The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Smoke Enemas, Secret Acoustic Engineering, Volcano Traps Lighthouse

Episode Date: May 16, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from trying to revive dead (or unconscious) people by literally blowing smoke up their butts to the secret testing your favorite products go through to sound expensive. 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 on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Mary Beth Griggs: www.twitter.com/MaryBethGriggs Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman Golf noises courtesy Taylor-Made --- 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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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into those articles, there are a lot of other 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 Scytons. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Shodosh. I'm Marybeth Griggs. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start out by offering a little tease of a fact that we picked up in the course of our

reporting Wikipedia spirals, Twitter binges, what have you. And we decide which one is just so exciting that we need to hear more. Then we start off. We all spin our science yarns. And at the end, we reassess and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. So let's get started. Marybeth, do you want to give your teas first? Sure. And I mean, I was actually out of the office for a part of this week on vacation. And so instead of finding a fact reporting a story, I was actually kind of out in the field. And I visited a place where there's a lighthouse that got stranded by a volcanic eruption that built a square mile of new land out into the sea. Wow. What a useless lighthouse. Basically. That's the spirit. I'm so sorry.

That poor lighthouse. Oh, man. Am I next? Yeah, you go. Okay. When Clinique introduced their high-impact extreme volume mascara, they tested 40 prototypes, not of the actual brush or the actual mascara, but of the cap. Hmm.

Boom, bum, bum. Weird. Very strange. I love brands. So that one, that sounds great. There's so, so many brands in this episode. I apologize in advance. Sponsor us.

So a few days ago, a bunch of us were at the Science Friday Trivia Night, and we won for the second year in a row. Something flashed up on the screen that we were supposed to identify, and I didn't actually know what it was, but I instantly whispered, that goes in a butt. And I was correct. It was a smoke enema, and I was like, it's weird that I've never really heard of a smoke edema or what it was supposed to do. So I decided to look into that And it took me on a journey Through the history of resuscitation I want to hear more about the smoke enemas

Because I have been wondering What the heck this was Ever since Rachel instantly knew what it was I was I was talking to my boyfriend Who was with us at Sides Friday And I said, guess what I'm going to do On weirdest thing this week?

And he said, well I know it won't be about butts And I said, are you sure? Jokes on you. He thought it was too soon since my ginger horse story. Go back to episode one. It's a real zinger. And he said, you know, I don't think you ought to be known as the butt girl. And I was like, do you know me?

So here we go. That's already my brand. On that note, smoke enemus became very popular in Europe in the 1700s. It's really interesting because it was kind of this confluence of the rise of the attempt to resuscity. people and the rise of tobacco. It had just come over from the new world, so to speak. And First Nation people had used tobacco in medicine in various ways, including allegedly occasionally as smoke enemas.

They also used tobacco enemas as horse laxatives, potentially. I found one source citing that. So basically, we were still in an era of medicine in Europe where doctors were bleeding people and balancing humors and things like that. And because tobacco had this warming effect and it absorbed a lot of moisture and it was this new potential medicine, it became kind of a panacea for a while. Doctors figured it could do everything. They were like mash it up, put it on bruises, swallow it, smoke it. So it's not surprising that tobacco was featured in many medical procedures.

The smoke enema was part of this effort to resuscitate drowning victims, which no one had tried. tried to do before the 1700s. For various reasons, basically there was a lot of stigma about handling potentially dead bodies, especially if they might be victims of suicide or crime or they might be criminals. So if you pulled someone up out of the river, not many people were going to want to do much for them physically. And there was also this worry that if you brought someone into your house to try to resuscitate them and they died there, you would be liable to pay for the funeral. So, what a weird legal system.

So resuscitation was just not a thing people did. But around the 1750s, there were all of these efforts to change that by medical professionals. There was this group founded called London Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently D drowned, though other sources said it was called, Apparently drowned. Other sources said it was called the institution for affording immediate relief to persons apparently dead. comma, from drowning. It went on to become the Royal Humane Society, which still exists.

