Stuff You Should Know - How Crystals Work

Episode Date: May 21, 2019

In a new age shop or on display at the Smithsonian, there are varying interpretations of what crystals can be used for. But at their base, they are a thumb in the eye to entropy, a perfectly ordered piece of matter.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chubb Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

And this is Crystals. How are you doing, man? Well, what do you think? It's okay, the source material is not great. We won't say where we got it. But I think that once we kind of make it through the structure part, we'll be home free. Plus it's crystals, like they're so worth understanding,

going to the trouble of understanding because they are basically a finger in the eye to the tendency of the universe to move toward chaos and disorder because a crystal is the most ordered structure in the universe. It's a pattern that repeats over and over and over again, so much so that in a crystal,

if you look at a perfectly formed, pure crystal that came to be under ideal conditions, the shape that you're looking at, if you could zoom in to the smallest three-dimensional unit of atoms inside that crystal, it would be the exact same shape. Yeah, I mean, that is the one positive I took out of this article was just that thing early on,

the author did about the word crystallize, that we take colloquially. That was a couple extra L's in there. That we take, you know, everyone knows what that means, and it means like, you know, someone has distilled and made order out of something tough with their mouth words. Right, like colloquially.

And that makes sense. Yeah, so when you think about it, like an actual physical crystal, you get why that word came from that because it is that, it is this extreme order where all these molecules come together as friends to be perfect together. So we both love crystals

for basically the same reason it sounds like, right? Yeah, and like, before I started researching this, I just thought, I don't know, like crystals were just the things you buy in little five points at the shop with the kooky person who, you know, wears them on their forehead for healing chakras. Who wore Birkenstocks before they were cool.

And I didn't even realize that it's like, crystals are also salt and sugar and snowflakes and diamonds and rubies. It's like, you're a crystal as far as I'm concerned. So are you, Chuck? Thanks. Can we all be crystals in our heart? Sure.

In our heart chakras? Yes. So, yeah, that was a big takeaway for me, too, was the fact that crystals aren't necessarily a thing. They're a type of structure that a thing can fall into. You know what I mean? Yeah, and there's seven basic shapes or lattices that a crystal can take.

Cubic, trigonal, triclinic, orthorhombic, my favorite. Triaminic. Hexagonal, tetragonal, and monoclinic, monoclinic? I don't, I think there's like 10 people on the planet who say that word out loud ever. So, however you want to say it, they're okay with it. Nine of them will email us. Right.

So, yeah, and again, those lattice shapes that you just described, those are three-dimensional structures, arrangements of atoms and the crystal itself that you can sit and hold in your hand and be like, I can feel the energy just pulsating through this. If you zoomed in, the smallest three-dimensional arrangement

of atoms that forms a pattern that can be repeated, the minimal size pattern that's repeated is called the unit cell. That is the exact same shape. I just, I can't, I'm gonna say that five different times I think in this episode. So, there's two, okay? And oh, hey, sorry, I know we've already gotten started,

but do you mind if I do a little plug here? Whoa. I know this is kind of out of the field. Yeah. Sure, Josh's crystal shop. So, just real quick, everybody, geez, this is really poorly placed, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's great.

We're not talking about crystals, so it's good. Right. So, I wanted to plug, I'm gonna do some live shows, Chuck. Yeah. I'm going to be in Minneapolis at the Parkway Theater on June 19th, okay? Okay. And then the next night on June 20th.

Am I supposed to be at these places? Yes, you are. I've got a front row seat reserved for you at both of them. And it's gonna, I'm gonna have actually a cardboard cutout of you sitting there, so everybody will know, they'll notice if Chuck didn't show up, you know what I mean? Yeah.

The next night, you're going to have to travel to DC because that's where I'll be at the Miracle Theater on June 20th. Awesome. If people were so inclined to buy tickets, they could go to the parkwaytheatre.com or themiracletheatre.com, and there's tickets there. And I assume this is End of the World material, correct?

Yeah, sorry, thanks for that. I'm so bad at this. It's the end of the world live, and whether you've listened to the End of the World series by now, the podcast series I made, or not, you would still get something out of it. This is gonna be a pretty cool show because it kind of takes these themes and expands on them

and explores other avenues, other blind alleys that I didn't go down in the series. I love it. Thanks, Bill. Go, everybody, go, go, go. I appreciate that. Of course. So obviously we're talking about crystals again now. Yeah, so crystals can be very small,

like in our Great Snowflake episode is a pretty good example, or they can be very big, and the longer these crystals grow, the bigger they're gonna get, and they're gonna have fewer contaminants. Although, as we will learn when we talk about gemstones, those contaminants are where they get their brilliant colors.

