently a win for safety because also the script had it so Orpheus needed to put on magic gloves that were just obviously latex gloves. And like, he had a win. He actually kind of wore some P.P.E. to do the shot, which is great. And then just entirely with clever cuts and angles, they made it look like he walked through the door by doing an overhead shot. And then the big kind of magical moment is when they say, oh, this is just a mirror, but then his fingers move through it because it's actually mercury.

So I found the clip because I'm really curious about this. I see. So, yeah. So he's a guy. He's got shiny gloves on. And they're cool French cinema people. They're not in togas and stuff, yeah. No, no, he's like he's looking nice. Oh, nice. Yeah, now he's putting his hand, oh, my goodness.

And he's going all the way through. Yes. And it amazed the whole world, you know? Wow. Fun and cool. That's awesome. That's a really nice effect. Yeah, like Mercury can be really fun in this way.

Yeah. And the fundamental number for all these tricks is about five, thousand years because apparently people have had pretty easy access to mercury for that long. All you need to do is heat and ore called cinnabar and get the pure mercury out of it with heat. And you don't need crazy furnaces or anything to do it. Right. You can just stick that right on your stove. People kind of did, yeah.

Oh, boy. Sinabar is a reddish ore and its whole chemical structure is just one atom of mercury and one atom of sulfur. bonded together. Mercury and sulfur not very good for you. But people would just go for it. They would just heat that. The sulfur bonds to oxygen and goes away. And then you have just the mercury.

The short version from Hugh Alder C. Williams is this is basically amazed and frustrated people for millennia. Because they do the burning. They get this awesome, shiny liquid metal and then realize it has no purposes other than being awesome. Right. Right. So people mostly used it for

ceremonial stuff or stunts and you know, cocktail and Calder and this YouTuber, they're all in that tradition in their way. Right, right. Yeah. Well, you know, and so that's kind of explains a lot of YouTube, though, if people are doing this stuff with the Mercury. But yeah, I mean, because like surely, if people were playing around with it a lot, you would think that at some point they would notice a connection between playing around with it too much and, you know, getting things going weird with the brain. Yeah, and it seems like people slowly understood that, but also super not, because not only did some people say, oh, I think this may be harming people. Other people said the extreme opposite and said, if this is the only liquid metal and has these unique properties, it must be magical.

Like, it must help your health. we can use it as a wonder drug. Like we should on purpose take Mercury, like go out of our way. Well, no. Well, no. Actually, no. I feel you rejecting this. I feel like you're not into it.

Well, actually. But actually, no. Okay. I mean, that's, you know, one perspective. I'm sure maybe one that. I'm just waiting for RFK Jr. to come out with that one. Like, because originally their whole thing was like, I don't know if we're going to talk about the whole vaccine things because it's very tedious. Actually not. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. I mean, I can summarize it. There used to be some bonded form of mercury where it's like bonded to another molecule, which again, it's like it wasn't. There's no evidence that this was like dangerous inside vaccines. But I'm just like waiting for that whole group of like health influencers slash are the secretary of health and human services to do it about face and be like actually now that like we've stopped all the vaccine research we think it's good to eat mercury. It's going to happen. That is the end point of their whole deal. Yeah. Seems like it. The rest of the vaccine was bad and the mercury is the good part. Yeah.

Right. That's the stuff you want. And the idea of it being good to consume mercury gets us into takeaway number one. People's intentional mercury consumption helps us understand all sorts of historical figures from Chinese emperors to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Okay. There are many centuries and more of people going out of their way to eat mercury or consume mercury because they thought it's good for you.

And that has weirdly helped us advance. the historical record because mercury is a very heavy metal and doesn't really go away. No. And I mean, I think I might have mentioned this. I'm not a doctor, so this is a bad explanation, but like it gets stuck, whereas like normally you can sort of filter out things from your liver with the mercury, it will just kind of like sit in there. And there's only, There's like a certain amount of space for like, say you get some heavy metals in you, which you will over your lifetime just through normal human stuff. It's don't worry about it.

