Unexplainable - Bird people and deep space shrapnel

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Two mysteries we can't stop thinking about: Is lightning actually caused by cosmic rays? And why don't birds play chess? Articles featured: “What Causes Lightning?” by Charlie Wood (also featured on The Quanta Podcast) and “Empire of flight” by Antone Martinho-Truswell. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada.

All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from fetch pet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise.

That's where fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. And that's us.

Noam and Meredith. Jazz hands. Jazzing it up. All right. So do you remember the great archive scramble of 2025? When we had to save all our show ideas. Yeah, yeah. All of our, like, oldest messages we'd sent each other on the team.

We're going to disappear. Yeah. Show ideas, books we'd found, our favorite science articles. Exactly. Then you scrolled through that whole thing, right? Like years and years of messages, and you put them into this ridiculously huge Google Docs. It wasn't the most graceful solution, but we saved it. I was actually just scrolling through this the other day, and there's so much good stuff in there, way more than we could ever make into episodes.

So it got me thinking that we should just shout out some of this great work. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, some of our favorite science writers, our favorite articles, and point listeners to where they can find them. That sounds awesome. Let's do it. Yeah. So today, for you know, I'm, I picked an article. by Charlie Wood in Quanta magazine.

Ooh, love Quanta. And this is just like an example of some of my favorite science writing. The kind of writing that takes something every day, takes something ordinary, and just makes it extraordinary. Yeah. So his article is called What Causes Lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting. I don't know if Lightning is ordinary. It's true.

It's a pretty, it's of the like everyday phenomena. It is pretty extraordinary. Yes, it is already, let's be fair to lightning. It's pretty cool. I love watching thunderstorms. So, believe me, already a lightning fan. But this article blew my mind. And it's because we know what lightning is, but we don't know what triggers it.

Classic unexplainable. Classic unexplainable frame there. Yeah, what actually is lightning? I feel like you're saying we know what lightning is. Science knows what lightning is. I don't know if I would be able to tell you what lightning is other than electricity. It is electricity. It's a form of static electricity.

So the same as rubbing on a balloon and then shocking yourself, but just at a wildly bigger scale. And in this case, the static electricity comes from ice and water droplets and hail inside the giant thunder cloud itself. that through all the turbulence and updrafts is rubbing against each other and building up this giant electric charge. And that's lightning. And that's lightning. But there's a problem.

There's just not enough energy in the cloud. Like there needs to be enough electric force to literally like break apart the molecules of the air and release, as Charlie puts it, like an avalanche of electrons that crash across the sky. Oh, okay. There's this threshold that we need to get over. and there's just not enough energy in clouds to get over that threshold.

Wait, is it, is it not Zeus? It is perhaps not Zeus. Okay. But it might be cooler. Okay. Apparently there's a whole generation of scientists who are using tools designed to look at things like solar flares and deep space explosions, and they're pointing them at thunderstorms. Incredible.

And they started to see, burst of freaking gamma rays inside thunder clouds. What? Yeah. So like, what is that even? Right. I mean, well, like, gamma rays are on the electromagnetic spectrum. Like, they're a type of light.

So if you go past the visible spectrum, more and more energy, higher frequency, past ultraviolet light, more intense, more intense, past x-rays, and you start getting into like the most energetic type of light, these gamma rays. And gamma rays are so intense. Scientists usually see them when something really big happens, like a supernova explodes. Yeah. And they're happening in thunderstorms. Even when there's not a visible lightning bolt, thunderstorm clouds glow and flicker with gamma rays.

And you're saying glowing and flickering, but this is not stuff we see, right? Right. Because it's way past the visible spectrum. way more energetic than the visual spectrum. So it's associated with lightning, but even when there's not lightning that we can, like, see from the ground, thunderstorms are roiling with this, like, high-powered light energy. Okay.

One astrophysicist in the article, Joseph Dwyer at the University of New Hampshire, thinks that really, really fast electrons, electrons going close to the speed of light could be crashing into atoms, in the air, releasing the violent gamma-ray burst of light, and then that crashes into more electrons, causing this feedback loop that doesn't just trigger a single subatomic avalanche, but a whole bunch of overlapping avalanches. So that piling of avalanches gets you over that threshold and

like sparks the lightning pole. But there's another theory that lightning is triggered by a kind of of deep space shrapnel that comes from like supermassive black holes and dying stars. And that Charlie writes, I love this line, Cosmic Rays, this like deep space shrapnel. He writes, travels billions of light years across the universe and slams into the Earth's atmosphere. And that could be the thing that's tipping lightning over the edge and cosmic. Okay, hold on. Hold on.

