Are There More Raindrops In Clouds Or Data In THE Cloud?

Does "the cloud" hold more data than a clouds hold raindrops? Can a new organ literally rewrite your personality? Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens, VSauce, weigh our massive digital servers against a standard downpour, before unpicking the biology of transplant patients suddenly waking up with entirely new cravings. Michael also has a new Curiosity Box coming featuring an altertative periodic table disguised as a snail pin badge to showoff to Hannah. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. This is Field Notes, our, well, sometimes Thursday, sometimes Wednesday, depending on what part of the world you live in, episode where Michael and I delve into a whole host of curious items and questions.

• 0:17Michael Stevens?

  That's right. Today, I'm going to be showing off some pretty neat little things, including this, an alternate periodic table arrangement. Does the periodic table have to be so tabley? Does it have to be so rectilinear? How would God like the periodic table to look? Well, we're going to address that today, but first, we're going to start with questions from you all.

• 0:44Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:47Michael Stevens?

  If you wanted to type out the entire human genome, you would have to type at 60 words a minute for eight hours a day for about 50 years. Okay, that's the scale of the DNA rulebook inside each one of your cells, telling it when to grow, when to divide, and when to stop.

• 1:06Hannah Fry?

  And different tissues read that same rulebook in different ways. A skin cell doesn't behave like a lung cell.

• 1:12Michael Stevens?

  And cancer can begin when those instructions change. Not one dramatic moment, but through small, gradual edits over time.

• 1:21Hannah Fry?

  Now, cancer isn't one disease. It is more than 200 types shaped by where those changes to the rulebook happen and how cells respond.

• 1:31Michael Stevens?

  Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, backing studies across all types of cancer.

• 1:38Hannah Fry?

  Work that takes years of very careful, steady progress to deliver each breakthrough.

• 1:44Michael Stevens?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Ever think a lyric says one thing and it's actually something totally different? See, not everything is what it sounds like, but hotels.com, it's exactly what it sounds like. Go to hotels.com to choose from hundreds of thousands of hotels. Instantly get up to 20% off with member prices and earn rewards on every stay. Sign up for free and book today. Hotels.com, it's all in the name.

• 2:56Hannah Fry?

  Okay, right, first up, we've got this really lovely question that came in. So Matt asks, which technological or scientific heist had the biggest impact on the world? I love the story of Byzantine Emperor Justinin breaking the Chinese silk monopoly by smuggling silkworm eggs. Are there any others in short? Now, okay, I didn't even know this, this silkworm story, did you, Michael?

• 3:19Michael Stevens?

  No, me neither. No, never heard of it.

• 3:21Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so the Byzantine Empire, which is Eastern Rome essentially, they're like obsessed with silk. They love this stuff. However, the Silk Road, where all of this silk came through from China, was controlled by these Persians who were, who were basically the Byzantines' bitter rivals. And so every time that they wanted to buy any silk, they had to pay their enemies a premium, which is, I mean, that's going to sting, right? But then what happened was these two monks who, who lived in Central Asia, they approached the emperor and they were like, okay, look, we know, we know how this, how silk is made. It's not growing on trees, which is this, this common myth, this secret that people have been,

• 4:05Hannah Fry?

  a rumor that people have been spreading. They knew that it came from worms. So what they did is they got these walking sticks, they hollowed them out, these bamboo canes, they hollowed them out, and then they stuffed these canes with loads of silkworm eggs and then also mulberry seeds right in there, right? Which is the only food that, that silkworms eat instantly. And then they took two years to, to cross over this like thousands of miles of territory with their sticks in hand. And if, if the eggs had hatched or been frozen or anything along the way, then, then of course the mission would have failed, but they managed to get there. And then as a result, these, these mulberry seeds were planted, the trees flourished,

• 4:44Hannah Fry?

  the, the eggs hatched and, and thus silk, not just in China, was, was possible. Which I love that, like what an amazing, amazing story. So I tried quite hard to find something that could that could beat that or could at least could at least match it. And I think I found one, which I would argue had an even greater impact on the entire world than just stealing some silkworm mix. Okay.

• 5:10Michael Stevens?

  Let's see if that's true.

• 5:11Hannah Fry?

  I'll admit that trade route was quite important, but this I think is also very important. Okay. So this comes from the 1700s and Britain had worked out how to create water powered spinning frames where they could they could produce textiles essentially at these these speed and scales that were, I mean, untouchable. This is like, you know, at this point, Britain is like incredibly dominant in textiles. This is like a really phenomenal thing. But the British government knew that we had this power, say we, as though I was involved, I obviously wasn't. But they had all these rules in place. So so you weren't allowed to export any textile machinery. You weren't allowed to export any textile blueprints,

• 5:55Hannah Fry?

  you know, for the for the machinery. And the skilled mechanics who worked on this machinery, they were not allowed to leave the country. Okay, like, there was really strict rules in the immigration of those people as well. But then this guy, this 21 year old, he knew that if he stayed in England, his life wasn't going to be anything particularly special. But he realized that if he worked out how to build one of these things and then took himself with all the the knowledge in his mind to the Americas, then he could be like a king. He could, you know, live lavishly. He would be untold wealth. So he went off and got an apprenticeship at one of these, you know, water wheel spinning machine places.

