The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Moon Allergies, Singing Statues, Secrets of Famous Movie Sounds

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Dallas Taylor, sound designer and host of Twenty Thousand Hertz, joins the weirdos as a guest host. The weirdest things we learned this week range from statues that sing first thing in the morning to the animal sounds that make up Star Wars' tie-fighters and Jurassic Park's dinosaurs. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Trodosh. And I'm Dallas Taylor. Dallas, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thanks for having me. For our listeners who don't know, Dallas is the host of one of my favorite podcast, 20,000 Hertz. Dallas would you tell our listeners just a little bit about what you do over there? Yeah, so I do a podcast called 20,000 Hertz, which is the name is a playoff of the upper limit of human hearing. Now, most of you who are listening to this probably can't hear all the way up to that point.

but like babies can. And so over there, I kind of deconstruct the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. Awesome. Well, for listeners who don't already follow 20,000 Hertz, I definitely recommend it. And you will learn all sorts of weird and interesting things the way you do over here, a weirdest thing. But for today, we have roped Dallas into sharing some of his weirdest sound-related facts with us. So let's get into it.

On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, why don't you start with your tease? I'm going to talk today about the Apollo astronaut who found out he was allergic to moon dust. Oh, that's unfortunate. I know, got all the way there only to find out he had allergies. I have allergies everywhere, so I'm just going to assume I would be allergic to moon dust too. Same.

Not bother. That's why I'm not an astronaut, actually. Otherwise, I would totally do it. Dallas, how about your teeth? So the Netflix sound you know and love when you turn on Netflix that goes That sound I know it well It almost it almost had a goat bleat at the end of it

Oh my God I would love that True story Oh my God what a missed opportunity Oh wow okay well I already know what we're starting with But my teeth is that there's a pair of ancient Egyptian statues That were once said to sing Oh, spooky.

But Dallas, I am intrigued. And I love goats and I love Netflix. So I would love it if we could start with your fact. Sure. So the story of that Netflix-like sound had never been told before. And so they, like most Sonic brands, so that's basically called, you know, a Sonic brand for Netflix. And they spent a year building the sound out. they had kind of alternative, something that had to do with like bubbles coming up from the, I don't know, the depths of the earth or something.

And they went through all kinds of different audience tests and stuff. But yeah, so this sound that like, bong, they wouldn't let me play it, but they said that they would play it for me. And they were like, no joke. This was literally in like the final few sounds that they were going to use for this. And I can tell you exactly what it sounded like. So it went to like, but don't, b'n, baa. No joke.

Which is kind of perfect. It's like a perfect example of how you can kind of get so stuck creatively in the weeds that you can't just kind of zoom out and see it for what it is. So it was the exact same sound except for with the goat. And the reason that they, that, so is Todd Yellen, who works over at Netflix, who led this campaign. The reason is because kind of in our sonic history, we had Leo the lion, the kind of the thing from the MGM lion. And so they wanted to do a bit of a throwback to kind of movie making and things like that.

So they thought, okay, well, maybe we can try a goat. And it had, I guess, like a call and response aspect to it that they really liked. fortunately when they kind of got to the very end of the process Todd let his 10 year old daughter hear a couple of them and this was in it and she was just like dad this is so obvious just use the one that doesn't have the goat bleed in it so yeah so that was that but but the whole idea about putting animals sounds into sound design is something that goes way back into evolution and the way that our brains think and sound designers use these sounds kind of all the time to sweeten sounds in order to give them like life and character.

And I have a few, I brought a few sounds that you can, you can check out. So the first one that's really common is the Thai fighter from Star Wars. So you can play that and I'm curious, there is a very clear sound of an animal in this. And I'm curious if you can hear it. I mean, I can definitely hear that there's like an animal roar in there. I don't know that I would be able to guess. what it is though. It sounds like it feels like it must be like a big cat, right?