But basically, it was researchers trying out all these ways. They were basically arguing for the first time, you know, just because someone appears to have drowned doesn't mean that they're dead yet. That just because they're not breathing doesn't mean they can't be revived and that we should do things to try to save them. And there were various efforts to varying degrees of success. I found this thing that was popular around, the same time as the

tobacco smoke enema called the barrel method. I have a diagram that I can show those in the studio. The rest of you can see it at popsye.com. But it was literally just folding someone over a barrel and kind of rolling them. Wow. That is a whole new

definition of roll out the barrel. I'm never going to think of that song the same way again. And it's kind of considered a precursor to modern CPR because the point was to just like apply pressure to the various organs and try to push water out and get the heart

beating again. But a lot of physicians were not into it. They were like, it gives them concussions. It doesn't bring them back to life. It gives them concussions. Well, because you were kind of like banging. You were like rolling them around, presumably kind of banging their head against... Oh, God. It's a lot of the methods

of resuscitation sound like when they worked. It was probably just because the person was unconscious and they were kind of startled back to waking life. There are a few reported cases of the smoke, and I'm a working. It is what it sounds like. And in fact,

you could improvise the device, which was like a pig's bladder or a bellows and some kind of tobacco pipe and a nozzle. They actually started putting them around waterways, like the Thames, like water. Sorry, sorry. They would just sort of leave little kits to the river.

It was like a first aid or CPR kit. Wow. Just like a phone booth, but for saving someone if they've apparently drowned. Right. And so mouth to mouth was considered vulgar in many circles. A lot of physicians were pushing for mouth to mouth to be a thing or publish papers on sort of blowing air through the nose or doing like early versions of tracheotomies and things like that. But for the most part, people were grossed out by mouth to mouth. Apparently, I just love that they were grossed out by mouth to mouth, but blowing tobacco smoke up someone else's butt.

was not a thing that they felt was gross. And one of the known records of this supposedly working was actually an improvised tobacco smoke enema where a woman succumbed in the water and her husband was looking

for help for her and a sailor walking by was like, you need to do this smoke enema dude. And he was like, how? And he said, oh, you can use my pipe. And when they improvised with a pipe, they would just, you know, insert the part of the pipe that you would have, you know, imagine is insertable.

And you would kind of like hold your hands over the bowl of the pipe so you could blow so that you could get the smoke going. And supposedly, allegedly, it worked on this woman. I think she was probably just like faint and she was like, what? And woke up. You know, it was supposed to work because it was warming. it was supposed to be a gentler way of inflating the lungs. There was concern that if you use bellows through the mouth, I think, that you would over distend the lungs and hurt them,

which is probably true. If you're just kind of pumping away at a bellow, there are better ways to do that, like with your mouth. It was also because of the tobacco was a stimulant. They thought it would make the heartbeat faster and kind of spook them to life. It was also apparently used to treat cholera at times, which is part of why they developed the apparatus

because when you were using an improvised version where your mouth was doing the blowing, that was very dangerous because cholera is transmitted by fecal matter. So if you accidentally inhaled, you had cholera. I'm so curious because if you have this knowledge that, okay, this is going to be bad because we're going to have my mouth near this thing that's going to maybe transmit cholera to me,

but they still don't have the medical understanding of how you're not blowing the air into the lungs exactly when you're doing this. So how did they think the lungs and the anus were connected? Yes, thank you. Unclear. Okay. So during this time, the Society for the Recovery of Persons apparently drowned offered the equivalent of about $160 to people who could prove that they had revived someone because they were really looking for, data, as all good scientists are always. And it fell out of fashion permanently around 1811 because this English scientist named Ben Brody carried out tests on animals that confirmed

nicotine was harmful to the cardiovascular system. So tobacco smoke kind of fell out of fashion as a medical tool. It's really interesting to me that like big tobacco managed to keep going for another like 150 odd years before anybody cared. I was just going to say. How did we go backwards? I mean, people kept smoking. They were just like maybe we should blow up their butts. And as kind of a side fact to wrap up, I found what might be the earliest really thorough medical documentation of an attempt to resuscitate someone.

and this was in 1650. And it's a really cool story because this is a woman named Ann Green in England near Oxford, I think, and she was a servant and kind of like had the same tragic tale that many female servants had at the time. She was impregnated, you know,

probably not super consensually by a member of the household she worked for. And the baby, by all accounts, was stillborn. and she hit it. And when they found it, she was accused of infanticide and was sentenced to death by hanging. When she was hanged, she had some choice words for the family that had, you know, done her wrong. And then she was executed.