You're not doing anything wrong. That's just how life is. But if you have a lot of it, then that it's like, it's basically it like takes up all the space in your filtration organs. And then they don't work good anymore because it's all clogged up there with stuff. that you should not have been getting such a high quantity of in the first place. No, it's true. And like, another thing with Mercury is it's so poisonous to us.

It's easy to forget that it's also natural. Like, there is mercury that just exists on the Earth and is around. So it's not like we need to catch the tycoon who invented Mercury and bring him to justice. It's just out there. That's what, I mean, you know, part of the thing is like our filtration organs are built with a bit of cushioning, so to speak, like a bit of the ability to store harmful molecules in it for the rest of your life, essentially. And they're just there. But there's not that many of them ideally. And so it doesn't, it's just like there and being kind of contained safely. It's like prison

for bad metal. For bad metals. Yeah. It's a life sentence for them and for you. But that if the prison gets too full, they start going Attica, Attica. And then there's, I might be mixing my metaphors a little bit. Anyways, please. I think so. Please, Alex, help. Hydrogyrum Day afternoon is the movie.

I don't know. Hydror. I forgot the rest of it because they didn't come up with a new monic. It's too hard, yeah. Some key sources here are the World Health Organization and the Cleveland Clinic and the Health and Human Services Department of the state of Iowa because they have good web resources on what mercury does to the body. It attacks the kidneys, lungs, and brain.

It attacks all sorts of cells and tissues by breaking down cell membrane brains, disrupting protein production. And also, if you only ever experience a tiny amount of it, it may not matter. When we talked before about see a doctor if you like handle mercury, if you handle so much that you're like, hey, look at this mercury. If you're just walking around in your life, it doesn't seem like that will happen. Right. Yeah.

I mean, like, because I have heard, you know, you can try to limit your mercury consumption based on, say, fish you eat. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the Mad Hatter character we talked about before Lewis Carroll first published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. and he did not come up with the trope of hatmakers being driven mad by Mercury. So since pretty early in the 1800s or earlier, lots of people in the world were saying, Mercury definitely does something bad to you. Let's avoid it. And then at the exact same time, for millennia, people believe the opposite and thought

Mercury has positive medical qualities. You should go out of your way to have it, like a vitamin or like an antibiotic or something. Right, right. And the biggest modern-ish example is a medicine that was called calomel. From the 1500s AD, well into the 1900s AD, people consumed calomel, which is a compound of mercury and chlorine. Mercuris chloride. Yeah, it doesn't sound, like calomel sounds kind of like caramel, so it sounds good. It's a super pleasant name, and when I was Googling things about it, there's like a clothing brand called that.

now. I don't think either they know or they don't care, you know? Like, it's probably not made of mercury. Probably not. But people said, Calimel is this amazing medicine you got to take. And they believe that for two reasons. One is that it has some laxative effects. But the reason it is a laxative is that it is killing you.

Oh. The other reason is that it does fight and kill some of the bacterium that causes syphilis. Oh. But the reason it does that. that is that it is killing you. It just kills everything. Oh. And you can take like regular penicillin and so on for syphilis later.

Oh. So that's good. Yeah. Katie's on a roller coaster. Oh, man. And so between those two effects and also people telling themselves, I don't know my disease self-resolved. I think it was the Calamel.

A lot of people thought Calimel was doing good things. And that also. fit thousands of years of people thinking that Mercury is very good for you, and in particular, emperors of China thinking Mercury makes you immortal. Oh, okay, interesting. That was an early goal of especially the first emperor, Chin Shi Huang. It's all of this just because it looks cool? Essentially, yeah.

Okay, man. It looks cool and nothing else looks like it. That's it. See, if I was allowed to just do stuff, I would definitely have done this, because, like, The way my brain works is that things that look cool, yeah, I think it'll make me immortal. Yeah, because consuming mercury, there are bad mental and bad physical results pretty fast. Like, nothing good happens except the laxative bit or if you have syphilis. Well, but probably the madness makes you feel like it's really working. Totally.