Right, yeah, so you kind of want contaminants, but most crystals from what I understand are colorless. Like most pure crystals are colorless. Pure, just don't say pure crystal. That's different. That's a different thing. So you hit upon something that I think is also worth pointing out.

Like usually when people think of crystals, again, they're thinking of like that little five-points hippie shop kind of crystal. And you imagine it being formed in like a cave, or in some sort of fissure in the earth, or something like that, somewhere inside the earth. But like you said, snowflakes, they form above the earth. Salt forms on the earth's surface.

These are all crystals. So again, a crystal is not necessarily just a thing. It's a structure. It's a repeating pattern of an arrangement of atoms. That is a crystal. And one way to remember this, or to really just kind of have the awe smacked into your forehead chakra,

is carbon can be arranged in different ways. So the same molecule of carbon can be arranged in a way that makes it graphite, or makes it a diamond. So chemically speaking, diamonds and graphites are the exact same thing. Christologically speaking, they are two different things, because they form two different crystalline structures.

Right, and if you're confused by saying the words little five points two times, we just assume everyone is from our neighborhood in Atlanta. But that is an area of Atlanta where you can find a drum circle, or buy a crystal, or some Birkenstocks, or some high quality incense. Or a pure crystal.

Or probably pure crystal in the right corner. It throws a pretty good Halloween parade too. Yeah, it's great. It's remained fairly unchanged since I was hanging out there in high school. It's kind of great in that way. I would think just about every city has its own version of little five points, wouldn't you?

Yeah, absolutely. I've been to them in every city. Okay, so there you go. So that's what we're talking about when we say little five points, everybody. Yes. So let's talk crystals. Let's talk how, like what an actual crystal is made from,

or how it's made, I guess. No, no, I still can't come up with the word. What makes a crystal a crystal? That's what I'm looking for. Yeah, because it can get really confusing if you think about the fact that crystals can be salt, or snowflakes, or semiconductors, or in a computer display monitor,

or a television as liquid crystal. It's, and I know we've hammered this home, but it's really all those things because crystals are a formation. Right, right. So you take atoms of a certain type of variety. Usually ions are a big early, like predecessor atom of crystals.

Ions, they're either positively or negatively charged atoms as an ion, right? So they've got an extra electron, they are missing an electron. Something went horribly awry with their electrons, and it converted this atom into a charged atom. And those ions can attract other ions, they can repel certain kinds of ions,

and they start to clump together in a certain way. And they will, depending on the ion, or eventually the atom, I don't think you have to have ions to have crystals. I just think they're the most common basic type of atom that you find in a crystal. But depending on the type of ion or atom that starts setting off this aggregation

or attraction of other atoms into a clump, it's going to start to form a three-dimensional model. What I spoke about earlier, what are called unit cells. And that little three-dimensional model is going to start attracting more atoms in another three-dimensional model. The exact same variety is going to be built. And now you've just gone from a unit cell,

the most basic unit of the three-dimensional shape of a crystal into the lattice, which is the build-out of that unit upon unit, upon unit, upon unit, that just can keep going and going virtually and definitely. Yeah, it's almost like these ions are attracted, and when they get there, they see what's going on, what kind of party they're having.

Sure. And they're like, that looks great to me. Yep. Like I'm going to jump in there, and why would I want to mess it up by being any different? Yeah, I really feel like falling in line. It's kind of a fascist piece of matter if you think about it, a crystal is.

Yeah, and there were another couple of decent descriptions or metaphors, I guess, in this article, in terms of long-range order and short-range order. I thought that made a little bit of sense. If, because crystals, like you said, can, it can be a single crystal, or it can be a very large structure. And if it's a long-range order,

they liken it to like a half-time band, all marching in formation, like 200 people all together in synchronicity like that. Okay. Does that sound about right? Yeah, I just found that deeply confusing, but I got it. Oh, really? Once you explained it, I got it.

Short-range order, on the other hand, they liken to that marching band scattering around into smaller subunits. Right. And this is more like liquid crystal, like you would find in a TV monitor. Yeah, and so from the research that I saw, this short-range crystals

almost didn't even need to be mentioned in this article, because it has so few, it appears in so few places that really when you're talking about crystals, it almost, by definition, has to have long-range structure. Yeah, I mean, you usually think almost always of crystals is solid manner.