She hung for half an hour. During which time, according to this very thorough historical document, her friends did lots of things like pulling down on her legs, like lifting her up and pulling her down with a jerk, because for those who don't know, death by hanging, if it works, it breaks your neck. If it doesn't, you slowly suffocate, and it's very unpleasant. So her friends were trying to save her from that. And when everyone was sure she was dead,

she was sent off to be vivisected because pretty much the only way physicians had of looking into the human body was taking people no one cared about, like criminals, and cutting them open. But when they opened the coffin, she made a breath and a rattle. And...

Whoa. So the two doctors abandoned all thoughts of dissection and proceeded to revive their patient. So they tried a bunch of really random things because, again, resuscitation was not really a thing at the time. So they, let's see, wrenched open her teeth and poured in her mouth some hot cordial, which is a type of spirit, which caused her more coughing. Great sign. They rubbed and chafed her fingers, hands, arms, and feet. and after a quarter an hour of this with more cordial in her mouth and the tickling of her throat with a feather, she opened her eyes. So then doctors bled her of five ounces of blood, as you do.

Obviously the best way to resuscitate someone. Right. And, you know, kept trying to warm her up, give her hot cordial rubbing her arms and legs. They did give her an enema, of course. Obviously. Did they have smelling salts back then? It's not mentioned with her resuscitation. In my research on the kind of smoke enema era resuscitation,

there was some talk of using like alkali substances to try to shock people with their sense of smell. But for this, they really just like got her drunk and bled her a lot. And finally they put her in bed with another woman to keep her warm. And then like 12 hours later, she was fine. And she went on to go around the country with her coffin and charge in, mission and had several children and lived for 15 years later, which means she was only like 37, but for 1650, that is not so bad. Yeah, especially after having been hanged.

Right, yeah. So surprisingly happy ending. Yeah, Anne Green feminist hero, certainly a marvel in medical history. And those are my facts. Wow. That's what we got. That's incredible. That was an amazing history. And it all started with something that I just knew went in a butt.

It's been scientifically proven that Monday is the worst day of the week, or at least it used to be, because now that's when you can expect new episodes of Pop Size other podcasts last week in tech. Every week, we recap the big technology stories that you may have missed while you were furiously refreshing your Twitter feed, hoping that Elon Musk tweeted something else really ridiculous. You could subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocketcast, or SoundCloud. Now, back to the weirdest thing I learned this week. All right, we're back, and now we're going to consume some. some weird facts about consumer products. Oh, nice. I love that.

That's really good. It was my best work. So, you know, just to remind you, my fact was about Clinique when they introduced their high-impact, extreme volume mascara, which, by the way, can we, mascara brands all are, like, the most intense adjectives. But when they introduced this mascara, they tested 40 prototypes just of the cap, not of the actual formula or the brush. all of my facts are interrelated today

because I think the idea of engineering your products to sound a very particular way is interesting so Clinique was very concerned about their mascara because it's like a $20 mascara which is more than most people want to spend on mascara and so to convince you that it is a luxury good it needs to sound like a luxury good and so when you twist the cap back on

they want it to click in a way that feels high quality so they tested all these prototypes and they discovered that the steepness of the curve the cap travels down as it rotates, determines the sound it makes. So if it's a very steep curve, it makes a high-pitched sound. But that sounds cheap to people.

So they made a very slow slope so that it was low, and that sounds like a high-quality mascara that you want to shell out $20 for. You know, I don't think I have ever, like, listened to my mascara. But you have. You just didn't know.

And see, that's what bothers me. Yeah. Yeah. We're all being secretly manipulated. I'm so offended. by this. Part of me that is just like these companies, they know, they know so much about us and how we think and what we buy.

Yeah. And it's amazing because it's incredible research and it's pretty interesting. I want to know more. So I should say that like a lot of these facts come from a Wall Street Journal article called The Search for Sweet Sounds That Sell by Ellen Byron. It was like from 2012. So credit goes to her for all of this amazing reporting. But I found the original fact because I stumbled upon one of the most incredible pieces of scientific review that I've ever found,

which is called The Psychology of Condiments, which I've mentioned several times already to speak to my coworkers. I've never heard. I can't stop talking about it because I thought it was so interesting. And in that there's just like this casual fact that Snapple reduced, they totally eliminated 180 million feet of plastic wrapping because they realized that, that the sound Snapple makes when you open it has that distinctive pop sound. And that assures people that it is nice and fresh. So you don't need to put the, I guess the plastic is not actually necessary.

