Stuff You Should Know - Did Archimedes build a death ray?

Episode Date: October 8, 2013

During the siege of Syracuse in 214 BCE, the city-state's resident genius, Archimedes, built a number of clever war machines to thwart the invading Roman fleet. One invention, the death ray, has been considered the stuff of legend. But could it have been real? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant is with me. Jerry's over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right, the audio adventure hour. Yeah. I'm telling you, we need to change our name to the audio adventure hour. Oh, I got you.

Because people will be like, I said it on a recent one, and you said, boy, that's going to stick. And now you can't even remember it. Yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, that's right. Which episode was it? I think it was Broken Bones Healing. Oh, that was pretty recent.

It just dropped yesterday in real time. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, but here we are in October, and it's long since forgotten. It was kind of agonizing, too. Like, just talking about, what was it, the green tree or green stick where little kids' bones break? Oh, yeah. Man, we heard from a lot of people on that, too.

Yeah, and everybody had a hard time listening to it. Yeah, and we got some pretty gnarly pictures. Yeah, that dude with the staples down his leg. Yeah, and the guy with the crooked wrist. Like, don't send us this stuff anymore, please. Stop. So, Chuck, I know you're familiar with the work of economist Jeffrey D. Sacks.

The Sackster. But don't let me bore you too much. I'll try to keep it brief. OK. Of course, you're aware that Sacks once said that humanity can most likely reproduce its way out of any dire situation. Yeah. Global warming, climate change, starvation, reaching carrying

capacity, running out of water, all of these things. We can paradoxically get ourselves out of by producing more people, more people who are going to consume more of these things. And the reason, of course, that Sacks is saying this is that the more people that are produced, the higher the chances that some of those people are geniuses. And the more geniuses you have running around the planet

at any given time, the more likely those geniuses are to solve the big picture problems that we face. We need more geniuses. So apparently, we're all supposed to reproduce more. Does he account for all the dummies? Yeah, I guess what he's saying is that when you put the dummies against the geniuses, even the dummies can't undermine the work of enough geniuses.

All right, so one genius can for the undoing of 1,000 dummies. Yeah. Nice. But it's like then you have the idiocracy problem. It's like, well, we need to make sure that smart people are reproducing, too. Oh, I thought you were going to say a movie based on one joke.

I love that movie. It was a cute movie. I thought it was good. Sorry. It worth in for me. It didn't. Yeah. No, actually, it was OK, but it worth in.

I'm not poo-pooing. Did you like office space? Yeah, sure. Who didn't? I don't know. I think everybody on the planet loved office space. Yeah, that was a big underground hit. Still is.

Like it's still part of the vernacular for people to say things like flair, and there's always one guy in the office that's talking about it today there. Right, sure. Every office has got someone quoting office space. Or he's a straight shooter with upper management written all over. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

True. So Archimedes. Yeah, speaking of office space. Well, we were talking about genius as in, you know, it's something to be a genius now. But when you are a genius, you basically expect to do immediately sell out to the man or the government and your ideas are going to be used for nefarious reasons

against everybody else. Yeah, that's kind of how it works a lot of times. You know, like that Matt Damon soliloquy in Goodwill Hunting, where he's interviewed you by the NSA. Oh, that one, yeah. Yeah. It's probably pretty accurate. Yeah.

There was a time, however, where just being a genius was you could change humanity forever. And you can make an argument that it was easier to be a genius before because there was so much to be discovered. Yeah, sure. I totally agree. But still, you should take your hat off to guys

like Archimedes. Oh, yeah. Some of the earliest geniuses. Because Archimedes was, thank you. You just did, didn't you? I'd off my cap. He was somebody worth taking your hat off to. Let alone the one thing that's possibly the biggest thing

that he figured out was calculating pi. Yeah. So he invented pi. Throw the people who can calculate pi to 150 places or whatever. Just out the window. Just throw them out the nearest window. People who are standing next to them right now.

Because this guy came up with pi originally. Yeah, he calculated pi. If you don't know who Archimedes is, by the way, he was a mathematician and a physicist and an engineer and inventor and all around Renaissance man, pre-Renaissance. Well, let's talk about him a little bit. He was born in 287 BC in Syracuse. The orange.

Which is modern day Sicily. Yeah. So he was just an Italian. Or, well, that back then, it was a Greek city state. Yeah, but you know, like. Sicily, Sicily. Yeah, sure. You know the old saying, Sicily, Sicily.