So it's actually an elephant roar. And I think they did a little bit of processing to it like an elephant bellow. That sound is essentially made up of two elements. And this is being borrowed because we don't have the original elements. But we do know from interviews with Ben Burt, the sound designer, that the two elements is essentially a car pass by and then an elephant bellow right over the top of it. Wow. I can hear it.

Yeah, because like our brains think of the sound of like a predator as being pretty scary. And so that's something that psychologically you can add into something that might not be real to give you kind of this like boost of, I don't know, emotional weight to it. And this stuff happens all the time. So like I'm a sound designer. I lead a sound design company. So we do things like car spots and stuff all the time. And this is really common in car commercials. And so if you listen to number six, which is just a car startup,

and then we have a lion roar, which would be very scary if you were out in the middle of nowhere in the jungle and you heard this creeping up behind you. Sure. Or if you were in your car. Or if you were in your car. But now if you put those two together, you get this version of it, and you can hear that now this car has like an actual personality to it.

Wow. That's so cool. Cool. Yeah. Even things, so it's just playing off of this like fear factor of, you know, us from 200 years and all the way to the beginning of human, human history brain deep in there. But yeah, so this can go into all kinds of things. So we have explosions. So here's, here's the sound of just like a really cool sounding explosion with no animal in it. Oh yeah. Can definitely imagine someone, you know, walking away from that without turning around. Yeah, exactly. And then we have like the most famous bird in all of sound design. And that's the red-tailed hawk that you'll hear on any wide shot of like the desert. Iconic.

Right. And now you put you put those two together and now you have like character to the explosion. Wow. Yeah. It sounded like something was screaming as it died. Yeah. Just so scary. Just with that like dissonance of a random bird.

So if you take this same concept, but then you apply it to like a creature, then you get kind of the most famous thing in sound design as far as like from creature vocalizations is the T-Rex roar from Jurassic Park. And come to find out, T-Rexes would have sounded absolutely nothing like this in real life, but you can get like a quick rapid fire of all the elements that came together to make this sound. And so here's the sound of the T-Rex roar just straight-fright. from the original Jurassic Park. And then all the elements that make that up,

there were all kinds of things. So the sound designer mentioned a baby elephant, a Jack Russell terrier growl, a lion, a whale blowhole like crocodiles. And so here's not directly from the source, but here's kind of a rapid fire of those sounds. I love that I can hear the like Jack Russell terrier in there now. because imagining just a little, a little, little, little bitty dog that became a T-Rex is beautiful.

Oh, so great. Now, the interesting thing is that we learned in the show where we were deconstructing this, that most likely the sound of the T-Rex and these big giant dinosaurs were probably a lot more like an alligator, like a gutteral, really low sound because they were so large. There was also no real need to sound scary. You know, if you're about to go eat another animal of some sort, you know, the last thing that you would do is like scream at it before you eat it. You know? So it'd be like us going to a meal and just screaming at it and then eating it. There was no. Do you not do that?

I don't know about you. So the whole idea here is that, I don't know, we think so much about dinosaurs from where. what we see in Jurassic Park, but really just like all entertainment, it's entertainment. It's there to kind of scare you. You know, were they this scary? I don't know. I mean, they probably would have been really scary. But no, they probably weren't screaming at you before they ate you.

And, yeah, theater. Wow. I love that. I, as someone who really appreciates and enjoys learning about sound design, but have zero experience in it myself, I'm always like, how, like, who sat there? and was like, Jack Russell Terrier, that's it. That's the missing note. Yeah, exactly.

