Stuff You Should Know - How Weather Modification Works

Episode Date: February 10, 2013

It began with old-timey guys dropping dry ice on clouds. Since then weather modification was used to keep the 2008 opening ceremonies dry and flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but does it work? Learn about weather control plans, diabolical or otherwise. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner, the residue-free, fast-drying solution especially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like stone, tile, laminate, vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and it's Stuff You Should Know. Rainy edition. Is it rainy? How appropriate that we're doing this one today,

because it has been raining in Atlanta for 40 days and 40 nights. It seems like. It really has been. I've been breaking out the duck boots, man. I almost never wear those, because it's not that rainy. Sure it is. Dude, we're in the midst of like a 10-year drought, you know. We're still in drought level conditions. Yeah, and then tomorrow it says maybe even snow in the northern suburbs. I know. That'd be nice if it's going down here. Another 100% chance of rain or snow. You know, despite all this rain, we still are in a drought condition, and we haven't for a while. You remember back in 2007, when Sonny Perdue was the governor, they held an official state prayer for rain, where Governor Perdue led a prayer for rain,

saying like, God, please rain for the love of God, for the love of you. Please make it rain. Yeah, and it rained. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that he held that prayer on night before it was calling for 100% chance of rain the next day. I don't remember it raining the next day. Yeah, it rained the next day, and people were saying, oh my goodness, God made it rain. Sonny Perdue is a magic rain. Yeah. Mother nature at work. So you've got people praying for rain. You have the rain dance, which is really hard to find any information on these days, but apparently the Pueblo had a pretty cool rain dance because, you know, they lived in the Southwest where it was very dry, so they knew what they were doing. Sure. And then there was something that

I discovered today called the paparuta, which is from Romania. And basically, a girl from a village would run around wearing like a skirt with made of like vines and branches. And she would go dancing through the streets of the village and then go house to house. And then when she was greeted at the door of each house, people would pour water on her. And she would just continue dancing and people would be playing music and eventually it would hopefully rain. Eventually that would evolve into the wet t-shirt contest at Panama City Beach. I guess that's probably where it came from. Yeah. Wow. Who knew? Yeah. Which of course, you referenced the fact that Panama City Beach was settled by Romanian settlers. Yeah. So yeah, for a change, we're talking about the

weather and it's not some little boring chit-chat. You know what I'm saying? You don't think this was boring chit-chat? No. It's legit because, you know, usually when you're like, oh, you know, it's raining here. It's just a very boring way to say I have not much to say. Oh, gotcha. You know what I'm saying? I see what you mean. But this is actually topical. Yeah, it is. We're saying that because we're talking about weather modification. You could say that rain dance was an early attempt at it. Yeah. And then in the early 20th century, people started to try to apply science to it. And there were some pretty cool attempts early on by very smart guys from like Harvard and MIT and a Dutch guy to basically either make it rain, to make it stop raining, or to deter some other

kind of weather phenomenon. Yeah, like fog or hurricanes or tornadoes. Yeah. Actually, this came along a little later. But fog, I think you have down in 1938, they were trying to dissipate fog. Yeah, a guy named Professor Henry G. Houghton of MIT. Yeah, I think my favorite is the Harvard guy, Professor Emery Leon Chaffee. Sounds like he should be from the University of the South. Yeah, well, he was flying around and applying in 1924 with charged sand. Whatever the heck that is. Well, I think it's sand that you apply an electrical current to. Yeah, I think so. You do something to its ions, right? Yeah. And he was dumping into the clouds. And actually, he was definitely on to something. I don't know where he figured that out, but he was,