The plastic is just to like tell you, the consumer, don't worry. And it's so annoying. Yeah. And but they got rid of it. So I brought a Snapple bottle. I don't like Snapple, but I figured we have to have the snapple sound. So let me, we're just going to. Oh, wow.

Beautiful. Someone else can drink the Snapple now. But yeah, okay, so Snapple has its pop. Sharpie, I also brought a Sharpie that today is prop day. That nice Sharpie sound, which they call, there's a term for it in Sharpie World. It's the Scritch Scratch. And apparently when Sharpie develops new products, they make sure that it has the Scritch Scratch sound.

There's an actual test just to make sure that all Sharpie products have that distinctive sound because otherwise it just doesn't sound like a Sharpie to people. And for the people that are listening to this, that was like a blue wide-tip Sharpie. And I would love to know, how does the other one, which is a more fine-tip Sharpie, compare it? Because I want to see if this is... Okay, you're ready? Here's the red, fine-tipped Sharpie. Oh, it also scratches.

It's different. Probably other pens make the sound. I have other pens like that that kind of make that sound. But I think they're right. I think it doesn't sound like a Sharpie unless it makes that little noise, and you just don't realize it. It's just amazing to me the amount of research that goes into. like GE is designing a new line of appliances and the little like tunes that it makes. Those tunes are amazing.

Yes, but they, did you know that the tunes vary by how expensive the product is? Oh my gosh. Because the expensive stuff, literally there's a quote from someone from GE about how they put like things that sound vaguely like classical music in the expensive ones. And I guess cheaper sounding noises if you haven't shelled out the money for their high-end products. The other one was tampon. which anyone who gets a period will know, tampons come in these very noisy wrappers. Tampax made a wrapper that has a 25% decibel reduction

from the Tampax Proline, which I assume they actually measure the decibels coming from the wrapper. So I bought the wrapper because this article came out in 2012 and I've never heard of a quiet tampon wrapper, but we're going to test them. So I have a Tampax sport because I didn't want to buy two kinds of tampons. So here's a normal tampon wrapper.

It's not bad. It's not bad. I guess it's louder in a quiet bathroom echoey. But then this is the Tampax Radiant one. It's just, it's kind of creepily soft. You can feel it. I urge you all to go feel a Tampax Radiant wrapper. No, it's truly radiant.

Yeah. I think it feels a little bit like mushroom leather. Oh, it does. Yeah. Another Popsize staffer stand. our tech editor, he wrote an article, I think it was last year, about how you design golf clubs to sound nice. You like tune a golf club because you don't want it to make a cheap pinging sound. I don't golf, clearly. But Nike Sumo apparently is a golf club.

That Nike made it, I assume it was quite expensive. And they just like could not sell these clubs because they had a frequency between 2000 and 3,000 hertz, which is the peak range that humans can hear in. And so it was incredibly loud, and people hated the sound of it. And so they like, that was the beginning of the revolution of designing golf clubs to sound a certain way. So when Stan was writing that article, he actually got like clips of the sounds that three different golf clubs make.

So we clearly don't know what golf clubs. Yeah. This is great. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to queue up the first one. I heard the tiniest little playing. Dink, tink.

Now we're going to go with the second. Oh, a thwack. Yeah, definitely a thwack. Okay, and for number three. Ooh, a tinny thwack. I don't like it. Yeah, I didn't like the third one. The third one is a good sounding driver, solid and metallic.

Wow, this really confirms that I shouldn't be watching golf. I also found literally an entire paper about how you design the cap of a lighter, because, again, I don't, I'm, talking about all these products I don't use, I don't use a lighter, but when you flip the cap open, it apparently makes it clicking sound. And people want that clicking sound to sound like a nice lighter because if you're a person who uses a letter, you use it a lot. And there was a paper researching what kind of sound people associated with a high end lighter. And as it turns out, apparently low-pitched sounds, I think, are just seem fancier to us. But it turns out that that's it's partly a function of if you have a very heavy material right but it's also mostly about

the shape of the cap and so you can design a cheaper lighter to sound more expensive just by changing the angles inside the cap such that the clicking sound is more satisfying. Wow. I think this is weird. My toaster makes quite a satisfying clicking sound. I guess it makes sense that things that we perceive as being like heavier and more solid seem higher quality. We just like heavy sounding stuff I guess. Yeah, and I mean other things that are annoying are mosquitoes which have this awful high pitch noise, right?