A lot of people try to sneak in sounds. There's actually an amazing story about the sound designer from Game of Thrones. She went through a really hard time in her life while she was the sound designer on Game of Thrones. And she would find herself putting sounds of her animals into the dragons and into the, I think they were called the dire wolves, I think, you know, the big wolves. Like she lost one of her dogs along the way And she memorialized the dog By making it kind of just the vocalizations of the dire wolf And so this happened kind of throughout the entire series

And sound designers do this a lot Like we know that that animals do Bring some of kind of an actual like Real life aspect to something But it's a really beautiful story About how like she kind of memorialized her own world Through the sounds That's so sweet

It is sweet Okay we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is in part inspired by a very real phenomenon. The year is 1961. In Santa Cruz, California, thousands of sooty-shearwater birds are losing their minds, dive-bombing into buildings, regurgitating fish guts, and biting people. For 50 years, no one knew why.

In episode two of Popular Sciences video series Wild Lives, we uncover the true story of Hitchcock's attacking birds, a mystery solved by scientists half a story. century later. Click on the link in the description box to watch and subscribe to popular science on YouTube for more. Okay, we're back and I'm going to share My Fact, which comes from an issue of Popsie that came out, gosh, at this point, probably more than a year ago, but time is meaningless, but this is a feature package by one of my favorite freelancers, Aaron Blakemore. So this one's for you, Aaron. We wrote about seven mysterious sounds that science has yet to

I'm a big fan of mysterious hums myself. I love thinking about just like weird noises that some people hear and others don't and maybe have an explanation, maybe don't. But this is one that I didn't know about until we worked on this package. So I figured it was about time to share it. So the colossi of Memnon are this pair of statues that were built around 1350 BCE, just to the west of what's now Luxer. And they originally stood guard over the absolutely palatial memorial grounds of the Pharaoh, Amon Hotep III. He became Pharaoh at the age of 12 and he was left a very, very wealthy empire by his father. And he's known for really rapid fire commissioning a bunch of super grand buildings. One source I read actually said that archaeologists for a while thought he had lived like super long

and had an unusually long rain because otherwise they just didn't understand how he could have been responsible for so many buildings. But he was just rich, which is a great life lesson for us all. So his mortuary complex, you know, which was kind of the, basically the temples that pharaohs would build to themselves for people to honor them in death was no exception to his grand plan for building up Egypt. It was actually likely the largest ever built at the time, and its various buildings and porticos covered more than 87 acres. And while most area residents would never be allowed inside, the statues at its entrance were designed to be seen and appreciated for miles around. They depicted Eminhotep in the style of Osiris, which was very common. Kings tended to want

iconography of them that was going to be presented after death to style them like Osiris because, you know, he was king of the dead and the pharaohs were supposed to be gods themselves. So it was just really hammering the point home for people that this ruler had been omnipotent. And yeah, they were beautiful. They were each 26 feet high carved from a single block of quartzite sandstone that came from hundreds of miles away. And they had all of these scenes of Eminhotep III and his wife and his mother and all of these hieroglyphics that, you know, pointed towards symbols of rebirth. They were supposedly quite magnificent. And they're still there, but they are not so magnificent

looking today. The temple and other structures around the complex actually did not last long at all. One problem is that they were right up against a floodplain, which is something you should try to avoid when you're building your giant mortuary complex. Also, Egyptian rulers were known to go snag building materials from their predecessors' monuments in a pinch. So, Emin Hotep building an 86-acre mortuary complex was really just asking for slightly less rich descendants to just take some stone. from there. And then around 1200 BCE, an earthquake did away with pretty much everything but the

colossi, the two statues. And then in 27 BCE, another earthquake hit and it shattered the northern Colossus. It collapsed it from the waist up and cracked the lower half. But the legacy of the Colossi was actually

just getting started. So around the time of the big BC to AD, switch, the Greek historian Strabo reported that one of the colossi would sing in the morning just at dawn. And this actually sparked a tourist craze, which is my favorite part of the story. And visitors left like the ancient equivalent of Yelp reviews in the form of graffiti on the statue's base.

They would just like write down how they felt about being there. Oh, my God, I love that. Really casual stuff. Yeah. Julia Balbila, who was a Roman noble who visited in the year 130, she wrote a poem on the statue's leg, comparing it to the sound of ringing bronze. Other people described it as sounding like a broken harp or a lyre string or a slap. So generally it was not described as a particularly pretty sound, but it was some kind of ringing and it would only happen at dawn. and it became a very, very special, very spiritual tourist attraction.