Yeah, that does interfere. Yeah. Like, I am invincible. I am immortal. Yeah, apparently early emperors of China, there were some beliefs about jade or mercury, each of them because they're cool looking in different ways, being some sort of immortality source or ingredient. Right. Interesting. And the first emperor, Chin Chi Huang, he essentially hoped to achieve immortality in the process of, like, he was the first king in China to call himself an emperor. He really invented the whole thing. So he's known for a tomb of terracotta warriors.

He's a little less known for a giant mechanical model of his kingdom that had pumps to move mercury through the model rivers. Like he had mercury models of rivers, which is awesome. It's so cool. I mean, that's, that's sick, dude. I love model trains so much. And I'm obsessed with really detailed model train things. So I would, God, I'd be so all over this. It reminds me of Calder's Fountain or the movie.

fact. It's really cool. Yeah. That sounds so cool. I would totally get mercury poisoning if I was royalty at this time in our history, which I wouldn't be statistically. Statistically speaking, no. I'd be farming potatoes. But, you know.

And a woman. And a woman, which is bad. Everyone knows. Yeah, so he really tried to surround himself with mercury, and there are pretty solid written records of him having a regimen of mercury pills that he consumed. And I guess he didn't break this idea by dying at age 49. Future emperors said it's still probably a good idea. There's also been like modern soil testing around his tomb that found extreme levels of mercury. Like we're pretty sure he just ate mercury on purpose and then died of it.

Well, you know, you only live once. And if you want to spend that time with your really cool mercury-based build, eating a lot of mercury, bathing in mercury, and just, you know, I don't, you know, who's to say? And that's what Chinese emperors kept saying. Apparently, five rulers just within the Tang Dynasty died of consuming mercury. One of them named Wu Zong was famous for a huge series of erratic decisions from the start of his mercury dosages until his death. But all of them, I guess, kind of thought either at least it's a laxative or I'm going to be the one it works for. It was very strange.

That's what I'm always thinking about things that I put in my body. At least it's a laxative. Yeah, yeah. How constipated were these dudes that they were desperate. Relaxative. Constipation apparently was a severe problem among the Lewis and Clark expedition. Oh. This is the other big historical thing we're learning a lot about through Mercury.

Ah. Like, Mercury is helping us know where the Lewis and Clark Expedition set up camps and their exact route because the latrines they dug are still loaded with Mercury that they consumed and excreted. So there's like very old Lewis and. Clark poops that are down there. And I assume most of the poop is now become part of the forest, but not the mercury. Exactly. Like what will happen, especially at state parks or national parks, is Rangers will find what seems to be an old campsite or latrine, like, you know, like trace evidence that people were here. And then specifically by testing the soil for mercury, they know it was the Lewis and Clark expedition and not like campers later or or somebody else before.

So why were these guys, like I would assume you'd want to travel light. Why were they bringing a lot of mercury with them then? Yeah, they were way into the trend of that Kalimel medicine that I mentioned before. Apparently they brought it in three forms. They brought ointments and tinctures and pills because they were so excited about having Kalimel ready no matter how they needed it. But they were also dying of diseases and starving. And so among their problems, it was hard to notice the mercury poisoning symptoms, you know. Well, I don't think it was helping though, Alex. Yeah, they seemed to think it was either a curative or a preventative or something.