I guess you could say, the grandfather of cloud seeding then. Yeah, Grandpa Chaffee. And things were kind of humming along a little bit until Kurt Vonnegut's older brother, Bernie Bernard, Dr. Bernard, really took it by the horns and made some headway. Yeah. As far as cloud seeding and actually controlling the weather in the mid 1940s. Right. I guess he was researching that for GE. And he figured out that silver iodide has virtually the same distance between points in its crystal lattice structure as ice. So he said, you know what, I'll bet this would be a really good stand-in for ice formation. So if you put it into clouds, maybe it would make ice form. Yeah, and he even figured out how to generate it, right? Yeah. Yeah, he's like,

not only that, this isn't all theoretical. I'm a Vonnegut. So I'm going to just go the extra mile. You don't know my little brother yet, but you're going to be knocked out by his books. You're going to love him. People are going to try to ban T-shirts with his quotes on it during ban books weeks. The irony is going to be lousy. That's right. So what's the process? Well, the process of creating it, he dissolves a mixture of, what are we going to call it, AGI? Yeah. AGI. An acetone, which is also iodide. Is that right? Oh, another iodide with acetone. Yeah, the acetone is flammable. You spray that through a nozzle, make the tiny little droplets, then burn those droplets up, and then that really makes it more efficient. One gram of AGI can then

produce 100 quadrillion nuclei for these ice crystals. Yeah. So you take that stuff, you put it up in the clouds. It goes up. That's right. And it actually, according to Vonnegut's theories, has a number of effects. And here's how it works. Yeah, this is where I get a little confused. Okay. This is what the segments we like to call Josh teaches Chuck in addition to the world. Okay. You ready? So you think that zero degrees Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit is where ice freezes? It is. That's what they always say. This is actually the melting point of ice. So ice. I knew that part. Ice freezes between zero and negative 39 degrees Celsius. Right. And it depends on the number of impurities, which we'll call nuclei. Okay. And when we're

talking nuclei, when we're talking about cloud seeding, you're talking about any particle that can attract water to become a raindrop, that can attract water vapor and turn into ice through sublimation and become snow or a sleet or anything like that. So a nuclei is anything that you introduce into a cloud that becomes the center of this precipitation. Right. Okay. See, that already makes more sense. Okay. So with those two types of clouds, as far as Vonnegut's concerned, or as technique is concerned, there is a super cool cloud, which has water that is less than zero degrees Celsius. Yes. Present. And that's the ideal cloud for cloud seeding, correct? For one type of cloud seeding, for using silver iodide. Okay. Because what you're

trying to do there is create ice. Right. And if you're using silver iodide, which has a similar structure to ice crystals, you're going to use that in the super cool one. Because if you use it in the other type, the warm cloud, right, it's not going to do anything because it's not going to form ice no matter what the temperature is too high. But you can still see the warm cloud correctly. You can. So you use a silver iodide. Vonnegut's method is still in use today where you're burning silver iodide mixed in acetone to create quadrillions of nuclei that float up into the cloud. Yeah. Create an updraft because check this out. This is even more beautiful. When the silver iodide nuclei enter the cloud, they start to attract the water

vapor. Right. And as the water vapor converts from vapor, not turning back into liquid because it's sublimation. That's right. Converts from liquid or vapor into ice. It creates heat energy as a result. It doesn't create it. Heat energy comes about. Okay. It's magic. Right. And as that happens, that creates a convective current going up in the cloud, which creates a swirl and updraft, which makes the cloud bigger, which means that the stuff, the particles that happen at the top have longer to fall through to create more ice, accumulate more ice and have a better chance of becoming snow. So that's the super cool cloud using silver iodide. So the cloud is literally pregnant with precipitation. Yeah. That not only creates snow and ice, but actually makes

the cloud bigger to increase the likelihood that it will produce snow and ice. Wow. Just by introducing silver iodide. That's Vonnegut was a genius. Yeah. The other way is to do, to use a warm cloud, which is a cloud where the water temperature, the air temperature is over zero degrees Celsius. That's right. And then that is pretty simple. You just use table salt. Really? Or sand, charged sand or otherwise. Yeah. Okay. But you want to dump that into the top of the cloud. Right. And it requires dumping a lot of it too. Right. Right. Is that one of the problems with it or? Yeah. I mean, just there's more to it. If you're doing, if you're using Vonnegut's method, you can use a seeding station on the ground. Right. If you're using static cloud seeding,