• 6:38Hannah Fry?

  And he memorized every single gear, every single spindle, every single dimension on the water wheel. This is for the arc right spinning frame. And he put it all in his brain. And I mean, this is a mole, basically, right? In the British textile industry. And then with all of this in his head, he then disguises himself, this is in seventeen eighty nine, as a farm labourer to avoid suspicion. So nobody knew that he was this skilled worker, boards the shit for New York, doesn't have a single scrap of paper on him at all, just the whole thing is like in his, in his brain. And then when he gets to the Americas, he, he meets with Moses Brown, he's a businessman, and working entirely from memory, he manages to, to rebuild this insanely complex machinery.

• 7:22Hannah Fry?

  So, okay, this is like, this is all very interesting, right? There's like this, this, this leak of the information that ends up going to the Americas. But the thing is, why this is such a pivotal moment in history, and in quite a dark way too, is that this is the birth of the American factory system, it's the, the end of the British monopoly. But crucially, this ripple effect of this is that at this moment in time, you know, seventeen eighty nine, lots of people, including lots of Southerners in America, have thought that slavery might naturally fade away because it wasn't profitable to, to grow tobacco or rice anymore.

• 7:57Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 7:58Hannah Fry?

  But now, all of a sudden, you have this American factory system.

• 8:03Michael Stevens?

  That needs raw materials.

• 8:05Hannah Fry?

  Raw materials and can produce textiles at an ungodly rate and just this bottomless demand for raw cotton. So this exact moment, right, the efficiency of these Slater's meals basically ended up feeding this, it, it changed the maths of human suffering essentially, and ended up feeding this demand for slavery in the South for, you know, many, many, many, many, many more decades to come.

• 8:34Michael Stevens?

  Man, so then what, whatever happened of this Slater guy? Like, you're over there in the UK right now. Do you see him as a, as a traitor? As a, a little rat, think?

• 8:45Hannah Fry?

  I mean, I imagine people thought of him as a bit of a, a bit of a, a weasely little rat. But I also think at the same time that this is, I mean, look, now you have much better laws in place about patents and intellectual property and so on. And, but, but I mean, I do also think that once an. has been created, it is sort of inevitable that at some point or another, when you have something that can turn a profit, that can that can dominate a field, create a monopoly, it's sort of inevitable that you can't hold on to it forever. So, you know, maybe he was a rat, but maybe I think also he was probably an inevitable rat.

• 9:20Michael Stevens?

  That's right. If it wasn't Slater the Rat, it was going to be, you know, Richard the Rat or Veronica the Rat. It was going to spread and America was going to get its claws into this spinning machine.

• 9:31Hannah Fry?

  Eventually. Yeah. Okay. What questions have you got?

• 9:34Michael Stevens?

  Okay. Well, I I loved this one, which at first I'm like, I don't know how to answer that. But then I got really deep into it. This question comes from Arlene Finn. Is there more data in the cloud or raindrops in the clouds?

• 9:49Hannah Fry?

  This question was made for you, Michael.

• 9:51Michael Stevens?

  I know, right? I love it. And of course I fell down so many rabbit holes. As it turns out, back in like 2013, more than half of people thought that data stored in the cloud was literally stored in a cloud in the sky.

• 10:04Hannah Fry?

  No, that's adorable.

• 10:06Michael Stevens?

  I mean, and this was 13 years ago. You know, people were hearing about the cloud for the first time in their lives and they were like, oh, I guess this is using the weather or something. Why not? I also found out that there was a giant problem at a Facebook server back in like 2013, around the same time. One of Facebook's data centers, the humidity inside wasn't controlled well enough. And so an actual cloud formed inside because of the air conditioning systems, the heat produced, the ambient humidity, and it began to not just become foggy inside, but it started to rain. The droplets collected and it was like, oh, this is really bad. Now, this happened again 13 years ago as well. 2013 was a funny year for the digital cloud.

• 10:52Michael Stevens?

  And I think they do a much better day, they do a much better job now of protecting data centers from producing their own weather and also protecting them.

• 11:01Hannah Fry?

  Well, this is, this is why they put so much effort into, I mean, the amount of electricity they use is largely for cooling, right, to prevent stuff like this from happening?

• 11:10Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly. And they actually have to do a lot of sealing, a lot of rubber sealing on the, the electrical components in data centers, like literal, like raincoats, because you don't want something like this to happen, especially nowadays when the cloud is so vitally important to our digital infrastructure. But let's talk about it. First of all, I guess the first thing we need to ask is how much water is in the clouds? And there is no single amount. It depends seasonally, of course, throughout the year. The amount of clouds in Earth's atmosphere isn't always the same. But I'm specifically taking this question to be asking about clouds, not water in the entire atmosphere. Because of course, there's

• 11:52Michael Stevens?

  a lot of water in our atmosphere. There's more water in the atmosphere than there is water in just clouds. And the, the problem, though, is that the water that's in the atmosphere is in the form of vapor. It's a gas. It's water vapor. But a cloud is made of liquid water, vapor that has condensed into very, very small droplets that are so tiny they stay aloft. And yet, we're talking about tons and tons of water that just stays up there in these tiny drops. When those tiny drops touch each other and they get, and they, they kind of like form larger drops, suddenly they're too heavy to stay in the air and they, they fall. And we call that rain. Now, clouds are also made of ice. And

• 12:33Michael Stevens?