Right, exactly. With basically short-range is just this crystalline structure, the unit cell forms over a few atoms, and anything beyond that is long-range, and that's when you start to get into the money crystals, I guess, is what you'd call them. Yeah. You wanna take a break?

Sure. You feeling okay so far? I'm all right. Yeah, me too, ma'am. We will be right back, everybody. We're gonna go breathe into a paper bag. Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. Packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay. Okay, we're back. We went through three paper bags. Yeah. It's so funny.

After 11 years, we still care enough that we can feel like we're hanging on by our fingernails, but we still push through and generally get it right. I'm good with generally correct. Right, yeah. Most of the time we get it right. There's that little bit of impurity and those impurities give the individual podcasts.

They're brilliant hues that make some of the gems to us. Very nice. So there's a little more to talk about about how crystals form, right? Again, when we're talking about crystals, I guarantee you the thing that's coming into your mind is an amethyst or maybe even you're savvy enough to know that precious gems are also crystals

like sapphires or rubies or something like that. That's probably what's coming in your head and what you're seeing there, what you're imagining, this brilliant, beautiful, translucent, perfect shape with a bunch of different facets that are on display. That's a kind of crystal, but what you're talking about is a kind of crystal that formed under ideal conditions

and those ideal conditions are very rare, which is why gemstones tend to be pretty rare. More often than not, what you will see in nature or just on the ground or in some kid's backpack, I don't know, I'm grasping at straws right now, are what are called poly crystals where the conditions that the crystals formed under, and we'll talk about how crystals form in a second,

but the conditions that they formed under were not ideal and there were a bunch of different kinds of atoms present. And so rather than forming one beautiful single crystal, because again, when you have this giant, beautiful tetrahedron of amethyst in your hand, that is one, that's considered one single crystal. It's one giant crystal. If you have a big rock with a bunch of like pyrite in it,

just kind of sparkling back at you, what you're holding is a countless number of individual crystals that all kind of grew together. And rather than forming one beautiful crystal, they formed one big lump or mass and it's still a bunch of crystals and it still has crystalline structure. It's just multiple crystals and it's called a poly crystal.

And that's what you see much more frequently because again, conditions for crystals to grow under are infrequently ideal. Right. And this is where I step in and make the one joke that I thought of during that, which the tetrahedron of amethyst was the best yes album. Yeah, it was.

That's a good one. Yes, I have to say yes did second to iron maiden in beautiful album covers. They were pretty good. They had great ones. So polycress, contrary to what you might think. Or here or read. Or not stronger than single crystals

because it's like, I mean, it kind of makes sense. If you're assembling a model from a hundred pieces, it's probably not as strong as something that's made from one thing. Right. Because where they join it's gonna have weak points. That's a million percent right, right? Because again, if you realize that a beautiful giant crystal

is just one solid piece, those all those little smaller crystals, they're gonna break apart much more easily because they have weak spots. They're not joined together with these amazing covalent or ionic bonds that are holding that single crystal together. Right.

So it makes sense in that respect. Sure. So let's talk about how crystals are formed. Do you want to? There's really basically just three ways that they form whether they're human made or made in nature. They basically come about three different ways.

Yeah, and I'm gonna skip out of order here because for the kids out there, you can actually grow a crystal at home. Yes, you can. In pretty short order and it's pretty neat. So if you are a kid or if you're a parent with some kids, here's what one kind of fun thing that you can do.

And this is how to make a crystal out of a solution, which is one of the three ways. You can actually grow a sodium chloride salt crystal. Oh yeah. In just a few days. It's not the kind of thing you need to wait around like a year for. Or millions of years.

That's right. So to do this kids, you need get some whatever kind of salt you can, but you can just get regular sodium chloride table salt. Some distilled water, a glass like bell jar, any kind of glass is great. And then a spoon. You stir salt into boiling hot water

until no more of it will dissolve. And you're gonna start to see some crystals start starting to appear at the bottom of this thing. And make sure the water is as close to boiling as you can get. Then you're gonna pour that solution into that clear jar. And you put the spoon there is just to make sure the jar doesn't break, that always helps.

Oh okay, is that, we've got to do a short stuff on the physics of that someday. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that was an old like waiting tables trick when you made iced coffee. Which is just what we did was just pour hot coffee in a big thing of ice. Sure, well this was pre-hot coffee craze.

Cold brew. Right. Yeah. So then you suspend a string, that string that I told you about, into the jar from a spoon and just lay it across the top of the jar so it's hanging down in that solution.