where you're flying overhead and dropping stuff into the clouds, you have to have a plane. You have to have a lot more of it. But what you're using is called a hygroscopic solution, which attracts water to create raindrops, which fall through the cloud, becoming bigger and bigger on the way. And then bam, you have rain. You've just seeded a cloud. That's amazing. So GE did have a plane in 1946, or at least the articles as they rented an airplane. It's another one. And they said, we should try this out. And they released dry ice into these clouds for four days in November, December of 46. And on the last day, they received the heaviest snowfall of that winter in the air of New York's Schenectady, New York. But there's been

a lot of, well, we'll get to whether or not this stuff works at the very end. But it seems like every time it happens, people are saying, I think we might have caused that. And other people think, yeah, but did we really? Right. Were you guys just cloud seeding enough so that over enough days that it was bound to rain anyway? Like the governor of Georgia praying for rain the night before it's supposed to rain. Exactly. So GE was convinced enough that this was working, that it was like, we can't do this anymore. Yeah. And the army said, hey, we have a bunch of money. Why don't you let us in on this? And we have a bunch of money and low scruples, because we're about to start testing acid on people, whether they like it or not. So cloud seeding is like

nothing to us. And GE said, okay, as long as you guys are totally liable, sure we'll do it with you. Yeah. So they partnered up for Project Cirrus. Right. And in 1947, in October of 47, they dumped 180 pounds of dry ice into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean and possibly changed the direction of that hurricane to make landfall right here in Georgia and ended up killing several people. Yeah. So that was sort of an oops. Although again, they're like, did we really cause that? Well, the guy who was Bernard Vonnegut's boss, Irving Langmere, he was a Nobel winning chemist. He was totally convinced. According to him, there was a 99% probability that they had caused this hurricane to change direction. I think he felt a lot about himself, didn't he? He did.

Seems like he was always like, no, that was us. And he would publish papers like that and the government would step in and be like, this paper doesn't exist anymore. Do you want us to like grease you? Yeah. Are you trying to push our buttons? But there was another scientist who pointed out that a hurricane followed the exact same path caused about the same amount of damage in 1906. So was it the dry ice? Was it not? Who knows. So you just compared it to an older hurricane said this could have happened naturally. Right. They did the same thing in in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1948 and July 1949. And apparently it rained all over the state of New Mexico and as far away as Kansas causing actually that was later on 1951. But the same deal from New Mexico,

they think they made it rain in Kansas to the point where like the great floods of Kansas and adjacent states they thought, man, could it have traveled that far? Well, that was another thing Langmuir was convinced about that like they had impregnated clouds that traveled a thousand kilometers away. Yeah. And enough that he was like, we have to stop doing this. And Bernard Vonnegut testified to Congress like nobody should be doing this except maybe a federal government. Right. But then other expert meteorologists came out and said, you know what, this whole thing in Kansas, if there was any effect at all, it might have been just slightly enhanced. So it's really not all your fault. So the US government is very much interested in this or very much

entrenched in this even as they're not sure whether or not it's working or the scientific community is at odds over whether or not it was working. But the US government was convinced enough that they were basically weaponizing the weather. They're doing all this to figure out how to screw with other countries, troops, economies, the whole shebang. Yeah. And as the US were carrying out tests, so were the Brits, right? Yeah. The Royal Air Force, of course, if we had our project serious, they had Operation Cumulus, very clever to think of all these cloud names. And this was going on recently in 2001, the BBC investigated these rumors. And apparently, or actually, were they investigating the old rumors? Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, I guess that makes more sense.

