Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Whatever happened to acid rain?

Episode Date: November 21, 2020

Along with the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain was one of the first international environmental threats. It's fallen to the wayside in the face of climate change, but we have yet to lick it. Join Chuck and Josh as they revive the 80s drumbeat in this classic episode. 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. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen Whatever Happened to Acid Rain from back in 2012. It's the story of one of those really neat, rare times

when humanity came together and said, no, no more. We're going to actually save the planet this time. Let's hope we can do this again. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we're doing this again. We're bringing the science this time for once in our lives. Acid rain. Yeah. Falling down from the acid clouds. That's not how that song goes.

That's not how Acid Rain by Tejon Day goes. That guy's so great. We watched that again the other day just by chance, and I hadn't seen it in a couple of years, and it's still just, it's hard to, like Chad said, our friend, it's hard to believe that that voice comes out of that guy. Yeah.

And he's got a new one, like Mother Economy. Oh, really? Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, he's a good guy. Don't know what chocolate rain's about, but there's a good call out. I would be very interested to hear everyone's interpretation of what chocolate rain means.

Good, I'd like to hear that too. Let's see, Chuck. Do you remember back in the 80s, hearing about two things, two terrifying environmental things. One, the ozone layer, specifically the hole in the ozone layer. Yeah.

And two, Acid Rain. Yeah, throw an apartheid, and that is the 80s. Yeah, I'm not going to play Sun City. Nope. Yeah, that's pretty much. Also, don't forget Cocaine, Ronald Reagan, Jelly Beans, and the A-Team. Yeah.

And Magnum. Sure. But he kind of transcends the 80s really, if you ask me. He's just a man of all times. Fair. Yeah. Never get told.

The weird thing is, is since, I guess, maybe the mid-90s or whatever, you don't hear about any of those things, except for Magnum any longer. Yeah, because of course, global warming took over, and everyone's afraid we're going to melt now. And so they said, well, we don't need to worry about Acid Rain anymore, we fix that problem.

Right, I think there was a perception that, you know, Acid Rain was fixed and taken care of. And, astoundingly, in a lot of ways, it has been. Yeah, they've come a long way, baby. The ozone layer, by the way, has not been. As a matter of fact, another one opened up in the Antarctic now, so now we have two. But that's another topic of discussion.

Acid Rain, let's get back to it, though, is a very, it's a nice success story in a lot of ways. And it came from a comprehensive understanding of a problem and a comprehensive will to address it. That's right. That's how you take care of stuff. There is still a long way to go, though. Yeah, you're always bringing me back down to earth, aren't you?

Not completely fixed, but it is good. It's heartwarming to know that you can see a problem and reduce something like Acid Rain. Precisely. So, Chuck, what is Acid Rain, man? Acid Rain, Josh, is a trans-boundary issue, which means even though it just occurs in the north, mainly occurs in the northern hemisphere,

it still is going to cross over and affect the rest of the world. And the reason that's worth mentioning is because for many years, up until the 1980s, they thought it was a very local problem. And then they realized, oh, no, it's not. And everybody kind of got on board with fixing it. That's right.

But like you said, northern hemisphere, it occurs mostly there because we're the dirtiest. Yeah, more industrial. The most polluting, yeah. So specifically what it is is rain with Acid in it, literally, emissions of sulfur dioxide, SO2, nitrogen oxides, NOX, from things like cars and factories, power plants, all those nasty things.

Lightning strikes, volcanoes. Those are the natural ones. They will actually react with water vapor in the atmosphere and turn into acid, sulfuric and nitric acids. And they can fall in the form of wet rain, snow, sleet, fog, or they can be deposited as particulates in gases. So that's dry acid rain.

Well, the whole thing's called acid deposition because it can be wet or dry, right? And it's being deposited. Exactly. On the earth. Yeah, that's what that word is. It's branched from deposit, isn't it? I think so.

Yeah, it didn't even occur to me. And so bravo on explaining acid rain in how it's formed. Bravo Sarah Dowdy, who wrote this. Yeah, she did a very good job on this. You can't just be like, well, this rain seems a little hanky. So we're going to say that that's acid rain. They actually know there's a very strict definition of what constitutes acid rain.