And then just don't touch it for a while and you will literally see crystals forming on this string over the next few days. Yep. It's really, really cool. It is very cool. I saw another experiment you could do at home. It's got a couple of extra steps,

but you can make a beautiful kind of magenta colored crystal with just straight up alum and a couple of things. You grow a seed crystal and you use that, you dangle it like on a string like you were saying, but it actually grows more crystals up to it as well. So you can grow this stuff at home and both of those are crystal grown from solution. Right.

And crystal grown from solution is like you were just saying, you put in salt into hot water until you can't dissolve it anymore. That means that the salt or the water has become saturated with salt. No, it cannot hold any more salt, right? Sorry, TS, but that salt's got to go somewhere and it will eventually be forced into a solid state,

especially as that liquid cools because water that's warmer or anything that's warmer means that the atoms and molecules are further apart, which means there's more space for salt. But as that water cools down, that space shrinks and that salt's got to go somewhere. So it turns into the solid state and forms crystals. And that happens with salt at a relatively cool temperature

at a relatively low pressure, basically sea level pressure on earth. But that same thing can happen under water and hydrothermal vents. It can happen with magma inside the mantle of the earth. The conditions can change. So you have different temperatures, different pressures, different types of atoms,

and they'll form under those different conditions, different kinds of things, but crystals can form anywhere. They can form on the surface of the earth, again, in clouds and inside the earth itself. Yeah, and if you're gonna grow from a solution like that, like you do in your kitchen, you can produce crystals much, much faster and produce bigger crystals than you can

with a vapor deposition, which is, you know, snowflakes, which we've talked about a lot on the show. Which is basically, so vapor deposition is basically the same thing. Instead of a liquid solution becoming super saturated, a gaseous solution has become super saturated. And so that the water vapor can't, the air can't hold anymore,

so it pushes it into a solid state and form snowflakes. Yeah, then there's a third method from growth from melt, which is really kind of interesting, and there's a few different ways to do this too. But basically what you're doing is you're cooling a gas until it's a liquid, and then chilling that liquid until it starts that, you know, crystallization process. And there's a few ways.

There's one called crystal pulling or the, here we go. Zakrowski method. Yeah, and this is a human-made method of creating crystals, right? Yeah, it was named from a Polish scientist by the name of Zakrowski. Kazmir Funk. In 1915.

And this, you know, all of these involve actual machines. And this, you know, when you hear about superconductors and stuff like that, like this is, these are man-made things or human-made things and methods and processes that people figured out a long, long time ago. Right, crystal pulling's pretty not so amazing. Did you see any videos on it?

Yeah, I watched some videos and looked at like some still images of the machinery. It is pretty cool. So it's like that science experiment that I found where you create a crystal and then you tie it to a fishing line, you basically just hang it over the solution. This is, that's a very simple version

of what they're doing with crystal pulling. You're using a seed crystal that is basically providing the structure for the solution below it. Yeah. And you just touch that seed crystal just to the solution and it basically sets off an attractive chain reaction that creates a crystal.

So you slowly raise the crystal upward or that seed crystal upward and the crystal follows it out of the solution. It's like something from a Marvel movie. Essentially, yes, it is. That's another reason why I love crystals. It's just that the way that they form is so astoundingly awesome.

And with crystal pulling in particular, this is kind of an old technology. I think it's from the early 1900s. Yeah, 1915 was when it was first invented. And since then they've gotten so good at it and it's so perfectly automated that they can calculate how fast a crystal forms under crystal pulling.

And so they will have the machine raise that seed crystal at the rate of crystal formation. And now they can get to places where they're forming crystals that have like, they're a foot around in diameter. Amazing. That are just perfect, absolutely perfect crystals because also the solution that they're using that they're dipping that seed crystal into

has been purified. So it's the absolutely pure version of whatever you're trying to make a crystal out of. So say that you could make diamonds out of this. You would have pure carbon in a solution usually melted and then you would have a diamond dangling down as the seed and you would grow a seed diamond. That's not how you can make diamonds

but that's how they, that's what they do with silicon actually. Yeah, and there's another method from, from with the, you know, the melting method called the Bridgeman Stock Bargher Method, named for Percy Bridgeman and Donald Stock Bargher. I guess it's a hard G, right? Sure, he's the art garfunkel

of the crystal manufacturing world. And from what I got, this is used when the crystal pulling method isn't so great for certain materials. Right. And in this case, you take, it's sort of like taking ice cream cone shape, a conical shape and you lower it,

fill it with molten material, lower it into a cooler area. So it cools from that very bottom tip, just the tip. Just the tip. Upward. And it just kind of the same way. It just sort of works its way up joining the party, saying this looks good.