No, I don't think so. And they took so many of the pills they nicknamed them Thunderclappers. Like in the writings of the members. There's like I had and took thunder clapers. It was great, you know. But pardon me. Why were they called thundercoppers? Massive poops. Yeah. That's what I thought. Okay. I appreciate you bothering to ask. Yeah. All right. So, and we have statues of these people. Yeah. If people don't know, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it was two guys, Marriweather Lewis and William Clark and then their crew, including the now more famous Native woman, Sacagauea, but they began a mission in 1804 to go from Thomas Jefferson's United States to the Pacific Ocean

to like explore for science and geography, but also prepare for colonization. And they stopped more than 600 times along the way because it was uncharted to them. They didn't record the locations in very much detail. And so now we're like piecing together their route because of the mercury they thunder clapped out of their butts into latrines. And mercury is an element. You cannot break it down more. So it's just there. It's a perfect clue, you know?

It's just it just still remains there. And it's not like you had some sort of little dung beetles carrying off the mercury to their little, you know. Right. It was just, yeah, okay. I just imagined a really frustrated dung beetle trying to make a salad ball, but it's liquid at room temperature. I was thinking of a dung beetle with like a dung beetle bell, a dung bell made out of two little dung balls. And they're really heavy because it's got mercury and he's like exercising his little arms. Oh.

Oh, good for that. That beetle, self-improvement. Right. Gaines. Gaines are gains. That's what they say. Gaines is gains. Folks, that's such a baffling takeaway. I had a lot of numbers. We're going to take a quick break. I don't know what you mean. Before exploring mercury across the Earth and then the universe. I don't know what your problem is. Okay. Put the pixie stick down. No. No. We just talked about this. We're back and we've got pollution to explore next.

Fun. And that's in two takeaways all at once. A scary takeaway and a weirdly exciting takeaway. Yay. Ah, yay. Ah. No. Because takeaway number two,

the modern world's three most prominent sources of mercury pollution are coal power, evil gold mines and melting ice. Evil. There's three different. ways that are the main way mercury gets out into the world today. And only one of them, the coal power, is famous. Okay. And then that's all pretty negative. The other thing here is takeaway number three.

Some modern societies are limiting mercury pollution and turning to a kind of fungus to help. All right. There are some like winds here too, which I had never heard of either. You know, fungus is always there for us when we're down and out. Yeah, there's new studies of a fungus that can break down the most dangerous, arguably, kind of mercury pollution. It's awesome. Wonderful. Yeah.

Yeah. And like tons of sources in this section, in particular, this Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, the American Chemical Society, Harvard School of Engineering, and also a lot of science reporting from the New York Times and popular mechanics. And digital resources from Dartmouth College, which is an Ivy League University. Dartmouth, oddly, is a leader in trying to solve Mercury in honor of a deceased professor. I mentioned that mercury is dangerous for people. In 1997, a Dartmouth chemistry professor handled an extremely concentrated form of mercury that was used in specific experiments. And it turned out her gloves were faulty and a couple of drops killed her. That was it.

Oh, no. Oh, my God. So now they're like a very committed institution to, for one thing making, it's called dimethyl mercury. Now dimethyl mercury is mostly banned even for the scientific purposes. Yikes. But also a leading like super fun cleanup kind of institution in honor of this professor. So that's kind of a nice legacy thing. I should bother to say her name, Dr. Karen E. Wedderhan.

And when, sorry, you did mention when this happened, but I kind of missed that. It wasn't that long ago. Yeah, 1997. We are still figuring out how to protect ourselves from mercury in some ways. My God. It is hard to run into mercury in life in a way that's like obvious. Because yeah, mercury, it is an element. It is like a sort of a fundamental format.

But it pollutes the earth in three main ways. There's just the metal as it is. Then there's an inorganic compound that we call mercury salts. That's where it's bonded with an acid. That's what Kalimel was made of. Don't eat that. Oh. But the one that is most pollutant today is an organic compound called methyl mercury.

And that's the one that does something called bioaccumulating. It stays in the bodies of plants or super simple life. And then that gets eaten by other life, eaten by other life up until a human's eating seafood with mercury in it. Oh, thanks. And that also is often the kind that we get from something like coal power being spit out into the world. because when we put mercury into the atmosphere, it can rain down and descend onto any other place on the planet. There's a landmark 2023 Harvard study that estimated from the 1500s to today, we increased Earth's atmospheric mercury by seven times through human activity.