And so maybe there's something to that. We don't like the annoying whining. Yeah. I just, I really hate mosquitoes. Yeah, pitch is so important. If you get too low, it sounds are very like existentially disturbing to humans because it, well, we're, it makes sense because if you think about it,

like what natural creature could a sound that low come from? It would have to be huge. So there's a lot of like talk about infrasound, which is sound that's too deep for you to hear. This was in spook, wasn't it? Yes, the spook by Mary Roach, great book. Yes. About all things scary and supernatural from a scientific perspective.

Like a lot of haunted houses will have infrasound. It'll be in the track of scary movies. Wait, wait, horror movies put in sound. that are like solo that you're like, you're not really perceiving them, but it makes you feel creeped out all the time. No. And then they use high frequency. They use high frequency to like startle you.

So they're really, we can do a whole episode about horror movie sound design. You should do one for Halloween. All right. Well, I think that's enough with the brand. So we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back. Do you wear your pride on your sleeve? Popular Science is partnering with Out in STEM. to make limited edition t-shirts with a rainbow pop-sci logo.

100% of the profits go to Outen Stem, a nonprofit that empowers the LGBT community in science, tech, engineering, and math fields. Scoop one up before they're gone. And share on social with the hashtag SciPride. That's SCI Pride. All right, and we're back for Weird Fact Number Three with Mary Beth Griggs. My fact was that I'd visited a place

where a lighthouse had gotten stranded away from the coast, which is kind of unusual. And it was stranded because over 60 years ago in 1957, and this tiny whaling village in the Azores, someone started noticing, oh, off the coast, there's smoke coming out of the water. There's like something coming out of the water. It wasn't smoke. Yeah. Smoke on the water. But this wasn't smoke. It was ash that was coming out of a submarine volcanic eruption. And that's interesting in and of itself, but this eruption, it lasted for 13 months. It just kept going.

It ended up building out 2.4 square kilometers of land. And so the lighthouse all of a sudden wasn't right on the coast anymore. And it was this massive eruption that was studied very intently at the time that was It was Capulinos was where it was, and it's on an island called Fial. And it was this wild thing where this land was created, and the lighthouse itself ended up getting buried. The entire first story of the lighthouse ended up buried under ash, along with 300 homes, lots of crops. It was this massive disaster. And today, when you go and see it, there's still about 20% of the land, new land that is still there on the coast.

and it's still this barren, desolate place. But I had never really heard of it, even though it was this kind of incredible eruption that had happened and actually caused some major social change on that island. Back at the time that this happened, if you end up destroying all the crops on the island and there's this little wailing village that all of a sudden didn't have quite the same access to the sea that it used to have,

it ended up a lot of the people there had connections through the whaling industry to the United States and New England and because that was another center of whaling in the Atlantic. And so there were thousands of people who, after this disaster, there were two senators that sponsored a bill that actually brought a lot of those people that lived in this little whaling village that had been destroyed by this volcano back over. And one of them was John Pastori from Rhode Island. and the other one was John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts. Whoa.

Yeah. And he'd helped. Surprise Kennedy appearance. Surprise Kennedy. And, you know, that was, like, part of this kind of social change. And, you know, today, you know, there is still, like, American slang. There's still, like, a kind of connection between that region of the United States and these islands and the middle of the Atlantic that were shaped by these volcanoes.

Wow, that's bizarre. Yeah. It's really, really kind of bizarre and wild. in a very, very odd place. And people thought for a while that this kind of shallow eruption, okay, maybe it'll be called after this volcano, which is the Kaipelinoch volcano. And it turned out that five years later,

there was another massive eruption up in Iceland that created the island of Searcy off the coast. And nowadays, that kind of eruption, it's not known as the Kaipelinos eruption. It is a Seerzian eruption. That's a particular kind of volcanic eruption. They stole. Yeah, it got stolen.

Like their thunder got stolen. Their volcanic thunder. That's so sad. Which is also a thing. Volcanic thunder is a thing. This was not a volcanic thunder kind of eruption, but it is also a thing. Which you can read about at Pop Saed. You can.

