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Feeling Blue · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
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  Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
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  Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
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  Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Science and the military share an uneasy alliance in the
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  Speaker 1: course of human history. Some of the most remarkable inventions
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  Speaker 1: only came about because of a war effort, the latter
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  Speaker 1: providing the impetus and infrastructure for a country to outstrip
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  Speaker 1: its enemy, not just in weapons, but in development. William
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  Speaker 1: Lawrence Bragg was already an acclaimed scientist by the time
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  Speaker 1: he was drafted into the army, the youngest man ever
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  Speaker 1: to be honored with a Nobel Prize for Physics, an
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  Speaker 1: award he shared with his father. By the way, he
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  Speaker 1: had to put his promising career on hold when all
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  Speaker 1: of Europe descended into the First World War, and so
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  Speaker 1: the twenty five year old Nobel laureate found himself in
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  Speaker 1: a cavalry unit in France. In the war years, Bragg
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  Speaker 1: eventually shifted into a more technical position and he was
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  Speaker 1: given a very specific assignment. His commanding officers wanted to
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  Speaker 1: know how to determine the position of the German artillery
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  Speaker 1: based entirely on the sound that their cannons made. The
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  Speaker 1: cannons were loud enough for the average person to hear,
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  Speaker 1: but with no real accuracy and not from a great distance.
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  Speaker 1: The main system for pinpointing cannon fire was based on
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  Speaker 1: a series of microphones lined up along front line trenches.
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  Speaker 1: Army technicians could see the flare of a distant cannon
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  Speaker 1: shot and measure how long it was before their microphones
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  Speaker 1: picked up the boom, since sound travels slower than light,
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  Speaker 1: But the system was based on guesswork, and it was
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  Speaker 1: imprecise when it came to actually locating the cannons. After all,
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  Speaker 1: a cannon makes three enormous booms when fired. There's the
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  Speaker 1: initial blast of the gun, the sound of the shell
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  Speaker 1: breaking the sound barrier, and then the eventual impact when
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  Speaker 1: it strikes the target. And on top of all of this,
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  Speaker 1: the microphones at the time were not able to detect
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  Speaker 1: lower frequency sounds. Bragg would be stumped by this conundrum
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  Speaker 1: for a very long time, until one fateful day in
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  Speaker 1: a latrine in Flanders. As the story goes, the army
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  Speaker 1: toilet had a door and no window, so that when
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  Speaker 1: a soldier was using it, he was completely cut off
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  Speaker 1: from the outside world. Bragg was sitting on the toilet
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  Speaker 1: one day when his rear end lifted fully off the
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  Speaker 1: toilet seat, and this was caused by infrasound generated by
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  Speaker 1: a nearby piece of British artillery on their side. And
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  Speaker 1: around the same time, a member of Bragg's team, a
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  Speaker 1: guy named William Sansom Tucker, noticed that his quarters would
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  Speaker 1: shiver every time a gun went off, even if he
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  Speaker 1: cannot hear the blast. Brag, Tucker, and the rest of
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  Speaker 1: their team set to work trying to develop a sensor
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  Speaker 1: that could properly detect not the audible sounds of cannon itself,
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  Speaker 1: but the infrasound generated by the initial cannon fire. It
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  Speaker 1: took them many months of frustrating work, but eventually they
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  Speaker 1: developed a system based on Tucker's observations of how infrasound
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  Speaker 1: affected his sleeping quarters. Their wave detector was an ammunition
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  Speaker 1: box with a hot wire running through it. They drilled
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  Speaker 1: a hole near the wire, and when a cannon went off,
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  Speaker 1: the infrasound pressure would force a puff of air through
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  Speaker 1: the hole and onto the heated wire. The changing current
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  Speaker 1: in the wire would give them data that they could measure.
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  Speaker 1: This device was named the Tucker microphone after William Tucker,
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  Speaker 1: the man who had designed the specific wire mechanism, and
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  Speaker 1: this was the first piece in a far more effective
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  Speaker 1: method of detecting the location of enemy guns. Unlike those older,
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  Speaker 1: imprecise microphones of the early war, the Tucker microphone could
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  Speaker 1: place German guns within twenty five to fifty meters mere
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  Speaker 1: minutes after the gun had been fired. By September of
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  Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, all sound ranging stations were using Tucker microphones.
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  Speaker 1: It was an instrument developed in the war effort, leading
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  Speaker 1: to several key victories. Not to every scientific breakthrough has
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  Speaker 1: a true Eureka moment, most come through steady, unglamorous hard work.
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  Speaker 1: But none of these sound ranging developments would have happened
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  Speaker 1: if not for the observation that William Lawrence Bragg made
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  Speaker 1: while sitting on an army toilet somewhere in Belgium. Even
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  Speaker 1: if it's not audible to the naked ear, there's no
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  Speaker 1: sound like inspiration. Our health is an ever changing concept.
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  Speaker 1: One hundred years ago, what we may have considered healthy
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  Speaker 1: looked very different from today. Back then, dangerous narcotics were
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  Speaker 1: marketed as cold medicine and used in soft drinks. Doctors
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  Speaker 1: would actually recommend smoking to help with asthma, and many
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  Speaker 1: people believed that radioactivity was the hot new thing in health.