So coal power is one of the big ways we spread mercury. Also, coal is not primarily made of mercury. Apparently, what's in coal qualifies as a trace amount. But the problem is when we burn it, we blast all that mercury into the atmosphere. And we just burn so much coal for our power systems. So we're like, we're just taking the trace amounts of mercury out of the ground and sort of sauteing it into the sky. Exactly. And if the coal stayed in the ground, the mercury really would not be much of an issue at all.

Right, right, right. Yeah. So in the past, it was mainly countries like the U.K. in the U.S. doing this. In the present, it's countries like the U.S. and China doing this the most, especially the current president, like, went out of his way to prevent some coal plants from closing

and keep spreading mercury. Yeah, but he keeps talking about clean coal. Clean coal. Remember when he kept talking about clean coal? It is a satisfying, alliterative pair of words, but otherwise I don't like it. Squeaky clean coal.

I brush my teeth with the coal. It's clean. And then there's two other much more surprising ways we put mercury out into the world. One of them is small-scale illegal gold mining. Uh-oh. You're on to me. It turns out humans have known how to do this for a few thousand years, but only ever did it on such tiny scales that didn't matter much.

Mercury and gold. are only one proton apart. They're somewhat similar in a way that's surprising. One proton apart on the periodic table, I mean. And so there is a way where you can pour mercury onto ore and then heat the mercury back out of the ore. And in the process, the mercury amalgamates with all of the gold there because gold just sort of lets it in and mixes with it.

And then you can melt back out all the mercury and get just pure gold. Whoa. So there's a great way to mine gold except for it destroys the entire region you do it in and the whole world. I mean, that's kind of like, you know, technically if you wanted to, you could use radioactive materials to really microwave some soup. Right. I could have a uranium Taco Bell franchise where we heat our foods with the uranium. Exactly.

Sure. And it'd make it glow in the dark so you could eat. Taco Bell in the dark. Ooh, it lights the sign without the power company. Take that. Right, exactly. That's basically the wisdom of mining gold this way. And there's so many ways to just like dig up gold with shovels and so on.

You don't have to do this. Yeah. So the main people doing this are organizations that are already completely illegal and evil as it is. The main example is horrible drug cartels across Latin America. Ah. Like gold prices are so high and they are so high. and they are so on the run and in combat with authorities that illicit fly-by-night gold mining makes more sense than regular gold mining equipment to them. Right.

But they're evil. There's an evil thing to do. Wait, you're saying drug cartels may not be good? Yeah, they're heinous, yeah. Oh, okay. Then the third big way mercury gets released into the world today is our past pollution of mercury that's locked into polar. ice and permafrost. It turns out that our past pollution, particularly in the northern hemisphere, got frozen in cold polar places. And when that melts, it releases back into ecosystems.

So a 2025 study in nature communications estimated that even as we decrease human pollution, melting ice might mean mercury levels don't dip right away because the mercury releases back into the oceans from ice. The pollution is released back in. to the environment and then it gets refrozen and remelted? Is that what you're saying? Is that like people burned coal in, say the 1800s? Okay, that's what I mean. Some of the mercury like ended up somewhere cold and frozen to ice.

So it's like it's pollution from hundreds of years ago or through all of human history. How long does this cycle kind of last from when it's frozen to when it's melted? It can be from any time and just humans pumped out a lot more mercury. especially once we started using cold power. I see. Okay. That sounds bad. Yeah.

Like there's old, there are also scientists who get like a core of ice and find old Roman pollution or something. Oh, wow. That just wasn't the scale that, you know, like Industrial Revolution Britain did. It's more of a problem now because we did a lot of stuff more recently. And that also we're heating the planet some. So then the ice melts and the mercury rushes back out into the water. Yikes.