So part of this story actually is that the name the colossi go by, the colossi of Memnon, actually comes from this period of kind of Greco-Roman tourism. The Greek hero Memnon fell at Troy. He was an Ethiopian king who fought alongside the Trojans and was killed by Achilles, but he was apparently so heroic and noble and braids. that the Greeks venerated him as a hero. And so Greek tourists, apparently, when they came and saw these massive statues in Egypt, just associated them all with the legend of Memnon, because that was like their big African hero, I guess. And then, in fact, in like the third century BCE,

an Egyptian historian actually claimed that they were the same person, which I do not think was at all true, but, you know, it was good enough for the tourists. And so, yeah, they started referring to the colossi of Memnon. And actually, according to Greek mythology, he was the mortal son of the goddess of dawn. And so people started to say that the eerie whale you could hear in the morning was him crying out for his mother. And so, yeah, a lot of the visitors suspected some sort of of supernatural significance to the sound, especially since it always happened at the same time of day, but it otherwise wasn't consistent. So people put a lot of stock into whether or not they heard the sound when they went there. They would pray, they would ask it questions. I don't know

if it was like a yes or no thing. And it's just like if it sang it was good, if it didn't sing it was bad. I'm sure there were many interpretations of what it meant for the klausai to sing at you. but we do know that people really saw it as a sign of good luck or some other kind of omen. So, of course, you know, we realize these were probably not supernatural singing sounds. But of course, this was a long time ago. So it would be very reasonable for us to have no idea what had happened. But we actually do have a very good guess. And the reason we have such a good guess is because of when the Colossi sees,

stopped singing. And this story is actually kind of ironic. So, okay, in either 196 or 199, very specific, but we don't know which of the two, apparently. I love history. Not 197, though. No, absolutely not. The Roman emperor Septimus Severus visited the site and he heard nothing, which was, you know, very embarrassing, I think, probably for a Roman emperor. And also like, you know, who knows what question he was asking. Maybe it was a real bummer for him that he was not hearing a resounding yes from the singing colossi. But whatever happened in his head, he allegedly decided to attempt to curry favor with whatever gods were associated with the singing colossi. And so he supposedly paid for them to be repaired. Now, we don't know for sure that that's what stopped the

colossi singing, but we do know that the sound stopped for good right around this time. And we know that it started, at least it was first recorded right after that big earthquake I mentioned in 27 BCE. So the best theory is that there were cracks in the stone of the Northern Colossus that had previously been collecting dew and depending on how much dew had been collected and how big the temperature differential was from night to day as dawn broke and things started to warm up, sometimes the warming

dew would create these sonic vibrations. And ironically, when Severus had those cracks repaired, he shut this thinging up for good because those fissures weren't there anymore and there was more weight to the statue kind of keeping these very

subtle vibrations from occurring. Also, he apparently did a terrible job and this is why the Colossus, eye no longer look like twins. I, you know, I look to pictures of the claw eye and I'll put them, I'll put them in the post on popsight.com slash weird that goes with this episode. To be fair, this repair job was done some 1800 years ago. So like, I don't want to assume anything. They've clearly gone through some wear and tear regardless. But like, it does kind of look like someone just like shoved some like blocks in.

