Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that really lights your fire.

I’m your host this week, Shea, and with me are:

I’m Aaron, and as I lose my hearing and am forced to start learning sign language, which I am in fact terrible at, I’ve realized that a hand job from a deaf person technically counts as oral…

I’m Steve, and I was exposed to covid again last weekend, but this time I did not get it, so yea for vaccines MFr’s.

Round Table

Go here: https://www.covidtests.gov

This Week’s Beer

I dunno about you lot but I’m drinking a Guinness-Bodington’s black and tan in honor of one of my headlines… kind of. – 10

Steve: Tommyknocker’s Blood Orange IPA Idaho Springs, CO at 6% 55 IBU -7

Shea: Alaskan Midnight Hazy IPA Juneau, Alaska, 6% -8

Headlines

HL1: Found The Jedi

I’m willing to bet that everyone who listens to this show has not only seen Star Wars but at some point in your life had an epic lightsaber battle when the wrapping paper roll ran out.

Because the real gift of the season is an empty cardboard tube and someone to whack with it.

One YouTuber, Alex Lab, has taken things to the next level, winning a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating the world’s first, properly “retractable” lightsaber.

Now, before we get all mired in the physics of it, no, it’s not a “light” saber in the literal sense, it uses hydrogen. But it does do a lot of lightsaber-y things, including really looking the part! It’s based on Starkiller’s saber from The Force Unleashed — and he did a hell of a job, it looks screen-ready.

Using an electrolyzer, a device that generates and compresses hydrogen and oxygen without a mechanical compressor, he was able to pack 30 seconds of hydrogen into the handle. The saber generates a three-ish-foot plasma stream of roughly 2,800°C (5,072°F) which is hot enough to cut steel – albeit not as quickly as in the films. And, per Alex, “plasma is a stream of high ironized particles so this lightsaber can also attract lightning and other high voltage charges,” which he demos in the video with a small arc of electricity.

It’s not perfect yet though, only running for 30 seconds, not cutting as cleanly as a real lightsaber — or even the much hotter Hacksmith version — and there’s that little drawback of, as Alex explains “sometimes the lightsaber just blows up in your hand because of hydrogen flashback.”

So, other than that, lightsaber. Done. Check out the video in the show notes, it’s pretty impressive.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAL6BUl6-rM&list=PLWDlqkmKieaqgtG0Oc8EoC5TmTUoxPOa3


• https://www.iflscience.com/technology/youtuber-wins-world-record-for-worlds-first-retractable-lightsaber/?fbclid=IwAR0GjhtnVQiZIyuSNxSjcEYwXYB4NteNBxLILuSpzjg2Ui7oD3ARr6KVBb0

HL2: Rarities.

Flash is fast, so fast that he, “can perceive events that last for less than an attosecond,” or roughly the time it takes light to traverse a water molecule. The shortest time we can measure. Though his top speed is measured in The Human Race as something like 23.8 tredecillion times the speed of light. Dr. Manhattan has “witnessed events so tiny and so fast they can hardly be said to have occurred at all.”

<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><figcaption>Flash’s Speed</figcaption></figure>

This headline might not match their achievements, but it’s not far off — at least on the math. Scientists at the XERNON Collaboration in Italy built a dark matter detector known as XENON1T. It uses the noble gas to attempt dark matter detection, the jury’s still out on that. What it did record was the radioactive decay of a xenon-124 atom, which has a half-life of 18 billion trillion years. More than a trillion times longer than the current age of the universe.

The observation was published in Nature 536, in a 2019 paper called Observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in 124Xe with XENO1T.

“We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,“ co-author Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer, said in a statement. ”It’s amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.”

But if it takes so long… how?

Well, the half-life is a probabilistic measure, not a stopwatch. It measures the calculated time for half of the atoms in a radioactive substance, like xenon, to decay. So it’s an ongoing thing rather than something that happens once in a billion trillion years.

The detector housed 3,500 kilos (7,716 lbs) of xenon, which is roughly 17 billion billion billion atoms (1.701×1028), so the odds weren’t not in our favor.

While the machine wasn’t designed to track atomic decay, it’s incredibly sensitive, and did. In case you’re wondering what that record looks like… here’s a quote from sciencer Brown who is way, way smarter than I am.

“Electrons in double-capture are removed from the innermost shell around the nucleus, and that creates room in that shell. The remaining electrons collapse to the ground state, and we saw this collapse process in our detector.”

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586–019–1124–4


• https://www.iflscience.com/physics/scientist-have-seen-the-rarest-event-ever-recorded/

Drink, Drank, Drunks

I’m sure you have picked up in the last few months that I moonlight as a bartender. I love the job but sometimes things get so monotonous that you don’t want to do it anymore. That was me this week, so instead of paying any attention to customers I instead looked up stories about alcohol to entertain my coworkers, and in the vain of being green, I am recycling it for you!

Today I have a couple of stories all involving booze and the trouble it can get you into, this is Drink, Drank, Drunks.

In an earlier episode, we talked about the slowest flood in history, Boston, 1919, with 2.3 million gallons of molasses. You guys remember, right? Well, this story is along the same lines but just a few, 44, years before. 1875 was a simpler time, US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, Electric dental drill was patented by George F Green, and most importantly the 1st recorded hockey game (Montreal). Also, there was a horrible fire flood through Dublin. What’s a fire flood, you ask? Well, buckle up cause this is a good one.

According to The Irish Times, the disaster occurred on June 18th, 1875 at Malone’s Bonded Storehouse in Dublin, where more than 5,000 barrels of whiskey and spirits were stored in various stages of aging. Bottled whiskey meant for retail is less flammable because it gets diluted down to lower alcohol content. Where in these casks the whiskey was undiluted, high proof, and highly combustible. According to NFPA, volatile alcohol vapors and high temperatures from distillation equipment additionally create conditions where explosions and fire can occur.

I’m sure you can see where this is going…

The first reports of a fire at the warehouse came at 8 p.m. that night. Shortly after, barrels began to burn and explode, while torrents of burning whiskey flowed out of the building down the streets and alleys of Dublin. Creating a wave of flaming whiskey flowing down the streets setting buildings and livestock on fire. In this time period, it wasn’t uncommon to have farm animals living either inside or outside these tenements. As a result, panicked animals ran through the streets and only added to the mayhem of lava-like whiskey running alongside them. Locals tried to douse the flames with water but the whiskey just rose to the top and continued to burn its way through the city.

The Dublin Fire Brigade arrived, under the leadership of Captain James Robert Ingram, who had been a fire officer in the New York Fire Department, and was renowned for his “unconventional” strategies to control fires. He knew that to pour water on the fire would be disastrous as the whiskey would float on top of it like petrol and spread the fire throughout the city. Instead, he sent for soldiers and ordered them to pull up paving stones and pour a mixture of sand and gravel on the whiskey. But he soon realized that wouldn’t be enough as the whiskey started to seep through the sand. Oh shit… Speaking of shit!

Meadow Muffins, road apples, horse manure, Heaps of it lay in depots around the city. Ingram ordered that it be brought to the fire by the cartload and shoveled it back onto the streets, from where it had once come. As the burning whiskey met the damp manure it formed dams and was soaked up, the fire slowly began to subside.<