You can, along with volcanic lightning. There's a lot of volcano stuff right now, I've got to say. So I have a question. Yes. What determines whether the land sticks around? Right. So only 20% of the land is left, but like, What happened to, did that just get eroded away?

Like, I don't know anything about how little canals form islands. No, it's amazing because what happened, and this went through a few different phases, right? Because it's erupting under the sea, and so you have lava coming in direct contact with water, and that is a bad mix. That is a bad mix. And so you end up having this explosive reaction that sends ash just like shooting out of the water. And then you also had other phases of this eruption, because it lasted for 13 months. Like, this is a very long time for something to be erupting. I did not even know volcanoes could erupt for 13 months.

They can erupt for a very long time. And so for this one, you actually had lava getting built up into a more stable thing. But because it was mostly like ash that had kind of gotten welded together by the heat, and it's this very fragile rock. Rock can be very fragile sometimes. And wind and water are incredibly good at destroying what the earth makes. It was a wild and different kind of landscape. to see. And it's incredible that over 60 years later, like, it's still barren. You can still

see that parts of the houses that are just buried in the sand. And you can actually climb up the lighthouse, which is something that the lighthouse keeper kind of did at the time. He didn't have to look out for ships anymore because he kind of couldn't see them. He kept keeping the lighthouse. He kept keeping the lighthouse. But instead he would, like, carry people's cameras because there were people that were coming and being like kind of tourists or scientist and he would carry their cameras up to the top of this lighthouse and like actually take pictures for them up there because they weren't allowed to go up. That's industrious. It was. It was. I feel like there's just some parts of the world where volcanic eruptions are

a part of your life. And I cannot imagine what it is like to live in one of those places. But probably, I mean, I also can't imagine what it's like to live in a place with earthquake regularly or or mass hurricanes or matter of fact. Yeah, the northeast I guess is kind of relatively lucky in that we don't have a ton of those like really regular I mean snowstorms sometimes hurricanes but not anywhere near the magnitude that other parts of the U.S. even get it. Yeah and that's that's one of the wild things is that people just kind of learn to live with this. On another island right across the water from Fial is Pico and there they had a lot of these eruptions that occurred like while people had settled the islands after people had settled the islands

and they ended up wiping out entire towns and villages. No one died in these particular people were able to kind of get out of the way in time. But they were calling them, they were just like, these are mysteries. And you'd still end up, this is mysterious. What an odd thing to happen. They're not wrong. Yeah, it's very strange. And so they ended up just building on either side.

And they still kind of live with that today. like there's entrances to lava caves that are just situated in the middle of those cow fields. It's just in the middle of a pasture with cows like kind of wandering around nearby. And, you know, there's the entrance to a lava cave. That's so cool. Can you go in the lava caves? You can go into the lava caves. And did you? And I did.

Tell us what you found in the lava caves. Oh my gosh. There's so much. You go into a pasture and then there's this hole in the ground that looks like something out of Jurassic Park with ferns growing all around the edges of it. And then you go into the cave and it's so humid. It's just like 100% humidity that even though it's a normal temperate day, you start breathing out and you can see your breath. It's there. Why are they so humid? It's just the rocks there because they're made out of this volcanic rock basalt and this particular form is very porous. And so water just seeps kind of right through the island.

And so there's just water dripping everywhere. And how do the lava caves actually form? Yeah, it's wild. they form because think about during a volcanic eruption. You've got a lot of lava that is just kind of pouring down the path of leaf's resistance over the surface of the land towards the coast. And lava is molten rock. And so once it starts cooling down, there are parts of it that will start cooling down first. And the first part is going to be the part that's in contact with the air, which is much cooler than the molten rock underneath.

And so you'll have like this crust that forms. But underneath that crust, everything keeps moving. It's still hot. It's still liquid. It's still flowing. And so you end up getting this tunnel. If it drains out, if like the lava kind of stops flowing up at the top, and you end up having all the molten rock just drain out, you'll end up with these caves and tunnels that are used by lava multiple times. It'll just keep kind of coming down the coast and towards the coast.