to where the statue's torso used to be. It's like a little reminiscent of those like statues and paintings that have been quote unquote restored by local amateurs. So yeah, Septimus Severus really messed up and that is why we we don't have the singing colossi today. Though in his defense, they probably would have crumbled to the ground by now without some kind of intervention. So I guess, you know, we can't have it all. But yeah, there are now a lot of excavations going on around the colossi because those earthquakes like buried a lot of statues and other relics that otherwise probably would have been lost to time. So now archaeologists are working to unearth them and study them. But yeah, I just love the idea of this ethereal ringing and people

flocking to it in droves for decades and leaving their little Yelp reviews in Greco-Roman graffiti. I love it. I generally, like, don't believe the idea of kind of like the supernatural sound aspect. Like what we have nowadays that kind of is reminiscent of this is like EVP, like the electro voice phenomenon. And when you don't understand something, it's so easy to put so much meaning behind something that may be meaningless because we're always searching for communication when we don't know like what is happening. But yeah, I think that I think you're you have that right. Like my guess here is especially if it happened at dawn and dusk, there's going to be some sort of like temperature change. And so it's

either going to expand or contract. I assume that there's like a cavern inside. So it's going to give it some sort of like ringing sound. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Especially in the desert, you'd have probably quite a big change between your nighttime temperature and then like as soon as the sun hits it, everything starts to warm. And it was in a floodplain. So we have humidity, but it could be in a dry area. Yeah. I also just love when science, I mean, obviously we don't, we don't know for sure exactly what happened. But I love like scientists being able to look into the past and at least speculate about what may have explained what seemed to be supernatural. Like, um, like the Oracle of Delphi, who had visions of people's future and in fact it was probably like either a hallucinogenic gas or like

carbon monoxide or dioxide coming out of the earth and like depriving the oracle of oxygen so that she hallucinated that way and we just people just thought man when you stand in this area when the oracle is here she has these visions and like she did have visions just maybe not from god All right, we're going to take another quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. We're back. And Sarah, you have an unfortunate allergy to tell us about. I do. I thought for a second you were just going to say I have an unfortunate allergy, which I do have a lot of.

Let's talk about gluten. No, we're going to talk about moon dust today. Okay, so for those of you who don't know, lunar dust has been called the number one problem for missions, to the moon, and that is because it is incredibly tiny and also incredibly abrasive at the same time. So on earth, dust and sand basically like forms, it's going to sound stupid, but as large rocks break into smaller rocks. But here on earth, we have like wind and water that help break down the particles and very crucially smooth out those little individual particles. So when you like sand may feel very rough to your hand, but the truth is that those little particles,

are actually like pretty smooth, relatively speaking. They're like little, little balls. But that does not happen on the moon because the moon does not have an atmosphere and it doesn't have running water. And so lunar dust forms when little micrometeorites impact the surface and pulverize the rocks. And then that's it. They just sit there. They don't get smoothed down by the wind or the rain or waves or anything like that. It just sits there completely untouched. And so it has these really, really jagged edges. The chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Center said that it was like Velcro because it has these little tiny arms and little hooks that like to stick onto things and grab you. I don't like that in dust, I have to say. No, no. It's not great. We think of dust as kind of like

soft and gentle and it's the opposite on the moon. It's also sort of extra sticky because the radiation coming from the sun leave it electrostatically charged. So think of in the dead of winter when your socks stick together from the dryer except it's sharp dust everywhere. Yeah, we're not supposed to be there. Yeah. No, no. Let's not go to the moon. I won't for sure. So this is all to say that moon dust is a huge problem and that no one knows that better than Harrison Jack Schmidt, who was an Apollo 17 astronaut and also a Harvard-educated geologist. He's the first and only professional scientist who's ever walked on the moon. He used to work at the U.S. Geological Survey in their astrogeology department. And then from what I gather, NASA kind of asked, like, were there any volunteers for scientists who wanted to be astronauts? And he put his hand up and he ended up on the moon in the Apollo 17 mission. So, go ahead. I just want to say that that's so wild to me. Like, I respect the hell out of, I would say, most astronauts. But we really, like, we wasted a lot of the Apollo program on like Air Force Fly Boys. Like, good.