I know, right? Deep Space Strapnel is one of the coolest things I've ever heard. I mean, my band name, right? Great band name. Deep Space Strapnel here is cosmic rays. Cosmic rays, yeah. Which are, you know, bombarding us all the time. Yeah, so that's like radiation coming from these ancient, distant supernova explosions, right?

Supernova explosions, supermassive black holes, dying stars. It's sort of like the debris. of a really, you know, bombastic universe that is flying all over the place and can come from billions of light years away. And what this is saying is that there's not enough energy in the cloud system itself, but these rays that are coming in from outside are tipping it over the edge. Like the cosmos is throwing a match onto a pile of wood or something like that. Yeah, it could be. And this is also still a theory. Like, it could be...

I like that theory. I know, right? See what I'm saying? Cooler than Zeus. I mean, it does feel a little like Zeus throwing the Thunderbolts, but whatever. Okay. So, like, the actual mechanism is still a mystery.

It could be one of these theories. It could be all of these theories. It could be different for different clouds. It could be something else entirely. But I know I will never look at thunderstorms the same way. way again after reading this article. Wow. So you should definitely go check out this article, Quantum Magazine, Charlie Wood.

Yeah. And you can learn more about, like, the history of lightning science. You can learn more about scientists strapping gamma-ray detectors onto planes and flying them into the scariest storms on Earth. Okay. There's also these, like, wicked cool videos of scientists actually sparking lightning in the sky with rockets. We are the zoos. We are the zoos.

So you should definitely go check it out. Can we put like a link in the show notes or something? Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely throw that in. Okay, awesome. So now it's your turn, Noam. I want you to find an article and bring back something cool, something you recommend. There is an article that I've been thinking a lot about that I have been wanting to talk about on the show for a while, actually. Nice.

It is a piece about birds. and a different evolutionary track they could have gone down but didn't that might have made them a lot more like us. Bird people. Bird people. After the break. Support for the show comes from quince. The other day, I was out shopping and picked up a cute dress,

but I wasn't totally sure it was my style because I've been kind of moving away from sleeveless stuff lately. And then I brought it home and tried it on over a little lightweight black t-shirt that I got from Quince. And I am literally wearing the whole outfit right now as I record this ad. The shirt from Quince was just the perfect thing to pair with the dress to give it sleeves. And the shirt is light and breathable enough that I'm not like sitting in the studio too warm. So as a person who loves to layer clothing, I really really, really, really appreciate that Quince has a wide array of shirts and a whole bunch of different

cuts, lots of options for people like me. But if you are looking for not just shirts, but a whole range of lighter, cooler wardrobe pieces as part of a summer refresh, Quince also has you covered. Quince can help you find some new, breathable outfits that are easy to wear and still look put together. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com slash unexplainable for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too, so that is Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash unexplainable for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash unexplainable. Support for this show comes from Vetch Pet Insurance.

Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network.

Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Visit BetMDM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play response. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. All right. Mara. Noam. I have found this article that I really, really, really loved

and never got a chance to talk. about. So this is a great chance. This is the time. Shoot your shot, man. Yeah. So it's from Eon. Okay. Eon magazine, spelled A.E.O.N. And it's from this zoologist named Anton Martine Martine Truswell. He's also an author. He wrote this book all about bird cognition called The Parrot in the Mirror. So like how birds think? How birds think and how they got to be the way that they are. And his article,

starts with this kind of big basic question, which is, why haven't birds developed complex culture like we have? Okay. Which is like, on the surface, it's kind of a weird question, right? Like, why would they have developed complex culture? I don't look at birds and immediately assume, like, they should be playing chess. There's no, like, real housewives of cockatoos. I mean, that would be dramatic. It would. It would definitely,

it would involve a lot of singing, I guess. But Anton says that birds have a lot of the basic advantages that we have. So they've got complex brains. They've got strong relationships between parents and children. They communicate with their voices, which is really useful. And unlike other non-mammals that are smart, like octopuses, you know, birds have long lives. So this is really huge because like octopuses, they have these really short lifespans. Their parents die when they give birth. So octopuses are

basically born orphans. But birds live a pretty long time, like long enough to have overlapping generations, like to have grandparents. And these are all things that are underpinning how cultures emerge? Yeah. I think this is. stuff that in a vacuum we think might lead to culture. They have all the things. They have the brains, the communication, the family structures, the lifespans. But they don't have what we have. They don't have art and philosophy and the sopranos.