Right. And he was one of the OG Sicilians, a Syracusean. Yeah, and he lived his whole life there. And later in his life, he would do a lot to try and protect his fair city. Right. So basically, he's walking around Syracuse aside from going and being educated in Egypt, which

is where a lot of the early Greek thinkers went to study. Yeah. He, like you said, lived his life in Syracuse. And he was basically allowed to roam around being the local oddball because he was so smart. And he was. He played that part pretty well. Yeah, not only did he calculate pi first,

he worked, it wasn't quite calculus because calculus wasn't invented, but it might as well have been calculus. These proofs he was coming up with. Right. About 2,000 years before calculus was invented. Yeah. So he was pre-calculus and not that class

he took in the eighth grade that you hated. I shouldn't knock math. I always knock math. I'm sorry. Don't apologize to me. I have a lot of hatred towards math. I don't want to slant the youths of today, though. Go to take pre-calculus.

You're going to love it. Yes. That's what I say. Yeah. I don't think you're telling them anything they don't already know, though. You know, like kids who math appeals to. They're into it.

Yeah, you're right. I have a deep admiration for those kids and don't begrudge them anything. I think you're born into it. Yeah. Like if you're into math and you're a kid right now, you have, you're smarter than Chuck and Josh put together. Yeah.

And you've got a big advantage in life, too. Yeah. Because. Your checkbook is going to be. That's right. He came up with the principle of hydrostatics, displacement, calculating like the volume of the human body or really anything.

But at first it was a human body because he did it by getting in a bathtub and it spilled over. Let's talk about this. Yeah, this makes sense. Yeah, and what did he do when he figured out that. He ran around naked, apparently. Shouting Eureka, which means I've got it. Let's talk about the story behind this.

Yeah. So there was a king who had a pretty favorable opinion of Archimedes, King Hero, the second, I believe. Yeah. And King Hero came to Archimedes, this is a story, with a crown that a local goldsmith had made. He had commissioned a local goldsmith to make for him. Yeah.

And the king said, hey, Archimedes, I suspect, I gave this local goldsmith the gold to make this crown, but I suspect that he replaced some of the gold with silver and that this isn't a pure gold crown. And I wanted a gold crown. Can you help me? You're a smart guy. Yeah, can you help me figure it out?

Yeah. And Archimedes was like, oh, man, this is a tough one. And he thought and thought and thought and thought for a long time. And it was when, like you said, he was in a bath. He was lowering himself into the bath that some water spilled over, that he came up with what's called Archimedes' Principle of Hydrostatics,

which basically says that the volume of an object displaces an equal volume of water, right? Yeah. So we have things like airships, or not water, but fluid, which can be water or air or gas, liquid or gas. So we have like airships, a.k.a. zeppelins. Yeah, ship ships. Ship ships.

A.k.a. ships. Yep, things that float and don't sink. We can thank Archimedes for the math that led to those. But anyway, so he's got this crown, right? And it was when he was in the bath that he realized how he could figure out how the crown was pure, whether it was or not. He weighed the crown and then got a bar of gold

that he knew was pure, that weighed the exact same as the crown. He had a cylinder of water or a bath of water. He had a receptacle of water filled to the brim with water, like we said. A.k.a. water. He drops the gold into, is my natural aversion to understanding math showing? No.

I feel like it is. No. He has this receptacle of water filled to the brim. He takes this bar of pure gold, drops it into the receptacle, and it displaces water. Displace, displace. So now he takes the gold out, and the volume of water has been reduced.

Some of it spilled out, right? That's equal to the volume, which is produced by the density of the gold, of the gold. OK, so now he's got the gold crown. If he drops the gold crown into this receptacle of water and it brings the water up to the exact level that it was before the gold bar was dropped in there, that means that the density of the gold crown

and the density of the equal weight gold bar are the same, meaning that the gold crown's pure. Yeah, and that's the key. I don't think you mentioned at the beginning was that the gold bar he had was supposedly the same amount of gold as what was used to make the crown. Same weight. So it should have the same exact density.

Now silver has a different density than gold. So the same weight of a bar of gold and a bar of silver have different densities, which means that if the guy had added some silver to this, the amount of water wouldn't come back up to the top. So what happened? Who knows? Who cares?

Oh, wait. You don't have an ending to that story? I don't. The ending is that he figured this out and he ran naked to the street shouting Eureka. Oh, man. Now I have to know. Was the gold crown gold or was it gold and silver?