I like the way you guys are shaped and ordered. I'm just gonna jump right in. Yeah, so as the tip of that cone goes further downward into the colder temperature, that crystal grows upward in the tube, right? Yeah. And then eventually you have a whole tube that's just one giant crystal.

That's right. And then you think, how am I gonna get that out of here? Oh yeah. I hadn't really planned this out all the way. I've just got a beautiful crystal trapped in the canonical tube. I'm sure this, I'm sure it opens, don't you think?

Well, maybe that's where, what was the second name in that? I can't remember. Donald, this is his first name. Well, maybe that's where Donald, that was his big contribution, was having a hatch on the back. Yeah, I imagine there's something like that.

So if I were gonna put my money down on the best human-made synthetic crystal process, it would be epitaxy. And in particular, molecular deposition, molecular beam epitaxy. Yeah, and this is one, again, where you're growing, I mean, all of these kind of start with a base crystal and it grows from there.

And in this case, the base has to be just like, atomically flat. Right. That's a good band name too. Atomically flat is pretty good. Not bad. Math rock? Yeah, of course.

So with the reason it has to be atomically flat is because you wanna build from a pure crystal structure. And again, if you introduce atoms, especially like previously sorted atoms, like the kind of atoms you want to build this crystal structure out of, they will fall into this arrangement when they're introduced to the crystalline structure

that's already there. And then they layer by layer, atomic layer by atomic layer, will form a crystal that's built out. And with molecular beam in particular, you're shooting a beam of atoms across this perfectly flat substrate. And they're introduced in a way so they don't collide with one another.

They just click, click, click right into place. Yeah, again, there were a couple of decent examples in here and this one, they said, if you think of a rack of billiard balls, and if you just throw a ball on top of that, it will come to rest somewhere, who knows where, but somewhere between those other balls, it's not gonna, it would be pretty amazing

if it just sat directly on top of one of the balls, but that's not gonna happen. It's gonna find its place where it fits best. Right, it gets in where it fits in. Yeah. Where is it from? That was from roundabouts. Right.

Then there's chemical vapor deposition, which is the same thing, but instead of a beam of molecules that you're sending over that substrate, you're shooting vapor, you're just blowing vapor over it and that way the atoms kind of link up too. Yeah, and that's faster, right? It's faster and that's what they use for synthetic diamonds.

Yeah, they're like, you need a crystal now? Right. And no, I needed it yesterday. Remember the diamo-nique from the 90s? I don't remember diamo-nique. I remember diamo-noid and diamels. It's all the same, I'm sure. Yeah, or cubic zirconia.

Yeah, those were probably just all trade names, right? I would guess so, sure. Yeah. Diamo-nique just always stuck with me. It just sounded so fancy. That's a nice name. And then lastly, there's liquid phase epitaxy, which is pretty awesome.

So imagine a solution and you have that perfectly flat atomic substrate crystal and you just lift it up out of the solution and as it comes up out of the solution, a crystal just forms out of nothing. Amazing. Oh my goodness, I can't take it, Chuck. You wanna take a break?

Yeah, we'll take another break and then we'll talk about gemstones and then crystal healing and what that's all about right after this. ["The Nineties Call David Lasher and Christine Taylor"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, dude, I should say I was at the Smithsonian the other day. Oh, nice. You know, I went up to DC because to hear Jeff Bezos deliver his news about Blue Origin landing on the moon. How was that?

It was awesome. Yeah. It was really cool. Like, he was up there on stage. And it was probably a room of 150 people, maybe. And behind him, the curtain comes down. And there's a full-scale model of the lunar lander he's going to send up in like three years.

Oh, wow. It's pretty cool. Did everyone gasp? Yes, and clapped. Oh, cool. Appropriately so. But so while I was there, I killed some time at the Museum of Natural History.

That's easy to do. And I was just entranced. As a matter of fact, we're doing this episode because of the crystal display there. I was like, have we never done one on crystals? And I thought, no, we haven't. And then I thought, well, we really should. And then I thought, well, let's go get a sandwich

in the meantime. And I wasn't there to knock you over the head with a rubber mallet. Yeah, to knock me out of the loop. And be like, what happened? I don't know, man. You just passed out. We had a sandwich in his hand.