  I'm including ice and so I'm including solid water, ice clouds, as well as liquid water, regular clouds. But as it turns out, I've got all my numbers down here, so I'm gonna be reading off of my notebook. How much liquid water is there in clouds? Around the average of the numbers I'm getting is 1,000 cubic kilometers of water.

• 12:54Hannah Fry?

  What? 1,000 cubic kilometers?

• 12:56Michael Stevens?

  1,000 cubic kilometers, which sounds a bit small, but keep in mind, clouds are very diffuse.

• 13:03Hannah Fry?

  I mean, sure, but if you think about it like, okay, so the the earth is forty thousand kilometers circumference, right? So you're taking, so if you got all of the cloud together in one single block of water, uh, it would be, you know, one thousand kilometers. So a fortieth of the way around the earth uh, in both directions and then and then a thousand kilometers at home. Yeah. I mean, that's, admittedly, that's above the common line, but it's quite a tall column of water.

• 13:32Michael Stevens?

  It's it both sounds small, but it's also really big. I mean, we've talked before in our water episode, which if you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to that one. There's so little fresh water on earth, let alone just total water. I mean, all the water on earth is what? Like, uh, like a couple teaspoons on a foot diameter globe. Now we're talking not just about only water in the atmosphere, only water in clouds.

• 13:58Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 13:59Michael Stevens?

  One thousand cubic kilometers. That's only two thousandths of a percent of all the water in Earth's atmosphere. And it's only two ten thousandths of a percent of Earth's total fresh water.

• 14:11Hannah Fry?

  It's nothing.

• 14:12Michael Stevens?

  I want to get really specific here because that doesn't include water that is actively raining.

• 14:18Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 14:19Michael Stevens?

  At this very moment, it's raining in many places on earth. And I found a fantastic Reddit thread where someone really did the math. They've since deleted their account name, so I can't give them credit. But they calculated that at any one time, there are actively five point four quadrillion raindrops falling to earth.

• 14:41Hannah Fry?

  I love this so much.

• 14:42Michael Stevens?

  Right? Okay. So we've got two things. And the reason I'm separating them isn't just to be cute. It's because raindrops and clouds are made of things of very different sizes. A raindrop is about two thousand microns wide, about two millimeters wide. That's that's the thing that hits you on the head when it's falling. But clouds themselves are made of drops that are only about twenty microns wide. So that's a good like hundred times smaller. I felt like we should separate them. So I took the size of a raindrop and a cloud droplet. And I compared that to the total volume of water in clouds. And found how many raindrops are actively falling?

• 15:26Michael Stevens?

  And how many tiny or much smaller droplets are currently in clouds? And here's the numbers that I got. How many raindrops are there currently on their way to the ground? 2.38 times 10 to the 20th drops. That's a lot.

• 15:40Hannah Fry?

  A lot.

• 15:41Michael Stevens?

  That's like 238 quadrillion raindrops are currently having the ride of their life. But in the clouds, there's 238 septillion droplets. On average, at any given time. Now that we have those numbers, let's compare them to how much data is in the cloud. And this, it gets a little complicated because, I mean, we, I was gonna say, we don't know specifically. We don't know specifically how much water is raining or in clouds.

• 16:12Hannah Fry?

  I mean, they're estimates, but here's what I'm looking forward to. I'm looking forward to you making the, the unit switch from braindrop size to data chunk size.

• 16:19Michael Stevens?

  To data, yeah. How do you measure data? That is the big question. Should I use bytes or bits? I've done both, so I could just share both.

• 16:29Hannah Fry?

  Go on, yeah.

• 16:30Michael Stevens?

  The difference, of course, is that a bit, I, I prefer the bit answer because that also seems like uh, the smallest piece of information. It's just on or off, a one or a zero. Um, when you start talking about bytes, you're talking about eight bits. But then again, if we're going to talk about bits or bytes, should we talk about raindrops or water molecules, right? Like, things can get, anyway, let's just continue on and then we can do some more like corrections at the end. So, right now, it's estimated that there are 240 zettabytes of information stored in the cloud.

• 17:09Hannah Fry?

  Wait, hang on, how many zeros is that?

• 17:10Michael Stevens?

  It looks like it's gonna be 2.4 times 10 to the 22.

• 17:15Hannah Fry?

  Not much different to the number of raindrops.

• 17:18Michael Stevens?

  No, 24 sextillion bytes, which is equal to about 190 sextillion bits. I hope people can correct me on this math. You'll see how I'm just, I'm literally taking the number of bytes and multiplying it by eight to get the bits. So 190 sextillion bits are stored in the cloud, but 238 septillion droplets are just in clouds alone. Now, how do these numbers work? Because we're getting into some really big words. A sextillion is smaller than a septillion. Sext means six, sept means seven.

• 17:56Hannah Fry?

  Well, sext means something different if you're from my, my neck of the woods, but carry on.

• 18:00Michael Stevens?