We're going to go ahead and say it's gold because if it were gold and silver, then the king would surely have to slay the goldsmith. And I have the impression that King Hiro, the second of Syracuse, was a fairly benevolent, beneficent king. Hold on. Before we go any further, what do you think about a message break? It's great.

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All right, so our comedies. I'm done talking for the rest of the podcast. No, you're not. So he was a smart guy. That's what that story equals. Yes. He wasn't an inventor, but he was more than an inventor. In my opinion, he was a modifier of inventions.

Like he didn't invent the catapult, but he made the catapult into a variable range weapon instead of a fixed range weapon, much more useful. Yes. He didn't invent the water screw. He did invent the water screw, I think, didn't he? Apparently, it's an Egyptian thing that he found and improved.

Oh, OK. Well, good for him, though. I'm not saying that like. Well, they call it Archimedes screw. Well, yeah. I have the impression he wouldn't have called it that. I don't think he was much of a self-promoter. He was a producer.

You think so? Yeah, he just got the work done. All right, so eventually, his tinkering and his obsession, like he would get really fixated on his work, would lead to his death. Although he was old, he was 75. That's got to be old for that age. Oh, sure.

For before the common era. 75? Yeah. Heck, yeah. He was really old. And a Roman soldier, I've seen varying accounts of this story. But the gist of it is, is that a Roman soldier came in and said, hey, you need to go meet with General Marcellus, because.

Marcellus Wallace. We're in charge here now. Marcellus wants to meet with you. He's got a brief case that glows and no one knows what's in it. And a mysterious band-aid on the back of his neck. And so he goes in there and he says, General Marcellus wants to meet with you. And Archimedes was in the middle of his math, basically,

trying to come up with some new proofs. Yeah, like he's creating a geometric proof or something, right? And he was in the middle of it. Yeah, and he had drawn this on the floor. It was all drawn out. And one account I saw, he said, no, I'm too busy. I can't go see him now. And the guy got angry and killed him with a sword.

Yes. You found that he was beaten to death. Yeah. Either way, he died. But he had said something along the lines of, don't disturb my circles. Very dismissively to this Roman soldier. Yeah, which pissed him off.

Yeah. And so the Roman soldier killed him one way or another. Exactly. And apparently, the Roman soldier didn't realize who he was. Well, no, General Marcellus was not too happy. No, because he wanted to use him. Yeah, Archimedes was very well known around this area.

And the whole reason that a Roman soldier was even in Archimedes' house in the first place was because they were besieging and had been besieging Syracuse for two years, two full years. Well, yeah, they, Syracuse was surrounded by a 16-mile wall. So it was a very fortified city. Right. So it wasn't the kind of place you could just waltz in and siege.

Right. Like, this will be an afternoon siege. It was a two-year siege. So here's the weird thing. For about 50 years of King Hiro II's reign, this city state, the Greek city state of Syracuse, allied itself with Rome. Everything was fine.

It was a time of peace. The Romans were pretty much conquering the world. Sure. The forefront of everything. Yeah, and taking care of their friends, including Syracuse. But King Hiro's successor, his son, decided to go and ally Syracuse with Carthage. The General Hannibal had recently

had some pretty good victories. And it caught the attention of Hiro's successor. And as a result, his successor was assassinated in like 13 months. And there's a lot of civil strife that kind of came about as a result of this. Syracuse was divided. We should ally with Carthage.

We should ally with Rome. Well, whatever the case was, their complete alliance to Rome had been shattered. And Rome sent General Marcellus to negotiate it first, I guess, to get them back on their side. And when negotiations failed, he started to attack the city. And when he attacked the city, Archimedes' war machines were unleashed upon the Romans.

Well, yeah, they went to Archimedes. And they said, you're a smart guy. Can you figure out some innovative ways to thwart these people? And he said, hey, it's no problem. So one of the things he came up with, and I love his war machines, because it's just kind of cool stuff, it's all like back in that day,

it was all very practically oriented with pulleys and levers and things that wasn't like nuclear fission. He's like, hey, let me think how I can use these, drop these big, heavy things onto people the best. Yeah, with the people that I have at my disposal. Which is a lot of people. One, my favorite thing was the iron hand

or the iron Archimedes claw. This was basically, it was like a large lever with a grappling hook. And it would hang flush with the wall so they wouldn't see it. And then when the ships would come into the harbor, they would swing this thing out. They would lower the boom literally.