They don't tweet? They don't, well, they do tweet. But he answers this by looking at why certain traits develop to begin with. So if you think about evolution, right, it's not something that looks ahead and goes, this species needs this type of fix to get better. Over time, certain traits that help animals survive and have babies tend to spread. And when species are under a lot of pressure from their environment, if there are predators or if it's cold or if there's not a lot of food,

Right. Evolution ends up feeling like some type of gravitational pull. Okay. And that is a metaphor that Anton uses throughout his piece, which I find particularly sticky. I really like thinking about evolution as gravity. And he sees culture as this huge advantage that humans developed. It's what allowed us to pass down our knowledge from generation to generation to generation to develop language and writing and technology and take over the planet for good or bad. Right.

And we developed it at a certain point because we were vulnerable, right? We had to work together as a species to fight off predators and disease and the cold and all kinds of things. Being vulnerable wasn't the only thing that allowed us to develop culture, but Anton basically argues that it was a big factor. And he says, birds never got there, right? He says some biologists talk about birds as a near miss when it comes to culture. Interesting. He says Peter Godfrey-Smith, who's this famous scientist and philosopher, who works on octopus intelligence,

he's often wondered why birds never got to culture. And when Antone last talked to him, Peter asked him, you know, you study bird cognition, why have birds never got there? Yeah. And Anton basically writes that he thinks it's because birds had an even bigger advantage, which was flight. Interesting. So that meant that they didn't have the vulnerability that pushed them to find other solutions. Yeah, they were still vulnerable, obviously.

Like, you know, I guess unless you're the absolute top of the bird food chain, there's still another bigger bird trying to get you. Right. But yeah, flying opens up this whole dimension of space. You know, if a predator is coming, you don't have to hide, you don't have to be strong, you don't have to outsmart them, you just fly up. It's not a perfect solution, but it is like, as far as solutions go, it is a very, very good solution. And when you think about how animals' lives are just basically all about finding food and running away from predators, if you have the ability to fly, it's like you are golden. Check and mate. Yeah.

So his idea that he puts forward in this article is that flight might have solved so many of the problems that birds were facing that culture never even was a possibility, right? They were almost gravitationally pulled down this different evolutionary path. Because culture is like very hard. Yeah. It is something that requires brain size. ability to manipulate the environment, all that, and lots of environmental pressure. Right. And what I think he's saying is that birds had the former, you know, they had the raw materials,

the brain size, the communication, and they didn't have the latter. They didn't have the same type of vulnerability that necessitated this type of adaptation. It's like the raw materials, but they need to come together. They almost need to get like forged in a crucible of, vulnerability. Yeah, a crucible of vulnerability. That feels like our lives. We're all living in a crucible of vulnerability and we have culture. We're still in the crucible. But we're surviving. But we're surviving. One thing I'm kind of wondering is I've seen videos of crows on snowy days sledding down rooftops again and again. Obviously, I mean, it could be an anthropomorphic

lens, but it looks like they're having fun. It looks like that could be, you know, a sport. Could it be the case that we're just missing where the bird culture is? That is a very good point. Like, first of all, you're right. Crows are super smart. And there's this one experiment that I love where this scientist wore a particular kind of mask all the time. and when he did, he trapped and released crows. And then the crows that had been released, they alerted other crows. And then some crows that had never been trapped

learned to be afraid of the guy in the mask. And then apparently future generations of crows learn to be afraid of this mask. So there's definitely some type of intergenerational transmission. Anton says this is not full complex culture, right? This is not economics. This is not the Sopranos. This is not baseball. But I was thinking about this when I was reading the piece.

I think there is a certain anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism? Is that even a... I like it. I'll go with yes. There's a sense in which it has sort of an anthropocentric view of like, why didn't they get to culture? But you want to ask sometimes, times, like, well, is culture the end-all be-all? So your question is valid, which is like, well, maybe this is crow culture. And do we need to say that one is lesser than the other?