And they use the pH scale to determine it. Good old pH scale. So the pH scale is the spectrum between highly acidic and highly basic, right? And acid rain obviously falls toward the acidic side of the scale. And in the middle of the scale is pure water. And that's at a 7.0.

It's not at 0. That's entirely neutral. It's neither basic nor acidic. Yeah, I just find it interesting that it's a scale of 0 to 14 with 7 being in the middle. 7's in the middle of 0 to 14. Yeah, but I mean, just for me, I would say 0 is neutral. And anything above would be high and negative.

But whatever. In the grand tradition of civilization established by the Romans, though, the pH scale starts at 1 rather than 0. Sure. But yeah, I see what you're saying. Actually, it says 0 to 14 in here. I like the fact.

I think it goes from 1 to 14. Well, then Sarah got it wrong. In the graph here says 1 to 14. I wonder. But back to it. 7's in the middle. Either way. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

Yeah. So it would start at 0, I guess. OK. So the more acidic is the lower numbers and the more basic is the higher numbers, right? Yeah. The thing is, rain isn't neutral. Normal rain still is slightly acidic,

and it hits about 5.6 on the pH scale. Right. Why so? Why? Well, it combines with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form a slightly acidic. Carbonic acid. Deposition, which is branched from the root word deposit.

That's right. So acid rain is something like 5.3 to 4.0 as far as acidity goes, right? 4.3 to 5. OK. Yeah. That's a big difference. And it's something like what?

The acidity between orange juice and black coffee? Yeah, which Sarah is keen to point out, which is a bit of a misnomer. While that's true, you can't say, well, like, oh, it's just like coffee. And you're like, that's not going to throw coffee in your grass and it's not going to kill it. See, and yeah, my hat was off to her for saying,

like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't just be like orange juice is fine or coffee's fine. Because if you think about it, if it rained orange juice all the time, it'd probably have the same impact. That'd be awesome. I would just like it. Hold the old cup out the window at your morning. I'd be like, oh, it's with pulp today.

The problem with acid rain, though, Josh, even though it has the acidity of a coffee or an orange juice, it can wreck small parts of an ecosystem. And as we all know, if you wreck small parts of an ecosystem, there's a domino effect that occurs that spreads throughout an ecosystem. One of the most valuable things on the planet is something like plankton.

Yeah, plankton is high currency. It's like honey buns in prison. But for things, you know? Pretty much. And when plankton, which is very, very sensitive to changes in pH, especially when it becomes more acidic, when plankton dies and small invertebrates die, then yeah, it starves out the larger animals, fish and frogs.

And then we start to get hungry, especially the French, who eat frog legs, e.g., acid rain is a huge problem in France. That's right. And eventually, it's just mass hysteria. Pretty much. Cats and dogs living together. Kimberly from Different Strokes ends up with green hair.

That's right. There are a couple of programs that monitor this in the US, the National Atmospheric Deposition Program. And they handle the wet deposition. And the Clean Air Status and Trends Network handle the dry. And what they're looking for is trying

to determine the critical load, which is how much an ecosystem can take before it starts saying, man, I'm breaking down. You're killing me with this stuff. Right. And the pH scale is determined by the concentration of hydrogen ions in a substance. That's what makes it either acidic or basic.

So what these programs are doing is measuring the concentration of hydrogen ions to determine acidity. And they say, oh, well, this is too much. Science. I would just walk out and be like, look at this. This plankton is not looking very healthy. This is acidic. I don't even need to measure this stuff.

You can just spot unhappy plankton? Pretty much. Nice. It's not hard once you know what to look for. Sure. I'll teach you sometimes. Well, it's not hard when you've met happy plankton. Your life will never be the same.

The difference is, like, night and day. So surface waters are where acid rain is going to hit you most initially. Precipitation. And you don't really think about this. You think it, well, it rains in a lake and in a river. What it does is it rains on the ground. And although, sure, it rains on the water surface,

it's also going to run through soil to get to water. Right. One of the purposes of soil, one of the functions it provides is buffering water that percolates through it toward groundwater, toward bodies of water. And what's buffering mean? Well, it has the ability to neutralize acids.