And this grappling hook would attach onto the front of a ship or any part of the ship would be great. And they would have all these people and oxen and things that would immediately yank it up and basically yank these ships either in half or tip them over and capsize them or drop them in the front end out of the water and then release it and then drop it back in the water

where the boat would break or capsize. Right, exactly. The sailors would be shaken off. And these are big ships. Supposedly they were called Quinn querings. Yeah, that was the ship of the day. Yeah, and those things weighed about a hundred metric tons. I had like 400 dudes on these things so they were not small.

They weren't small. And there was supposedly this giant iron claw that could pick them up and shake the people off and then throw the ship back into the sea. It's pretty cool. And they think that it was probably balanced with a counterweight rather than say like pulleys, which some accounts have it as.

Yeah. Because the counterweight would be, it would balance out the weight of this huge arm and the claw. Meaning that just a few people could move it up and down and side to side when they needed to because the bulk of the weight was countered. And again, he didn't invent this,

but he modified existing things to make war machines basically. And we should say it's entirely possible the iron hand or iron claw didn't exist. Or existed in some less fantastic fashion, less James West fashion. Yeah. But it's possible and probably even that it was,

there was something like that that was used during the siege of Syracuse against the Romans. The coolest things to me is that this is so long ago that we don't have the great record. So there's a lot of speculation of how he did it. It's just like, how are the pyramids built? You know, it's kind of fun to sit around and tease your brain with that stuff or build these things.

Like Discovery Channel did on their show, Super Weapons of the Ancient World. They built an iron hand. Did it work? Heck yeah, it did. I mean, it's not, it's very basic. It's like, let me lower this big hook onto your ship and use a lot of force to pull it up and then drop it.

It's like the claw that you use to like win stuff at the bowling alley out of those machines. Well, an upside down version of that. Oh, is it like a hook? It's a hook. Yeah, it's a grappling hook. Okay, gotcha. But the nomenclature of the day, that was called a claw.

I gotcha. Yeah. Okay. So let's take another little second for a message break. Okay. Stuff you shouldn't know. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business.

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So you had the iron claw that was probably for real and used against Rome, because it was mentioned several times by not necessarily contemporary historians, but Plutarch mentions it. And Plutarch did a lot of the historical recording of the day for Archimedes. But it was about 250 years after Archimedes lived.

Yeah. There was another one that was pretty cool that may not have existed, but was possible. And it's called Archimedes' Death Ray. Cool name. It's a great name. Greatest name for a weapon ever, probably. Archimedes' Death Ray, what about a band name?

Oh, I'm sure that someone has taken that one. Don't you think? Yeah, there's an Archimedes' Death Ray out there. Okay, all right, fine. Archimedes' Death Ray has taken. Just gotta be. But it is a cool thing. The thing is, it's not mentioned.

It's mentioned a couple of times by some historians, even a couple that are fairly close, who wrote fairly close after the Siege of Syracuse. Well, now, what's considered fairly close? Couple hundred years. Okay, so Galen does not fall into that category? Galen? That's about 350 years after.

Okay, so let's say Galen mentions it. But he doesn't call anything a Death Ray, obviously. He basically says that Archimedes burned ships remotely. I don't remember exactly how he says it, but he just kind of, he says that Roman ships burned from afar because of one of Archimedes' weapons. Okay.

And he just mentions it. It's not until 500 AD, about 700 years after the fact. That they named it? That a guy named Anthemius of Tralis, who is talking about mirrored surfaces, mentions offhandedly that Archimedes probably used a mirrored parabola to burn these ships. So it was known that Archimedes used something

to burn ships remotely. And then it's not until 500 AD that Anthemius says, this is probably what it was. And the idea of the Archimedes Death Ray really kind of took shape from there. Yeah, and if you've never seen one in action, because a lot of people have tried to recreate these. Some very successfully.

Yeah, I sent you that video, the 19-year-old kid in 2011 named Eric Jacques-Main from Indiana. He built one out of a satellite dish in little disco ball mirrors. Yeah, the little squares. And it worked. Like, man, he could melt stuff and melt aluminum

and catch things on fire and he's pretty ingenious. Somehow melted a rock or singed a rock somehow. Yeah, and he said it committed suicide. He thinks it burned itself in a barn. Wow. Like the sun hit it wrong and it caught the barn on fire. But apparently he's making a new one. I don't know how he's coming along on that.

Yeah, but it's a pretty interesting little video to watch. Yeah, but the idea is that you're harnessing the energy of the sun, just sort of like you would with a magnifying glass to create a very small focal point of extreme heat to catch a boat on fire. Right, but this is from reflection. You're using mirrors.