  I've never heard of it, but there are more little droplets of water just in the clouds alone. I'm not even talking about raindrops than there are bits of information in the cloud, which is pretty incredible. And it's, it's especially incredible when you consider the fact that we are talking about bits of information. You can't get smaller than that. And we're comparing them to droplets in a cloud. And you can make a droplet smaller. A raindrop, for example, contains septillions of molecules. So like, Mother Nature is still beating us, just when it comes to water.

• 18:36Hannah Fry?

  I mean, we've got, look, there's, we've got nothing, nothing on the clouds, which in turn have got nothing on the atmosphere, you know? That does put it in perspective, doesn't it? Everyone getting all caught up about the size of data centers. It's nothing, it's nothing, you guys.

• 18:51Michael Stevens?

  It's nothing. There's more wetness in the atmosphere than there are ideas in the cloud. And by the way, the cloud is like really cluttered with crud. Some might even say crap from the internet of things. It's just like my oven is connected to the internet and it's, it's responsible for some of this stuff that's in the cloud. Whereas the water in the clouds, I love it all. It's all pretty important.

• 19:14Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, there's, I think there's quite a lot of my old emails from, from approximately 2001 currently in the cloud that's clogging up a lot of space. And frankly, frankly, water would do a lot more good, a lot more good for everybody.

• 19:28Michael Stevens?

  Right. So basically, bottom line is, I might be off by a degree of magnitude, one way or the other, or even a couple. And yet I still think it's quite undeniably true that there are more drops of water in the clouds at any given time than there is data. In terms of bits in the cloud.

• 19:47Hannah Fry?

  Okay, we've got a conclusion for you, Arlene. A firm, a firm winner there, Big Water. Okay, next question. I absolutely love this one. This is from Brickie Wes and the boys. Okay. Here's what Brickie Wes has to say. I'm reaching out regarding an observation from construction sites in the north of England that has sparked a debate among the crew. One of the lads claims that over a 15 year career across various regional sites, the high frequency of blue eyed workers has been a consistent pattern rather than an anomaly. On our current scaffolding project, we have six brickies and five out of the six have blue eyes. Are we looking at a genuine demographic trend within UK trades?

• 20:31Hannah Fry?

  Or just a fascinating trick of geography and human psychology? Okay, I'm going to tell you, I like this question so much that I think next time I I teach hypothesis testings to my students, I'm going to use this example because it's absolutely brilliant. Okay, right. So obviously I've done, I've run the numbers on this Wes for you. One thing to say first off is how common are blue eyes? So around the world, it's not that common at all. Actually, brown eyes dominate. So 70 to 80% of people around the world have brown eyes. Blue eyes only about 10%. However, in the UK, it's much higher. So there's lots and lots of data on this, especially from DNA studies

• 21:14Hannah Fry?

  that say that roughly 48% of the UK population overall have blue eyes. Me being one. Yours, are yours quite blue as well? Yours is sort of greeny?

• 21:23Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, my, my eyes are pretty blue.

• 21:25Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, they are very blue.

• 21:26Michael Stevens?

  In the right light.

• 21:28Hannah Fry?

  Is this, maybe we should both be brickies. Maybe that's the big conclusion that we can make from this.

• 21:33Michael Stevens?

  I know, I'm starting to think. Well, how do you describe your eyes?

• 21:37Hannah Fry?

  Mine?

• 21:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Hannah Fry?

  Blue.

• 21:38Michael Stevens?

  Can you get really close?

• 21:40Hannah Fry?

  They're bluish green.

• 21:41Michael Stevens?

  You're much more blue green. I am very blue gray.

• 21:44Hannah Fry?

  Hmm, there he is. That's our cover photo right there. Okay, so this this variation, like forty eight percent across the UK is slightly different in different regions. So when you go further north, the concentration increases. So it's it's around about fifty percent when you're further up north. Okay. Um. Now, if you've got a hypothesis that like this, that there is something fishy going on with blue eyed brickies, um, then there is like a formal way that you can test this. So what you can do is you can say, okay, what we're going to assume, we're going to assume that there's nothing suspicious going on. We're going to assume that there's no magical connection between blue eyes and and brickiness. And then that's going to be our hypothesis. And we're going to test the alternative. We're going to like, see, we're going to follow that

• 22:27Hannah Fry?

  logic through and see if it breaks at some point. Okay, see if that that logic ends up breaking. Because the evidence here is that five out of six brickies are blue eyes. And um, and we're going to say, what are the chances of seeing this or a more extreme result? Okay, so if it was like, if you were just kind of like randomly walking into different construction sites, what are the chances that you would see at least five, if not six, uh, of the brickies having blue eyes, given that the background rate is fifty percent? Um, okay, so I've worked it out, basically. The chance of having exactly five is about nine point four percent. Um, the chance of getting six is one and a half percent. So in total, the chance of getting this or a more extreme result is about ten point nine percent.

• 23:11Hannah Fry?

  Okay, there's been a lot of numbers in this episode. Um, but if you are following the rules of uh, of scientific hypothesis testing, ten percent, ten percent chance of seeing this effect is not enough to be statistically significant. Means that if you went round to ten different construction sites, you would expect this result in in at least one of them. It's like, it's unusual, but it's not crazy. It's not scientifically crazy. So I also reckon your your mate who has noticed this over a fifteen year period, it's possible that there's a little bit of confirmation bias going on here. There's possible that he's noticed the trend once and then only noticed it when it appears really strongly. That could be the case.