Yeah. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. I think it brings everything more toward purified water or neutral pH, right? Yeah. But I think specifically with a lot of the minerals that are in the soil, like, say, calcium,

they counteract acidic rain or acidic water to bring it more toward neutral, right? Right. The problem is, is when the soil's buffering capacity is overloaded, there's just too much for it to handle, a lot of that un-neutralized acid gets passed along into the body of water, and then you start to have those big problems with the little

unhappy plankton. Yeah, it's almost like a water filter that's passed its date. You know, it just can't filter anymore. Nice analogy. Thank you. ["Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel-Wheel. On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called David Lasscher

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.

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 want to 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. S-Y-Y-Y-S-K-S-P-K-P-K-K-M-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N but you should know. But you should know. So we've talked about what happens,

where the French end up with a lot of big problems. In coastal areas, nitrogen, remember, we have, what is it, sulfuric acid and what acid? What, for acid rain? Yeah, nitric acid. OK, so nitric acid is based on nitrogen. Nitrogen has a really interesting impact on coastal waters where when it's deposited, it supports algae blooms.

Yeah, lots. Because algae love nitrogen. And when algae blooms take place, algae starts to die eventually, and they sustain bacteria, specifically aerobic bacteria that flourishes itself and sucks up all the oxygen in the water, starving fish, shellfish, plants,

and eventually like leading to at the very least a strain if not a collapse on coastal ecosystems. So too much acid rain will increase algae. Increased algae means increased dying algae and increased dying algae means increased bacteria and they rob fishies of their oxygen. Yeah, that's a domino effect. One of the things I love about acid rain

is just how elegantly understandable it is. It is very basic and simple, I love it. It's not basic. Acidic, very nice. So we're not done with the soil too, by the way. No, no. In addition to, I guess, decreasing its buffering capacity

or overloading its buffering capacity, acid rain has the terrible habit of drawing aluminum out of the soil. It's normally locked in the soil. Acid rain draws it out, which means that tree roots can suck it up and that's poison to them, that's a toxin. Yeah, and Sarah makes a good point here.

It's not like a, it's not a situation where you're gonna find a rainforest that's leveled all of a sudden because of acid rain, or you're gonna find a lake or a river that looks nasty and decaying and disgusting. Water might actually look cleaner. Yeah, and then ironic. It is.

It's ironic and beautiful. And what it's gonna do to your forest is it's gonna stun its growth and over time it's gonna have an effect. Yeah, like you're gonna have bald trees. Because in addition to the, this toxin's coming out in the soil on low-lying areas from acid rain, and it also degrading helpful minerals,

like we said, like calcium and other things that trees also use. So in higher elevations, that acid rain turns into an acid fog. That's crazy to me. That, I'm gonna say it this time, that is a great band name. Acid fog?

Yeah. But so just imagine like trees bathing in that all the time that strips their leaves and basically makes them chilly. Yeah, and that's why when you see mountains in the Appalachian mountains that have bald peaks, it's not because trees can't grow up there, they could grow up there if they weren't sucking in

and being surrounded by acid clouds. Acid fog. Acid fog. That's nuts, just, it doesn't have to be raining. Right, yeah. You know, it's just in the particulates, in the air. Yeah. Crazy.

And that kind of leads to how it affects us because we are not nearly as sensitive to these kind of changes with that acid rain brings, right? No, it's not gonna burn you. No, you can swim in a lake. Sure. An acid lake and you will be fine, but. An acidic lake, let's say.

And yeah, because it's just above battery acid. Yeah. So you couldn't swim in a battery acid lake, that'd be terrible. That'd be awful. But you could swim in an acidic lake as far as acid rain's concerned. The problem comes with that dry deposition.

The sulfuric and nitric ox or nitric acids combine in low-lying areas with ozone. Yeah, VOCs. And create smog, which is bad for your respiratory system. Ground level, baby. Yeah. It can also do things like, if you've ever seen an old building

that is, or a monument that's got these little smooth grooves, that could be acid corrosion like years and years. It'll wear away stone, it'll, it's no friend to your car, paint job, that's for sure. Which, I mean, if you're into your car, that's a big deal. Yeah, that tree sap pollen, bird droppings and acid rain are the four enemies of your auto paint.