But the mineral and crystal and gem collection they have there is just amazing. It's just so beautiful. It's like just a little wonderling. And you're just wandering around from case to case staring at crystals. It's really neat. And there's one in particular that really caught my fancy.

They just look like ordinary dumb rocks or whatever. And then the light goes out and a black light comes on in this little display case. And they're fluorescent crystals embedded in the rocks. And then the light comes back on. And then it goes back out. And then back on. And it's really amazing to watch.

And then the light came on and your pants were down. Do not follow my own, everybody. I'm just sullening this whole thing. So gemstones, like we said a couple of times, they are crystals. And here's the deal. Like depending on the type of, I mean, we're not calling them imperfections or I guess impurities.

Flaws. Yeah, flaws. Shameful flaws. Yeah, that's where they get their color. So like a ruby and a sapphire, they're both corundum. But rubies are red because of a little bit of chromium that replaces a little bit of aluminum in the structure. Whereas sapphire comes blue because of iron and titanium

instead. Right. Otherwise they're kind of the same thing. Yeah. Just somehow some of those, some chromium or some iron or titanium atoms got sucked into the mix. And they said, hey, I kind of like this crystal structure thing, I'm going to hang out here.

And they did. And they said, I'm going to turn this thing blue, watch this. Yeah, and even the name crystal, doesn't that come from the Greek from quartz? Yeah, that's what they called quartz was crystallos, which is cold drop, which we take to mean as ice. Ice, yeah. And I read in this article, I didn't see it anywhere else,

that apparently the Greeks thought quartz was ice that had frozen so solid it would never melt. It sounds a little dumb to me for the Greeks. I think the Greeks were a little hipper than that. Because I mean, just think for a second, Greeks. And they would say, yes, you're right. This is something else entirely. But that's where crystal came from,

was that Greek word crystallos. Yeah, and quartz, I mean, like amethyst is a kind of quartz. It's just quartz with the right kind of impurity that gives it color. Yeah, and apparently they have not figured out exactly what gives amethyst its purple color. There's a debate over whether it's iron oxide or manganese or some sort of non-specific hydrocarbons.

But if you take amethyst, so remember, crystal is just, the chemistry can be exactly the same, like diamonds and graphite. But the conditions are different under which they form. And so they form different crystalline structures and appear to be totally different from one another. Same thing happens with amethyst. If you take amethyst and the conditions

are different in that the temperatures are much greater, it doesn't form purple amethyst, it forms yellow citrine, which is pretty amazing. I love crystals. And I mean, we could probably go on and on with different types of gemstones, but I think everyone gets the point. Yeah, yeah, I think they do as well.

Like you could take any gemstone and break it down and explain exactly what gives it its hue and but I think it's all here. Right, so that is how crystals form. And for a very long time, people just kind of appreciated crystals as for their beauty or their shape or something like that. One thing we didn't say that I think we should say, Chuck,

is a crystal that forms under ideal conditions will take one of those seven shapes you mentioned. But since the conditions are rarely ever ideal, they'll actually form other shapes under different conditions, things like plate shaped or table shaped or needle shaped, acicular. So there's other shapes they can take and people have appreciated these things all the time.

Like if you've ever looked at a crystal, it's just like a shock of what looks like incredibly sharp needles or just a tumble of perfectly shaped cubes growing out of some lumpy rock or something like that. There's a lot to appreciate there. And if you subscribe to crystal healing, which has become a thing again,

this has been going on, this idea that these things are not only beautiful, but that they contain some sort of energy that humans can harness to maybe straighten our own energy out or overcome disease or something like that. That this has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, so just a quick shout before we get fully

into crystal healing and what that's all about. I wanna encourage everyone to go look up some images of the Cueva de los Cristales, the Cave of Crystals in Chihuahua, Mexico. Unbelievable, if you wanna see like some of the most beautiful stuff you've seen in your life, that looks like something from a movie. Like it looks like the Fortress of Solitude in Superman.

Just unbelievable, these images of spelunkers and like these caves where some of these crystals are believed to have been growing for like half a million years. It's really something else. Yeah, that was one thing. So we talked about how fast that they can grow. They can also take a very, very long time.

Those are the big ones. Yeah, they're the big ones, but also some crystals form just by nature slowly, whether they're big or small. So like garnet in particular forms atom layer, atomic layer by atomic layer year by year. And so it can take 10 million years for just a two centimeter garnet to grow over time.