The more mirrored and polished surfaces, the more genuinely it reflects the original beam of light back. And if you can take them and put them in a concave parabola, you can focus them all into a point, like you said. And when you focus them onto that point, you have however many little mirrors, reflections, focus into a beam that you can use

to set something remotely on fire. Now, did they have magnifying glasses at the time? They had mirrored surfaces. No, not mirrored, but did they have magnifying glasses? No, they didn't. No, they would have used mirrors. No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm asking if they had magnifying glasses at the time.

I don't believe so. Okay, it's possible. Because I was wondering if it's so much better than mirrors, why wouldn't they have used magnifying glasses? And my only thing I'd come up with is maybe they didn't have them at the time. I don't know. I don't know how old magnifying glasses are.

It seems like that's something that would be pretty old. Yeah. You know? I don't know. I'll look it up. Do they have, they had glass back then, right? Surely. Well, if they had mirrors.

Oh yeah. All right, so. We did a podcast on mirrors. That was a good one. Yeah, surprisingly good one. Remember all the weird little facts about mirrors? Yeah, pretty cool. They're creepy things.

Yeah, and the more highly polished we learned, the more energy they can bounce back at you. So that's what our comedies used. Yeah, if you're using sunlight, sunlight has with it heat energy, so you're bouncing heat energy back. And again, if you use a parabola with a bunch of different mirrors,

you can concentrate that heat energy into one little spot and you can hit something and set it on fire, especially a wooden Roman ship. Yeah, and legend has it that he burned a lot of them. They're in the Mediterranean Sea. They were parked anywhere from 200 to 1,000 feet away and he burned them all, or not all, but enough to where they were like,

we're getting out of here, because I don't know what this death ray is, but it sucks. So like you said, some people have tried to recreate this. Yeah. In addition to Eric Jacques-Main. Of Indiana. A group of MIT scientists created one in 2005, I think.

And it was a 10-foot version of a Roman ship, just basically like the side of one, made of red oak. And they used 127 one-foot square flat mirrors arranged in a parabola. And there's video of this on the web, too. So it worked, caught it on fire. Yeah, after 10 minutes of sunlight uninterrupted by clouds,

but that raises some issues here. Sure. This boat was stationary. It was just like basically a beam of wood. Yeah, it was on the roof of the building and not in the sea. Yeah, and it wasn't moving. So if your target is a boat, it's gonna move in the ocean.

Yeah. It's gonna have some sort of motion in the ocean. Sure. And that's gonna make the area that your beams hitting kind of jump all over the place. Well, yeah, and the whole key to the death ray was you gotta have that fixed, it's gotta sit there long enough to heat up.

And if it's moving all over the place, it's not gonna be effective. Although, I bet some dudes on the boat, as it passed by them, are like, ah, right, you know. Yeah, if you go the sovereign building, just one building over, it has a bit of a convex. Oh, it does. Or concave surface.

And if you stand where it's reflecting that light, it is way hotter than just like a foot over, a foot over this way, just on the sidewalk. It's neat. Is it dangerous? Go check it out. I don't know if it's dangerous. It's uncomfortable, for sure.

So some other dudes called the Mythbusters, is that what's pronounced? Mythbusters tried twice in seasons one and three, and both times they declared it busted because they could not recreate the death ray of Archimedes. But again, the MIT group was able to recreate it and a Greek researcher in 1973. That's the one to me,

because he actually did that on a boat in the water. Yeah, he set some rowboats that were on the water, or a rowboat on fire. But the way he got around the motion in the ocean was he used like 50 soldiers. Yeah, he had live mirrors. Yeah, that could just adjust their position slightly to make up for the ocean's motion.

That's a pretty good idea. You got how many guys? 50. 50 dudes with a five foot by three foot mirrors. And I mean, that's about the simplest way to recreate this. You don't have to build something. You just gotta have a lot of mirrors and a lot of people.

Yeah. And some time. Right. And a sun. And a Sicilian army that's not doing a whole lot right then. I guess they weren't. So it is very possible for Archimedes death ray to have existed, or for it to have worked.

Whether it existed or not is highly unlikely. Here's some reasons. You ready? It was never used again. That's my biggest like sticking point, is if it was a death ray and it worked so well, why didn't they ever use it again? Another point, a lot of historians

wrote about the siege of Syracuse. They mentioned the iron claw, different historians. Nobody mentions the death ray until 700 years after. It's another sticking point. Could have been an artistic license at work maybe. Could have been. Another thing is that even if it had been deployed in the field during the siege,

Roman ships all had firefighters aboard. And they wouldn't have been too terribly threatened by something that caused like a smoldering fire that they could easily get to and put out. All you had to do was splash some water on that area and it was just completely undo any of the heat that you've generated in that spot. Hey, Hercules, go pee on that.