They're considered corrosive environmental fallout. And friend of Mako. Yeah, Mako loves that stuff. Yeah. So the idea about acid rain, consider this. That stone statue you were just describing. That takes a long time. A lot of orange juice rain has to fall on that thing

for it to become pockmarked and weathered prematurely, right? And it's had actually plenty of time to do that. What was the statue where James almost? You'd be like, it's spitting image. So sorry. Man, you got me with that one. So uncool. The reason it's had a long, we've had a long time

where that statue is weathered over very long times because we've had acid rain for quite some time ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I think. Yeah, pretty much. Because remember they thought it was a very localized problem and the reason they thought it was local is because it had such quick, rapid effects.

But the acid rain, I don't know who coined the term acid fog, but acid rain was coined by an Englishman named Robert Angus Smith back in 1872. Yeah. And it was the monuments that made him say, what in the heck is going on here? Yeah, there weren't a lot of people back then. Like I was thinking when I read this, like man,

it would have been great if during this boom of ingenuity and Industrial Revolution, there were just as many people concerned with the impact it might have, but it just couldn't have worked that way. It's almost like they just had to do their thing and then leave us to figure out how to fix it. How to clean up the mess? Sort of.

I don't know if those things, two things could have evolved simultaneously. I think you're onto something. I mean, maybe we wouldn't have, I don't know, the iPhone maybe? Who knows? Maybe we would, I don't know. Maybe we'd be better off, a lot better off.

Maybe we would have more stuff. Maybe it would have changed the way of thinking rather than just get, you know, it would have been get, but also how's this going to affect other people? So Smith was a man alone. An early ecologist, we'll say. Yeah. Yeah.

So good for him. Man, you've been coming up with some great like off the cuff creative solutions. Well, that's not a solution. If we had a time machine, it would be a whole solution. Yeah, the way back machine's in the shop, so. On the podcast, pay 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 want to 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 will 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. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke,

but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So scientists did determine by what, the 70s, 1970s, that acid rain was a problem and it was transboundary. It's not just local. And so then in 1980, thankfully the Acid Deposition Act

said, you know what, we're going to study this for 10 years and we're going to see what's going on. 10 years later in 1990, they said, yep, it's a big problem. Yeah. So we need to do something about it. And they did very quickly. Congress took the already established Clean Air Act and added sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide,

nitrogen oxide, right? Yeah. And that led to the list of like most wanted reduction people, materials. And this was in 1995 with the Clean Air Act and the Acid Rain Program. Right. So 1995, this is when everything really starts

to come into effect, right? And I guess at least as far as sulfur dioxide emissions went, it was wildly successful. Compared to 1980 levels, in 2010, the sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by 50%. That's good. That's astounding, dude. That is astounding because consider this.

That's not from hitting this since 1980. That's hitting it since 1995. We already got it back down to 50%. Yeah, of course. But it's down 50%. 15, 17 years. That's amazing. And the way they did that is through a cap and trade scheme.

I kind of like the old cap and trade. It makes a lot of sense. Cap and trade, Josh. Basically what they say is we're gonna set a cap for how much SO2 that your power plant can create. It's a limit. But they set the cap and they says, you know what, you've got these allowances though.

If you come under, you get these credits and you can actually sell those to other companies that are in need. And it just, I don't know. Something about it makes sense to me. It makes a lot of sense. And then over time, you decrease the amount that people are allowed to emit.

And when you're cutting it into these allowances, those allowances by virtue of the scarcity of them become more valuable. Yeah, and it really incentivizes you to do something about it for your company. Exactly. So that worked really well for nitrous oxide or for sodium sulfur dioxide.

Man, what are we even talking about here? That's why I just say SO2. And with nitrogen oxides, they didn't institute a cap and trade until like 2003. So it was lagging a little bit, but it too is something of a success story. They reduced it from 27 million tons in 1980 to 16.3 million tons in 2008.

That's pretty good. Yeah. And so this has had a discernible effect on the environment. Sure. Apparently, let's see. The acidic lakes, the number of acidic lakes throughout the country have reduced dramatically.

There are 70% fewer acidic lakes and streams in Wisconsin and Michigan than there were in 1984. A third of the bodies of water that were acidic in the early 90s in the Adirondacks and the Northern Appalachians are now not considered acidic at all. That's awesome. So there have been like huge strides made.