So all of that is hideous. And I said there's like this other takeaway going on where significant good things are happening. Yay. The big one is that we have radically decreased the amount of mercury in the atmosphere recently. Wonderful. Yeah. This is a 2025 study. Some of the readings are from samples of plants that grow on Mount Everest because that's close to the atmosphere.

It's really cool. But they found that from the year 2000 to the year 2020, atmospheric murals. Mercury dropped by more than 70%. Mm. 7.0. And they credited the change to human activity. Apparently the soil amounts in the world are kind of similar to what they were before. But we have begun making a huge dent and difference in how much we use mercury for stuff

and how much we do pollution like coal power that puts it out. Okay. That's awesome. Fantastic. Yeah. So I can take a big, deep breath of air with no worries. Pretty much. It is healthier all over the world now, yeah. And then the other exciting thing is a fungus.

I'm already excited. There's a fungus called Metarizium Robertsai. It doesn't really have a common name, apparently. That's the scientific name. Well, I'm going to give it one, Robert. Yeah, it really feels like it's named Robert. So Bob the fungus, in 20, In 2022, a study in PNAS looked at how this fungus works, because we knew that it colonizes plant roots, and then it promotes the growth of a plant by killing the insects that try to eat the roots of the plant. But also along the way, it attacks methylmercury.

Because, again, methylmercury is mercury plus some organic compounds, which makes it easily bioaccumulate. This fungus breaks off the extra organic stuff and leaves behind just the metal element. that mostly kind of sits there. It still impacts the environment, but it's a lot less dangerous to us. Okay. And then also the researchers tried breeding this fungus to do more of that process, more effectively,

and they were able to do it. They planted a field of maize, aka corn, in mercury-polluted soil, and then the maze they colonized with this fungus grew a lot better. Whoa. Okay, so were they able to measure whether it's like lowering the amount of mercury in the soil?

It's basically making the mercury less able to move around the ecosystem because you can't destroy it. Is the fungus containing it within its own body or is it creating a byproduct that's less dangerous? A little of both apparently. Okay. Yeah. It can't just like stop existing, but it is easier to prevent from getting around. Right. Got it. So it's still mercury, but it's like in little mercury handcuffs.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not ready to leap from the next life form to the next life form to the next life form. Right. Wonderful. And that's amazing that a fungus can do that already. Like they didn't have to invent a new species of fungus or something. Right. So cool. Yeah. And I don't want to like discount the horribleness of mercury pollution. It's just like a lot more complicated and somewhat rosy than I expected. I thought it's just like permanently bad and we're all dead, but it's not at all what's happening. I think it actually inspires more action when there's actual things happening that are improving. Otherwise, it's just like, yeah, we're all screwed.

Why even bother doing anything? But it was like, no, actually, like you can put some cool fungus on some corn. I assume you probably don't want to eat the corn or can you? Can you eat the corn? Can you eat the mercury corn, Alex? Apparently, yeah. Oh, that's unexpected. I guess because the mercury isn't really going into the corn. Yeah, like it's growing healthfully because mercury is not, it's not methylmercury going straight into the plant, you know.

Its roots are protected by the fungus that has colonized it. Right. Whoa. Okay, so we should just like take this fungus worldwide. Can't nothing go wrong with that. Right. theoretically we just blanket the earth with Adam. Yay.

Problem solved. It's definitely, the fungus is just controlling my brain so it can tell people that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this will end up good just like the noble cane toad did. And off of all that, let's look beyond the earth with a last takeaway number four. The element mercury got its modern name from a set of errors in the fields of chemistry and astronomy. Okay. We'll talk more about the planet Mercury next week.

Yeah. The spark for the element being called this was that ancient Greeks misunderstood the planet we now call Mercury. Those dumb-dums. They're so funny. Key sources here are writing for BBC Sky at Night Magazine by Russell Deeks and a report for NPR Science Friday by Johanna Mayer and digital resources from the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. because like we said, Mercury is a planet and an ancient Roman god on top of an element. Mercury was the Roman name for the Greek god Hermes, who was a male god, winged shoes, sometimes a winged helmet. And as Roman culture absorbs Greece's religion and its stories, Hermes didn't really change much except for the name.

