April 17, 2025 • 9 mins
Human curiosity has pointed to some amazing conclusions. Today's pair of stories are perfect examples of the power of a thoughtful mind.
Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
Science and the military share an uneasy alliance in the
course of human history. Some of the most remarkable inventions
only came about because of a war effort, the latter
providing the impetus and infrastructure for a country to outstrip
its enemy, not just in weapons, but in development. William
Lawrence Bragg was already an acclaimed scientist by the time
(00:57):
he was drafted into the army, the youngest man ever
to be honored with a Nobel Prize for Physics, an
award he shared with his father. By the way, he
had to put his promising career on hold when all
of Europe descended into the First World War, and so
the twenty five year old Nobel laureate found himself in
a cavalry unit in France. In the war years, Bragg
(01:17):
eventually shifted into a more technical position and he was
given a very specific assignment. His commanding officers wanted to
know how to determine the position of the German artillery
based entirely on the sound that their cannons made. The
cannons were loud enough for the average person to hear,
but with no real accuracy and not from a great distance.
(01:38):
The main system for pinpointing cannon fire was based on
a series of microphones lined up along front line trenches.
Army technicians could see the flare of a distant cannon
shot and measure how long it was before their microphones
picked up the boom, since sound travels slower than light,
But the system was based on guesswork, and it was
imprecise when it came to actually locating the cannons. After all,
(02:00):
a cannon makes three enormous booms when fired. There's the
initial blast of the gun, the sound of the shell
breaking the sound barrier, and then the eventual impact when
it strikes the target. And on top of all of this,
the microphones at the time were not able to detect
lower frequency sounds. Bragg would be stumped by this conundrum
for a very long time, until one fateful day in
(02:21):
a latrine in Flanders. As the story goes, the army
toilet had a door and no window, so that when
a soldier was using it, he was completely cut off
from the outside world. Bragg was sitting on the toilet
one day when his rear end lifted fully off the
toilet seat, and this was caused by infrasound generated by
a nearby piece of British artillery on their side. And
(02:43):
around the same time, a member of Bragg's team, a
guy named William Sansom Tucker, noticed that his quarters would
shiver every time a gun went off, even if he
cannot hear the blast. Brag, Tucker, and the rest of
their team set to work trying to develop a sensor
that could properly detect not the audible sounds of cannon itself,
but the infrasound generated by the initial cannon fire. It
(03:05):
took them many months of frustrating work, but eventually they
developed a system based on Tucker's observations of how infrasound
affected his sleeping quarters. Their wave detector was an ammunition
box with a hot wire running through it. They drilled
a hole near the wire, and when a cannon went off,
the infrasound pressure would force a puff of air through
(03:26):
the hole and onto the heated wire. The changing current
in the wire would give them data that they could measure.
This device was named the Tucker microphone after William Tucker,
the man who had designed the specific wire mechanism, and
this was the first piece in a far more effective
method of detecting the location of enemy guns. Unlike those older,
imprecise microphones of the early war, the Tucker microphone could
(03:49):
place German guns within twenty five to fifty meters mere
minutes after the gun had been fired. By September of
nineteen sixteen, all sound ranging stations were using Tucker microphones.
It was an instrument developed in the war effort, leading
to several key victories. Not to every scientific breakthrough has
a true Eureka moment, most come through steady, unglamorous hard work.
(04:11):
But none of these sound ranging developments would have happened
if not for the observation that William Lawrence Bragg made
while sitting on an army toilet somewhere in Belgium. Even
if it's not audible to the naked ear, there's no
sound like inspiration. Our health is an ever changing concept.
(04:42):
One hundred years ago, what we may have considered healthy
looked very different from today. Back then, dangerous narcotics were
marketed as cold medicine and used in soft drinks. Doctors
would actually recommend smoking to help with asthma, and many
people believed that radioactivity was the hot new thing in health.
So it's no surprise that the guidelines for living well
(05:03):
can change pretty quickly. We sometimes find out something we
thought was healthy was based actually on faulty science or
bad data, or, in one case, even fraud. In two
thousand and four, researchers published a study in the journal
Experimental Gerontology about the areas in the world where people
live the longest. The authors speculated that people live longer
(05:24):
in certain regions because of traditional diets, lifestyles, or genetics.
On the map published with these studies, the regions were
shaded in blue, leading to the term blue zones. The
next year, in two thousand and five, National geographic reporter
Dan Buttner published an exhaustive story on these blue zones
and launched them into fame. According to Dan, in places
(05:45):
like Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Ekaria, Greece,
and Loma Linda, California, people simply live longer, and those
who do live longer live better, healthier lives. Dan set
out to find the keys to these Blue zones and
found the original researchers speculations rang true. Visiting each place
(06:05):
and performing exhaustive in person research, he discovered that Blue
Zone dwellers were more likely to live the following lifestyle.
They ate nutritiously with lots of fruits and vegetables. They
were physically active and active in their community. They abstained
from smoking, drink only occasionally, managed their stress, and of
course felt that they had a purpose in life. Basically,
(06:27):
Dan concluded that living well led to a longer life.