Amazing. So like I was saying, with crystal healing in particular, Chuck, these things are not only awesome or amazing or beautiful, they also supposedly contain some sort of energy. Yeah, I mean, this is where it gets a little hinky because this is one of those things that Western medicine, for lack of a better term,

has pretty much generally poo pooed as pseudoscience. But the idea is that these crystals can carry and transfer energy that can facilitate healing of like disease, let's say. So you would book a session with a crystal healer and we'll get into whether or not those people are credentialed at all here in a minute. But, and they will lay you down on a table

and they will put different crystals. Some crystals facilitate some sort of energy, others facilitate another sort of energy and they don't all agree on that as well, we should point out. That's kind of a big red flag. It's a big red flag. And then these crystals are placed on your body in various points and they will tell you

that that will bring in good healing energy and channel out bad diseased energy. Yeah, and those points on your body are actually pretty specific and they follow the Buddhist or the Hindu chakras, right? So you've got one on the top of your head, you have one in your forehead, on your throat, your chest, somewhere around your heart,

your stomach, your gut, and then around your groin for your root chakra. And there's a different color stone that's supposed to be associated with each of the chakras and there's different stones that can be roughly of that color that you could use for that chakra. And then like you were saying, they free up energy. Like according to this idea,

energy can get kind of gunked up and if you have a bunch of negative energy hanging around, it's gonna just do you wrong until you get rid of it with crystal therapy, that kind of stuff. Some crystals you can just put in a room and they'll help direct energy better. Like I can't remember what crystal I saw

but it's known for its properties of facilitating communication. So really we should have one in here for me and Jerry. Like if people are talking to one another and they don't understand what the other one's saying, this crystal will kind of cure that. Well, that's me. And so you are, you're a pink tourmaline, Chuck.

So like this is the kind of, this is the idea behind crystal energy. And as I was saying a minute ago, if you follow this kind of stuff, there's a whole crystal lore and supposedly this dates back thousands of years to the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, all use crystals for healing.

The problem is there's absolutely no evidence that that's the case at all. People have been writing about crystals since the classical Romans but they didn't talk about the energy properties they had, they just described them and tried to classify them. It wasn't until like the 70s or 80s that that, the idea that they contain energy really seemed to catch on.

Yeah, and there haven't been scientific studies really done because mainstream science just kind of doesn't study stuff like that. But they have done some other kind of studies, notably almost 20 years ago, there was a study done at the University of London where they got, how many people was it, 80 people together. And they said, here's what we're gonna do,

go meditate for five minutes, hold this quartz crystal in your hand. They're not gonna, they don't say this of course, but some of those are real crystals, some of them are completely faked, but they all believe that they're real. They were lied to. They were blatantly lied to.

Half of the participants, 40 of them were primed beforehand to say, you know, just think about any effects and see if you can notice any effects that these crystals are having. And so after meditating, they did a Q and A session and a question and error and said basically like, how do you feel the crystal affected this healing session?

And they found out that the effects reported by those who held the fake crystals while meditating were no different at all than people who had the real crystals. Both reported feeling like a warm sensation in their hand holding either the fake or the real crystal. And both reported feeling an increased overall feeling of wellbeing.

But the people who had been primed, those 40 to, you know, basically like think about how you're feeling and how this crystal is making you feel, they reported stronger effects than those who had not been primed. So it all sounds like placebo. Well, that's, yeah, that's what they attributed to. The whole thing is placebo,

which as far as Western medicine is concerned, placebo is great. Sure. And if it's, if you have some sort of ailment that this can help you get over through the placebo effect, fantastic. The, they seem to kind of walk a fine line with that though. And that they are worried that people will say,

well, I'll just use crystals to cure cancer rather than chemotherapy. And that probably won't work, but the placebo effect can't take on absolutely everything that ails you. And so if crystals are based on placebo, that's one way they could be dangerous. But for the most part it's considered pretty harmless.

Yeah, just know that you're going in to see someone who is not like licensed or certainly not medically licensed. But I think generally in all states, there's no like licensing of crystal healers. There's no organization looking over that. No, I think there are some organizations but that do accredit individual healers,

but those organizations aren't accredited themselves. So it's like at some point down the line, some like the accreditation is just being pulled out of the air. Yeah, and then there's this other thing that's a little more troublesome when it comes to babies. There is this belief by some that Baltic amber necklaces will help your babies teething.