• 23:55Hannah Fry?

  It could be that he is selectively remembering the the blue eyed lads just because of confirmation bias. Or, or, and I will allow room for this possibility. It could be that you are on to the greatest physiological discovery in the history of UK construction. Okay. And the science demands rigor, Wes. So in between all your trial work, if you could just fire up Microsoft Excel for me, collect some data and come back to me when you've got a sample of at least 400 northern brickies. That's, that's what I'm looking for.

• 24:25Michael Stevens?

  Is that how many we'll need to be able to find a significant difference?

• 24:28Hannah Fry?

  I mean, yeah, I reckon that's, that's, that's about what we're talking about.

• 24:31Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 24:32Hannah Fry?

  Hold on, Michael, you look confused every time I use the word bricky. Is this not an American word?

• 24:36Michael Stevens?

  I don't look confused. I, I think I've figured it out. A bricky is a person who is a bricklayer by trade.

• 24:44Hannah Fry?

  What about, what about a chippy?

• 24:46Michael Stevens?

  A chippy is a person who fries up french fries as a living.

• 24:50Hannah Fry?

  It's a carpenter.

• 24:51Michael Stevens?

  A carpenter is called a chippy. Wow. I see. I hadn't heard that.

• 24:55Hannah Fry?

  A sparky?

• 24:56Michael Stevens?

  A sparky works on cars? No, electrician. I was thinking spark plugs.

• 25:01Hannah Fry?

  It never even occurred to me that that was British slang. It's a lovely phrase, though, isn't it?

• 25:04Michael Stevens?

  Well, every time you said it, I thought, oh, I should probably ask for clarification. But then I thought, no, I'm going to act like, oh, yeah, he knows too. Honorary Brit.

• 25:14Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, sometimes, actually, I've got to be honest, sometimes I spend hours watching bricklaying videos on YouTube, bat and plastering. I find it so relaxing. I mean, I imagine it's not relaxing to do as a job, especially when you're having to lug the bricks around.

• 25:26Michael Stevens?

  It's such a, a, a combination of everything. Like, it's, it's labor, it's craft. But then you watch some of these videos and you're like, this is an art form too, man. Wow.

• 25:36Hannah Fry?

  Very much so. There you go, Bads. Thank you.

• 25:38Michael Stevens?

  We're going to talk about some artistic things and some labor. After the break, I'm going to show off some of our latest inventions from the curiosity box and my mind.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 26:36Hannah Fry?

  Okay, the time has come. We are, we're gonna take down the periodic table in its original form and Mendel is gonna be crying in his grave. Michael, over to you.

• 26:47Michael Stevens?

  Well, look, I love Mendeleyev, right? Like, on a deep level, but at the same time, I don't get it. Like, why do we have the lanthanides and the actinides, like, pulled out into their own little block?

• 27:02Hannah Fry?

  Hold on a second, right? My chemistry knowledge is, I'm gonna be honest with you, limited. The original periodic table, right? What's the argument in favor of it first?

• 27:12Michael Stevens?

  Well, I can only tell you so much because I'm really here to talk about the shape in general. But I'll also, I'll tell you this. I love Mendeleyev, okay? He's got an element named after him, all right? However, take a look at the periodic table. Or if you have it in your mind, you can kind of think like, or if you're watching, we'll put one up on the screen. It's cool in that the thing is a list of every possible element, all right? Arranged in a table that you can read from right to left, top to bottom, and as you read, you're reading the name of an element that is different because it's got one more proton in its nucleus.

• 27:56Michael Stevens?

  The vertical columns tell us something about the physical properties of the chemical element. So- We've got hydrogen over in this column with lithium, sodium, potassium, and so on. Helium winds up getting put all the way over to the right so that it lines up with all the other noble gases, helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and so on.

• 28:18Hannah Fry?

  But then, of course, if you go down those columns, I mean, the alkaline, the first column, it's like they're all going to react with water, you know, lithium, potassium, and so on. And on the right hand side, they're all really in it.

• 28:29Michael Stevens?

  And that's why it's called the periodic table, because as you start filling in the table, you periodically see certain characteristics repeat.

• 28:39Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 28:39Michael Stevens?

  You do, you know, potassium, and you're like, oh, wow, potassium behaves in a certain way chemically, and then calcium's different, and scandium, and you go all the way across to krypton, and you go back down to rubidium, and you're like, hey, this is kind of like potassium. So we'll start again right underneath. It's it's pretty neat, but if you keep going, you get yourself up to fifty five, fifty six, fifty seven. Element fifty seven is lanthanum. And then you move one step to the right, and you're on half neon, which is element seventy two. We jump from fifty seven to seventy two. So fifty eight to seventy one are like a little satellite table, the kids' table. They don't get to be part of it. I should

• 29:19Michael Stevens?

  be clear that sometimes people do put them in, and they just make the periodic table much longer. But we rarely see that version in chemistry classrooms, or in books, or on T-shirts, or any posters, anything. Usually, the lanthanides are put down below, and that's what we call elements fifty eight to seventy one.

• 29:39Hannah Fry?