Exactly. That bow. Hercules is like, I can pee on that plenty. That's why Hercules impressed me. Nice. Are those all the reasons that they? No, there's a whole list of them. There's military, practical, all sorts of reasons

why it probably didn't exist. I'm surprised that some modern military force hasn't tried to do some sort of version of this. Like harness the sun to kill. We have missiles and guns. So we don't really need the sun. He had like logs and trebuchets. Yeah, but like, you never know.

What if it was, I'm gonna get to work on it. Well, wait a minute. Was it one of the supermans that like a satellite like captures all the sunlight and then shoots it back? Was it a James Bond? There was some movie in like the late 70s or early 80s where that happened. Maybe Goldfinger?

Oh, not Goldfinger. No, that was just the laser. You do a kill, maybe. All right, if you do a kill, boy, that one is a stinker. It's the best one. We've had this conversation with Tanya Roberts with Christopher Walken. Yeah, Walken, Grace Slick.

No, Grace Jones. Yes. Have you ever heard her cover of a joy division she's lost control? No, it was good. It's like kind of like a reggae dub version of it. It's really good. Yeah, she, what happened to her?

I don't know. She was an odd duck. Grace Jones, if you listen to stuff you should know, write in and let us know how you're doing. Yeah, I mean, the last thing I remember seeing her in was Boomerang, the Eddie Murphy movie, remember? I mean, she was in that, wasn't she? Yeah, she was very funny in that, actually.

Yeah, she's probably pretty cool. I bet she's very cool. So that's Grace Jones. That's all there is to it. She did exist. Or did she? If you want to learn more about Grace Jones or the Archimedes Death Ray, you can type Archimedes

into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And I'm not going to spell that for you. You're going to have to figure it out yourself. And since I said search bar, it's time then for listener mail. I'm going to call this Collagen or Weird Collagen. Hey, guys. I've been listening to your podcast about broken bones. You mentioned the vital role of Collagen in the body.

I figured it'd be a perfect opportunity to send in this email. I have this weird and rare condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, EDS. You ever heard of that? No. Essentially, it's a defect in the makeup of my collagen. It's almost like my collagen is chewing gum. Keeps stretching and stretching.

And as a result, it doesn't hold my joints in place. I've had hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dislocations since it first started affecting me badly nine years ago when I was 11. Wow. Every joint in my body has been dislocated at some point, the exception of my left elbow. Is it painful?

It's got to be painful. Well, we'll find out here in a second. There's no cure for the condition, but my physiotherapy helps as it allows the muscles to build up around the joints and stabilize them, thus doing the job that collagen can't. My EDS is a lot better now. My shoulders only ever dislocate every few weeks or so. This is a tough person.

Yeah, very tough. It's manageable with medication. I'm proud to say I've made it through my first year of university, despite these occasional setbacks. Be really cool if you could do a show on EDS as it has a lot of different effects on its sufferers and it's pretty interesting. Finally, I want to thank you for providing me

with hours and hours of entertainment and information during the long nights of being kept awake by pain. Oh, no, it is painful. It is painful. Man, that is rough. I've learned a whole lot from you guys, and you never fail to cheer me up. That is from George in Brighton, UK.

George, you're a tough guy, and congratulations on finishing your first year at college. Yeah, my buddy Dave has a shoulder that dislocates quite a bit, or not quite a bit, but seven, five, or six times since I'd known him. Not like George's. Not like George. Every couple of weeks is good for George.

Yeah, hats off to you, George. Heck yeah. Maybe we'll do an EDS when we have to look it up. If you want to tell us about a condition you have and ask us to do a podcast on it, there's nothing wrong with that. You can tweet to us at our Twitter handle. It's S-Y-S-K Podcast.

You can hang out with us on our Facebook page. That would be facebook.com. Slash W should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.discovery.com, and you can check out our super awesome website called stuffyoushouldknow.com. I'll see you next time. The South Dakota stories, volume one.

She was a city girl, but always somewhere else in her head. Somewhere where bison roam, rivers flow, and people get their hiking boots dirty, like actually dirty. So one day she fled west and discovered this place of beauty, history, and a delicious taste of adventure. But before she knew it, she was driving away with memories to share and the hopes of returning. Because there's so much South Dakota, so little time.