We should have gotten a few more scientists up there. I mean, I kind of get it. Because if you were, if you were a test pilot, you would be, you know, at least somewhat used to the idea that they were going to stick you on a giant rocket and just throw you into space. Because the idea that as a geologist where you spend all your time studying the ground, that you go, yeah, I'll go into space. I guess I have the benefit of having grown up in a world where people just go to space sometime. That's true, yeah. I mean, I grew up in the same area. I cannot imagine it. But I mean, I mean that, like, in the 60s, it was that much more unfathomable for a man who studied rocks to go to the mood.

Yeah, it's like the most interesting fact here is, like, you found a geologist who was insane enough to do what insane stunt pilots were going to go do. Yeah, he was apparently like a very, a very quiet, studious kind of a guy. So I guess he fed in really well with the fly. boys. But he ended up on the moon in December of 1972. And the Apollo 17 mission was one of the worst missions moon dust-wise because the rover had lost a fender. And so at one point, its wheel like spun in the dust and it kicked up a whole bunch of it. And it got into like the joints of the spacesuit arms. And so Schmidt and at least one of the other crew members, members had a lot of trouble moving their arms because the dust just like is so abrasive and

sticky. It also wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on the soles of his boots. Oh, I don't like that. That's a problem. That's not what you want any of the material of my space suit wearing down. No, it's not what you're searching for. But astronauts on every Apollo mission complained about the dust. So it apparently smells like gunpowder. It sticks to absolutely everything, and it's also an enormous pain once you're back inside the spacecraft, because although it's very low gravity on the moon, there is at least some gravity, but you all get back into the rover and then you lift off of the surface of the moon, and then all of the dust that was on your suits and on the floor just gets resuspended back into the air. It was so bad that

a lot of them just elected to keep their helmets on for a while while they were inside so that the filtration system could get rid of it because the dust was apparently almost blinding and it would just sort of fly around and scratch things and get into your lungs. But Schmidt had another problem, which is that he took his helmet off and started having an allergic reaction. Oh, no. Like, we're not talking anaphylaxis, thankfully, because I don't think there would have been any saving him. He was pretty far from a hospital at the time. But his sinuses sort of, you know, swelled up. He got all irritation in his nose and throat. Like, you know, think of your classic allergic reaction. One of the NASA physicians seemed to think that it was consistent with an allergic response.

And Schmidt, to this day, says that he has lunar dust hay fever. My question was like, I don't know how you could be allergic to something that you've never been exposed to because my understanding of allergies is that you have to have an exposure somehow because otherwise, like, how does your body learn to be allergic to it? He did say oddly that the reaction happened the first time that he breathed in the moon dust, but by the fourth time he didn't really notice it. So I do kind of wonder whether this was a true allergy or was it irritation, because clearly the dust is absolutely terrible for you,

because that would basically be occupational asthma, which, like, to be honest, there's actually a lot of strange parallels between, like, mining and being an astronaut because you end up with, like, lots of fine dust particles everywhere that you breathe in, it's not very good for you. The moon lung. Moon lung. Yeah. And weirdly one flight surgeon, who, as I gather, is not a medical surgeon, but I couldn't tell

you what the flight surgeon does, but I can tell you that he was taking space suits out of the Apollo 17 command module. And he had a similar reaction, like some kind of allergic, inflammatory reaction. He actually had to stop what he was doing and leave the room because it was getting really bad. But we don't really know, like, why? or what causes it because, as you can imagine, it's hard to expose a lot of people to moon dust and see how they react. We don't have a whole lot of it. And for that reason, like, NASA hasn't

really studied it a lot because we also didn't really intend to go back to the moon. But now we have Artemis, which is the new mission that's going to put the first woman on the moon by 24. And so there's all this, like, renewed interested. How might the human body respond to dust from the moon? And just how bad is it for you? Because it seems potentially really bad. There's some concern that astronauts could end up with something similar to silicosis, which occurs when you inhale very fine silica dust, and that can give you inflammation and even lesions in your lungs, so miners get it. It also occurs in deserts where people get long-term exposure to very fine grains of sand. So that wouldn't be great for the astronauts.