  What are the lanthanides like? What do they do?

• 29:42Michael Stevens?

  Well, they just are boring. I look, I I don't know. But I do know that I read my daughter, Theodora Gray's entire elements book. And when you hit the lanthanides and the actinides, you're just like slogging through. You're like, okay, and yet again, we have a silvery metallic element that is useful in optics sometimes, but not really ever. It's kind of like, America has the era of forgettable presidents. This is the, this, this kid's table is the era of forgettable elements. You're like, okay, so we've got europium, gandolinium, turbium, disprosium. They're the elements that no one ever names when they try to name all the elements they can think of.

• 30:26Hannah Fry?

  What about the actinides? They're more interesting.

• 30:28Michael Stevens?

  That's right. The actinides are, uh, they're still separate because if you keep them in, the, like, the pattern of the table above gets kind of thrown off. But you're right, it contains some really big stars. I would say thorium, uh, ever heard of uranium, plutonium, americium, right? We've got them in our smoke detectors. But still, to keep the table nice and tight, they've been removed because they kind of break the, the periodicity that you've got i- in everything of, from the 50s and, and down, meaning back down to hydrogen. So we don't have to organize elements in this way. And back in the swinging 60s, Otto Theodore Benfik came up with a beautiful arrangement, which, where the heck did I put this thing?

• 31:12Hannah Fry?

  The thing that I really like about this is that you've got the kids' table, or actually, it's just the, the boring party guest table, where they're all sat there looking the same, not doing anything. And then in amongst them, you've got the stuff that you need for an atomic bomb.

• 31:27Michael Stevens?

  I know.

• 31:28Hannah Fry?

  I'll be honest, I want to sit at that table. I think that table sounds way more fun than being over there with boring lithium and potassium.

• 31:36Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, you're right. The periodic table is kind of like you've done a seating chart for a wedding and you've had to put like all the people you barely know at the same table as all the really violent people and you feel bad.

• 31:48Hannah Fry?

  But you're watching them from the front, being like, hey.

• 31:51Michael Stevens?

  Hey, how's it going down there? You guys are so important to us. Don't sit next to us, though. All right. So, so in the swinging 60s, Otto Theodore Benfik, uh, comes up with this arrangement that is not only, uh, more psychedelically fun, but also

• 32:08Michael Stevens?

  Doesn't require a separate table and it's this one right here known as the periodic snail. That's got all the elements, but they begin in the middle here.

• 32:16Hannah Fry?

  They're swirling around.

• 32:18Michael Stevens?

  Swirling around like a snail shell, the elements increase from in number of protons. We go from hydrogen to helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen and so on. But then after going around enough times, it breaks off into this little. I don't know what we should call that, like a little.

• 32:37Hannah Fry?

  Detour almost.

• 32:38Michael Stevens?

  A little detour that breaks off the spiral and comes straight out and makes a rectangle. And that is the lanthanides and then beyond them, the actinides. We come back and we start spinning around in this purple area on the pin, which is the transition metals. These are all those metals in the middle, in between the two larger columns on the table. And the transition metals are pretty well known. We've got copper, nickel, chromium, titanium, gold, right? Silver, they're all in here. But then this spiral arrangement still preserves a lot of the chemical properties in columns. I mean, in fact, it does in the same way that the that Mendeleev's does. Cause we've got the, it's hard for me to see, I'll turn it and look at it.

• 33:22Michael Stevens?

  We've got all the noble gases in a line. So here they are. Okay. I'm pointing to them. Helium, neon, argon, and so on. We've got the alkaline metals, the alkaline earth metals. They're all still lined up in the same way. But you just wind up taking these detours for the transition metals. And the lanthanides and the actinides. And then there's even a little third leg coming off of the spiral for the still sort of undiscovered super actinides, which we believe should exist out beyond the elements we currently have been able to find or manufacture.

• 33:56Hannah Fry?

  These are the ones that be bigger than the bigger than uranium, plutonium, et cetera.

• 34:00Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. The stuff way beyond there. I think this particular one I'm holding. It goes all the way up to organison, element 118.

• 34:10Hannah Fry?

  That's a big boy.

• 34:11Michael Stevens?

  That's a big boy. I mean, we're past livermoreum, we're past moscovium. But there's the last one, OG.

• 34:18Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 34:19Michael Stevens?

  They're at the end, but you can keep going. I guess you could fill this in as we discover more.

• 34:23Hannah Fry?

  These are ones that haven't been found in a stable form at all. They're just like theorized to exist.

• 34:30Michael Stevens?

  Theoretically, you can just keep adding a proton to a nucleus and make a new element again and again and again.

• 34:35Hannah Fry?

  Vsauceum?

• 34:36Michael Stevens?

  Vsauceum. Sure, I'll take it. Um, as we've said in previous episodes, though, I really want a John Quincyum. Not because I love John Quincy Adams, um, the, uh, a very early president in American history, but because the letters J and Q are just not used in the periodic table in English still. But John Quincyum, bam, it's a person's name and you'd knock both of those letters out at once. So anyway, I love, I love talking about the periodic table and how to organize stuff and taxonomies, you know? So we, we made this. The thing I've been holding up is a pin with a little magnetic clasp on the back. See? I've, I've turned it around and I'm pulling off a little metal bar that has magnets in it.