Other places there have not been. And also you found this really good little kind of overview about acid rain and what happened to it by Nina Rustogi from Slate. That's who's stuff I'm quoting right now. So there have been huge strides, but there's still, like you said, originally a long way to go.

Yeah, the National Acidic Precipitation Assessment Program said that another 40 to 80% is what we need to hit to really restore these ecosystems. Yeah. And I think we're headed there. It sounds like it. Yeah, like we'll check in in 10 years and follow up on this.

Who am I kidding? We could, we'll do it for us in 10 years. Well, no, it'll be our comeback special. Okay. Whatever happened to whatever happened to acid rain. Great. But Chuck, I think that this is a really valuable lesson. If you have a non-polarized international initiative to take care of a problem and you can shout down business interests and just say, no, this is what you're doing and here's how you're gonna do it.

Yeah. You can make things happen. Yeah, I guess no one was saying acid rain doesn't exist. Acid rain's really not bad. Right. It was pretty much non-polarizing except for big business. And also were any jobs lost by this cap and trade scheme? I don't know.

Was industry hurt by this cap and trade scheme? I would wage or probably not. Do you think? I would wage or not. I bet they're still in business. They're just doing it with clean coal and wet scrubbers and all that good stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. And I'm not even an environmentalist.

I hate the environment. I'm just fascinated by this stuff. It's not true. Well, if you want to learn more about acid rain or acid fog, you can type either of those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and that will bring up this very interesting article by Sarah Dowdy. And I said acid fog, which means the time for listener mail. I'm going to call this MIT nerd alert.

I got a very nerdy email from an MIT student and I teased her and said, I'm going to read this on the air and make one of you. Is that OK? And she went, oh, yeah. And here's some other stuff you can make fun of me about. Hi, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I love your recent episode on how language evolved, but as an MIT senior, graduating in a month, which is probably like right now, actually, I felt at my duty to make a very

important correction to your intro. We are called the MIT engineers, not the MIT eggheads. I think I called them eggheads. I'm sure you did. Indeed, our unofficial school song is the MIT engineers drinking song, which includes many nerdy jokes, some of the expense of that small liberal art school up the river, Harvard. Additionally, our mascot is Tim the beaver, Tim being MIT spelled backwards. So clever.

Because beavers are nature's engineers. In fact, every class has a special ring called the brass rat, which depicts a beaver on a bezel, B-E-Z-E-L. What is that? See, I'm so dumb, I don't even know what a bezel is. We would not make it an MIT. Supposedly, it's one of the most recognizable rings in the world. Oh, man.

I started listening to the podcast during long, long hours in lab, and I'm grateful to you guys for entertaining me during my past four years at MIT, P.S. At MIT, we refer to everything by number, including majors in buildings. Linguistics, the field of Mr. Chomsky, is called Course 24. The inimitable Mr. Chomsky. Nome, I believe. Oh, yeah. And is housed in a pretty crazy-looking building, building 32, a.k.a. the Stata Center.

Sorry to ramble on, I'm very proud of my soon-to-be alma mater and P.P.S. I thought of one more really geeky thing you might want to make fun of regarding MIT's mascot, the humble beaver. One of our cheers for our football games is called the beaver cheer, and I will do that right now. I'm a beaver, you're a beaver, we are beavers all, and when we get together, we do the beaver call. E to the U, D-U slash D-X, E to the X, D-X, cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159, integral,

radical, M-U-D-V. These are smart things, I don't understand. Slipstick, slide rule, MIT, go tech. I feel like you just issued some sort of orders that only three people understand, and now they're carrying out some sort of terrible mission. Yeah, like the nuclear suitcases heating up right now, like the bomb inside. Yeah. Yeah, I can't even say you're beaver cheer, that's how dumb I am.

It's okay, Chuck. Who's that from? Laura. Thanks a lot, Laura. That was a good one. So let's see, Chuck. Oh, what were we going to ask for? Was that the bea- Oh, what does chocolate rain mean?

We want to know what chocolate rains means. Also, if you're Tays on Day and you listen to this, if you tell us what it means, that would hold a lot of water, that'd be great. That'd be pretty special. You can tweet to us, Tays on Day or otherwise, at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can also visit us on Facebook, right, facebook.com, slash stuff you should know. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. What you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio 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. Send a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.