So NASA started studying this a little bit more. There's tons of research efforts into figuring out how you get rid of the dust. So just this summer there was a team at University of Colorado Boulder who made what they call a lunar dust buster, but I think it's more like a lunar leaf blower. So it shoots a beam of electrons that make the dust so negatively charged that it just starts to repel from itself, the way that like two negative magnet ends would repel each other. So that's one method. You could also potentially use like a big magnet, kind of like a vacuum, but instead of sucking in air, you're just attracting charged particles. So there's still a lot of innovation. The leaf blower isn't 100%

effective. You're just kind of blowing it away from you. You're not really removing it. But NASA also has a call out through their breakthrough innovative and game-changing or big idea challenge that is asking university students if they have ideas about how to mitigate lunar dust problems. So if you are a student

and you have thoughts about lunar dust problems, contact NASA. They may want your ideas. They're not really sure what to do about it yet, I guess. Now I just imagine the entire moon is a giant ball of asbestos or something. Oh God, right. Yeah.

I mean, maybe not that dissimilar. Yeah, it's like I would be fascinated to find out if there's actually some allergic component in play. But to your point, Sarah, like, I'm someone who has a very reactive respiratory system, and I certainly have allergies. But I also know that allergic or not, my body would certainly have words. with me if I inhaled a bunch of tiny razor sharp moon dust. Yeah, that's why I just think it's amazing. What's more notable is that the other astronauts didn't have some kind of attack from moon dust because it seems lethal potentially.

Yeah, it seems bad all around. Like, no matter what, a little jagged hook, rocks going into your lungs. That just seems bad on all fronts. But it's surprising that not everyone has that problem. Yeah, I mean, I guess no one enjoys it, I would say. But, you know. Breathe in that fresh moon dust air. Nice and sharp and just really wakes you up in the morning.

But yeah, I mean, to me, this is really representative of why I would never go into space because anywhere where the dust can kill you is a place I don't want to be. Here, here, Sarah. All right. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week, folks? Oh, God, I forgot this was coming. You know, I'm going to have to go with the asbestos moon. Yeah, asbestos moon is great.

I feel really justified in the lack of effort I've taken toward becoming an astronaut. because now I realize I would immediately be disqualified because of my sensitivities to moon dust, which with absolutely no evidence to corroborate this, I am still certain that moon dust would make me really unhappy. Yeah, me too. I was thinking the same, like the geologist who put his hand up about, okay, well, I'll go to the moon. I was thinking, ah, you know, if NASA ever asked, like, any sound designers want to go to the moon, I'd probably put my hand up. But, like, the moment you kind of give me any problems along the way, like radiation or, like, lack of air or, like, you know, moon dust. Any actual hazards in the process of going to space.

Like, I very quickly just don't want to do that, you know? It's too bad because there's lots of interesting acoustics going on in space. Like, we had a piece for the magazine. It was probably ages ago now about what you'd say. sound like on like other planets just based on the atmospheric composition. Yeah, I did a whole show on that and actually like did oralizations of every planet. Oh God, I missed that one. Yeah. Well, now I'm going to have to go back. Like on Venus, you'd sound like you're like underwater and Yeah. Yeah. Oh man, I can't believe I miss that. It's a fun one. Well, Sarah, that's a great reminder

for our listeners to go check out 20,000 Hertz. We should all go back and listen to that episode. Yeah, that's a good one. It's all spelled out. That's the big, that's the hard thing here when we're only speaking, so it's, you know, T-W-E, etc. 20,000 Hertz. And the show's totally evergreen, so you can really just, whatever seems interesting, just click on it and listen to that. But yeah, I highly recommend the space one. That's the only episode we've actually revisited

and did a whole kind of update to it because we loved it so much. Well, Dallas, thanks for joining us. We really enjoyed your weird facts today. And weirdos, go check out 20,000 Hertz. We promise you will love it. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

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