• 35:21Michael Stevens?

  So you can put this on your shirt, put the magnet bar underneath and wear it like a pin without having to stick holes through your shirt, which a lot of big pins would normally do. See, look at me. Now I'm fashionable. I've got the periodic snail on my shirt, my backpack, wherever, and I'm feeling good.

• 35:41Hannah Fry?

  Now you'll get invited to parties, Michael.

• 35:43Michael Stevens?

  Finally. So this is, this is like one of my other jobs and I love this. I love being like, look, I want to celebrate other periodic tables, alternatives to Mendeleev's arrangement. I'm not against Mendeleev, obviously, but I just think that if you play around and you show people the different ways we can organize elements, the more I and they get to think about why we organize them, what makes them different and, and what's beyond what we've already found. So this is in the new curiosity box. We have subscribers who like every season, four times a year, get this giant box, like this is the new one, full of all the wacky stuff we've invented because of their support.

• 36:24Michael Stevens?

  So the box, by the way, that I'm holding up is, is, I don't know, it's like a big shoebox size, but it's covered in, in black and white lines, which if you're a World War I history buff is

• 36:35Hannah Fry?

  dazzle camouflage.

• 36:37Michael Stevens?

  Dazzle camouflage. It makes it very hard to see what the shape and velocity of the box is with your eyes alone. Radar can beat this. But if you don't have radar, it can be hard to know how something's moving and where its corners and edges are if it's covered in this like zebra stripe pattern. So we just decided there's literally, there's never a theme to the box. It's like whatever we happen to have ready in time. So we're like, all right, dazzle paint box, periodic table pen, fine. And you know what else? How about a stuffed animal? I've shown this to Hannah before. So she doesn't have to act like really shocked and surprised, but we're all probably pretty familiar with the old rabbit duck optical illusion. It's, it's unknown who came up with

• 37:21Michael Stevens?

  this first, but its first like known publication was in like 1899, like turn of the two centuries ago. And it's a drawing of like a duck, but maybe also a rabbit. It depends on how you look at it. The, the two ears of the rabbit could just as well be the two halves of the bill of a duck. And so it's an ambiguous illusion that shows a lot about how our brain works and how taking different perspectives means we interpret things differently. Well, we created a stuffed animal version of that illusion. Here's a bunny rabbit, right? Or is it a duck? Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. And it's cute and cuddly and kids love that it can be both. And us illusion nerds

• 38:06Michael Stevens?

  love that we can finally sleep with optical illusions.

• 38:11Hannah Fry?

  Amazing.

• 38:12Michael Stevens?

  The bunny rabbit's tail becomes the webbed feet of the duck, right? And this, this began as us trying to figure out how to do a rubber ducky for the bathtub. And I said, here's what we should do. It should be that rabbit duck illusion, but as a bath toy. Problem is, we couldn't figure out how to make it float in both orientations.

• 38:36Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 38:37Michael Stevens?

  But we could figure out how to make it stand up in both orientations as a stuffed animal.

• 38:41Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's a shame. Did you try putting like a movable weight in it?

• 38:47Michael Stevens?

  No, we didn't. And it's mainly because I, I bet that might work, but at a certain point, we have to just make a decision. And it was like, look, let's just do stuffed animal. I feel like maybe a stuffed animal would be more popular than a bath toy. But I can show you back on my wall, I've got one of the prototypes for a smaller, solid rabbit duck.

• 39:06Hannah Fry?

  Go and grab it, grab it, grab it.

• 39:07Michael Stevens?

  So here is like a prototype, a 3D printed prototype of the rabbit as a duck as well.

• 39:14Hannah Fry?

  Oh wow, that works so well.

• 39:16Michael Stevens?

  This works, yeah, it works really well.

• 39:18Hannah Fry?

  Amazing. I can see how that might be very difficult to make it float in that orientation.

• 39:22Michael Stevens?

  It's hard to get it to float in this very vertical rabbit position, but you're right. What if there was just like a giant glob of mercury in it?

• 39:31Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. I think that's absolutely perfect for a Charles Bath toy.

• 39:36Michael Stevens?

  And you move it this way, now it's really weighted here, it's really weighted here as a duck. But yeah, you can see how we, this took us quite a while to prototype and then, you know, find a factory that could make a stuffed animal version to our specifications. But I'm very proud of it.

• 39:55Hannah Fry?

  I'm not surprised. It's very fun.

• 39:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, and you know, this T-shirt is also in the box. We always come up with apparel. And so this one is, it's our take on a spring, a spring break T-shirt. Seen, it's not Senior Frogs, it's Senior Inks. Woo, party time! And it's got a recipe on it for party punch, which on a lot of these shirts, it's like a margarita recipe, but this is actually a recipe for how to take uranium ore and process it into yellow cake. And that's only half the recipe. The other half tells you how to then enrich that uranium.

• 40:27Hannah Fry?

  You haven't included that half, no?

• 40:29Michael Stevens?

  We've included that half because there's like no risk. Enriching uranium is not something that a hobbyist can just do at home because their shirt told them how to. You need access to centrifuges that only state governments have the information about and the, like the money to build and the experts to run. And today, they don't even really use centrifuges, they use lasers, and this is the old fashioned recipe. But I just love making things that force people to go, oh, what's that shirt? And you're like, oh yeah, it's got this recipe for party punch. And then they read it and they go, wait. That's not a cocktail.