I thought they did it recently, too, though. No? I don't know. The Brits, I don't know. All right. So in 1952, the Royal Air Force did fly above the cloud line, dropped a bunch of this stuff and 30 minutes later, it started to rain and it rained and rained and rained. And by the end of the month, North Devon in north of England was basically got 250 times the amount of rain they ever get, which is a pretty spectacularly convincing 250 times. Yeah. It's like flood time. There was actually a huge flood, too. In a village, Linmouth, where basically 90 million tons of water converged on the village at once. Unbelievable. On the day that they started seeding when it started raining. And 35 people lost their lives. They were carried out to sea. They were crushed by

boulders. Entire houses were taken out by boulders that were brought down by the water. But of course, they said this wasn't us. Right. And the Royal Air Force pretended it never happened. Yeah. So who knows? We did our own little experiments here in the US. And as far as weaponization goes in Vietnam, we tried to extend the monsoon season on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And apparently it worked by like 30 to 45 days. Supposedly we extended monsoon season that year in 1971 at a cost of like $21 million and over the course of 2600 missions. Yeah. And they said it like they look at it now as a semi successful mission, whatever that means. It was good enough. Yeah. They're like meh. Things were slippery. And that was actually called Operation Popeye.

Yeah. No cloud names. And the whole reason we have an awareness of Operation Popeye is because a reporter named Jack Anderson, he got his hands on a secret memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Johnson that made reference to weather modification techniques in Laos. And he started digging around and found out that the government had done that. And when this article came out, it was at a really good time because the US government was or Congress was not in a mood to weaponize weather. Right. And so they kind of took this article, they took the publicity from it. They took a Senate committee's recommendation that like this is way too big for us to be messing with and went and had a summit with the Soviets about banning weather modification.

Yeah. They said it was a lousy idea. Did you practice that one? Well, I thought too much time had gone by and I was like, you know what? I'm going to say it anyway. It was good time. It doesn't matter when you throw the pun down. It's always bad. It was a lousy idea. And they did. They got together with the Soviets and they said the big deal breaker, I guess, between them making a deal right then was they couldn't decide between the distinctions of tactical versus strategic. They thought, hey, if it's tactical, that's cool because we're just trying to benefit from the weather and make stuff harder on you to get around. Strategic uses would try and flood a major city. Ruin crops. Yeah, ruin crops, ruin your economy. It destroyed the economy. Yeah.

And so the summit dissolved, but the fact that they were even talking about the strategic ones suggests that the U.S. and the Soviets both thought that one or both were on the verge of being able to do weather modification at that level. So the talks fell apart, but the U.N. basically stepped in and said, hey, we'll take over from here. Yeah. And they created N-MOD, which is the Environmental Modification Convention, which basically bans weaponizing weather. And the U.S. and the Soviets ratified it, came into effect in 1978. So you can't weaponize weather, but you can still do weather modification as long as it's not what's called geophysical warfare. Right. Like you're trying to dissipate a storm or change the course of a hurricane

for good. For good and that kind of stuff. Yeah. For instance, China, they've been at this for a long time since the late 1950s, and they have a program that employs between 30 and 35,000 people called the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. Yeah. And that is, they have a department, the Weather Modification Department, and they use that, and you probably remember in the news, even seeing this at the Beijing Olympics, they busted clouds to try and prevent rain from happening. Right. Because they didn't want to rain out their opening ceremony in their games. Yeah. So any cloud that they saw, they would shoot with rocket-propelled grenades filled with silver iodide or anti-aircraft artillery filled with silver iodide. They were just shooting

clouds. And there's like 30,000 people, a lot of them are farmers who are armed with government issue rocket launchers. Yeah. Because they're on the right place. Yeah. To shoot at clouds. Get that cloud. Yeah. I did that like a southern redneck. That was weird. Get that cloud, man. That was a weird Chinese. That was what they sound like in China. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course,

yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, y'all. This is Dr. Joy Harden, Bradford, host of the award-winning weekly podcast,