Have you heard of that? Or your toddlers teething. No, I hadn't heard this, but the idea is that something called succinic acid is released, it's pain relieving and it's released from the Baltic amber because your child is wearing this necklace and the skin of the child is heating up this Baltic amber and it's being released and gathered into the bloodstream

and making your little kids teething better. Right, and there is succinic acid in Baltic amber, that's true, but apparently it's just like one of those kernel of true things because it's not been shown to be able to be released from the Baltic amber by saliva or body heat. Body heat, yeah. So it's problematic.

And it's dangerous because you should not put a necklace around your baby or toddler's neck when they sleep because they can choke. Yeah, right, or stones in their mouth, you know, yeah. Or do they put stuff in their mouth? Well, that's what, for them to teet on are these little necklaces made of these stones. Oh, I didn't think they were supposed to chew on them,

I thought it just laid against their throat. No, I think they're supposed to chew on them. Hmm, that's what I got. I'll have to look that up. I thought the idea was it laid against their skin and it was absorbed into the skin through body heat. I think that's part of it, but I think it also, they chew on it too.

That's what I got from it. Well, boy, you're really doing it wrong if you give your baby a necklace to chew on in their sleep. Right, so I have no issues with that though. I should say I used to carry around a crystal in my pocket all the time. Oh, yeah? Yeah, all the time, for years and years and years.

And like, I don't recall really thinking it contained any energy or anything, but it was more like just a neat thing to just kind of rub, kind of like a fidget spinner, but much prettier to look at. Okay. You know, just something to have in your hand or whatever, just keep it in your pocket.

What ages was this? Oh, like 20s. All right. I think that explains a lot. Yeah, sure. So why, what age is appropriate for carrying a crystal around your pocket? 20s. Okay, okay. That's when that happens.

That's when you listen to the doors. Sure. And you burn incense and stuff like that. That's right. So yeah, more power to you. If you're into crystals, just don't shun medical advice if you have a real big problem. No, definitely don't.

And that's, oh, I have one more thing about crystals, Chuck. You got a second? Yeah. Okay. Remember how I said that graphite and diamonds are the exact same thing. They're just arranged differently crystal-wise? Yeah.

I saw in a couple of different places that a diamond, since they're formed under tremendous temperature and pressure, when they're taken out of that environment and brought up to earth, they will over a long enough time period melt into graphite. Amazing. It's just too long of a time period

for humans to ever witness it. Yeah. So that's crystals. Get you to the Smithsonian whenever you get a chance. Go to the Museum of Natural History and just gaze and wonder. And also wonder how your pants got down when the light came back on

and the fluorescent mineral display. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Yeah. Yeah, which one should I do here? How about nicknames? Hey, guys. Really enjoying the short stuffs. And the nicknames episode was no exception,

but I was surprised that you didn't go into the origin of the term nickname. I didn't even think about that. I didn't either. I felt pretty shamed. Yeah. I'd always assume this might sound silly that the first true nickname was Nicholas shortened to Nick.

So they call them nicknames. But she did a little searching and said that's not quite right. Looks like the term started as a Middle English word in the 1300s. E-K-E-Name, pronounced ik-name, meaning additional name. So over time, as people said, an ik-name became nickname and it's nickname.

We didn't have time to look this one up, but I'm assuming. I'm just trusting Liz. Yeah. Liz, I hope you're not steering us wrong. Yeah. She said, my husband's name is Nick, which is what got me thinking of it.

And I jumped to that conclusion. If you could give Nick a shout on your show, it would be great. His birthday is next week, which means by now it's probably a couple of weeks ago. So happy birthday, Nick. Happy birthday, ik. And they are counting down the weeks

until their twins are born. Oh boy. Liz is expecting a baby girl and a baby boy in late June, their first children. And she said, we've been listening to a lot of your show while pregnant. Forget Mozart and Beethoven. I'm convinced that listening to stuff you should know

in utero makes babies smarter. Of course it does. And that's from Liz and Nick and babies that will be named Josh and Chuck and Jerry. That's right. Yeah, they need to have triplets, huh? I think Chuck and Jerry's a good name. Okay.

And Josh, the outsider. No, it could be Josh and Jerry or Josh and Chuck. What if both of them's middle name is Jerry? Josh, Jerry, and Chuck, Jerry. I think that sounds great. I think it does, too. Well, thanks again, Liz. I hope you're right on this one

because if not, we're going to have follow-up listening to a mail from other people who are pointing out how you're wrong. Either way, best wishes on your new expanded family and happy birthday, Nick. If you want to get in touch with us, like Liz did, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com, check out our social links, or you can send us an email

to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called,

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.