• 41:04Hannah Fry?

  Well, it's all is a cocktail in a way. It's just a, it's just a kind of more atomically potent cocktail.

• 41:12Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, I mean, yellow cake is not like more radioactive than the uranium ore that came out of the ground.

• 41:18Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 41:19Michael Stevens?

  You haven't enriched it at all. It's still, you know, 99.3% uranium 238 like, but it's easier to transport because it weighs less. It is more concentrated in the sense that the rock contains dozen of elements, but the yellow cake only contains two, uranium and oxygen. And of course, once you've got the yellow cake, you can more easily start enriching the uranium. And I, you know, the process, again, it feels weird to share how it's done, but no one can really do this. I, I think you shoot the yellow cake with fluorine gas, which is really reactive.

• 41:58Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 41:58Michael Stevens?

  And it rips the uranium off and probably burns the oxygen. And then you're left with uranium hexafluoride. And that's a gas that you can spin in a, in a centrifuge. And then you can separate the different uranium atoms by their weight because some of them are lighter than others and some are heavier because of how many neutrons are in them. And you want to then pick out just the most unstable radioactive uranium 235 ones. Now it's enriched and what's left is called depleted uranium.

• 42:30Hannah Fry?

  And this is the point when the American government are on to you.

• 42:34Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. Exactly. Any kind of enrichment is against the law in the United States. Even though you only need to enrich to like 3% uranium 235 to, to have something for a nuclear power plant. You need to go higher for nuclear submarine or, or, or battleship engines, not battleship, aircraft carriers. But you need to go up even higher to get into the weapons grade area. And it doesn't matter because any amount of enrichment, you're breaking the law. So, you know, don't even try. However, it exists as an idea and knowledge is power. And knowledge allows us to be wiser. So you can wear the shirt in case you ever forget and you're like, oh, shoot.

• 43:18Michael Stevens?

  Exactly how much hydrogen peroxide do I need to use? What, what's the target pH for precipitating out yellowcake? Now you know. Now you know.

• 43:26Hannah Fry?

  Now you know. Now you know.

• 43:29Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, basically. So that's a taste of the kinds of things that I get to do and I love it. I love it. And I love that there are so many people out there who also find this kind of stuff exciting. Because I don't think anyone else was gonna make a periodic snail pin or a shirt that shows you how to process uranium ore. I couldn't find one.

• 43:46Hannah Fry?

  No, I, I think you really definitely identified a gap in the market, Michael. Um, and goodness knows the market is glad you exist. I quite want one. Where's mine? I want one in the post.

• 43:55Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, you know what? I'll, I'll sign you up. I'll just get you, I'll get you a subscription. Send me where you want me to send it and we'll get you one every season. Why not? I mean, you do wind up with like a lot of shirts, you know? After five years, you're like, dang, I've got 20 shirts. So that's the only kind of shirt I wear.

• 44:13Hannah Fry?

  There's no need to ever buy clothes anymore. That's, um, I'm, I'm here for it.

• 44:16Michael Stevens?

  That's what I say. We did do a Mobius scarf last season instead of a shirt. Which was a scarf that had that twist so you could unzip the scarf and it didn't become two scarves. It became one larger scarf.

• 44:29Hannah Fry?

  Amazing. Okay. Well, that, that I think concludes our podcast expedition for today into the, a little, a little dip into the designer mind

• 44:39Hannah Fry?

  of, uh, of Michael Stevens. Um, if you have any questions that you would like us to answer or anything else that you want us to send in, any suggestions for other borderline illegal recipes that Michael can have printed onto shirts? Um, then you can send them into us, [email protected].

• 44:53Michael Stevens?

  And you can join our newsletter at therestis.com/science.

• 44:58Hannah Fry?

  We are going to be back next Wednesday slash Thursday, depending on what country you live in, with another edition of Field Notes and, uh, on Monday slash Tuesday, uh, with our normal episode.

• 45:10Michael Stevens?

  We'll see you then.

• 45:11Hannah Fry?

  I really need to simplify that message, I think somehow, don't we?

• 45:14Michael Stevens?

  I think so. I think we just say like, next time. I don't know.

• 45:16Hannah Fry?

  Next time, next time. Yeah, good idea.

• 45:18Michael Stevens?

  See you later. Specifically when? It's up to you, right? You're free, you're free to make yellowcake. You're free to listen to us on Friday if you want.

• 45:27Hannah Fry?

  The point of podcasting, isn't it really ultimately?

• 45:29Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  We are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with 350 passengers onboard.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 46:04Speaker 06

  We assess, Prime Minister,

• 46:07Speaker 06

  with high confidence it was Russian.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 46:15Speaker 05

  A man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: Do you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You have done nothing!

• 46:28Speaker 03

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 46:30Speaker 05

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 46:46Speaker 06

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 46:50Speaker 03

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom Macduff, Duffy!

• 46:55Speaker 06

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 46:57Hannah Fry?

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  We have two tight, friendly KIAs.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  Where Britain plays its strongest arm... He's the best. ...against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.