Over the next twenty years, the Blue Zones became a
brand in themselves. Dan's Blue Zones Llc. Published books, launched
a line of soups and iced tea, and even created
a program for cities to become Blue Zones certified. But
if you've heard of the Blue Zones, it's likely because
of the Netflix documentary series from just a couple of
(06:48):
years ago. Basically, blue zones weren't just a big deal,
they were also big business, which is why it came
as a shock In twenty nineteen, when one researcher made
a new claim the blue zonesring to him were actually bunk.
That year, researcher Saul Newman of University College London first
released his study on long lived populations. In it, he
(07:09):
found that areas with the highest concentration of centenarians have
another unifying feature, poor record keeping. What Saul argued was
that it all came down to poverty. Many places that
on paper have exceedingly long lived populations are also often
poor or have been poor in the past few decades.
As a result, it's often the case that birth, baptism,
(07:31):
and other records that could prove age went missing or
were never recorded at all, meaning many of the folks
who believed that they were over one hundred maybe younger
than they think. According to an interview with Minnesota Public
Radio in twenty twenty four, Saul gave this example after
traveling through Japan and going back through birth records, he
found that eighty two percent of Japanese centenarians were either
(07:55):
missing or had died without the death being recorded, which
is another reason why the number might be lying. In
impoverished areas, it's much more likely for an elderly person's
relatives to simply not report their death to the government.
That way they can keep collecting pension or social welfare checks,
meaning that a good chunk of the Blue Zone dwellers
(08:15):
may have also been frauds. So who's right. Are the
people in Sardinia or Costa Rica just healthier than average
or is their life expectancy just a case of shoddy
record keeping. For his part, Dan Butuener and Blue Zone
supporters have refuted Saul Newman's claims. They assert that they've
done exhaustive research to confirm ages and birth dates of
(08:36):
the people they've studied, and that their points about diet
and lifestyle hold up. And of course Saul has his detractors,
but he also managed to win a cleverly named Ignobel
Prize for his work, meant as the colorful counterpart to
the Nobel Prize. Ignobles are supposed to honor achievements that
make people laugh and then think. It's hard to tell
(08:56):
who's really in the right here. After all, the Blue
Zone lifestyle does sound like a great way to live,
but data is sometimes difficult to correctly interpret, and that
difficulty curve gets deeper the deeper a project goes because
the blue Zone concept is aiming for highly specific signs
and markers. Getting it all perfectly right is a lofty goal,
(09:16):
but then again, so is living to one hundred. I
hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
(09:38):
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
Science and the military share an uneasy alliance in the
course of human history. Some of the most remarkable inventions
only came about because of a war effort, the latter
providing the impetus and infrastructure for a country to outstrip
its enemy, not just in weapons, but in development. William
Lawrence Bragg was already an acclaimed scientist by the time
(00:57):
he was drafted into the army, the youngest man ever
to be honored with a Nobel Prize for Physics, an
award he shared with his father. By the way, he
had to put his promising career on hold when all
of Europe descended into the First World War, and so
the twenty five year old Nobel laureate found himself in
a cavalry unit in France. In the war years, Bragg
(01:17):
eventually shifted into a more technical position and he was
given a very specific assignment. His commanding officers wanted to
know how to determine the position of the German artillery
based entirely on the sound that their cannons made. The
cannons were loud enough for the average person to hear,
but with no real accuracy and not from a great distance.
(01:38):
The main system for pinpointing cannon fire was based on
a series of microphones lined up along front line trenches.
Army technicians could see the flare of a distant cannon
shot and measure how long it was before their microphones
picked up the boom, since sound travels slower than light,
But the system was based on guesswork, and it was
imprecise when it came to actually locating the cannons. After all,
(02:00):
a cannon makes three enormous booms when fired. There's the
initial blast of the gun, the sound of the shell
breaking the sound barrier, and then the eventual impact when
it strikes the target. And on top of all of this,
the microphones at the time were not able to detect
lower frequency sounds. Bragg would be stumped by this conundrum
for a very long time, until one fateful day in
(02:21):
a latrine in Flanders. As the story goes, the army
toilet had a door and no window, so that when
a soldier was using it, he was completely cut off
from the outside world. Bragg was sitting on the toilet
one day when his rear end lifted fully off the
toilet seat, and this was caused by infrasound generated by
a nearby piece of British artillery on their side. And
(02:43):
around the same time, a member of Bragg's team, a
guy named William Sansom Tucker, noticed that his quarters would
shiver every time a gun went off, even if he
cannot hear the blast. Brag, Tucker, and the rest of
their team set to work trying to develop a sensor
that could properly detect not the audible sounds of cannon itself,
but the infrasound generated by the initial cannon fire. It
(03:05):
took them many months of frustrating work, but eventually they
developed a system based on Tucker's observations of how infrasound
affected his sleeping quarters. Their wave detector was an ammunition
box with a hot wire running through it. They drilled
a hole near the wire, and when a cannon went off,
the infrasound pressure would force a puff of air through
(03:26):
the hole and onto the heated wire. The changing current
in the wire would give them data that they could measure.