And it's just this really strange environment that gets created. You can actually see how the lava was made. moving inside the cave while you're there, which is really wild. Yeah, you can see, like, where the drips kind of stopped and cooled, like mid-drip. And so it's these very odds to lactites that kind of form in the caves. That's so interesting. That's really awesome. There's a, I know that Auckland has, because that's super volcanic, like they had an island

that was fairly recently created just, like, casually in the harbor. But, like, that whole city seems like it's built. on lava caves. But I don't think you're not really supposed to go in them. Apparently you can, there are manhole covers that lead to them because. Really? Yeah. So if you as an engineer are building in the city and you find a lava cave while you're

trying to build something, you have to, like, I know, you stumble on one. You have to note, you know, where you accidentally stumbled into a lava cave and you have to put in a manhole so that I guess people, you can access it. It's not clear to me why you put in the manhole cover if you're not really supposed to go in it. But so there are just these entrances all over the city to lava caves. And you're not supposed to go in them because I guess it's considered you're supposed to be maintaining like the geologic. Yeah. Sanctity.

Thank you. Of these caves. I bet the teens go in there all the time. They probably do. Yeah, I would, honestly. I think there are other lava caves elsewhere in New Zealand that you can visit. But you're not supposed to go in those ones. but there was this whole article that I read,

which featured a guy who just happens to know where the entrances to the lava caves are, some of which are in people's backyards. Yeah. Because there was an, it seems like an art project kind of a thing. There was an art installation where someone took a LIDAR scanner inside some of these caves, I think inside of these caves, and they basically mapped where the caves were. And so there are these images online that's kind of, almost like a black background and then like almost a ghostly shape of these caves and some of them

like literally are just next to someone's basement or just like under a car and it is incredible so if you if you google Auckland lava caves it's i think it's the first result that comes up they're just absolutely incredible and it's it's incredible just the efforts that are kind of going into mapping out these these underground places it's it's wild because like on the island that I was visiting, there were like 130 caves that they know of. They haven't even mapped them. And so it's like, it's nice that in a place like Auckland, you have like this effort to kind of like figure out where everything is.

Like if you're on an island with just cows, like, we were stepping over bones and stuff. So like the danger there is mostly that a cow or a goat or a sheep will get lost in the cave and you won't be able to find it. But like actually like building, I would not want to build like a house or something on top. of one of these structures. As amazing as they are, I mean, it's just like... It seems like you can, though. Yeah, I mean, they're strong, they're thick.

Yeah. It's just kind of spooky. Yeah. It is. Like, what's in the cave? What's underground? Yeah. If I lived in that house where the basement jetted up against a lava cave,

I would for sure be drilling through the wall in the basement so I get out my own personal lava cave. I'm just imagining living on top of a lava cave and, like, hearing the sounds of a before Lorne Cow that got lost in there. No. Actually, did you ever read that story about the sheep? It's got to be in New Zealand. Let's be honest.

There was a sheep that wandered away from its herd, and they just assumed that this sheep had died somehow. Yes. And then, like, three years later, the sheep came back. Oh, my God, it is incredible. Google this. I don't know what you Google, but. No, it's so beautiful because the sheep, it is coat. It just kept growing.

The wool grows forever. Yeah. So it just came back. this like, Majestic. It looks like you took, so gorgeous. If you took five million cotton balls

and just shoved them together, rolled it around in dirt and grass, and probably some poop. Probably. Certainly some poop. It was so dirty. And there was, this was such a big story that there was a whole event

to shear this sheep for the first time. Oh, and you had to have like an expert person come and like actually shear this sheep. sheep because you don't want to cut the poor sheep as you're trying to get the coat off. I mean, you couldn't see it had so much wool. Oh, this poor poor sheep. And then it was fine.

Yeah. No, it's so wild. And I mean, I'm sure it didn't really, probably if it was lost in a cave, it probably didn't matter that it couldn't see because you kind of can't see the way. I just imagine this poor sheep wandering around, slowly losing its eyesight. And how did it make it back if it couldn't really see? I don't know. Sheep, that's strength of will.

Yeah. Yeah. Or it just couldn't see it. I stumbled accidentally back to the farm and was trying to escape. Dumb luck. Yeah. All right. Well, those were some great stories.

Do we have any thoughts on what the weirdest thing we learned this week was? I'm right. We're supposed to vote. For my part, I'm still concerned about the resuscitation. Yeah, I'm going to go swimming. I'm going to be concerned about the resuscitation for the rest of my life. Yeah. Great. I win. Good.

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