Therapy for Black Girls. Our incredible community of sisters has been building the Therapy for Black Girls podcast for five years running. And over that time, we've published over 250 episodes and gained over 18 million podcast downloads. During this time, we've tackled the stigma surrounding mental health and shared conversations to help us all understand ourselves and others a little better. Hundreds of incredible licensed mental health care professionals and other experts have joined us to share tips on taking better care of ourselves. We flipped through the pages of your favorite romance novels with author Tia Williams, checked in with Grammy award-winning artist Michelle Williams and discussed the hurdles of balancing competitive sports, motherhood,

and mental health with Olympic athlete Natasha Hastings five years down and many more years of work to be done. Join us now by checking out the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Jerry just left it there. So then Hale is the next thing that we've tried to conquer in 1971. The National Hale Research Experiment was started and basically to suppress Hale along what's known as Hale Alley in Colorado, some state called Kansas, Northwest Kansas, Southeast Wyoming and Northwest Nebraska. Right. And it was scheduled the last five years but it did not. I think it was shut down in 1973. Yeah, two years ahead of time. Not necessarily through any fault of its own. The 70s turned

out to be like the driest decade ever in Hale Alley. No Hale. But their whole goal was to seed clouds to basically hurry up the process of them precipitating so that it wouldn't have a chance to become Hale to keep them warm clouds too. And just to see if it is going to Hale, they would be smaller pieces of Hale and it would just accelerate the process. Right. But there was some funny things that came out of it. Like we learned that farmers don't like cloud seeding. Yeah, they tried that in Maryland and Virginia and there were farmers like shooting at the aircraft. And then in the San Luis Valley, there were somebody blew up with dynamite a radar truck for a private weather modification company all in the 70s. So the 70s weather mod was not very popular. And in some

states now, because of farmers concerns, weather modification is banned. Oh, really? On the state level? Yeah, people are afraid that you're going to take the cloud that was destined for their field and use it over your field. That was my cloud. Well, we might as well talk about it then. That's a big issue as far as our next topic, thwarting hurricanes. It seems like a great idea. But one leading scientist, what's his name? Moshe Alomaro. He's from MIT. He says, you know, only a handful of hurricanes ever developed out of like 100 tropical storms, let's say. And very few of those hurricanes cause landfall that do like lots of damage. Right. So this rainfall is vital to South America. And what are we going to start just trying to thwart every tropical

storm we see? Yeah. Like we're playing God here a little too much. This stuff happens for a reason. Right, exactly. Despite the fact that hurricanes can be very dangerous and costly, take lives. I get the feeling he's like, you know, we might just want to live with that every couple of years. Rather than try to mess with the thermodynamics of an ocean current. Exactly. Well, and that's kind of what some of the ideas for dissipating or moving hurricanes, a couple ideas are dropping hydrogen bombs on a hurricane to dissipate it. Yeah. Which I don't know what effect that would have. I don't either. But Bill Gates is in on a patent for dissipating hurricanes, which apparently uses fleets of vehicles to pump cold water from lower depths of the ocean

to the surface to mix with the warm surface temperatures or comparatively warmer surface temperatures so that the convective currents that those warm surface temperatures create in hurricanes that make them more and more powerful are dissipated. So the hurricane's force is reduced. Yeah, because hurricanes draw their strength from that heat. And you can cool it down. The idea is that you might can dissipate it. Begin messing with the thermodynamics. Is that a good thing? Playing God. And then there's one that's really routine. You've probably looked right past it at your local airport, which is fog dissipation. Yeah, they do this regularly with below freezing temperature fog. Right. Not too hard. They can do it from the ground. Yeah. But aren't they trying

to do it with above temperature as well? Yeah, they try cloud seeding to dissipate it as well. But they also will heat the landing areas. Yeah. Which dissipates fog. But it is weather modification. And then they'll also inject propane gas, which apparently dissipates below freezing fog as well at airports. Have you ever been on a plane that had to be the ice to take off? That happened to me for the first time this Christmas in Akron. It takes a really long time. It took a long time. And I was right there by the window of the wing and I watched the whole thing. It was fascinating, but also a little bit terrifying. Did you get it all? Yeah, exactly. Did you miss a spot? Did you see that? Maybe we should go over it again. Yeah, I wish I knew