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  Speaker 1: So it's no surprise that the guidelines for living well
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  Speaker 1: can change pretty quickly. We sometimes find out something we
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  Speaker 1: thought was healthy was based actually on faulty science or
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  Speaker 1: bad data, or, in one case, even fraud. In two
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  Speaker 1: thousand and four, researchers published a study in the journal
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  Speaker 1: Experimental Gerontology about the areas in the world where people
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  Speaker 1: live the longest. The authors speculated that people live longer
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  Speaker 1: in certain regions because of traditional diets, lifestyles, or genetics.
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  Speaker 1: On the map published with these studies, the regions were
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  Speaker 1: shaded in blue, leading to the term blue zones. The
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  Speaker 1: next year, in two thousand and five, National geographic reporter
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  Speaker 1: Dan Buttner published an exhaustive story on these blue zones
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  Speaker 1: and launched them into fame. According to Dan, in places
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  Speaker 1: like Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Ekaria, Greece,
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  Speaker 1: and Loma Linda, California, people simply live longer, and those
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  Speaker 1: who do live longer live better, healthier lives. Dan set
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  Speaker 1: out to find the keys to these Blue zones and
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  Speaker 1: found the original researchers speculations rang true. Visiting each place
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  Speaker 1: and performing exhaustive in person research, he discovered that Blue
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  Speaker 1: Zone dwellers were more likely to live the following lifestyle.
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  Speaker 1: They ate nutritiously with lots of fruits and vegetables. They
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  Speaker 1: were physically active and active in their community. They abstained
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  Speaker 1: from smoking, drink only occasionally, managed their stress, and of
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  Speaker 1: course felt that they had a purpose in life. Basically,
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  Speaker 1: Dan concluded that living well led to a longer life.
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  Speaker 1: Over the next twenty years, the Blue Zones became a
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  Speaker 1: brand in themselves. Dan's Blue Zones Llc. Published books, launched
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  Speaker 1: a line of soups and iced tea, and even created
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  Speaker 1: a program for cities to become Blue Zones certified. But
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  Speaker 1: if you've heard of the Blue Zones, it's likely because
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  Speaker 1: of the Netflix documentary series from just a couple of
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  Speaker 1: years ago. Basically, blue zones weren't just a big deal,
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  Speaker 1: they were also big business, which is why it came
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  Speaker 1: as a shock In twenty nineteen, when one researcher made
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  Speaker 1: a new claim the blue zonesring to him were actually bunk.
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  Speaker 1: That year, researcher Saul Newman of University College London first
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  Speaker 1: released his study on long lived populations. In it, he
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  Speaker 1: found that areas with the highest concentration of centenarians have
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  Speaker 1: another unifying feature, poor record keeping. What Saul argued was
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  Speaker 1: that it all came down to poverty. Many places that
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  Speaker 1: on paper have exceedingly long lived populations are also often
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  Speaker 1: poor or have been poor in the past few decades.
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  Speaker 1: As a result, it's often the case that birth, baptism,
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  Speaker 1: and other records that could prove age went missing or
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  Speaker 1: were never recorded at all, meaning many of the folks
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  Speaker 1: who believed that they were over one hundred maybe younger
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  Speaker 1: than they think. According to an interview with Minnesota Public
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  Speaker 1: Radio in twenty twenty four, Saul gave this example after
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  Speaker 1: traveling through Japan and going back through birth records, he
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  Speaker 1: found that eighty two percent of Japanese centenarians were either
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  Speaker 1: missing or had died without the death being recorded, which
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  Speaker 1: is another reason why the number might be lying. In
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  Speaker 1: impoverished areas, it's much more likely for an elderly person's
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  Speaker 1: relatives to simply not report their death to the government.
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  Speaker 1: That way they can keep collecting pension or social welfare checks,
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  Speaker 1: meaning that a good chunk of the Blue Zone dwellers
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  Speaker 1: may have also been frauds. So who's right. Are the
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  Speaker 1: people in Sardinia or Costa Rica just healthier than average
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  Speaker 1: or is their life expectancy just a case of shoddy
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  Speaker 1: record keeping. For his part, Dan Butuener and Blue Zone
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  Speaker 1: supporters have refuted Saul Newman's claims. They assert that they've
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  Speaker 1: done exhaustive research to confirm ages and birth dates of
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  Speaker 1: the people they've studied, and that their points about diet
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  Speaker 1: and lifestyle hold up. And of course Saul has his detractors,
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  Speaker 1: but he also managed to win a cleverly named Ignobel
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  Speaker 1: Prize for his work, meant as the colorful counterpart to
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  Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize. Ignobles are supposed to honor achievements that
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  Speaker 1: make people laugh and then think. It's hard to tell
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  Speaker 1: who's really in the right here. After all, the Blue
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  Speaker 1: Zone lifestyle does sound like a great way to live,
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  Speaker 1: but data is sometimes difficult to correctly interpret, and that
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  Speaker 1: difficulty curve gets deeper the deeper a project goes because
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  Speaker 1: the blue Zone concept is aiming for highly specific signs
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  Speaker 1: and markers. Getting it all perfectly right is a lofty goal,
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  Speaker 1: but then again, so is living to one hundred. I
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  Speaker 1: hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
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  Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
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  Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
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  Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
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  Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
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  Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
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  Speaker 1: dot com. And until next time, stay curious.