This device was named the Tucker microphone after William Tucker,
the man who had designed the specific wire mechanism, and
this was the first piece in a far more effective
method of detecting the location of enemy guns. Unlike those older,
imprecise microphones of the early war, the Tucker microphone could
(03:49):
place German guns within twenty five to fifty meters mere
minutes after the gun had been fired. By September of
nineteen sixteen, all sound ranging stations were using Tucker microphones.
It was an instrument developed in the war effort, leading
to several key victories. Not to every scientific breakthrough has
a true Eureka moment, most come through steady, unglamorous hard work.
(04:11):
But none of these sound ranging developments would have happened
if not for the observation that William Lawrence Bragg made
while sitting on an army toilet somewhere in Belgium. Even
if it's not audible to the naked ear, there's no
sound like inspiration. Our health is an ever changing concept.
(04:42):
One hundred years ago, what we may have considered healthy
looked very different from today. Back then, dangerous narcotics were
marketed as cold medicine and used in soft drinks. Doctors
would actually recommend smoking to help with asthma, and many
people believed that radioactivity was the hot new thing in health.
So it's no surprise that the guidelines for living well
(05:03):
can change pretty quickly. We sometimes find out something we
thought was healthy was based actually on faulty science or
bad data, or, in one case, even fraud. In two
thousand and four, researchers published a study in the journal
Experimental Gerontology about the areas in the world where people
live the longest. The authors speculated that people live longer
(05:24):
in certain regions because of traditional diets, lifestyles, or genetics.
On the map published with these studies, the regions were
shaded in blue, leading to the term blue zones. The
next year, in two thousand and five, National geographic reporter
Dan Buttner published an exhaustive story on these blue zones
and launched them into fame. According to Dan, in places
(05:45):
like Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Ekaria, Greece,
and Loma Linda, California, people simply live longer, and those
who do live longer live better, healthier lives. Dan set
out to find the keys to these Blue zones and
found the original researchers speculations rang true. Visiting each place
(06:05):
and performing exhaustive in person research, he discovered that Blue
Zone dwellers were more likely to live the following lifestyle.
They ate nutritiously with lots of fruits and vegetables. They
were physically active and active in their community. They abstained
from smoking, drink only occasionally, managed their stress, and of
course felt that they had a purpose in life. Basically,
(06:27):
Dan concluded that living well led to a longer life.
Over the next twenty years, the Blue Zones became a
brand in themselves. Dan's Blue Zones Llc. Published books, launched
a line of soups and iced tea, and even created
a program for cities to become Blue Zones certified. But
if you've heard of the Blue Zones, it's likely because
of the Netflix documentary series from just a couple of
(06:48):
years ago. Basically, blue zones weren't just a big deal,
they were also big business, which is why it came
as a shock In twenty nineteen, when one researcher made
a new claim the blue zonesring to him were actually bunk.
That year, researcher Saul Newman of University College London first
released his study on long lived populations. In it, he
(07:09):
found that areas with the highest concentration of centenarians have
another unifying feature, poor record keeping. What Saul argued was
that it all came down to poverty. Many places that
on paper have exceedingly long lived populations are also often
poor or have been poor in the past few decades.
As a result, it's often the case that birth, baptism,
(07:31):
and other records that could prove age went missing or
were never recorded at all, meaning many of the folks
who believed that they were over one hundred maybe younger
than they think. According to an interview with Minnesota Public
Radio in twenty twenty four, Saul gave this example after
traveling through Japan and going back through birth records, he
found that eighty two percent of Japanese centenarians were either
(07:55):
missing or had died without the death being recorded, which
is another reason why the number might be lying. In
impoverished areas, it's much more likely for an elderly person's
relatives to simply not report their death to the government.
That way they can keep collecting pension or social welfare checks,
meaning that a good chunk of the Blue Zone dwellers
(08:15):
may have also been frauds. So who's right. Are the
people in Sardinia or Costa Rica just healthier than average
or is their life expectancy just a case of shoddy
record keeping. For his part, Dan Butuener and Blue Zone
supporters have refuted Saul Newman's claims. They assert that they've
done exhaustive research to confirm ages and birth dates of
(08:36):
the people they've studied, and that their points about diet
and lifestyle hold up. And of course Saul has his detractors,
but he also managed to win a cleverly named Ignobel
Prize for his work, meant as the colorful counterpart to
the Nobel Prize. Ignobles are supposed to honor achievements that
make people laugh and then think. It's hard to tell
(08:56):
who's really in the right here. After all, the Blue
Zone lifestyle does sound like a great way to live,
but data is sometimes difficult to correctly interpret, and that
difficulty curve gets deeper the deeper a project goes because
the blue Zone concept is aiming for highly specific signs
and markers. Getting it all perfectly right is a lofty goal,
(09:16):
but then again, so is living to one hundred. I
hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
(09:38):
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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