exactly what they were doing. I'll have to look into that because I always like to know that stuff. Well, I'm sure we could just go ahead and suggest it ourselves. So do a podcast on plane D, I think. Yeah, we should actually. Really? They're spraying the wings. I know that. Yeah. But I don't think it was just like hot water. No, it's not. It's some sort of crazy solution. Yeah, that's what I figure. Crazy cuckoo solution. The icing. Yeah. So does this stuff work, Josh? That is a great question, Chuckers. No one really knows. There's actually, you know, we said Irving Langmere and Bernard Vonnegut were definite true believers. Right. But then there's plenty of other people who are like, you don't know that that happened. It could have just been coincidence. Yeah. And

there's actually a split among American scientific groups over whether it has any effect or not. Here's what I think. Okay. Here's my amateur opinion. I think it possibly works, but it's such a haphazard result. And so not easily so difficult to control. Yeah. That does that really work. Like you may have an effect, but unless you can really pinpoint control it, I don't know if you can say that works. And part of the problem is carrying out rigorous scientific experiments, right? Like if you can't control where the wind is going to take the silver iodide, so if you're trying to impregnate one cloud and keep another as a control cloud, how do you know that the control cloud is not infected with silver iodide and that it's going

to rain as well as a result of your experiment? So it's a very tough thing to experiment on. Well, and didn't they find out when they tried to do the ice crystals in the hurricane? Didn't they find out that there are already ice crystals there? Yeah. So it didn't like have much of an effect. Right. NOAA, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, they carried something out, which was pretty cool. It's called Project Storm Fury for like 30 years trying to seed hurricanes, and yeah, they found that. Oh, there's ice there, all right. This isn't going to have an effect. Well, they learned more about hurricanes though, at least. They sure did, by being crazy and flying into it. And then, so the National Academy of Sciences said 30 years of

study has produced no solid evidence that this stuff works. Right. The American Meteorological Society said, you know, we think there's probably about a 10% effect that this has. It increases precipitation by 10%. Gotcha. And everybody else says, who knows? Does it hurt? Does cloud seeding hurt? I can understand trying to mess with a hurricane. Yeah. But I mean, just shooting silver iodide in the air, if the Chinese want to do that with their rocker propelled grenades, well, I don't have their fun. I think you and I should, they got these biplanes here in Atlanta. I think we should get some dry ice. We should chop it up and we should go take one of these biplane rides on a cloudy day, dump it out and see what happens. That's a great idea. Let's do it.

Okay, let's try it. Can we charge that on the company guard? We probably could. Okay, good. As long as we documented it somehow. That's right. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way

better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, y'all. This is Dr. Joy Horton Bradford, host of the award-winning weekly podcast Therapy for Black Girls. Our incredible community of sisters has been building the Therapy for Black Girls podcast for five years running. And over that time, we've published over 250 episodes and gained over 18 million podcast downloads. During this time, we've tackled the stigma surrounding mental health and shared conversations to help us all understand ourselves and others a little better. Hundreds of incredible licensed mental health care professionals and other experts

have joined us to share tips on taking better care of ourselves. We flipped through the pages of your favorite romance novels with author Tia Williams, checked in with Grammy award-winning artist Michelle Williams, and discussed the hurdles of balancing competitive sports, motherhood, and mental health with Olympic athlete Natasha Hastings. Five years down and many more years of work to be done. Join us now by checking out the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to know more about things like dry ice, biplanes, weather modification, flying into hurricanes, people have actually done that. I wrote a cool article on it. Bill Gates. Bill Gates, you can type all those things into

the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring up some pretty cool articles. And we also worked off of some neat articles that we found online all over the place. So just search weather modification and have a great time with it. Since I said have a great time, I mean it's time for the Listener Mail. Before we do Listener Mail, a couple of quick shoutouts. One, we want to shout out our Kiva team with a new goal. Yes. If you don't know, if you go to kiva.org, slash teams, slash stuff you should know. We set up a microlending team how long ago now? October 2008. Yes, and it took off. 2009. It began with a little Stephen Colbert challenge, but we quickly dusted him. It was 2009. Yeah, we wanted to see who could get to 100,000 first. I'm not sure his