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I feel like flight is such an old trait, much older than what we consider, like what it sounds like you're defining culture. Oh, yeah, way. I mean, on the order of hundreds of millions of years rather than like hundreds of thousands of years. Yeah, it's just like hard to define. It's hard to think about what culture is outside of the context of humans. And then I feel like this is adding like an extra layer of complexity on top of that because it's positioning it with biological evolution. That's really interesting. Yeah.

Okay. So I think that what Anton is doing here is not necessarily providing an airtight historical explanation of exactly why this happened. I think this is more like a provocative idea, right? Yeah. We often tend to think about evolution as directional. I shouldn't say we, but maybe there is a common misconception that evolution is directional and it ends with us. You know, like the march, what is it, the March of Progress? What's the thing called?

With the like different apes to standing man. Yeah, the apes walking up to be humans. But I don't know, I take this as sort of a shift in perspective that. that there are other ways to be wildly advanced. You know, just think about sharks, right? I know you did this episode about when trees first showed up hundreds of millions of years ago. And I remember from that episode that they were like, oh, yeah, when trees showed up, there were sharks. And they were kind of the same as they are now.

Like, sharks just found this evolutionary niche and it's been great for them. And evolution isn't about getting to culture or intelligence. It's about adapting to your environment in a particularly useful way to you. Yeah. It's always interesting to think about like, we're all on the same evolutionary journey. It's just that, you know, sharks figured out what they needed to do hundreds of millions of years ago. I mean, we became humans within the last couple hundred thousand years. It's nothing. We have been so wildly vulnerable for our evolutionary history.

Yeah. And who knows what's going to happen to us now, but when I think about what Antone is putting forward here, it just makes me feel small in the best way. You know, it sort of makes me feel like that similar feeling of looking up at the stars and feeling really small in this huge expanding universe. But instead, it's like looking out at the species and feeling small. Like looking at this enormous family tree of evolution. and seeing all these other species that found their really good homes, you know, that got sucked into these gravitational poles that Anton talks about where there's no need to keep evolving

because that's where they are. They're fine there for a long time. And, you know, honestly, I'm comparing this to the feeling of looking up at the stars, but one of the things that I really loved about this article and, you know, the thing that really stood out to me that I didn't get to talk about much, was this metaphor of gravity, of evolution as gravity, and thinking about the evolution of our species on Earth

in a similar way to the evolution of the universe and how gravity is shaping everything in the universe and evolutionary gravity is shaping it on Earth. I don't know, it is a metaphor that sits with me in a really nice way that makes me feel small and humble and in awe of the world in a really nice way. So that's the thing that I'm excited for listeners to get from the article when they go and check it out, this sort of long meditation on evolution and gravity. I mean, some questions are the big questions.

Like, are we alone in the universe? How did it all begin? You know, the things that folks have been pondering for, you know, human history. But what I really like about these two articles is that they're questions that I would have. never thought to ask. Yeah. I definitely never would have thought birds were as advanced as they are. And I also never would have thought to ask, like, what triggers lightning?

I mean, I guess I always want to know what it is, but I never thought about what triggers it. And asking that question, which I never would have thought to ask, allows me to now understand that there might be, what, cosmic trapnel coming in and starting it. Yeah, well, I hope our listeners find these articles as interesting as we do. Oh, and listeners, please send us articles. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Send us your favorite stuff, your favorite shows, your favorite movies, your favorite unanswered questions you found out there. If you want to check out either of the articles we talked about on the show,

the first one is called What Causes Lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting. You can find it at quantamagine.org, and it's by Charlie Wood, The other article is called Empire of Flight. It's from Eon magazine. It's by Anton Martino Truswell, and you can find it at Aeon.com. This episode was produced by Meredith Hodnott. We had editing from Melissa Soap, mixing in sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassanfeld, who is me, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch.

Joanna Salvataraf, Valerie Schenckman, and Sally Helm are the fact that there are five teams in the big four men's sports. that are clothing-related, but only one is not leg-related. Let me know if you can guess which one. And Bird Pinkerton could barely keep up with Flapton as he scurried down the passageway. And after turning what felt like 100 corners in total darkness, they suddenly stopped. Flapton turned toward her and said, Welcome to the Resistance.

Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with Bird and me. and if you have thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at Unexplanable at Vox.com, or if you'd like to support the show, you can join Vox. Become a member. Just go to Vox.com slash members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Unexplainedable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you right back here next time. You'll be one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets. Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different, locked in, loyal, invested.

They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify Advertising. You're among fans.