There's root words in Latin for merchandise and for wages that have the mer on the front. and so Hermes became mercurious. Okay. Because he's a god of travel and roads, but that means he's a god of communication and commerce. Like stuff moving around involves money eventually. Right. And mercurial means sort of like shifting.

Yeah, that came from this Roman god's name. Yeah. Huh. Okay. The god is the beginning for both the planet and the element getting their names. Yeah. And it's when you talk about mercurial gods, I guess like that would be sort of like,

saying, hey, Alex, you're acting really Alexy. Right. And everybody knows what you mean. Like, oh, he's so Alexy. Tell you what. Yeah. Alexander Calder's like, no, I don't know what that means. I'm tinkering with Mobile Balance.

Leave me alone. Yeah. And so the Romans also take over some Greek insights into astronomy. me. And in classical times, people could see the sun and the moon and five of the other planets in the solar system with their eyes. What are now, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn can all be seen with the human eye, at least a little bit. They're really small, though. And especially Mercury is like visible, but tiny and very hard to see only briefly. And Greeks were so confused by it, they thought it was two separate stars.

Because you can see Mercury a little in the morning and a little in the evening. And so they called the morning version Apollo and the evening version Hermes. Because both of those gods are speedy in their association. And then Apollo is associated with the sun. So they made the daytime Apollo. And then I guess commerce can be at night. So that's Hermes. So they think it's like moving around and that's why you only see it for part of the day?

Yeah, all the planets caught people's attention because their movement is unlike stars. Right, right. So they said this must be important. And especially Venus became huge in so many cultures because it's such a bright star to them. Right. And so the BBC says this Greek error thinking Mercury was two things lasted a few centuries. And then around 350 BC they said, oh no, it's probably just one thing. we've probably been mushing it all together.

I see. The way it moves, you can tell it's kind of just one thing twice. I see, I see. And then in the process, they, either the Greeks or the Romans after them said, okay, do we call it Apollo or Hermes? And also the God Hermes gets renamed Mercury by the Romans. And so they end up calling this planet Mercury. The Romans also use their God names for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

I see. Then also the Romans, while they were naming this planet Mercury, they were naming this liquid metal element, hydrar gyrum. Hydrogyram. Yeah, and they partly did that because you wouldn't name some random goopy metal after an important god. Like that doesn't make sense in a Roman mindset, actually. You would just call it a metal kind of name. It's like if you called your car god or something. That would be stupid.

call my bicycle, you know. Zeus. Yeah, sure. And then the medal, it only changes names as European science advances and as less and less people speak Latin. Like a lot of European scholarship type people tried to keep calling things Latin names. But in the medieval era, European chemists get obsessed with the idea of seven of stuff. because there's seven things they can see in the sky, those five planets and the moon and the sun.

Just like Jim Carrey. Number 23, yeah. Yeah. Different number. Same numbers when you think about it. 23, it's three, four, five. I mean, when you add them together, it's only five, but that's only two away from seven.

And how many eyes do we have, Alex? Two. Two. Or three, if it's, magic? No, you're shaking your hat two. Two, two, two, two. Yeah, numerology is so fun because you could just make it whatever.

Yeah, I can just be like, and that's three away from bingo. Yeah, and on one of our color episodes, I think it came up that Newton partly wanted the rainbow to be seven colors because seven is magic to him. Seven. Because of the classical seven planets and so on. Yeah. And alchemists decided, hey, there must be seven important metals, right? Like we haven't identified basically any of the periodic table of the elements. That concept doesn't exist yet.

We don't really know much about the world. But I think like seven metals are interesting to me and I can kind of identify them. So that must be part of seven being magic in the universe. Yeah. I mean, that sounds good to me. Yeah. And two of the metals in the list of seven were silver. and hydrogyrim that they had started calling quicksilver.