team's even there yet, aren't they? They didn't pay attention to us, but it doesn't matter. The point is our team is doing great and we have a new goal thanks to our de facto captain, Splendid Sonya. They put together the numbers for us and our goal as of June 21st of this year is two million dollars loaned. Yes, by the summer solstice. Summer solstice, two million bucks is our goal for our team. We are well on our way and jump on board. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, and loaned 25 bucks and if it gets paid back and you said, you know what, that's the only loan over I want to make. You can actually get that money back. Yeah, if it feels dirty to you, just wait like about a month, maybe a little longer, I don't know, and once it's paid back,

you can take it out. Yeah, and Josh has written some great blog posts on microlending and the controversies around it and why we still support it. Yeah, so we're well aware. And we also want to shout out our buddy Bill Wadman. Yeah. We met Bill in Brooklyn and he's a very talented portrait photographer and he said, you know what, I'd love to shoot you guys here on my list of people I'd like to work with. Came out to the Bell House, took some great pictures. One of them is now our avatar on our Facebook page and it was a good experience for us, for two guys who really don't like having pictures made. Yeah, he was very gentle. He was very gentle and they turned out great and you can see his work at billwadman.com or he has a podcast about photography

that is not about, this is what lens you should get. It's about, it's called on taking pictures. It's more about the philosophy and science of taking pictures. Did you see the post on us? He was like, I think it was titled like, look at these two schmoes. I got that to sit for me. You can find that on at www.ontakingpictures.com. Yeah. And imagine an iTunes. I didn't look, but if it's a podcast, it's probably an iTunes, right? Probably. I hope so. Anyway, thanks Bill Wadman. And good luck to you, sir. We'll see you soon. Yeah, thanks everybody. All right. And now on to Listener Mail. This is a nice little Christmas homeless shout out to our good friend, Martin. Oh, we love this email. We love our Scottish friends. Guys, you asked for a Christmas story

while I was listening to your homelessness podcast. Anyway, last year, a friend of mine was going to catch a bus and saw a homeless man outside the bus station freezing night. And in Scotland, you know that it's cold. So he decided to give the guy 20 pounds. The homeless man began to cry, thanked my friends and explained that he was on the street due to a drug problem. And after running away from his family. However, that day, he had been thinking of going home to his family for Christmas and cleaning up his life. Now that he had the money, he was going to do just that. Took my friend's address. He insisted on paying him back. So my friend gave him the address and caught a bus. This summer, he received a letter from the man explaining

that he did, in fact, go home. He went to rehab and he is now working for his father. The family is extremely happy and he not only included the 20 pounds as payback, but a picture of him and his dad's workshop with his dad and his two brothers. This just goes to show what a little can do for some people, especially around the holidays. Love the show guys. How about a show on the Scottish Wars independence? And that is fun. Martin, that's pretty good. And then an awesome letter. Yeah, that was great. I just love that one. I did too. Thanks a lot, Martin. Thanks a lot to all of our people in Scotland. How's it going? I didn't say it right. It gets worse whenever you try. You sounded like Truman Capote on the last one. I used to do a bit of a Scottish accent. It left

me. Don't do Scottish accent. Do Sean Connery. Sean Connery. See, there it is right there. If you want to hear Chuck do a certain kind of accent, send us a suggestion. He takes all come or joy Chuck. Sure. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email at stuffpodcastdiscovery.com or you can join us on at our home on the web stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just

like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Boreen. I'm probably on TV right now. David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting groundbreaking and sometimes problematic black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Kyle Goodman, Sam J, Quinta Brunson and so many more. New episodes around every Tuesday.

Many episodes out on Thursdays where we answer you, the listeners conspiracy theories. Listen to my mama told me on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.