And they kind of said, if these are so important, they should have names that are more different. That's kind of tough, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's like if we had gold and super gold or something. Like, that's stupid. We need to change it. That sounds awesome. I want super gold now.

I'm throwing out all of my regular gold, which I don't really have that much of it. But I'm going to trade it in for super gold. We like fully in a bunch of clinking sounds to make it sound like we have lots of gold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get rid of this and this.

I tink a chink, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they said, I don't know, maybe we rename some of these metals. And also, hey, there's seven magic medals to us and seven classical planets. What if like each of those has a relationship to each other, right? Like what if each metal has a planet that it's assigned to? Nice. Yeah. I mean, this is like basically sort of tumbler levels of reasoning here where it's like here, these are my pairings for planets and metals.

Yeah, these are OTP, one true pairing. And so in the process of saying the speedy, shifty liquid metal called Quicksilver goes with the speedy little planet Mercury. In the process of pairing those as concepts, they eventually just started calling the metal mercury. Okay. Got it. And also, they didn't realize there's way more than seven important elements and metals in the world. Like, there are so many astronomy and chemistry errors here along the way. Yeah, but seven's a fun number. And how many elements have we discovered?

Over 100, yeah. Right. Because we can keep adding atoms on there. It's actually relevant to the bonus show. Let's head back. Oh, hey, okay. Bye. Yeah, let's go out of here.

Bye. Folks, it is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, we've learned more about the emperors of China and the Lewis and Clark Expedition and other historical figures because they intentionally consumed mercury for their health. Or at least they thought for their health. It's bad for you. Takeaways number two and three were kind of a pair.

Takeaway number two is that the three most prominent sources of modern mercury pollution are coal power and drug cartel gold mining and melting ice that contains past coal power mercury. Then takeaway number three with that, we have vastly decreased the amount of of Mercury in the atmosphere, and we've found a kind of fungus that can help us make Mercury spread less effectively. Takeaway number four, the element Mercury got its modern name from a series of errors in the fields of chemistry and astronomy, starting with ancient Greeks misunderstanding the planet, and ending with medieval alchemists getting really excited about the number seven.

And then a whole lot of numbers this week, including that atomic number 80, the reason HG is the abbreviation on the periodic table. The other metal elements melting or not melting, the surprising ease with which ancient people got their hands on liquid mercury, and just some amazing stunts in movies and art and YouTube involving this metal. 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 maximum fun.org.

Members are the reason this podcast exists. Some 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 two elements on the periodic table that would probably be abbreviated M.E. If Mercury was not so famous. None of them get to be symbolized with M.E because Mercury is just such a big deal. Visit SIFPod.f Fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 25 dozen. and other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows,

our recent and past digital art celebrating the show. It's all special stuff just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun, thanks. Check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include an amazing book. It's called Periodic Tales, A Cultural History of the Elements from arsenic to zinc.

That's by science writer Hugh Alder C. Williams. Lots and lots of digital resources from the Royal Society of Chemistry, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I'm linking a video from Britain's Royal Institution where they freeze mercury into a kind of hammer that is lumpy for no real reason. And then amazing science writing from all over the internet, in particular from the New York Times, the American Chemical Society. Further digital resources from Dartmouth College, the Harvard School of Engineering, the American Chemical Society. Society, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, in particular for pollution information, and then amazing science writing from all over the internet, popular science, the Guardian, the New York Times, popular mechanics, to name a few.

That page also features resources such as native-land.com. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadiguk people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in 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 is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 14. That is about the painting, American Gothic, the one that looks like it's a farmer with a pitchfork and a lady in front of a house. Fun fact there, the artist who made that, his name's Grant Wood. I think he has a much funnier and much more incisive painting called Daughters of Revolution that is worth checking out. The bonus show that week is all about that. So I recommend that episode and bonus. I also recommend Katie Golden's podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budo's Band.

Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing 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 artists-owned shows.

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